Ada Jiang
Jordan Rickman
Recurring Concepts in Art
22 Feb 2019
Our final project will be a participatory performance exploring intimacy and connection through anonymous touch. It is inspired by a durational performance that Jordan did last semester for a Design for Discomfort class. In that previous performance, he sat in Washington Square Park, blindfolded and wearing earmuffs, with his hand extended, and a sign that said “Will you hold my hand?” Strangers stopped by to hold or shake his hand. The performance explored what can or might be communicated through touch alone, and the differences in experience and connection when one removes the usual visual and conversational information by which we assess, judge, and relate to other people.
For this project, we want to continue exploring this territory, this time putting participants in a similar situation to the performer, as opposed to the passersby who interacted with him. Participants will all put on blindfolds and be paired up randomly, then guided to hold hands with each other for up to two minutes. Although they will not be holding hands with a complete stranger as in the earlier piece, they will have a similar experience of communicating with an unknown person through touch alone. In the original durational performance, though the audience don’t usually recognize the role they play in the piece’s existence, they are just as much a part of the artwork as they became excited by the feat of the artist. This time, by putting the audience in the situation of the performer and merging two roles, we are very curious not only to share this experience with the participants, but also to hear their variety of perspectives and reactions to the situation.
As the goal for this experiment is to explore connection solely through hand holding with no other sensory information given, we intend to establish an environment ideal for the interaction that eliminates participants’ major sensory inputs like hearing and sight that dominate our daily perceptions of the world. Thus, given the nature of the performance, there’s a number of variables we need to factor in, including choice of space, number of participants, use of props to block external distractions, duration of the interaction based on the 15 minutes presentation, bias of facilitators in pairing up the participants. To ensure we make the most out of the available resources and everything runs smoothly within the time restriction, we decided that we need at least two rounds of play tests to minimize the uncertainties and get the most valuable responses we want.
In the first round of play test, we will invite 16 volunteers, and group them into 8 pairs of 2. To avoid bias in the decision of pairing, we will write down the names of the participants and randomly draw pairs of names from the pile. There will be 16 participants and 2 facilitators. Before we start, we will instruct the participants to put on their blindfolds and stay silent throughout the interaction. Then the participants will be shuffled in the space so that they no longer know by whom they are surrounded. Facilitators will pair them up based on the names drawn. We estimate the preparation process will take around two minutes. And the interaction will take around two minutes. At the end of the interaction, we will spend several minutes collecting feedback from the participants on their experience of the interaction. Knowing what to expect in the second round of play test, we will make adjustments to some variables based on observations from the first round if necessary: the time constraints for preparation, interaction and feedback collection, the space and pairing strategy.