“Unsubscribe.” by Luke Hottinger and Joyce Liu (2015)

Sometimes we just need to disconnect.

On a campus with hundreds of clubs and organizations, we become inundated with flyers, posters, emails, Facebook requests and invites.  It’s already difficult to balance a personal life with an academic career; notifications and events slapping us in the face aren’t helping.  In a last ditch effort to rescue our sanity, we can always unsubscribe.

We decided to take the original idea of unsubscribing from a bulletin board and explore it in a more physical way through performance art. Instead of having the paper “Unsubscribe” taped on beside the bulletin board, we placed a table with a mouse on it. Beside the mouse there was a sign that said, “Click to unsubscribe.” This was another way for us to blur the lines of digital and analog within our piece, as the act of unsubscribing generally occurs on the web now, and it is generally done by clicking on a certain link or button. In our piece, when a passerby clicked on the mouse, a hoard of people would rush to the bulletin board and begin taking posters off. The people taking the posters off were performing the literal act of unsubscribing. Many of the people who clicked on the mouse or who were walking by were confused, but there was an observer who commented that he had never seen the board so empty before in all his time at CMU.