In this piece I walked around Flagstaff Hill in a large circle until the snow was flattened by my foot prints. I was looking at Simon Beck who has made a series of work by walking patterns in the snow. I found that by walking I find personal clarity, and by walking in circles you loose a sense of where you are in relation to the world around you. Although this is a simple task it leaves a behind a large circle of compressed snow that will be visible for a while, with a reference to a crop circle and all that that brings with it.

I chose to focus on acts of surveillance within the Carnegie Mellon community. Individuals within the community will eavesdrop or secretly photograph their peers for social gain, and the institution itself has several cameras in various points around campus and even employs people to observe certain areas. These acts are typically subtle, so as not to alert the surveilled of the observer’s actions.

I dressed in formal attire and walked around the University Center during lunchtime (a peak traffic time for the building) and would stop a few feet away from tables of people and stare at them while taking notes on a clipboard. I did not interact with any of the individuals I observed besides eye contact, and kept a completely straight face the entire time I was watching them. After a few minutes I would walk away and find another table to observe.

The responses elicited by those I observed ranged from curious to concern. No one directly confronted me, but people in groups tended to express looks of unease to each other, and the tension between me and the individuals was fraught with tension. It was an uncomfortable experience for me as well–being covert seems to be a natural inclination when we attempt to watch others.

This was a solid start to a project, I was pleased with the reactions elicited by the individuals I encountered. Were I to repeat this, I would  like to actually create legitimate forms for surveillance to fill out while observing people–I was using a random form I pulled from Google Images and simple writing jargon. Although the performance’s impact was the actual act of observation, I think the creation of artifacts from the observations would add an interesting dimension to the documentation of the piece.

It is a social survey performance. Not only are the first-hand experiences of the participants are important, but the experiences that the viewers have with the documentation of the piece is a significant factor as well.

For this project, I made a questionnaire for three people: the interviewer, the interviewee, a stranger who is willing to participate, and the interviewee’s friend.

These are the questions:

Four questions that were asked to the interviewees:

-What is your first impression of the interviewer?

– Based on the interviewer’s first impression, would you like to know more about the interviewer?

– How would you describe yourself?

– Do you think how other people describe your personality matches how you describe your self?

Two questions that were asked to the friends of interviewees:

-How would you describe your friend (the interviewee)?

– Do you think your friend’s first impression describes his/her real personality?

Two questions that were asked to the interviewer:

-What is your first impression of the interviewee?

– Based on the interviewee’s first impression, would you like to know more about the interviewee?

Throughout this experience, I wanted to engage with more people, to see if people are able to objectively judge themselves, and to know if a first impression is reliable. Choosing to let the viewer to have their own judgments to the performance, I left the documentation in its rough form rather than analyzing it.

The performance was successful, because I was able to meet new various people, and show the viewers the result of different traits. The performance was unsuccessful in a way that it didn’t show many people enough to make a valid conclusion. I was not able to push this performance any further to anything more than psychological research.

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Here are some ideas and questions that summarize my interest in stock photos:

– Stock photos represent ideal worlds in which bliss, love and stability
are normal.

– How can we reconcile the perfect/false worlds of stock photos?

– Do stock photos point to prevailing notions of normativity?

– A game-ritual grants us temporary access to the hyperreality of stock photos.

I staged the intervention in the Stever House television room. While not exactly a public place, it is a room where students gather to relax and socialize. I was wary of carrying out the performance in a space that would interfere with people’s work or daily consumption patterns. Perhaps my hesitation to bring the project to the public in earnest reflects an underlying insecurity regarding its premise – or my own communicative abilities. I don’t yet feel confident framing a personal obsession as something that has intrinsic value for others. Still, I feel that stock photos embody important cultural ideals that I have yet to fully articulate.

I announced the performance in a public Facebook event as follows:

“Some friends of mine need help. They say they have no thoughts left. They just stand around holding empty banners.

All I know is that there’s not much time to act.”

The event itself was an interactive game show, in which I was the host and organizer. Participants took turns standing in front of a whiteboard, providing stock photo people with new thoughts. I used an openFrameworks projection mapping library in order to calibrate the projection to the whiteboard surface. I also placed portions of the image around the perimeter of the whiteboard in warped perspective. This reinforced the sense I was trying to communicate – that this whiteboard was an unstable portal to another world (the world of stock photos).

Concretely, the participants used dry-erase markers to write words on the blank banners that the fourteen photos featured. While participants stood in front of the board, generic call waiting “muzak” was played from a hidden speaker, along with a synthetic voice counting down from 30 to 1. The audio was meant to convey a sense of urgency. I recall timed fitness evaluations in High School gym class that relied on similar tactics. A quivering instruction box read “Help! We have no thoughts. Give us some thoughts while there is still time.” Graphically, this instruction box took cues from Soviet era graphic design.

Technically, the project worked well – the audio provided a crucial sense of limited time, and therefore unease. The projection itself was clear and visible on the whiteboard.

Regarding the failures of the project, there is one that is particularly glaring. I found it difficult to establish a coherent tone for the project: it wavered uncomfortably between a sincere attempt to help virtual people in “crisis”, and an organized mockery of those very people. The project relied on the idea that stock photos depict perfect people and scenarios onto which we are obliged project our own ideas – but I never verified this premise independent of my own feel for it. Basically, I found it difficult to communicate what this activity was, and what ends it was meant to serve. I was curious what words people would use to contextualize generic imagery, but I must consider the likelihood that this curiosity didn’t extend beyond myself.

It seemed like the participants (the six that showed up) generally enjoyed the performance, judging from the video of it in which shows a friendly climate with an undercurrent of humor.

A future iteration of this performance might employ high resolution images. The ones I used were low quality, since it would have cost >$100 to purchase the photos in full resolution.

Software Tools used:

openFrameworks 0.8 with ofxMtlMapping2D
Photoshop CS5
Adobe Audition CS5

For more information go here.

2: Schenley Park is located along Forbes Ave across from the Cathedral of Learning. It contains many small restaurants, greenspace, and a performance tent with seating areas.

3: It’s close to both University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon; along several bus routes; near the Main Carnegie Library, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Phipps Conservatory; and near a popular strip of Forbes Ave, creating a confluence of a variety of people. The area surrounding the Plaza are points of interest or necessity for many people, and nearly half the people observed were using the area as a through-way to get to another place. This creates a passive audience, some of which may be willing to pause if they see something out of the ordinary.

4: Seating alongside Forbes Avenue provide small, intimate spaces potentially for storytelling or small-scale performance.

5: These areas were also filled with semi-enclosed outlet plugs. Some of the observed plugs had been affected by outside elements to the point where they were no longer useable, but the still-working ones could provide a valuable power-source for interventions that require use of computers, projectors, and/or other electronic equipment

6: Those who were actively at the park were observed to be using the walkway along the edge of Schenley Drive. The large tent at the end of this pathway not only provides performance space for medium scale acts, but also provides a white, matte surface that could potentially be used for projection.