Members of group:
Ingeborg
Henriette
Jeppe
Christian
Choice of the dices
| Pattern | Layer | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| 1. tresholds | 1. publicness | 1. play |
| 2. spots | 2. privacy | 2. work |
| 3. beginnings | 3. secrecy/intimacy | 3. transportation |
| 4. marks | 4. publicness | 4. speeding |
| 5. paths | 5. privacy | 5. relaxing |
| 6. intersections | 6. secrecy/intimacy | 6. idling |
Assignment wording
We are to develop a project for a place influenced by marks. The project should aim to heighten a feeling of Privacy based on the idea of speeding.
Idea
Our main idea for this project is to examine how people actually want to guard their private sphere/bubble in the city. An obvious situation where people are being disturbed in their privacy, is when people come up to you in the street and want to sell you something or want to present a good cause to support. Many people are getting sick of allways being stopped by UNICEF, Care or another organization alike. It is not UNICEF or the other organizations in themselves that people dislike. It is the fact that you, in some places in Århus, are being asked 3 times down the same street by hungry young people who sometimes..(!) only stand there for profit. (that is one of the things they are accused of sometimes.)
People often feel very ambivalent about this subject. Because on one hand it is a good cause the young people are stopping you for. But on the other hand, many people are already giving money to maybe 1 or 2 good causes, and are feeling judged in a wrong way when they keep asking you. Or maybe some people like the organizations but don't like the concept of standing in the streets, stopping every person passing by.
Project
Our idea of a project has more layers. As the assignment wording says we have to heighten the feeling of privacy. Our group is going to make a web-page presented as an organization, Privacy Fighters Inc., that guard the privacy in the public sphere. We are going to "spam" people so they notice the web-page and can visit. Hopefully it will be a forum where people can write their opinions about the subject. We are also going to make flyers with a map of Århus marked with places/zones that you should avoid if you don't want to be confronted with people coming up to you. Also a way of making people aware of the web-page. As the practical layer in the project, we are going to spend some time in the "zones" where the young people from the organizations are standing. Our point is not to be disrespectful to their work, but we somehow want to make them, and the people that they ask, aware of the fact that they are crossing a private sphere and how they feel about that.
The places where the organizations have positioned their folk are influenced by 'marks' in that sense that the public often has a feeling of walking zig-zag to avoid the organization-represents. This means that innocent people become 'marks' for the hunters of the organizations. Our flyers are also going to 'mark' the zones in århus. Our way of dealing with the word 'privacy' should already have been explained. "..based on the idea of speeding…" - the word 'speeding' also means to enhance or speed up a process, and that´s what we are going to do by confronting people with this subject: Intercepting Unicef before they can recruit people to their cause and hurrying the innocent people on their way, thereby speeding up the process of privacy. And helping the passer-by to maintain their private spheres.
From the outside our little organization is going to look like the real thing, really guarding the privacy and standing up for peoples rights to be in a private bubble in the public sphere. But from the inside, what we are really doing is maybe bringing a little sarcasm. By heightening the feeling of privacy, people might react differently and be more critical about their opinion of 'privacy'.
Our organisation could perhaps fall under the more resent developed category: "Glocal", a term that covers a type of globalisation where for instance an organsation has a global goal and network through the internet etc., but also has a local base. Privacy Fighters Inc. is global through the web-page, where people from all over the world can sign up, support or participate in discussions with relevance to the protection of peoples private spheres/bubbles, but at the same time the organisation is locally based since it (as a start?) focuses on specific hot-spots in Århus and thereby is present at a street-level as well as a more virtual one.
Check out our web-page: Privacy Fighters Inc.
Futher virtual info (Danish only)
Hemment's Taxonomy
OUR PROJECT: AMBULANT - SOCIAL, RELATIONAL.
According to Hemment’s taxonomy, our project rests primarily inside the sphere of the Ambulant, and more precisely in the Social, Relational box.
Our project will include a small social intervention, when we proceed to cut off the people from Unicef and Amnesty International, before they can hijack any ordinary people.
