new sNerdFluxkit (2017): inspiration and provocations for people who make interactives
Session facilitator(s): Scott Blumenthal, Britt Binler
Day & Time: Friday, 10-11:15am
Room: Johnson
SCOTT: So, um, so this is the new sNerdFluxkit 2017. Thanks everybody for coming out. I’m Scott. There’s a slide for this. We have a slide for everything! So I’m Scott Blumenthal and I’m the deputy editor at the New York Times.
BRITT: I’m Brit Binler and I’m always interactive developer also at the New York Times. I’ve been there for five years and five months.
SCOTT: So we’re out of this with different perspectives in the workplace but we do have sort of complementary backgrounds outside the New York Times. I was an actor before I started as a web developer and I did avant-garde, off-off-off Broadway stuff for a long time and I’m still in that world and I’m fascinated by the fluxus artist for a long time.
BRITT: And I was doing this prior to moving to technology. So I’m glad to have the opportunity to do this in this space.
SCOTT: So just a couple of basics, logistics about what we’re doing here today. So all of this is published on Fluxkit.site. So part of what we’re trying to do today is we’re going to try to collaboratively construct a set of inspirations and provocations for ourselves and possibly bring a movement of similarly minded, or complementary minded, argue with each other, and enter into this movement and share with you today, and some other folks. So we’ve got a lot planned. Hopefully we’ll get through all of it and you guys have plenty of time to participate and contribute. We are going to ask you in these exercises to contribute stuff through a Google form that we’ve set up and it will flow directly onto the site. So if you don’t want your contributions published out there for people to see, you don’t have to do it that way. You can write stuff down. You can just think about it. We’re not asking for any identification information so your names won’t be out there with anything. It will just be part of this group’s contribution. The etherpad doesn’t have anything on it other than things but you’re welcome to contribute to that, if you want to jot down your story. That would be great.
BRITT: So at the end of this session we’re going to walk away with new things. We’re going to — sorry, I should remind a little bit. So what we’re doing here today is taking a look, as Scott said, looking at the Fluxus art movement from the ’60s is and the ’70s and if you don’t know about it, don’t worry and we will actually write a manifesto actually that we will share with the whole group. And then we’ll also write instructions that you’ll navigate to the site. So by the end of this session, you’ll have a Fluxkit which will include these manifestos and instructions that you can take into your work going forward. All right.
SCOTT: So my little rant — it’s not exactly a rant but when I was thinking about proposing this session, one of the things that I wrestled with in particular at the New York Times as somebody who is in this world, interactive making, thinking about interactive journalism is I think that we, as a group of creative, intelligent, passionate people have a tendency to sell ourselves short in the work that we do, which is not to say that we don’t do great stuff. I have colleagues that I admire enormously through beautiful, wonderful, exciting, engaging things all the time. But I do think that, you know, that there’s more we could potentially do. And so I wanted to look at, I think, some of the institutional reasons that I think we need these barriers that we meet at New York Times. I would be curious probably after the session to talk to any of you about similar experiences that you might have had in your newsrooms, or different experiences. But here are a few of the things that I think we run up against on a regular basis. At the Times, anyway, and I think for many of us, individually, we have very high standards. We’re also talking about, does it meet kind of Keynseyan levels of — and when people do experiment with new stuff, I do think that some people in the newsroom have a tendency to scowl at things that didn’t rise to the level that didn’t succeed. And so there’s a quiet pressure or shaming that nobody I don’t think really means that goes on that dissuades us. We may have little time to do these things. And that’s a real pressure and I don’t know how to solve that but I do think that it holds us back. And I think most troubling to me is we often operate under the assumption that our readers are essentially impatient, that they don’t have, and they don’t want to spend the time, and they really don’t want to try to do with the work that we put out there. I can’t say that it’s entirely true. But I’d like to believe there’s at least more to it than that. So I think at least — so I think what happens as a result of this, often, as we’re making interactives, as we’re making interactive journalism, we sort of reach for the things that we’ve done before that we know work, especially if an idea is initiated from outside the news desk, or the graphics desk, possibly. You know, other folks in the newsroom will sort of look at the best option out there and say, can I do one of those things? They choose the shiniest option that will get the attention. But we don’t go back to the fundamental question of what we’re doing with this form, which is evolving. And so we end up with these very highly polished few forms that we tend to rely on rather than exploring new possibilities and discovering new options.
I think also very troubling for me in our newsroom is it creates a kind of a low morale for a lot of folks because we have to innovate, we have to innovate to stay alive and everybody is innovating, from editors to the reporters, and obviously, the digital arena but it’s really hard to get these new ideas to rise up, and to make time and space for them and I think it also consolidates power and creative voice and very few people in the newsroom, which I think is a real shame. I work with great, creative, fascinating people all over the newsroom, and if they don’t have these things to happen in the newsroom, often their voice gets silenced. So these are the things that I’m really trying to get past. And I’m not going to propose solutions to this today. I don’t really know how to solve this but I do think that if, together, some of us who make these things and collaborate with other people in the newsrooms who would like to make these things get a sort of fresh perspective on the work we do maybe, then we can start chipping away at it in a small way. So can we overcome or disregard these barriers, which I think of as a bit of authority, expense, prejudice, and fear, and build our readers — and this is where I get into where I want to go into this thinking about what journalism can be, build for our readers arenas in which to have experiences, make choices, take actions, and learn about themselves.
