Group 7: Jakob Groth Morten Koch Roesen Ida Haslund Ane Meyer
Assignment wording
We are making a project for a place influenced by BEGINNINGS. Our project will aim to heighten a feeling of INTIMACY and SECRECY, based on the idea of IDLING.
Link to our brainstorm here.
The Concept:
Monday the 17th of March there will probably be a line of people in front of the "Musikhuset" because that is the exact date for getting tickets to the Leonard Cohan concert this summer.
We will create an intimate zone with breakfast and coffee to establish a comfortable environment, where the people in the queue maybe will be more willingly to open up and tell us about there personal relation to the event. We will meet them in the beginning of a new day, experience and maybe at the beginning of new friendships (between the people in the queue). Obviously the people are waiting, they are in some state of idling and maybe they have nothing else to do than talking to each other. We want to enhance the feeling of intimacy and privacy by asking them about their particular emotional relationship to the music.
There will be to categories of questions, one considering the interviewed persons relationship to the music and another one focusing on the relations maybe just established among the people in the queue.
Questions
How did you get to know the music?
Is this your first Cohen concert?
Which one is your favorite number?
What emotions does it bring listening to it?
At what times do you listen to this music?
Do you have a secret that somehow is connected to Cohen's music?
How do you know the people standing next to you in the queue?
Have you "connected" with new people here?
Do you feel some kind of special identity bond/connection to all these people because of the music?
Do you have any friendships that are established through this music?
We will document the project by filming the "meetings".
Feedback
Here are some feedback we got on our project, from our teachers Johanne & Lone. We got it after we had carried the project out.
Our feedback can be read here.
Our intentions were:
It seems like our intentions with the project weren't clear or obvious enough, so we will begin this new phase in the project with further explanation of our intentions. We wanted to investigate on all the new relations which were established by the one simple reason, that people are waiting to get a hold on the Cohen tickets.
What we thought would be interesting, is how this group of people in the middle of a very public place, got to get intimate, while idling. We saw this as an example of how peoples bubbles could punctured by complete strangers and together with them making new bubbles. And then our presence would conceived as new strangers trying to interact in/with their community. We were trying to interact with their personal and private newly established zones.
By giving them breakfast we wanted to create a positive relation to the individuals in the group and try to talk them into an interview. An interview asking them relatively private questions, wanting them to explain to us how their relation to the music is, and how their relations to the other individuals has developed. We were hoping that they would tell us some kind of short stories from their own life's in relation to the music. Again here our purpose and agenda were to enhance or expose some invisible structures characterizes by intimacy and secrecy.
We were searching to find out how this beginning/pseudo event had potential to change the normal function of the specific area where it took place.
Fig. 1.
Miming all the bubbles we were expecting to meet at the queue. The biggest one established by their common interest in the music, the ones made between small groups of individuals in the queue, peoples individual bubble being their private spheres and us approaching them being the last bubble.
How the project were carried out
About 8:30 in the morning we arrived at the spot in front of Musikhuset, having with us some morning bread and coffee. There was about 15-20 people there waiting in queue, but there wasn’t really a straight line/queue because some of the girls made a number-system which functioned in the way, that when everybody arrived, they received a number. The idea behind this, was that when you had to go to the toilet or getting something to eat/drink, you could leave the queue in small groups without dropping out of the queue. In this way there actually was created a small community of queue-people, with their own little law system.
The fans received us with joy, they thought it was nice that someone was taking care of them, with coffee and food. We shared the food and coffee and explained that we, in return, were hoping to be allowed, to film them while asking some questions and taking some pictures.
“..of course you say hallo when you meet someone, it would be weird if you didn’t..”
That was one of the first commentary we got, when we asked if people had contacted each other when they arrived. When the waiting has a purpose and it is clear that you have something in common, you hope that you’ll have a good time together with the other people in the same situation. It seemed like they had had a good time waiting together and getting to know each other, the number-system provided some sort of secure feeling.
They told us, when we were asking them about intimacy, That they actually had made toilet-tours together during the night, toilet tours with people that they just had met. Some of the fans were arguing that the reason they would do such a thing, with almost total strangers in a queue, was that it was a queue to music which made it something special. It would not be the same if they were standing in a queue to a sale. A sale is a materialistic happening where a concert is something more than that.
