Artwork #3: Intervene

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

For my intervention I decided to have people from Isec and Ryder hall draw some robots. My idea first came up when we were talking about our intervention pitch for next week. I had a mix media art pad that I got for my 2d fundie class. I thought that I can have people draw stuff on it. The first idea that I had is having people from two location draw on the same paper. In the first location I would have people draw something cute and harmless on one side. Then at the other location I’ll cover the drawings on one side and have the people in the other location draw on the other. The prompt for the second group would be “draw things that will defeat the other side”. My idea is that people would draw dangerous and violent stuff that would attack the cute drawings. This is to demonstrate the idea of blindly follow direction. When thinking about the location I recall to when we played with the parachute. When we played the parachute in the common I saw a lot of people and some of them did participated. I thought maybe I can also conduct my intervention there too. During the intervention pitch meeting I had a second version of my idea. Coincidentally, we talked about a woman with a sign that says “draw on me” which is similar to my intervention idea. The second version will still involve two locations but the prompt will be the same for both locations. And the prompt will be vaguely worded to let the audience come up with their own interpretation. This way I can observe how people in two location think different and how the first drawing affects others interpretation. However, it is pointed out that this will heavily depend on the location. After many thought about the locations I decided to held it at Ryder and Isec hall. And the prompt must be relevant to both hall. Isec is more engineering and computer science centric hall. Ryder has more art and media students gather around. So I pull the two theme together and came up with having the people from the two hall draw robots. Students from Isec are familiar with robot and students from Ryder can express their creativity with drawings. My hypothesis before executing my intervention is that Isec students will draw more realistic robot like Roombas. And Ryder students will draw more creative robot like Gundam.

During Friday I decides to execute my intervention after game design. I looked around Ryder hall and noticed that there isn’t that many people, so I decide to go to Isec first. In Isec there were a lot of people studying and sitting around. So I stood outside the entrance where people would come and go. I held up my mix media with the word “Draw a robot of any kind” and marker to let people know that they can draw on it. People who walked by took a look at the pad before continue going. I waited for around 5 minutes standing like an idiot before someone came. It was a girl and she asked if she could draw. I answered yes and then she asked if this for a project and what class. A lot of people also asked this question. The robot that she drew is a conventional robot with boxing head and body and antenna. As time went by more people drew on the pad. In the end all the robot have a similar aesthetic in the form of a conventional robot. I believe that the first robot also influenced the others. The outlier is by a dude who’s with his friends, he drew the robot with the drill and whisk. Next is Ryder where I did it on Tuesday right before class. This time people are more willing to participate and I only have to wait aboutFff two minutes. The first robot is also a conventional robot however it’s more toy-like. It’s also the first time someone used more than one color in their robot. Then someone surprised me by drawing Doraemon which is a robot cat. The result was a lot different type of robots, people even drew laptop, car and claw. The last person participated asked if she could take a picture of the pad. She said that she have a similar project.

There is a lot of interesting result by comparing the two experiences and pictures. Students from Ryder are more likely to participate than Isec. I also noticed that in Isec, women are more willing to participate than men. Meanwhile, in Ryder both men and women have the same chance of participating. Everyone in Isec used only one color for their robot while 2 people used more than one color in Ryder. Ryder also has more unconventional robots, meaning that they think more outside the box. This has been a fun intervention and experiment.

Isec

Ryder

My intervention consisted of having a friend and I playing a fighting game inside of the East Village elevators and inviting people to join us as they walked onto the lift. Our set-up was a chair in each back corner and a podium centered along the back wall, upon which the switch was placed with the spare controller.

The first objective of this score was to shock the people who would enter the lift, which was achieved through the choice of the environment in which the intervention occurred. The choice of the lift was made as, in East Village, students are forced to use them in order to get to their rooms or leave the building, meaning that there was a very high chance that we would run into people while intervening. We also decided to head into the lift at 20:30 as this was the time when most people would be using the elevators as they were heading either to or from dinner or the gym, for the most part, meaning there was quite a high amount of traffic. The shock factor was thanks to the fact that people do not really associate this means of locomotion to anything else than that, and therefore upon coming across people who were not using that space for that purpose, they could not help but be surprised.

The second objective was to give the people we came across a break from their day. Most students are busy for the majority of their days, and therefore giving them the opportunity to take a break felt like it would go well with the first objective of the intervention. In order to achieve this, we decided to invite them to join us in our game, allowing them to take their minds off of things for the brief time in which they were in the lift. Asking them to join us I think was crucial to get them to participate as I do not believe that anyone would have joined us of their own accord as the lift rides were too short for them to think of entering the game.

The inspiration for this intervention came from two different works. The first one was a piece by the Yes-Men, which we had briefly touched upon in class. I found their work very entertaining and therefore chose to look into more of their works in my free time. I found this intervention in which one of them faked being a member of a company which was linked with a chemical disaster and made a fake public announcement in which he said that the company would take full blame of the events and would help those affected by these events, which is the opposite response given by the real company. I felt like this was created in order to shock the audience as this is something people do not usually see as corporations usually look towards profit and simply try to put behind anything that could affect them negatively. This also created somewhat of a break from all of the negative news which we are fed on a daily basis and gave some sort of hope.