So we talk a lot about interactive journalism. I think we’re too used to that idea. I thought participatory journalism is a better term to use, but what I’ve written on for this, is second person journalism, that’s a term of art for today, at least, that you can accept that, embrace that, or reject it as you like. All right. So we’re now going to get to why Fluxus seems like a good vehicle for these things.
BRITT: So what’s Fluxus? So the Fluxus movement was in the 1960s and ’70s of artists that were worked in all media, they made objects, they had performances called happenings, and they had immersive ideas. The idea was to essentially push back against the art world construct and see if they could innovate, experiment, be radical in their work, then try lots of new things that have a really scrappy vibe to them to their work.
They also were very keen on embracing humor. So to see some examples here as we move through some of these artists. And they were heavily influenced by ready-mades. So reallymades were artist that were claimed as art. So Marcel Duchamp is someone in that field, and also he’s famous for this piece with a spiral silent performance where any noise from the audience shaped the result of that work. One really important person from the Fluxus art movement is George Maciunas, he really drove the creation of the heart history of the movement. So we’ll see some some saw influence as we move on forward.
So the Fluxkit is an object that was a customized box where various pieces were included from the artists of the Fluxus movement. So you can see how it was compartmentalized. People were meant to actually take the objects out, manipulate them, participate with them. There is newsletters that were included in the Fluxkit, and although George Macuinas branded his Fluxkit, and marketed it to various audiences for purchase, it really was a collaboration, participatory object that ended up being the result of — do you want to add anything?
SCOTT: Uh, no. That’s okay.
BRITT: So we have some examples here for you to see. It’s essentially to get an understanding of what the tenor was with this work and how transitory it can be. Here’s an example of a solo violin performance from one of the Fluxus festivals. Here is a very funny interpretation of a score that Nam June Paik performed. His construction was especially draw a line — and you can see here Nam June Paik just dipped her hand in a bucket of paint and then drew a line on the floor.
Phillip Corner, Piano Activities, this was actually a really interesting piece that was repeated for a number of times where these artists actually took saws, and hammers to a piano and destroyed it bit by bit and we have a little video for you that we can show you a short clip so you can get a sense what exactly they were doing.
SCOTT: And this is the original artist coming back in 2012 to perform the work.
BRITT: We don’t have sound, unfortunately. So you get the idea of the Piano Activity.
AUDIENCE: Can you do full screen? Or are we not going to watch the whole thing.
SCOTT: We were just going to watch a little section. We can put it on for a second.
BRITT: Okay. So…
SCOTT: I do want to say that this is a group of old white men, primarily banging on a piano. But Fluxus was a very diverse internationally — women, men, racially diverse group of artists, and that was really part of what contributed to the whole tenor of their work.
BRITT: And this last example is Yoko Ono’s cut piece where she invited members of the audience to come up and cut pieces of her clothing away and eventually the clothing will come out of, and this was to force the audience to become part of the work, and complicate in the work itself. And so now Scott is going to transition into where this takes us.
SCOTT: This is not a Fluxus piece at all. But this is where we’re going to jump in and start working together, and see if we can craft stuff. So we’re going to start an exercise which is not really for making the Fluxkit but to get you in a state of mind, perhaps. So number one, the exercise is called your favorite thing. So I would like you to imagine your favorite thing that you do in your home that you can tell the rest of us about, or you can submit and submit something else. And we’re going to do it for two minutes, two whole minutes. And I mean it. So really try to take the opportunity to do that. You don’t have to jot anything down. You can close your eyes if you want. But really try to evoke the experience for yourself in as many details as you can.
Okay. So here’s our workbook. Hopefully you can get — if all of you have laptops. If you don’t have a laptop, hopefully you can do it on your phone. I can’t type on my phone but here’s the Google. And this is exercise number one.
AUDIENCE: What was the Tiny URL again?
SCOTT: Sorry, yes. Fluxkit2017. So all of the exercises are on one form, but you can go back and edit each exercise, and you can go back and make changes. I think there’s a second link that you can submit will let you just reload the form and start over again. But you can just start contributing willy-nilly as we start contributing to these things. So are people there, ready? So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to take five minutes now and each of you are going to write instructions to have your favorite home experience in their home. So take the whole four minutes, it may not feel like not enough time at all, it may feel like it’s way too much time. If it feels like way too much time, use it. But think about what the parameters of this might be. Think about what are the elements of that you want to communicate to help this person recreate, and think about their unique circumstances, whatever they may be. How might their own circumstances be different from your own circumstances but what can you do to construct for them, a clear set of instructions to get them to that experience? Okay. You have about a minute left. A little less. Okay. Let’s try to finish up. Cool. So we’re going to go ahead and move on from this but before we do, just two minutes, three minutes, does anybody have any observations, thoughts on anything that we’ve been talking about so far. Is there anything that anybody wants to offer up for the group? So I kind of feel like this is a model for what we do do, what we maybe a little bit could do better all the time when we’re thinking about making second-person journalism if you’ll entertain that term. Basically all we’re doing here is we’re using our own expertise, our own experience, our own passions to dive into a subject really to identify the essential qualities of it, and then frame an experience for somebody else to go through to try to get at that same thing. And also, hopefully, to do it in a way where their own unique perspectives, experience, circumstances, plays some part in it. So it’s not just about learning about us, and what we know, and what we like, although we play a part in it by proposing this to them. It’s also going to be about them, their experience, what they learn, what they hopefully learn about themselves through engaging with that. But I think that’s really, what I’m interested in. But we’re going to really dive into the Fluxus stuff into the examples now.
