Assignment
We have to develop a projekt influenced by spots (pattern), privacy(layer) and idling(activity).
Members
Meetings
Next meeting: Wednesday at 2 pm in "La Cantina".
Think about: Our concept about the "changing room".
Concept
!. Draft
Visual draft of our "changing room" concept.
Outside
Inside
We have changed the concept a bit because we hadn't used mobile interface and we thought it would take to much time to build a changing room.
Therefor we came up with this:
Using a red round spot painted like a "no entry" sign, which should indicate a privacy spot. We will place this spot around the city and on buses standing / sitting using mobiles and ipods, try looking idle. We will record how people react from a nearby location but hidden so nobody knows except us. By moving around we will "paint" a big "no entry" sign on a city map, maybe the biggest in the world. It could look like this:
According to Drew Hemments("Locative Arts") taxonomy our project would be categorised as "figuratve, expressive and performative mapping".
Re-thinking the project in his term "social authoring", we could add that people exposed to it, had to comment on their experience via sms.
Feedback from Johanne and Lone
The idea of exploring people's relations to the place they're idling at is interesting. You're carefully exploring the non-placeness of the place you've chosen and we like that.
However, we're not sure the chosen symbolism is well chosen. If you'd like to create a privacy spot, choosing a sign that signals "no entry" doesn't seem to be the best choice. Further, the symbolism in that sign is probably very contextual in the sense that people are likely to only take it seriously if it is linked to a passage way (a street or a door). Consider choosing something that stays within the context of the pavement – something that could direct people's movements when they stand still. Have a look at the project of privacy zones mentioned in the Dunne&Raby text (MI). We like the idea of the 'angle of surveillance' (that is, the big sign on the map), but right now it seems to be an add-on and not an integrated part of the symbolism, you're aiming at.
You would benefit from reflecting on the project in light of the readings from class, so make sure you take your time to do so (we recognise that you haven't yet had time to do so).
Also, you write that your sign is painted. We don’t really think we need to say this, but you should of course not put anything into the city permanently. You could use tape, stickers, posters and so on instead.
A new and more precise description of our project:
We will paint a round carpet as the "no entry" sign. Then use it as a mobile private spot different places around the city i.g. on the bus, in the mall, on the street. To point out the privacy zone, the person standing on the spot will be talking on the cellphone or listening to music on an iPod. We would also like to see if we'll get a different reaction from people without using the phone and the iPod. Will people respect the "no entry" sign or will they just walk into it or even realize its presence. We want to highlight the private-public sphere.
We will document the project by filming and taking photos of the act.
OUR FINAL PROJECT
With the three words: spots, privacy and idling we had to develop a project influenced by spots, which should aim to heighten a feeling of privacy based on idling. At first we came up with an idea which was later realized as being too complicated to carry out. We interpreted the word spots as spotlights at first, but when we spilt up and tried to interpret the word in a different way we found a lot of other possibilities in the word spot. In the end we decided to changed the word a bit to just spot in singular instead of the plural of spot. The idea that we came up with is discribed above, but in short we wanted to make the invisible private sphere that surrounds you, when you for eksample talk on your cell phone or listen to music in the street, visible. We were creating a sphere with our spot. We live in a culture, where people dream about being in the spotlight and people are exposing themselves in many different ways etc. on Facebook, Myspace, on TV shows. In our assignment we put ourselves in and on the spot.
When we are in a public place we have to respect the different signs and different people. Every day we are interacting with other people, but in the public space there are a lot of hidden boundaries.
Walking on the streets in the city people are surrounded by their private sphere and when we are standing in a public place we are surrounded by an invisible circle - our private spot. It is very different how big or small our private spot is. If a stranger gets to close to our private spot we get uncomfortable because there are interfering with our private sphere.
In our assignment we wanted to test people’s reaction if we made the invisible visible. Barnard talks about that communication is an exchange of signs. We wanted to communicate with our sign, and people responded differently.
The first happening
We created a “no entry” sign (SPOT) that we could stand on in the street while talking on the cellphone or listening to music. We obviously chose the “no entry” sign as a symbol to clarify that it was our private sphere and that we didn’t want anyone to enter our private zone. We wanted to see if anybody interrupted the private zone, by walking into and over the “no entry” sign. But it was only a temporary happening for a few minutes and then it was gone and left no trace.
When we met a Lille Torv in front of Magasin we had made a “no entry” sign out of an old bath mat and painted it red with a white stripe across it. Rebekka was the first one to carry out our performance. While Sune was filming behind a telephone booth, suitably far away to be hidden for most people, Katrin and Sidsel were observing near by. Quite fast we all realized that the sign was simply to small for people to cross it and the square maybe to big, so that people weren’t forced to cross it in some way.