Apart from that, we invite people to think of public space in a non-ordinary way: we are going to make a map of the so-called ‘hot-spots’ in Århus, the high-density places where everyone is at risk of bumping into these people-hijackers. Thereby, a different kind of map is created – a map of privacy in a city bustling with people.
ALTERNATIVE TAXONOMY: GEO-ANNOTATION – GRAFFITI, NARRATIVE, GAMING.
If we were to rethink our project into a narrative gaming dimension, one idea could be to ‘tag’ certain high-risk areas within our map on our webpage, so that people would be able to receive a text-message whenever they went near these areas. Furthermore, a route could be specifically designed to those daredevils brae enough to challenge these zones. One of the main rules would be to navigate through these zones without being ambushed by the notorious do-gooders trying to woo you to their benevolent cause. This way, a certain gaming quality is born in the cityscape.
Litterature
It has been difficult to find a text or author from our readings that writes about this exact idea. In some ways our projekt with saving privacy goes against a lot of the subjects we have been through in class. Where the subjects more have been about being open to new ways of experiencing the city - being challenged to open up your own little bubble. In other ways this is exactly where our project meet our class-subjects. Because we a long part of the way have a sarcastic undertone in our project. That makes it underline maybe the exact opposite of being a Privacyfighter. We want people to wake up from their sceptic and ambivalent attitude towards the salesmen and think about what they really think about it/them. Is it in the end a good thing that people do not have a wall build around them to guard their privacy, that people can connect in the public space? In the same way we want to make the salesmen aware of what they are doing and how they feel about it. Could this contact be made in another way?
We had the Yes Men in thought when we first started talking about making up an organisation. In their projects they try to inhance the things they don't like - in that way to make people realise that it is stupid. The sarcastic tone is in a smaller scale what we are trying to use here. As an example Yes-men bought a web-page that has a resemblance to the official web-page of The World Trade Organisation, and turned it in to a fake representation of the organisation, with a very formal lay-out and tone. As a result some people actually misread the web-page of the Yes-men as the real one, and therefore hired them to speak at a conference. The Yes-men added another layer of sarcasm to the project, when they turned up at the conference wearing a suit with an enormous phallus. So thereby they question authority, and test peoples willingness to accept a fairly unreliable situation as a result of a general acceptance of authority as being representatives of truth.
Lefebvre talks in his text "Plan of the Present Work" of how space is a social product. It is not already there, it has to be produced. It changes as the culture of the city changes and therefor it makes sense to put a thought in to the different factors that decides how a space is produced. In our hotspot areas in our project (Ryesgade, Clemensbro etc..) it is notisable how much the structure and rythme changes when the salesmen are there. Standing like spiders - trying to get people in their web. As a result, people passing by maybe speeding up or walking in zigzag to continue their walk and thereby try to avoid being held up by the people representing the organisation.
Our aim to protect peoples right to maintain their private sphere can be related to the view of the German sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who talks about how modern citizens do not have a need or an interest in mixing with people from other social groups than their own or with other lifestyles than themselves - they simply just want to keep to themselves or to their own group. This need to have a minimum of contact with other groups can be seen as manifested in peoples attempt to avoid the salespeople in order to avoid breaking their private bubbles, and thereby avoiding to interact with people (from the organisation) that doesn´t belong their particular social group.
Other inspiring examples
Another inspiration for our project is Space Hijackers. This group has some resemblance to our organisation, especially in terms of their purpose. As they describe it on their official web-page: "Our group is dedicated to battling the constant oppressive encroachment onto public spaces of institutions, corporations and urban planners. We oppose the way that public space is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit making space." A view that corresponds pretty well with Privacy Fighters opposition towards the organisations that invade public space and claim peoples private spheres. They simply want to "…claim back public ownership [of public space]", which they attempt through different kinds of events and projects, where they bring focus to the invasion of private owned corporations into public space.
In Action
Saturday the 4. of april we had planned to take our project to the next level. Before that day, we made professional looking flyers with coloured logo and punch-lines about privacy in the public space. We also made a page on Facebook and mapped out the risk areas of århus, to encourage people to give a comment in there. Today we have 48 members and hopefully our flyers that we handed out saturday will encourage more people to go in and give a comment. We will of course tjeck up on that up till the seminar days.