Actually this started a discussion if it was rather the concert itself or if it was the fact that it was a Leonard Cohen concert.
“If it was a Britney Spears concert, it would have been something else..”
This guy argued that it was because of the older generation attending this concert, and that they were more openly and willingly to talk to the other people in the queue, than the Britney Spears fan. One person said that if it was heavy metal people waiting in a queue it would also have been a different experience.
“Heavy metal people are also nice people!” - one of the girls replied.
Two of the fans, who actually found out that they knew each other, told us that they probably wouldn’t have talked to each other if they had met in on a bus or a train.
The fans told us that if they met each other after, or before, the concert, they would say hello and talk and together, and they would remember the waiting at Musikhuset as the very beginning of the Leonard Cohen concert. Also they agreed that this spot would be remembered when they pass it again and thereby connected to Leonard Cohen.
More pictures here!
Morten talking to the queue-people:
Part1
Part2
Part3
Problems
First of all we have neglected most of the issues and themes of the Mobile Interface course. This have created a situation for us, where it's difficult to combine our practical project with the "Mobile Interface"-theory. Later on in this text we will try to reflect on how we could ave integrated mobile technologies, beside the camera we used to film the interviews.
Retrospective we can see that our project ended up being more of an examination than an actual "event". -But still we think that our project has validity in terms of working with structures and interaction in the urban space.
Some more practical problems were that we could not get an one on one interview, because people were so anchored in the newly established social constellation, that they wouldn't leave the queue. Furthermore they were so engaged in their new soc. constellations, and they needed each other to confirm their new relations and mutual interests.
Solutions
To make this "investigation" relevant to the mobile interface theme, we will broadcast the interviews on Youtube where people probably will try to find visual recordings after the concert took place. Here time, from the day where the beginning of the event took place until the exact date for the concert, will collapse and connect these two experiences.
A hypothetical solution to actually get people to see these videos is to hang up banners, at the concert queue, with links to the specific place on the internet where they can go and watch them. This will make the inter-media interface context more obvious, and enhance the projects character as event.
Theory
Goffman
Social anthropological notes on the per-formative constituted self, considering the queue situation.
We all got introduces to him on our Saturday workshop, where we specifically used his notions on how people in public space, when carrying technological devices, created a shield around them self.
This type of notion seems very closely connected with a lot of his explanations considering an individuals performance, how they constitute themselves through the way they act.
Goffman suggest that life in general, how we behave and manoeuvre around this complicated world, is very much like theater. He discusses the dialectics between our public identity and our private identity, which he explains in terms a theater scene; “front stage” and “back stage”. This being to different spheres, which is dependent on the place where a person acts out ones identity. Front stage is where we act out our public identity which fx could be in the public space in front of Musikhuset. Back stage is tied to ones private zone which could be our home.
What we actually found was happening, in the queue for Cohen tickets, was that these two zones got all mixed up here. People did actually sleep outside on the pavement, which temporarily changed the area in to a private zone for leisure and comfort. Just as Goffman in general notes, also here the two stages come together. In the middle of a very public sphere where they even are objects to surveillance, the powerful pan optic of the public, they sit gathered around their ghetto blasters and drinks acting all private. There are no clear distinction between front stage and back stage. People in the line are not either performing as they would normally in the public sphere or as they would in the private, but somewhere in between.
Also it is worth noticing that these Leonard Cohen fans has created a whole new society, democratic in a way. This society, very small though, beholds people from different social classes and geographical areas. This group represents/mimes the idea of the Internet, a place where peoples identity is anchored in their interests not their nationality. But then again, from another perspective, people who are in lack of economical and sociological means are excluded.
Is our project artistic aesthetics that are based on its relations?
In a specific video sequence, Morten is handing out coffee and bread for the friezing fans, and nothing else, apart from a positive meeting between people, seems to take place here. This isolated event could easily be connected to one of our times most popular art practices called "relationel æstetik". This genre has its focus on meetings between strangers. It tries to provide all kind of different people with tools that makes these social relations possible, an event facilitating social meetings. Here the coffee and bread provide a metaphysical facility that opens up new relations, where people come together eating breakfast. The danish artist group Superflex made an event at a gallery, where the content basically was to have a chef make some soup and audience participated by eating the soup.