The second happening
With help from nice people at Panduro (a hobby shop), we therefore made a new and bigger sign which was 1,5m in diameter. We began our performance once more end with more luck this time. People were obviously aware of the red spot and the majority of the people that passed us, didn’t step into the spot or crossed it. A woman with a baby carriage even tried to manoeuvre around the spot with out stepping on it or let the baby carriage drive upon it. Some people just walked over it like it wasn’t even there, while others stopped and walked another way. Some people tried very hard to walk by without stepping on the sign. Some people laughed but nobody reacted verbally. No one asked us what we where doing which we at least thought they would do. People in the streets of Aarhus are very reserved and private.
We carried out our project on the following places:
- At Lille Torv (didn’t really work because the spot was too small)
- In badstuegade close to Café Jorden.
- In the very narrow unnamed street which is situated between skt Clemens stræde and Store Torv between McDonalds and Matas (The mens fashion store Axel is on the corner of this street and Skt. Clemens Stræde…).
- At Strøget, just before Clemensbro close to Mackies and at the end of Skt. Clemens Stræde.
- In the narrow passage between strøget and telefontorvet.
- In Netto (where we weren’t aloud to film and were asked to leave).
- At the stairs infront of Banegården.
- You can see some of the videos that we made underneath and peoples reactions.
Pictures and videos
Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24172282@N05/
Videos: [http://eyespot.com/mymedia?cmd=Gallery#]
Observations
The reason why we chose to carry out our project in these different places was to examine how people would react when they were more or less forced to walk into our private sphere. The majority of people didn't, as discriped above, walk into the "sign" but tried to pass it without stepping on it as good as possible.
But we could observe, that if there was no possibility to walk around the sign, people would step into it, but some of them did it really carefully!
Expecially when we carried out the project on the stairs in front of the train station, people were forced to step in to our privat sphere because there was no possibility for them to walk around it.
We also performed our experiment without cellphones and iPods to see if people acted different. Having a privat conversation or listening to music, makes it even more difficult for people to interact with you. The cellphone and iPod create a floating private place, which even underlines our privat sphere and furthermore symbolized by the red-white carpet. While on the cellphone you may be less aware of your surroundings. Regarding the iPod you underline the privacy more, because while listening to your private music, you don´t hear the sounds of the city(Based on the theory of M. Bull).
As well as the iPod also the cell phone underlines your privacy, because you kind of fall out of the puplic enviroment around you. The person steps out of the public into a private communication space.
At the time when there existed no cellphones you had architectual zones (Locke) that made clear, that you stepped out of the public sphere and into your privat sphere, like telephone boxes for example, which are rare these days. Inside them you were on your own and the other people could not listen to what your were talking about. It was commonly accepted as a private zones, but with the cellphone it is not accepted the same way. Sometimes it can be rude to have a mobile conversation in the public i.g. on a bus or some other place were silence is more suitable.
With our red carpet we kind of created a visible space that underlines our TIZ, temporary intimate zone(Locke), which we already created by talking on the phone. Of course it has not the same effect as talking on the phone in a phone-box where nobody can hear you, because the people around us could still have been able to hear what we were talking about.
So by being more "open", without talking on a phone or listening to an iPod we thought that people would more easily interact or react different, but as we observed they did not. Our project has a reference to the Sony walkman commercial, where a man and a woman listen to their walkman in a public place and they are surrounded by an invisible bubble, which separates them from the outside world. They have their own private sphere that doesn’t include the rest of the world. In our project we tried to make the invisible visible. The private sphere that surrounds us when we are in a public place was made visible by the red carpet painted to simulate a no entry zone. A carpet symbolises the domestic/ homely and a no entry sign the privacy. Carrying that with us out in the public space and by standing on the no entry sign talking on our mobile phone or hearing music on the iPod, we moved the private and homely into the public arena.
Critique
Maybe it would have been better to do the project with another "carpet", maybe saying "Privat". In that way people would recognize that the spot is meant as a private space, highlighting everybodys private intermacy zones as Locke talks about. So they may have seen the "no entry" sign but did they connect it with privacy?
We are not sure if the people recognized the carpet as an private sphere and even thoght about our happening. We should have asked people, both to hear what they thought about our project and to see if they understood it the way we wanted them to understand it.
It would alsohave been a good idea to carry out the project on a bus( as we actually wanted to do but did not do, because we were afraid that somebody would step on the carpet and fall). The bus is a semi-private place and so it would have been interessting to see how people had reacted, when we would have made our private sphere visible.
Theory
Michael Bull: "No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening
Barnard, M. (2002). Fashion as communication ( 2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN: 0-415-26018-3.
Locke, M. (2002). Wireless culture performs in the temporary intimate zone [Electronic Version]. Horizon0, 4. Retrieved jan 8, 2008
