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| (DRAFT WITHOUT HARVARD METHOD - 1535 words, still need conclusion and to finish connecting the research to the works)
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| I am stuck in a constant state of self-analysis and utter confusion. Fluctuating between an urgency for understanding and absolute apathy, I make works in an attempt to satisfy, punish and distract myself. I think.
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| I almost always approach this in a spatial way, perhaps because I am overly sensitive to my surroundings. The oppressiveness/comfort of a room or the paralysis/liberation of a landscape with endless possibilities. I often make works which are overstimulating and contradictory to try and reflect/decipher the complex social/physical/historical/political environment we have have been planted in.
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| Manipulation is a recurring element. As are the differences between public and private behaviour – the group and the individual.
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| I mostly make site specific installations, which will be inhabited by either myself or an invited audience.
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| To give you an idea of what I actually mean, I will describe three recent works of mine.
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| (FUTILE) FACILITY (2012)
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| I installed myself as a living exhibit, in the Ulster Museum, in Belfast, for 28 days. I confined myself to a beige bedsit, eating only beige food and wearing beige clothes. I constantly watched documentaries on screens built into the furniture. This, and any visitors were the only sources of colour and new information in the room. In response to this situation I made collages, maps, diagrams, dummies and interventions (using only beige materials). The bedsit changed throughout the experiment reflecting my mental state (sometimes deceptively). Beginning as an ordered and minimal environment, it slowly descended into chaotic squalor, then a fort and finally a semi-organised ‘kingdom’.
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| I wanted to directly inhabit my work, and use myself as the subject for various experimentation. By overloading the external stimuli I made it difficult to discern what elements were effecting my behaviour.
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| EXAMINATION (2013)
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| Outside the gallery is a waiting area. A receptionist asks the audience "Would you like to see the doctor?" and then instructs them to fill out a form, with information such as marital status and national insurance number. They are then invited into the gallery, alone or in small groups, and the receptionist gives the 'doctor' the (patients) form. The room is decorated like a modest office. Six large framed drawings resembling inkblot tests and distorted female genitalia hang on all four walls. A CCTV monitor in the corner shows the waiting area outside. A tall bearded Scottish man wearing a doctors coat, plain women's clothing and red lipstick sits in the corner of the room. He informs them he will ask a series of questions, which they must answer with either TRUE or FALSE. All of the questions relate to shame, morality, disgust and secrecy and have been taken from tests such as the MMPI-2 which is used by courts and employers to ascertain the mental state of an individual. A video camera is set up in the corner of the room to record the experiment. The 'doctors' is softly spoken yet cold throughout and he does allow participants to deviate from the questions. Although the audience has been primed with simultaneously sexualized and clinical imagery. The questions themselves never directly referred to sex or gender, but questioned the participant’s moral opinion. By only allowing a TRUE or FALSE answer to questions which are purely subjective (the tests the questions were taken from allowed a 1-10 scale of agree or disagree), the test investigated how people would feel about choosing a definitive moral stand point. Elements such as filling out the form, the CCTV, the camera and the verbal questioning, probed into how being viewed/recorded might alter how they answer.
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| THERE (2013)
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| An intervention taking place on the express bus route from Belfast to Larne. The bus left at 5:15pm on Friday and the journey lasted one hour The target audience was the unsuspecting passengers on the left side of the bus. Forty participants wearing identical clothing (a red woollen hat, a grey t-shirt, black trousers and black shoes), were located along the route on the left side of the road. They performed various actions to be seen by any passengers looking out the window.
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| This intervention was inspired by taking the bus to Glasgow from Belfast countless times. I wanted to experiment with the captive audience that regular passengers on express bus journeys could be. It was essential for me that they would be an unsuspecting audience, and that they would not easily be able to find an explanation for this elaborate spectacle (why?) The form/content (i.e everyone being dressed identically) of the intervention was based on the idea of reverie. Daydreaming whilst gazing out of a window, projecting yourself onto a passing landscape.