The other piece which I took inspiration from was the War Tweets intervention game which the creators had presented to us during one of our classes. The main point which I took from it was the audience participation, as the game could not really run if no one played it. I thought that bringing the audience into the intervention was somewhat necessary as it was don for them, and therefore making them take part in it would bring a whole new level of involvement.

Overall, the intervention was a great success. Many people decided to join us to play during their elevator trips, with some people even voluntarily missing their floors in order to play a bit longer. One person stayed as long as 15 minutes with us, and it reached a point where it felt like he was also a part of the intervention as he also invited people to join as they would step in before I would. Furthermore, I thought that even if people did not want to participate, I would still try to have an interaction with them in order to hopefully make their days a little better. The intervention had to end after an hour as an RA decided to kick us out of the elevators because we were apparently not allowed to have furniture inside of the lifts.

Artist’s Statement:

My work, “Free conversations”, was heavily inspired by the popular intervention piece “Free Hugs” and a piece called “Free listening” that I saw while visiting a friend at MIT. The goal of my piece was ultimately to have a conversation with a stranger, to produce a normal social interaction in a strange way. This goal has been achieved by both the “Free Hugs” and “Free listening” works, in which a sign is used to do such, with the normal social interactions being hugs and listening respectively. I took this concept, and expanded it to a different interaction: conversations. Conversations in general are a good way to engage and learn more about other people, and thus the “Free conversations” game was born. The format of the idea followed that of its predecessors, consisting of primarily just a sign with writing advertising the “product” being distributed. In addition, I’d say there was a little bit of influence from the Jejune institute which we studied in class. The Jejune institute was an ARG in which players encountered and took part in these strange public displays, such as the protest against Octavio and the phone dance scene. Both of these parts of these games are intended to encourage playfulness in the public arena while also providing an entertaining scene for those watching. Ultimately, “Free conversation” also acted as a bit of a spectacle, since the “free social interactions” concept has become quite popular, and thus people will get some entertainment out of it. The concept of someone walking around with a sign is in itself funny, and ultimately it did entertain people. Many people who didn’t directly engage in conversation with me, engaged either by taking pictures or just laughing at the sign. Interestingly, we talked in class a bit about how interventions could be used to entertain someone going about a menial process, such as waiting in a line. Ultimately we decided that rather than just standing around with the sign, we would walk with it, which played into this concept as many people who decided to engage in a conversation were just walking to or from a club meeting, and seeing a guy with a “free conversations” I’d like to think made their day.

Documentation:

The poster I made for the intervention:

Me, at the start of the intervention, standing in Curry with the sign, waiting for my first customer:

My first customer, we had a nice conversation about politics, though we both didn’t really know that much about politics. We mainly discussed the impeachment process and we both agreed that we weren’t fans of Trump:

My second customer, Hannah, who I knew from NUTV. She saw me with the sign and decided to come over and talk. We conversed about Thanksgiving and food in general as she was on her way to eat dinner. She told me her favorite Thanksgiving food is cranberries:

My third customer, he was on his way over to play the fourth floor to play pool with one of his friends, but saw me  and wanted to stop by and talk. Before he came up to me, he had been working on some complex probability homework as a part of his engineering major:

This girl came up to me to take a picture of the sign. I asked her if she wanted to have a free conversation, but she told me she couldn’t because she was running late for a club meeting:

My next customer and I had a lovely conversation about Kanye, who I don’t really know that much about, except that he has a new line of really weird merch which people have been talking about. I asked him his opinions on it, and he told me he would only wearing clothing if it looked good, not if it was a special brand:

We had a brief conversation since the guy came up to me to talk, but the girl yelled at him because they were having a conversation. It was pretty funny:

In this picture, I’m talking with my next customer named Katherine, who saw me and really wanted to chat. We talked a bit because she was running late for a club meeting as well. She mentioned that she had seen a lot of similar interventions in like NYC (like Free Hugs), but that they weren’t that good, so she was happy to see something similar here in Boston:

These three guys were promoting something for a club, and when they saw me, they wanted to talk about making bread by hand, which was very random yet very interesting.

These two guys were in Marino and they were skate boarding by. The guy on the right asked me if I knew how to skateboard, and I told him I didn’t, but that it was interesting. He said he didn’t want to talk if it wasn’t about skateboarding, so he told me he’d be willing to teach me, and I gave him my Instagram. It was very odd.

My final client was a student named Christian who’s from my hometown and is really close with my brother, but I hadn’t seen him while at Northeastern. So we had a brief conversation in Blackman, catching up on everything.

