Artwork #3: Intervene

This project idea originated after the Guest Lecture that Professor Derek Curry and Professor Jennifer Gradecki presented in class. As well as the documentary viewing of The Institute. When I watched the Institue, what spoke to me most was the way people stopped by a poster and started a game based on just texting or calling a random number. This is when I thought of a paper poster format for this project. I also thought of the Twitter game that both of the Professors spoke about and how they used people’s real-life interaction and put it into a game. I then realized I wanted to play around with everyone’s music interest and decided to put up posters of a Spotify playlist all around my dorm building, with the playlist labelled Make your Own Playlist and no prompt whatsoever.

Sadly, my first iteration of this project was not so successful. I quickly learned that we need permission to put up posters around different buildings. For my next iteration, I decided not to go the paper route at all. I decided to put up an Instagram story with the link to the Spotify playlist and the result was 16 users added songs. There were 362 total songs added to the playlist. It was an assortment of every kind of song, a hodgepodge of songs if you will. This was the most enjoyable project so far! I loved seeing the different types of music taste everyone had and the variety of songs I ended up with. Here is the link to the Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2LBz5ZvMwGgajSFnwzC9kn?si=3af805ccf2a54f46

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

“give me the HUGGY WUGGY SKIN THAT I GOT SCAMMED FOR!”

The first quote is from The Society of the Spectacle, a book written by prominent Situationist Guy Debord. The second is from a kid in a vrchat among us lobby who was subjected to trickery and tomfoolery when trying to acquire a Huggy Wuggy avatar in vrchat.

While the first iteration of this was more of an intervention (I actually intervened in a vrchat among us game with my youth pastor schtick) and I was more of an observer in the second iteration, where my plan was to do Seinfeld stand-up bits, I think that the spectacle I encountered is more interesting to focus on. While we didn’t have any assigned reading focused mainly on the situationist movement itself (at least as far as I’m aware), I believe they are relevant to the teachings of this class, especially since they built on the Surrealist and Dada movements. And I believe the philosophy of the Situationists was demonstrated in the spectacle I witnessed in vrchat.

The use of the word “scammed” in the huggy wuggy affair is interesting. What happened, as far as I am aware, was that someone lead the seeker of the huggy wuggy skin to a vrchat world where he said he could get the huggy wuggy skin (vrchat avatars are often gained in “avatar world” where an object in the world gives you and allows you to save an avatar), but the world contained nothing. There was no monetary transaction, and yet the bamboozled party claimed they were scammed. While scammed could just be the first word the kid could think of to describe the situation, I believe it reflects a deeper commodification of society that Debord wrote about. “give me the HUGGY WUGGY SKIN THAT I GOT SCAMMED FOR!” is an expression of the anger of someone who couldn’t acquire an image that is treated as a rare an expensive commodity as they wanted not only to have that image, but appear as it, in order to affect the social relation they had with others in this virtual world.

So to summarize this, in my adventures in the world of vrchat I encountered an exaggerated and hyperbolic representation of the modern society described by Debord and the Situationist movement. But rather than trying to do any direct critique of it or the capitalist world it is derived from, I just did some youth pastor and Jerry Seinfeld bits. Cuz why not, that’s kinda funny. Oh and I also won an among us imposter game as a painting of the Mona Lisa. All of that is documented in photoshop collages I made that can be found here. I’ll also include them in this post itself, but they will be lower quality. Maybe in the future someone smarter than me could do something to critique the relation of one’s avatar in vrchat to the social relations they have with others in it, but that’s an intervene project for another day.

