SECTION 4: EXPERIMENTS, DERIVES, ATTEMPTS TO CONDUCT SURREALIST INTERVENTIONS IN THE MODERN DAY
Throughout the semester, as we have engaged in an academic study of the way that Surrealists transformed space in their installations, we have also attempted to gain a more direct understanding of the way that Surrealists worked through a series of spatial interventions and experiments conducted around campus. These interventions were the source for a great deal of insight into the ways that Surrealist methods can be brought to a modern university environment and eventually provided much of the material for our own installation, Shared Data. What follows is a thematic account of the main directions our explorations took. Chronological but less contemplative documentation can be found on the tumblr that we have created as a supplement, which is frequently linked to in the following text.
Mythos
On our way outside of lecture one day, we noticed that a usually forbidden area had been left open across. We investigated the unlocked construction site across the street, and after a brief, but unproductive interview with a worker on his way out, continued on our way. We were struck by the name Shepley Bulfinch on the sign outside of the site, and this provided another source for our experimentation.
After Byrd and Christoph attempted to find out more about Bulfinch on the internet, we realized that the best course of action would be to go to Firestone. There, we found a collection called “Bulfinch’s Mythology,” which was the first appearance of the mythological in our experimentations. Although we didn’t find many useful revelations in the text itself, we knew that the mythological was something that we would pursue further.
Shortly thereafter, the mythological appeared in the course proper, and, inspired by Madeleine’s oral retelling of the Theseus cycle, which included three apocryphal sisters as the motivation for entering the Labyrinth, T.J. and Byrd undertook a new project, Mythtakes. Setting out at Frist at 8:30 one Wednesday, we interviewed random people about their recollections of mythological figures, both real and invented. We directed them to recount the tale however it first came to them, without worrying about fidelity to historical mythology, and we recorded the interviews.
Inspired by the Surrealist fascination with the idea of the “modern mythology”, we used these interviews to reconstruct eight classical mythological narratives, resulting in uniquely modern narrative adaptations. These narratives were then collated and used as the basis for a series of eight altar spaces, to be encountered during the journey through the lowest levels of the installation.
Memory
Near the beginning of our experimentation, we were confronted by the problems of remembering. Excited by the prospect of seeing the space we had secured in Shared Data, Byrd and T.J. went to Green without paying attention to the route they took. When we later sat down to recount the events of the day in our journals, we realized that we had forgotten our route. We resolved to attempt to reconstruct it at the same time next week.
Starting at Green at exactly the same time the next Friday, we asked passersby if they had come across a pair of two people matching our description, taking care to avoid revealing that we were looking for memories of our previous journey. Based on positive and negative indicators from the people we came across, we took a new path, eventually becoming mired in a prison-space of skeptical lab technicians who refused to give any indications. We learned from this exercise that the disconnect between individual and environment in contemporary society was pervasive and would be difficult to overcome, but also encountered the first indications that human interaction might be a viable way of destabilizing this relationship.
We transcribed the conversations that we had, resulting in the first script produced by our group.
Forgetting also played an important role in the vanishing of Christoph, as his last interaction with the group before his first disappearanceinvolved his resolution to forget the details of the graveyard derive.
Affect
One of our principle concerns with the modern museum is a question of affect. Spaces are created with certain goals in mind–audience participation, for example–and while the conception is good, the execution often fails. Museum visitors often don’t sit through the entirety of audio-visual presentations within a museum, for example, or, if asked to contribute writing or drawing or other forms of manipulation to an exhibition space, or to interact with one another, the atmosphere of the space itself sometimes interferes with their ability or willingness to execute those actions.
We hoped, in our exhibition to at least attempt to create an environment that did a better job of encouraging, with spatial cues, a certain type of interaction with the objects on display, or with the other people in the exhibition itself. In order to accomplish this task, however, we thought that we should attempt to create various spaces, to learn which affect-creation techniques worked best.
Our first experiment was probably our most successful–we threw a fake fraternity rush event. The set-up was relatively simple. We invited a large number of people over Facebook to a party for the frat Kappa Epsilon Gamma Tau Tau. Then we took a large stack of white pieces of paper, and wrote all of our “values” onto separate sheets– values as varied as “HYPERLINKS,” “LIMITED TOO,” “FEMINISM,” and “TASTELESS NUDES.” We then covered the walls of the dorm room with these flyers, and filled a bowl with corn chips. Over the course of the evening, guests would filter through. We handed them each a manifesto, and then watched them engage with one another.
We later decided that this exercise was particularly successful because the participants weren’t quite “in” on the joke, but they also weren’t quite “out” of it. There was a light tone of humor running through our Facebook invitation, our wall hangings, and our manifesto, that made it clear that this was a somewhat humorous event, but it didn’t feel as though we were “pranking” our guests–instead, we were just creating an interesting and hypothetical space for them to appreciate.
This fraternity event stands in direct contrast with another exercise in affect that we conducted a week or so later. We decided to take an Orange Key tour before picking up the key to Shared Data. We wanted to ask questions about keys and locks throughout the entire tour, until we were discovered. Our questions ranged from very specific and over-detailed concerns about the keyless lock system installed in the dormitories to questions about Keynesian economics.
Ultimately, however, the tour felt somewhat flat. We were never really discovered, but it also didn’t feel as though we significantly impacted the tour group’s experience in anyway. We didn’t want our actions to be read as a simple “prank,” but we were unable to have any other influence on the situation.
We also wanted to study performance, and the ambiance created by a performance. As a result, we performed a variety of surrealism-inspired poems in various spaces. We attended a conference on the Future, for example, that was thrown by one of the students in the Art is Interaction course, and performed a vision of the future. We also attended an open mic night, and performed a very different set of poems there. In both cases, we tried to tailor our content to the situation at hand–the Future conference was modeled on the academic colloquium, and we wanted to disrupt that model while still contributing in a meaningful way. In the open mic, we hoped to construct poems that wouldn’t detract from the other speakers, or de-legitimize their work by parodying or undermining the open-mic.
We also did smaller studies of affect. We tried to find ways to capture various experiences across campus through unusual deployment of sound-capture, photography, and the captioning of the products of both of those media– the ground, Terrace at night, reactions, a study space, the laundry room.
The idea of affect also cropped up in many of the other experiments mentioned or to be mentioned. In our Mythtakes exercises, for example, we found that we struck a good balance in our interactions with people, such that they gave us material that was rich, entertaining, and interesting–and was much more successful than our attempt to find ourselves. The graveyard, too, by virtue of the time and place, had a very particular and strong emotional character.
ABSENCE, or THE DETECTIVE NOVEL
The detective novel, along with mythology, is a recurring theme throughout many of our experiments. It’s most concrete instantiation was in the discovery of the murder mystery Sticks and Scones, found at the same time and place as the key to Shared Data.
But theme of clues and detection runs through many of our other exercises as well– the attempt to find Christoph, for example, or to find out more about Shepley Bulfinch, or even to find ourselves. Even the various connections that seemed to crop up between our various classes, or between our ideas and the material covered in class just days later, had a quality of clues dropped, or puzzle pieces fitting into place.
The detective novel reached its fullest form, though, in our exploration of the graveyard. Our path through Princeton is documented in detail in the images on our tumblr page, and it is possible there to better follow the connections we drew between all of the “signs” that we encountered during the night.