Orange Pie
| Rachel McCabe | moc.liamg|lehcarebaccm#moc.liamg|lehcarebaccm |
| Chanette Parbo | kd.iibuj|obrap-ettenahc#kd.iibuj|obrap-ettenahc |
| Marie Meldgaard | moc.liamtoh|draagdlemeiram#moc.liamtoh|draagdlemeiram |
| Sofie Kvist | moc.liamg|tsivkfos#moc.liamg|tsivkfos |
| Assignment: We are developing a project for a place influenced by thresholds. The project will aim to heighten a feeling of secrecy/intimacy based on the idea of play. |
Saturday with Simon
Our project is a collaborative photo tour of Aarhus. It features, Simon (a black-necked swan of the stuffed animal variety) and a variety of random chaperons who will adopt Simon (idea of play) for an unspecified portion of time (within a 12-hour period) one upcoming Saturday. Simon will come with a note that describes his situation: he wants the hospitable people of Aarhus to help him leave home (place influenced by thresholds) and discover/get to know their favorite parts of the city (secrecy/intimacy).
Should one take up the invitation, then he or she (the temporary "chaperon") is asked to take one (and only one) mobile camera photograph to capture their little adventure with Simon. The chaperon then sends the picture to the number indicated in the letter (Chanette's mobile phone) and is entrusted with the task of passing Simon on to another hospitable stranger who will do the same. Simon has a curfew (as all loyal stuffed animals do) and must be returned home by 10:00 p.m. The note will include the address of Simon's blog, http://saturdaywithsimon.blogspot.com/ so that the chaperons can track Simon's journey via the Internet. This will hopefully make them more invested in the activity as they will be able to see the results (the photo tour) when the day is over.
Simon's tour began on the morning of Saturday, April 5th. He was supposed to return to us at 20:00 that night. In an unanticipated turn of events Simon was accompanied by his first chaperon for a full 8 hours! Simon did not return home by curfew. He turned up randomly on Sunday afternoon with a new friend and is currently still out there, slowly making his way around the city.
Sources of Inspiration
Conflux Festival New York City 2007
- Theft and Rescue Project:
The Theft and Rescue project "encourages people to save and adopt unique, hand-made stuffed bunnies they find in the cityscape, then submit stories about the bunny and its rescue via the project website".
For one woman's personal impressions of the project click here
- Subtalk:
SubTalk is "a social experiment which aims to encourage social interactions in the subways of New York city. It’s an instruction based project where people are invited to change/exchange specific given objects (ex. throwaway cameras) while riding the subway trains. Such objects and instructions are given to participants on the starting points of subway lines which they must pass on to another passenger. These objects are not allowed to go over ground and must remain underground - within the subway network.
The objects will function as an interface for social interactions and at the same time they will document the interactions. We hope that such actions and exchanges will create happenstance interactions within the subway network".
Snap Shot City
Snap Shot City is "a worldwide photographic treasure hunt that brings people together on-the-ground and on-line. It celebrates the cities in which we live. It aims to open eyes to the extraordinary; everyday; everywhere by challenging people to become artists for a day and to create simultaneous fun for our extended social network all over the world".
The Traveling Gnome Prank
The traveling gnome prank is "a popular method of returning a garden gnome "to the wild". It involves stealing a gnome, taking it on a trip around the world (usually passing it from person to person), and photographing it at famous landmarks, with the photos being returned to the owner".
The Flat Stanley Project
The Flat Stanley Project was developed by a Canadian school teacher (1995) to get primary students excited about reading and writing. In the project children take pictures of and write journal entries about the travels of a card board cut out man (Flat Stanley) from a 1960s children's book. Students may find it fun to plot Flat Stanley's travels on maps and share the contents of the journal. Often, a Flat Stanley returns with a photo or postcard from his visit. Some teachers use e-mail.
Bookcrossing
BookCrossing is "the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise".
Geocaching
Geocaching is "an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world".
Supporting Theory
Dong-Hoo Lee discusses in her text "Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture" how the mobile phone today provides a space for exhibition: "(…) that exposes a slice of personal life, people and things with which the woman has intimate relations". That is one of the things our project aim to highlight. But unlike Lee who only talks about women, we would like to focus on people in general. In a way, you can say that we provoke people to be aware of that exposion you create when you use your camera phone. The intimate part of it gets very obvious with our initiative to take Simon to a place that means something special for the person concerned.
A complex thought arises for the intimate part of the project. Lee says: "While mobile phones tend to strengthen the intimate relations of a person, they also become interconnected with the Internet and can produce more diverse forms of communication." That's the situation that arises when people take an intimate picture with Simon and afterwards send it to us. Lee talks about how the content and the understanding of the picture will be changed, when it becomes public and displayed. She also points out how the person taking the pictures and sending them on to others become more aware of what is selected, "she is more careful in managing impressions". Is our project possible at all then with Lee's opinion in mind - is it possible for us to recieve an intimate picture despite of the person awareness of having to pass the picture on to a stranger? As Lee says, the boundaries between the private and the public becomes blurred.
