Here & Now

October 12, 2023

For this project, we were asked to create “an experience” for our classmates in pairs. The assignment was pretty open-ended; we could have made an interactive activity, a performance, or a participatory event. My partner, Marina, and I chose to create an activity that would start with individual work, evolving into group work, or a collaborative experience, resulting in a prize to signify success. We came up with the idea pretty easily due to inspiration from the reference artists we looked at while being introduced to the project. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled (Free/Still)” installation was the main source of inspiration. His concept behind serving food and bringing together groups of people caught our attention, so we wanted to recreate the community feel that he achieved by serving food. Marina and I wanted to further expand on this idea, though, and further inspired by being at an art school, we wanted to incorporate a creative aspect. Below is our brainstorming document and the steps we believed we needed to take while putting the project together.

Our concept for the experience is as follows:

Participants start outside. Inside, the desks and chairs are inverted so participants will face the wall while doing the first part of the activity. One host goes outside and demonstrates the drawing aspect of the experience. The drawing aspect consists of each participant using any color marker they choose, and drawing a continuous line of any length, shape, or design, on the provided piece of paper, as long as both ends of the line touch the edge of the paper. After this demo, the participants are let into the room, where a piece of paper waits for them on each desk, and a pile of markers is in the center for their picking. After the timed 10 or so seconds of drawing this line, participants will use their drawings and work together to produce a portrayal of a prompted image, for example, a pumpkin. They will have about 45 seconds to create this image with all of their line drawings, and the process will repeat 3 times. The last time, they won’t be able to talk to each other, and they will create the image of a heart together. After successfully finishing the activity, they will each receive heart-shaped cookies as a reward.

Below are pictures from throughout the experience in class, as well as the cookies that my partner and I made beforehand:

Marina and I worked well together. We came up with this idea very collaboratively, the cookies being our joined interest. We made the cookies together, and got the materials, markers and paper, separately. Throughout the process, there was only one change in direction we had, but it was due to an accessibility issue rather than our human error. We had initially planned for the cookies to be the Pillsbury Ready-to-Bake cookies with colored images on them, but we weren’t able to find them in stores near us, so we resorted to using regular cookie dough. I think the most challenging part of this project was figuring out how much direction to give our peers for the activity because we certainly had a vision in mind for how the activity should have ended up, but we didn’t want it to get too complicated and/or boring with an excessive amount of directions. As a result, it didn’t go exactly as planned, as the line drawings that everyone made were a lot more complex and harder to use than we expected. However, it was still successful, and we saw everyone working together and having fun which was our goal.

As for the project in general, it was extremely enjoyable to partake in other experiences and understand what everyone was going for. The production of the activities was excellent and really fun! It was super interesting to experience all of them having such different goals in mind. Some put pressure on the participant, some were performances to sit back and watch, and some had a lot of interaction. I think this project helped me understand the basis of “user experience” and thinking about the audience when creating any piece of art. Whether it’s a dance performance or an interactive installation, there are so many basic factors that we never would have thought we had control over, but they really make the piece.