Morten handing out coffe and morning bread; Exactly this sequence shows how our project, at first sight, could be percieved as aestetics based on its relations.
Debord
We can use Guy Debords term psychogeography on our project.
Psychogeography is a study of people’s behavior and reactions, and emotions in general, in one specific geographical area. It’s based on the observation that people divides the city into small or larger zones, and that these zones determine their behavior, and the hole atmosphere in these zones therefore also changes so it fits the human behavior.
In our project we observed, as earlier stated, the ticket queue in front of Musikhuset. Here had the people made their own little zone, founded on their common interest, their fascination of the music of Leonard Cohen. But this psychical relation between them wasn’t enough to make this zone by itself. A mental similarity isn’t enough to make a zone, there also has to be a geographical connection, in one way or another.
So these people in front of Musikhuset could make this zone, because they were mental focused on the same thing and they were at the same place at the same time.
Another interesting observation we did, was that this psychogeographic zone, not only was based on a mutual interest and a specific geographic place, but also on a feeling of intimacy and security. We observed that when the queue grew bigger, the people who had been there for many hours, no longer trusted their number-system, fearing that this new large number of people, wouldn’t respect this little communities rules. So we can conclude that in this case the psychogeographic zone only was maintained as long as the number of people could be surveyed.
Locke
Even though the project didn’t involve any mobile technology we can use Locke’s Temporary Intimate Zone (TIZ), to describe what happened in this event. The people in queue has, through their appearance in a public place, created a zone, where the purpose of being there was waiting. Therefore the zone was temporary, because it wasn’t architectural defined, it was only there for a short amount of time. The people waiting had created this zone with blankets and chairs to sit on. The zone was also auditory formed, through a ghettoblaster playing Leonard Cohen music. The interesting thing is that when we arrived with breakfast and coffee we were incorporated in the zone, and we were allowed to communicate with them.
Locke is using Goffman, to say that when you are in, for example an elevator, you become apart of that specific communication which is taking place in the "elevatorzone", at that specific time, rather you want it or not. It is because of the intimacy you are in, because of the limited space. Through your body language and 1-1 conversations you automatically involve everyone, because it is not possible not to notice each other, and hear the speaking. Locke’s point is that if you answer your cell phone, you are not creating a new zone, even though a cell phone could be an alien element, to the communication in the “elevatorzone”, Locke says that it is just adding something to the zone.
With that in mind we can conclude that we just added something new to the zone, and therefore we did not create new zones.
That is however also to be discussed, because as soon as we asked about secrets and stories connected to the music, they were not willing to tell us any. Was we the in another zone? No, not according to Locke. Locke says that how you communicate is how familiarly you are with the people. One can imagine that if we had been along in the queue with them the whole night, they might have been more open to tell us something.
Zygmunt Bauman
Bauman says, that the tendencies for people in the City, is that they isolate themselves in their own groups, and have lost interest in mixing with other cultures and lifestyles. However, we will state through this examination that he is wrong. At least in this example where people meet up with the same purpose, to buy a ticket for something that means a lot to them! The people in the queue even said it would be weird not to communicate when you are standing so close to each other in a public space. Some people however stated that it was because it was Leonard Cohen, and it would have been different, if is was a queue for a Britney Spears concert. Other replied that it didn't matter which concert it was. Their point was, that it is the pre-event itself, which create this loosening up for talking to strangers. Also others agreed on that, and said that in some cases it would also be the same waiting for a train. As long as they have a common purpose it doesn't matter which background you have.
Conclusion
We made a wrong turn at the very beginning of our project, so that we didn't got to incorporate mobile technologies. Still we got to make a very interesting examination. Unfortunately it became more of an examination than an actual event. Still we made people aware of their relations to each other and the music. The whole queue turned into our subject of examination and theorizing.
We observed how an intimate zone was established, and how it again vanished when the number of people in the queue grew. It is also interesting to see how different people with different backgrounds meet, and talked in the group without having any thing in common expect the music. Such pre-events, like waiting in a queue for the event can actually open our bubbles, so we are more willingly talking to strangers.