In this assignment, I chose to intervene in the Dead by Daylight. Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer game. The player can choose to play as a human or as a killer. The human player needs to fix five motors and open the gate to escape. And the killer needs to stop them from fixing the motor and kill them. My intervention was to do something completely unrelated to the character. Humans are supposed to avoid killers, but I try to find them and taunt them to see how they react. I’ve tried many times, but basically the killer takes me down as soon as he sees me. After many attempts I finally met a killer who would knock me down without meeting me. I crouched in front of him and pointed at him. He didn’t kill me. He just looked at me and spun around. In the end he knocked me down and hung me on a hook. My actions also saved the life of a teammate. My teammate ran out while I was interacting with the killer. After seeing the killer’s reaction I decided to play as a killer and see the human reaction. What happens when killers stop killing people.I don’t use a knife when I see a human player. I just watch them. The human players would run away at first, but once they knew I had no intention of knocking them down, they started interacting with me. It’s better to see how other players react when playing as killers than when playing as humans.I gave the human player two knives at the end, but I let them go. I think this interaction is interesting, because the relationship between human and killer is completely different with my intervention. My inspriation comes from Stanford prison experiment. In this experiment, everyone is doing something relevant to their identity. The authorities in prison exert pressure on the people in custody, and the people in custody suffer in silence. My idea is completely different from this experiment. I wanted to see how people react when they do things that are completely contrary to who they are. The identities of the killers and escapees in this game are like those of the prison guards and prisoners in the experiment.It’s like a prison cop who never punishes a prisoner again.I wonder if the relationship between the two will change.

My intervention was centered around the exploration of how products in the modern day are manufactured all across the world, and the process is very simple. In whatever room and with whatever amount of people, I ask the group of people to present however many items they have that are made in different countries, and I document the number of items. This intervention is vastly inspired by the class with the boxes, but I thought as to do something with what we carry everyday instead of asking people to specifically do something. I think this intervention is intriguing in that it calls on the participants to not just learn more about the global village, but to also think about specific memories they have with purchasing the item.

I attempted this intervention three times, once with myself, once with my roommates, and once in class. Alone, I documented 7 countries. With my roommates,  I documented 10. Finally, in class we documented 17. The final result in class was vastly different than what I expected. As the change between myself and my 3 roommates only differed by three, I expected the class to have a number much closer to 10. I had this expectation knowing most of the world’s products are manufactured by a few selected countries such as China and Vietnam. However, the class presented a great number of items from countries I didn’t expect to be included, some of which I knew way to little about to spell out. This surprised me because I wouldn’t even know if some of my belongings are manufactured in these countries.

While I, an international student from Taiwan, expected my intervention to open the eyes of my participants to things they don’t think about in this global village, it seemed to have opened my own eyes more than I anticipated.

For my intervention, I decided to take advantage of the season and do something Halloween-y. My girlfriend (who helped me with this project) and I decided that it could be fun to do a twist on Halloween standards and instead knock on people’s doors and give them candy.  We went down to Marlborough Street around 6pm. Things were already underway when we arrived, as there were already a few groups of trick-or-treaters wandering around.  We went up to a couple of stoops with people giving out candy, but each time the people politely refused our free candy. Which is weird, right? Isn’t that what halloween is all about? But eventually we both realized that no one would take candy from strangers, so instead we took a break on an empty stoop, with out candy buckets unfortunately full. Soon, though, people came up to us saying “trick or treat.” So we decided to change our plans and just started giving candy away at some stranger’s empty doorstep. After about two hours (and a fair few greedy children), we had depleted our candy reserves, and headed home, satisfied in our semi-success.

The original intent of the intervention was to cause some people to have a bit of unexpected fun on halloween, by receiving candy rather than giving it for once. However, we quickly realized that people didn’t really want to go along with that, so we shifted gears and adapted to the opportunity afforded to us. We were inspired by those prank videos where people carry around a door with a sign that says “please knock.” The door-holders would knock on a house’s door, then when the homeowner opened the door, they would see another door, knock on it, and the people carrying around the door would pretend the homeowners were trick-or-treaters and give them candy. We tried a version of that but without the door, just straight face to face offerings of candy. I’m a little surprised and upset that it didn’t work out, but I guess adults know better than to take candy from strangers. Which is really peculiar when you think about it, because they usually don’t have a problem with sending their kids out to do the same.