Lone Koefoed Hansen and Susan Kozel talk about in their text "Embodied imagination: a hybrid method of designing for intimacy", concerning their project Plabebo Sleeves, how portable, wireless, moble devices afford people the possibility to become performers in their own environment. With our project we in a way create a performative ambience for the chaperons engaged in the project. It has become very normal to take pictures with your mobile phone in places and situations you want to "capture". Hansen and Kozel see all acts as performative, but in the same way as they required a more specific framing of performativity for their project Placebo Sleeves, we stress the performative situation it is taking pictures with your mobile phone by making the participants take a picture of themselves and a stuffed animal which is not a situation in proportion to their mobile phone they normally would find themselves in. Maybe some of the participants will have to make it a performance, at least in their mind, to escape the feeling of being embarrased and weird.
Matt Locke's discussion of the Temporary Intimate Zone is also of relevance to our project. When the chaperon adopts Simon it is for a short span of time; it is temporary, ephemeral. The intimacy is created in taking the picture in a "special place" and because we are asking the participants to form an imaginary "emotional bond". The chaperons are also being intimate in that they are adopting and taking care of Simon. They have to buy into the game -a sort of parallel world of imagination. If play takes place in a magic circle (Huijinga) than the chaperons have to invest emotional energy in the project to make it work, otherwise Simon is just an inanimate object. The performative aspect is also interesting here regarding what Goffman writes about behavior in public places. While the protocols of "proper behavior" might discourage city users' from walking around town conspicuously with a stuffed swan, because the task involves performativity (taking a picture with a mobile phone) perhaps participants feel the boundaries of proper behavior change. The communication device that will signify the performance, after all, is associated in many circles with fun and play (see Lee). And as Chang and Goodman write, "games can excuse adults from adhering to ordinary customs. Games create their own worlds that temporarily overwrite everyday rules". The zone is understood as a kind of wave or irruption of private communication space within public space.
At first glance, the light-hearted theme of the project might seem frivolous. The use of "play" in media projects, however, is the topic of much theoretical debate. As Mary Flanagan asks in her paper, "Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism", do locative media projects involving play have the "potential to act as a tool for empowerment, community building, and cultural change"? While Saturday with Simon wasn't conceived of with the intention of changing the world, we were thinking about community building. The passing on of Simon from one stranger to the next was an important feature of the project. Much like the SubTalk project (outlined above), we were hoping to encourage social interaction through the exchange of an object within a limited space. We also thought the playful context might get participants to think differently about where in the city they would take Simon for his one-day adventure. We were trying to liberate people (at least in a small way) by giving them a "novel experience in the space of the urban environment" and allowing them to push the normal boundaries of "proper" behavior in public places. We also thought that the blog outlining Simon's photo tour would be a great way to create a feeling of community amongst the people who became Simon's chaperons, his "adopted family" if you will.
Finally, Saturday with Simon is not a "tour-guide project" (Chang and Goodman) where the creator of the game (us) is sole storyteller or owner of a place. We wanted our project to function as "a medium through which people tell their own stories" (Chang And Goodman).
Hemment's Taxonomy
As we think about our project with respect to Hemment's taxonomy of locative arts it seems that Saturday with Simon works into a few categories. It fits into the Mapping category because the chaperons will generate a kind of photo trail; one of the outcomes therefore is a user-generated map. It is also performative in the sense that the chaperons are aware that their movement is being recorded and will act accordingly. As far as Geo-annotation goes, Saturday with Simon has a social authoring component in that the project opens up "a social space by enabling people to produce their own content within an environment". The chaperons have to entrust other strangers and work collaboratively in the sense that a community of strangers has to take care of Simon and help him discover Aarhus. A new layer of meaning is inserted within the environment (a layer of lighthearted play). And finally, as far as the Ambulant category is concerned, as much as the Saturday with Simon project does have to do with movement, it was also conceived with the idea that we didn't want to "mediate" too much. We wanted the city user (chaperon) to direct the movement and to author the photo-tour.
Obstruction: If we were to shift our project to the Ambulant realm we could have 1) had participants follow a series of clues around the city to get Simon safely "home", 2) we could have created an audio tour to go with Simon, or 3) we could have added an obstruction to the adventure so that when the chaperon got to the desired location they had to call a number to receive a random series of parameters (like in Asphalt Games).
In the end, we agreed to mediate less because we wanted to give up "ownership" of the tour and be genuinely surprised by where Simon ended up (as evidenced by the photo outcome of his adventure). Our project has less to do with precise mapping, digital tracking and "axiomatic systems" in general and more to do with the experience of place (and even proof of fun) as they are linked to screen-based representations.
Feedback from Johanne and Lone
We like the concept very much, and you are reflecting well on the assignment wording. The concept of the chaperon is very strong even though the idea of the teddy has been seen before (Teddy Tours Berlin http://www.teddy-tour-berlin.de/). You alter it a bit as you make people pass it on – you're sending Teddy on 'holiday' with strangers and not a travel agency. The idea of making people choose one, and one only, picture is also great as it sharpens people's focus. Since we have seen similar projects, you could probably benefit from revisiting your concept in light of maybe pulling it slightly more towards the mobile interface culture aspect. Maybe you should send a mobile phone on tour?