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| Intro to research
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| Actual experiences, sociology, psychological experiments, philosophy, television, anthropology, evolutionary biology, environmental psychology
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| When we are with other people we are acutely aware of how we should behave and often give ourselves up to public roles. Goffman gives an elucidatory account of how individuals react to being in the compnay of others. In ‘The Presentation of The Self in Everyday Life’ he gives a dramaturgical approach to common social behaviour. Goffman is of the opinion that tos ome extent we ‘manufacture our own persona’ and draws comparisons to the theatre and real life. Goffman sees interaction as performance, constructed to provide others with the impressions that the ‘actor’ wishes to give off, to attain a desired goal. This is shaped by the audience (being played to), the ‘team’ (who co-operates in the performance), and the environment they are in.
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| “Half aware that a certain aspect of his activity is available for all present to perceive, the individual tends to modify this activity, employing it wit hits public character in mind. Sometimes, in fact, he may employ these signs soley becasue they can be witnessed. And even if those in his presence are not quite conscious of the communication they are receiving they will none the less sense something sharply amiss should the uncustomary be conveyed.”
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| I am interested in how behaviour changes when you are viewed . I have investigated this numerous times in my work, including (FUTILE) FACILITY and EXAMINATION. Goffman’s perspective can be combined with psychological experiments into conformity such as the Asch Paradigm, Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment to demonstrate the powerful response an individual (consciously and unconsciously) can have in group situations.
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| This clip shows a 13 year old contestant being eliminated from the American 'X-Factor'. Her reaction is that of a bitterly disappointed child. She cries loudly and falls to the floor. I am interested in how for a moment the scripted 'reality' that is presented in gladatorial manner to a live studio audience as well as millions of viewers is for a moment disturbed. The host and judges slightly panic as they seem to be more aware of how the incident could be reported in the media than any genuine concern for the child. She quickly regains some amount of composure by the end of the clip, thanking her fans and exclaiming that without them she is nothing.
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| (Real people acting but still being real, acting as themselves –goffman)
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| (Art – real life acting as art but still within reality and real experience…hmmm)
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| In 'Die Familie Schneider' Gregor Schneider produced a disturbing experience by installing actors into neighbouring terraced houses and creating in detail physical surroundings that are uncannily familiar. The audience can only access the work by collecting keys from the ArtAngel office in pairs. They have ten minutes to go around the house individually, then they swap keys and enter the neighbouring house. Each house appears identical. A woman washes the dishes, a child sits in the corner of a bedroom with a bin bag over his head, a man masturbates in the shower. The viewer is always ignored by the actors (who are identical twins). The viewer becomes acutely aware of their presence in the house as a voyeur to this depressingly mudane and painful repeated domestic scene.
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| (Activating the viewer whilst simultaneously controlling, oppressing)
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| (Atmosphere, experimenting with ways of showing work to an audience THERE)
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| “Why are we so vulnerable, so inconveniently vulnerable, to what the spaces we inhabit are saying. Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we hrbor within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like ‘us’, so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves… We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hol dus, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves.”
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| CONCLUDE with new questions/directions/research
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| Research had too literally become the work.
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| Work about human behaviour. Can feel disjointed but all comes back to human behaviour and always presented/expressed as an ‘experience’/active encounter.
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| Interested in creating experiences. For entertainment/learning? Showing the power of manipulation. This became confused and works tended to be more about contradictions, obsession with self analysis and voyerurism.
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| Actually live the thing. Bring it from ideas/theroy into real situations to experience them/learn from them/ be frightend or whatever.
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| Research by going to things/expereinces/scenarios
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| Recently I realised that the research was too literarly becoming the work. I was studying social or spatial experiments and recreating or adapting these in installation or game form. Initially I had looked at these to find ways of manipulating environments, to create charged spaces for audience encounters.
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