But this saturday we met up in front of the trainstation. We were going to walk down the pedestrian street (Ryesgade, Clemens bro and Store Torv) and find the salesmen that are always standing in the same zones, always saying the same things. But that saturday everything was different, because it appearently was the big day for Organ donation. There were stands with medical students presenting real animal organs, there were people lying in hospitalbeds and livemusic. Not there for the profit, but to bring out the main issue: "Har du taget stilling?" (Have you thought about organ donation?) Maybe 100 people were on the streets wearing white hospital robes handing out letters that people could take home and think about. The whole organ donation project seemed very well-organized and was in many ways different from what we actually wanted to highlight. Here we were dealing with a big project with a lot of action that was only running only that particular day. But eventhough we thought that the focus on organ donation was a good idea, (and we also think that focus on UNICEF etc. is a good idea, but maybe their strategies are a bit warned out) they were still an example of breaking privacy in public space. And that´s what we're fighting against in PrivacyFighters. So we agreed to act possitivly towards their project, so that we in a respectful manner could make people think about our points of view.
We did find people that were not a part of this big event. A guy trying to recruit people to a management course (at the trainstation) and one selling the newspaper Jyllandsposten. We (mostly Christian was our frontspeaker as the pictures show) went up to the privacybreakers and gave them a flyer, telling about our views and asking about their view on the subject. Walking down the pedestrian street we didn't want to be bubblebrakers ourselves. So we didn't confront the ordinary people with flyers, but put them on bikes and in car windows and in the money hats of the people playing music. Just to get our message out to more people than the hijackers we talked with.
The people that we talked with primarely could see the sense in our organisation, but were of course surpriced that we showed up and talked to them. We thought a lot about our own role in this, that we on one hand not were supposed to be privacy intruders ourselves, but on the other hand, we had to get in contact with the salesmen and tried to give them some of there own medicine. Mostly they reacted with the attitude "noget for noget" (if you give, you get - something for something). So the guy with the management course also tried to recruit us, and actually started talking about using Privacyfighters to work out new strategies to recruit people. He really thought we were a serious well-established organisation - which we of course are… at least for a couple of weeks.
Back to the assignment wording
We think that we combined the urban adventure with the mobile interface by having focus on Privacyfighters both on Facebook and out in the streets. Back to the wording, it was very clear that eventhough the Organ donation event was an unusual big event that was given lots of attention, it had the effect on the mass of people going down the streets on a saturday, that in front of the stands and around the people giving handouts there were more open spaces. Some people still didn't want to be interrupted and speeded up. We felt it ourselves too, because people notice that you have flyers and get suspicious. Eventhough our settings for our project was a bit different than we had planned, we think we got our message out. And maybe we actually had benefit of the fact that this saturday wasn't just and ordinary saturday, because our message was highlighted with a bigger contrast.
Feedback from Johanne and Lone
Generally a good idea and we like the idea of a phoney organisation. By regarding the salesmen as 'bubble breakers' you get a good starting point, but you don't seem to take full advantage of the conceptual layer of their acts. Will you actually heighten the feeling of privacy by intercepting the UNICEF etc salespeople? You could maybe gain some extra focus in your project by applying the more literal meaning of the word "speeding" – do people actually speed up when they see these salespeople? Do they excuse themselves by saying that they're too busy? Or how does the act of speeding influence these places? And could it be that it is not the place itself, but rather the people at the place (in the zone inhabited by sales people) that are marked (perhaps as money machines)?
We believe you need to sharpen your project as it aims to do many things at the same time. It is better to focus on one or two things than trying to encompass so many aspects that you can't do them fully. Given the limited timespan of the project, the website may be too ambitious as websites generally take a long time to get in circulation – how about a facebook group or cause instead if you want to use the web? Maybe you could get inspiration from the Penguin Army (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14048320553), although you need to do this in a much smaller scale - they are pretty ambitious.