For my intervention, I decided to try to get people to do Karaoke in Counter-Strike:Global Offensive. Initially, I was thinking of doing something at the circle on the edge of Centennial Common. The reason I wanted to use this location was that it sees a lot of traffic and is also a good space that wouldn’t be in the way of people’s daily commute. I wanted to do something there that brought a smile to people’s faces, or something that just brightened their day a little bit. I was mainly inspired to do this after our parachute intervention. However, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do to do that. So I looked to the video game interventions for inspiration and decided to do something in my most played video game, CS:GO. I decided I would try to do karaoke in CS:GO.

Each game-mode within CS:GO has its own community, and I’ll briefly explain each and how receptive or not receptive they were (or would be) to doing karaoke.

Competitive: People who are playing the game in its most competitive form. They really don’t want to be bothered, I didn’t try. I knew if it was me on the other end in a competitive match I’d be really annoyed.

Casual and Deathmatch: Not as competitive but people mainly don’t want to be bothered or aren’t using their microphones. Often people hop into these servers to warm up or just get some game-time in without the time commitment. Most people weren’t responding in this game mode, or had a negative response.

Surf: A casual game mode where people are either not listening to their game sound, or are having casual conversation. I got some responses here but nothing substantial.

1v1: This game mode houses multiple 1v1 encounters where everyone can voice chat. The people here aren’t necessarily trying to improve because if they were they’d be doing deathmatch or competitive, but they are often engaged in casual conversation with the people in the server. Due to the relaxed nature of this socially active setting, I had my best results here. Of course, it is the Counter-Strike community, and there was still a lot of negative reception here, but there were also the largest amount of good interactions here.

I had tried multiple different well-known songs, but I got the best reception when using Bohemian Rhapsody. Additionally, I had the best feedback when I sang along.

In this video, there is a short clip of a few people singing along, and the second clip is someone who sang the whole of the song with me. From his point of view, he is singing in time, but due to the voice-chat delay, he is a second or so behind from my point of view. It’s not the most pleasing version of Bohemian Rhapsody I’ve ever listened to, but I think it brought some “good vibes” into that server that I was on.

NEU Confessions was designed with an idea centered around the question “how does one feel knowing that the safety of a private event is stripped away for an exchange of a secret of another?” Well the answer to that is compassion. Knowing that someone out there has experienced something so impactful in one’s life that it should better be left hidden leaves a powerful message: vulnerability exists in everyone. Surprisingly, after personally participating in the event, I feel less “alone” knowing that someone else has voluntarily offered a peek into an event that in a public space will fall scrutiny to judgement.

NEU Confessions is designed to be a nonintrusive intervention that relies on the trust between individuals through anonymity. The rules are to write down one confession or secret that one is willing to share in return for an exchange of a secret from another random participant. The ideal location for this activity is in a public space with a lot of university students (individuals who are most likely within the same age range and are more “free-spirited” and willing/comfortable participating in public interventions).

After some research, the intervention has similar bearings with the popular ongoing PostSecret mail art project, created by by Frank Warren wherein participants mailed their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard, which would then be revealed to the public online and in a book. Warren’s intention was to empower both the participant of the project and the reader, as well as create inspiration or healing for those who write the secrets and give hope to those who identify with the stranger’s secret — in effect, creating ‘an anonymous community of acceptance’. Both his and my interventions also draw from fundamental ideas of the new games movement. Public participation, cooperation, and the emergence of communities are some of the ideas pushed behind the movement, and NEU Confessions attempts to do the same in our Northeastern school environment. I believe many students are naturally drawn to the curiosity of belonging, which is something that is commonplace in social media (in the form of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, questionnaires and polls on ASKfm, Quora). Media sites such as Buzzfeed provide a list of questions that one answers to determine traits and preferences (ranging from favorite foods, Disney princesses, star signs) aimed to provide amusement like tarot cards. NEU Confessions provides an exchange that differs from the one-way exchange that occurs on the internet, as writing with pen and paper is more personal and intimate.

Design Iterations and Testing

Initially I was intrigued with the idea of random acts of kindness as an attempt for a public intervention. I also preferred non-intrusiveness from the act (more similar to a score rather than performance art in comparison to the Fluxus movement). The combination of the two led to me creating a secret exchange, which transformed into confessions. To set up the activity, I initially wrote a couple secrets of my own and had a few friends write some (to start off the initial exchange) and placed them all in a box, secret folded up on paper. I then sat outside in a busy area on campus and waited to provide students with the opportunity to share their secrets.

Results:

The results of the activity were harder to document, as my first initial test made it so I did not participate in the activity for anonymity purposes. However, I did observer amusement from a few individuals who participated. My second playtest was in the classroom, which went much better as the additional fact that the participants “knew” one another (the secret is tied to one out of the ~20 people in the room). From my observations, I heard comments such as “Wow, I got a good secret” and other individuals who wanted to see more. From observation, some of the secrets could range from taboo topics such as crime, sex, and drugs, all of which come from a personal place. I definitely felt as if NEU Confessions created the reaction that I hoped it would, and it would be interesting to see if an iteration where every secret would be revealed for all the eyes (similar to PostSecret) would be a prefered option.