For my intervention project I set up a little “booth” on the ISEC bridge and put up some parodic posters of the University Health Counseling Services– my booth was the “University Hospitality Concierge Something” and was labeled “the doctor is in! 15 min for $70k.” The purpose of this intervention was to protest the lack of funding for the UHCS and how it affected students, with many rarely being able to schedule any consistent help for more than a couple 15 minute sessions. This seems especially egregious to me considering the incredibly large tuition fees students pay, close to $70k a year , and the University spending millions on other projects, including the ISEC and EXP (ISEC II) project, the former of which cost $225 million. I chose the bridge as the perfect representation of these excesses– it has since come to my attention that the bridge is part of the EXP project and not the original $225 million, but it’s still part of Northeastern’s ludicrous redevelopment master plan that totals at $1.9 billion.

My initial version of the intervention was a booth set up in the middle of the ISEC bridge, with volunteers lining up in front of it down the steps. I thought this would create a staggering visual that would drive the point home but quickly ran into problems when it came to practicality– apparently, the ISEC project has a history with protests, primarily the group DivestNU, which was received incredibly poorly by the university and students alike. This, alongside the nearby NUPD presence, made it very difficult to get volunteers. Other concerns that came up were accessibility issues.

As such, I restructured my project to just be the booth on the side. I stayed there from 1:30 to 3, joined by a couple of friends. The reaction to the booth was varied. Most people looked at our booth and seemed apathetic, others looked at it and seemed confused, a number of people smiled or laughed it, and a few people approached us to talk. While it’s improper to judge on appearances alone, we noticed there were some clear divides in reaction by gender/race. For instance, the preppy white males we saw almost always reacted negatively, and looked visibly upset and international students almost always looked confused. Perhaps most notably all of the people that actually interacted with us were either female or people of color.

Interestingly enough the people that approached us seemed to buy into a “roleplay;” we joked about a $70k IOU and they started venting about their problems, even though we were total strangers. It seemed reminiscent of the Five Day Locker Piece, where people simply felt comfortable talking about their lives because of the redefined context of interaction, even if the person was just a random artist (C. Carr, On Edge). I feel these couple of interactions would have been impossible with the large line I originally intended, and so I think that having to restructure the piece made it more successful in the end.

For my intervention, I choose to attempt to cover every whiteboard and chalkboard in Ryder Hall with drawings and words. As rules, we wouldn’t go into room that had other people in them, and we wouldn’t erase anything that was already on the board. I allowed anything to be drawn or written on the boards. Starting on a Sunday at 9:45, we started drawing as a big group covering as much of each board as we could. Team members would come in and out as they could, but in total we had around 15 people contributing to the project. Some rooms still had people studying in them, so we skipped those. We eventually filled all of the rooms on the first floor, excluding the ones with people in them, however when we began working on the second floor, the janitorial staff began erasing the work on the first floor. Because the intervention was no longer intervening the process we intended, we decided to stop the intervention early. Each member of the team drew independently and without specific instruction, though there were often collaborations during this. I thought this was important to the intervention to ensure that the message of creativity juxtapose with learning was at the forefront of the message. 

My initial intention with my project was to demonstrate how creative fields such as art, music, theatre, and dance are often seen as a distraction to supposedly more important and relevant fields like science and engineering. I was inspired by the absurdism of the Dada art movement and how they used exaggerated absurdity to question art itself. I wanted to use artistic expression in an exaggerated and absurd way to physically intervene in the process of teaching. I was also inspired by some of Banksy’s work wherein he uses the actual process of creating the artwork as part of its message. For instance some of Banksy’s graffiti work plays with the idea of not being able to stop his illegal graffiti as part of his message. One consideration we made while performing the intervention was to write in different forms the words: “Do not erase.” These words gave a sense of life to much of the absurd artwork, as if the artwork was speaking to the viewer. I found this quite similar to the repeating usage of “Dada” in the Dada artworks, whereby it’s repetition almost causes it to lose its inherent meaning. Overall the intervention was able to take inspiration from different intervention artists while still being able to use its unique medium to convey a unique message.

Intervention photos: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1v1vcH1q1BEgm8c5fNSLAC0_iBGCB4hZw