I recently worked in a group project with two of my classmates, Rebecca and Arthur. The project was a displacement social experiment where we get people to communicate with us, telling anything they wanted in whatever language they wanted to.The name of our project was “Don’t talk text,” the idea was mostly influenced by Arthur, he wanted to show how people can be tied down by their phones, but Rebecca and I wanted to take that advantage and have people text us instead. The way we had it set up was to sit on a table, with a poster that only had the title of our porject. Rebecca and Arthur would sit on one end of the table while a stranger would sit on the other side and start texting. The only way they could text us is by a phone that was placed already on the table, that was already opened to the message up, so things would run smoothly.
This project reminded us of, Mariana Abramivić, who is a performance artist. Abramivić art was having a total stranger sitting across from her staring at each other and expressing different emotions. In our case, we took it to the modern world of texting.
Our process was going through a bunch of places we wanted to have the social experience. We wanted to make sure where it would be the best place to make it a displacement. We decided to go to The New School’s main building “UC” where most of the students hang out, outside the building in a sitting area, but we then moved inside to the cafeteria of the school, due to cold weather. In all honesty, it all worked pretty well in the end.
While we were outside in the sitting area, we had people stopping staring at our posters, giving it weird faces and even saying “Woah that’s weird” while proceeding to look down at his phone. Other’s were walking faster thinking we would talk to then to participate, or walking fast to get away from the cold. We were realizing that people did not want to stop and sit down in the cold windy weather. Then we had to quickly go to our second option which was the cafeteria. The people at our caf were becoming more interested in our project, asking questions about the meaning behind it, and some wanted to participate. The cafeteria at the New School was a place where not many people are texting their friends, it was a place of verbal communication between people, and then seeing our table where two people were texting each other, was becoming a little misplaced. 
There was a student where we didn’t give him time on how long it would take him to keep texting, so he was talking to Rebecca for about 40 minutes straight. Another girl was telling us that she would rather talk to someone about her feelings rather than having to text them. Others were comfortable texting in their own language, feeling a little bit more freeing by expressing their feelings.
During the project, I had the role of supporting my team, cheering them up and giving them a positive attitude that our project was going to be great. I enjoy the role of pushing people to their full potential. The only difficulty was that I was also trying to keep my head up. This role was pretty fun overall! The different types of reactions you would see when people passing by to the people who wanted to participate became an interesting observation too. I do wish we could have stayed outside longer, and the weather was nicer.
I feel like I would like to do this social experience again, at a different location with a different type of environment to get new reactions. It would be great to do it again.