BRITT: So as we talked about Fluxus is this act of participatory art-making, there are a few interesting things to think about. First, the locus of participation is in space and time. What is the artist’s presence, what is the role of the artist, how does that impact the piece itself? Also, is artifact important? Is that actually of value in this case? And then, how does participation in the artwork by the audience shape the art? How does it impact the outcome? And then, the stakes, are they low, high, or somewhere in between? So sort of stepping back into this and framing it differently, here are some questions that you can use to think about participatory art. Where it’s happened, how does it happen, and who actually cares.
So one example of a score that was created by Yoko Ono was this city piece, which is walk all over the city an empty baby carriage. And so going back to the questions that you were just asking, this can happen whenever, wherever, Yoko Ono isn’t really present in the piece itself other than the writing of the score. And unless the booking in which the score was written counts as a piece of artwork, there is no object. And then, again, it doesn’t matter if no one does it. And if you do do it… these are all important questions to think about as you’re considering the role of the person in participation in this art-making process.
SCOTT: And, you know, we’re going to stay away from what we actually do in the newsroom from day to day. I’m going to leave it to you all to sort of draw the connections but I did, you know, less to seem entirely unmoored from what we’re doing, this reminds me of something that I would call interactive journalism, second-person journalism is Eric Asimov’s wine school. Anybody know this? It’s really cool. Sometimes people do. He’s our wine expert, and so, every month, he proposes a lesson, and in this case, it’s on Lambrusco, and he tells you about the type of wine that he’s interested in, and he tells you a little bit about why, and he recommends a few bottles to try over the course of the month, and he often gives some alternatives if he can’t find those, and then you’re supposed to drink the wine. You’re supposed to write in the comments and talk about your experience of it, and then at the end of the month, he does a round-up and he talks about his experience over the course of the month drinking those wines and reflects on his readers’ experiences and what they thought about. And one thing that I really love in the way that he sets this up, he did exactly what you guys did, he also proposes a scenario, or an approach to drinking these wines, it’s not just about drinking the bottles. So these were his instructions for the thirst quenchers. So don’t serve these wines or fancy culinary school experiments. Toss some burgers or sausages on the grill, get a rotisserie chicken, and make a sandwich, that sort of thing. Lightly chill the wine before pouring, and I guess it’s “glou-glou.” So stage it from your experience and learn something. Okay.
BRITT: So I don’t actually remember what’s next.
SCOTT: Yeah, so we’re going to get back to cut piece here which Britt before. This is Yoko in her original construction of the piece. She’s done this several time and I believe she’s done it again in the meantime MoMA exhibition she had a few years ago.
BRITT: So we wanted to include a cut piece in this deck but we felt that it would probably be better to leave the video up to you to watch on your own but we wanted to discuss the variables going back to what we were talking about earlier in the performance itself. If you remember folks would come up to her and cut off a piece of her clothing, eventually until it was gone. She performed this multiple times and she is very present in the performance itself, at least at first. And then, as audiences — or as audience members stepped up and cut off clothing, participated in the act, they actually came essential to the work or performance itself, if not central, if not integral to the performance. So Yoko really engaged with a high-stakes action where she allowed people to come up to her, and put scissors right up to her skin, which could be threatening but she trussed that the audience would participate in a way where it would be productive for the art-making experience. So here we have another Times example. I think this is —
SCOTT: Yeah, this one’s cool. I think this one is maybe slightly a more tenuous connection. But maybe not far off. So we’ve been doing these live chats more and more all the time. And this was sort of more of a live Q&A discussion rather than covering breaking news or something like that, and it was talking about race, policing with children. And, you know, this is a situation where our reporters were there in the chat. The entire action, the piece took place on the site, realtime on the site with the reporters. And, you know, there were stakes to this. There were really strong personal feelings that were voiced, and there were the readers who were participating and the reporters were taking public action, you know, voicing themselves, their feelings and experience, and I think that’s a big part of the risk in cut piece, as well, it’s not just the risk to the performance, but it’s the risk of how you would be seen by the rest of the audience, like, are you going to be brave and bold, or are you going to be timid? So before I get to one of my favorites, the Fingerbox, I do want to reflect the fact that those last two examples, there’s a big complicated technical component on the live chat discussions. But it’s a platform right now at the New York Times. So neither of those forms really demand any special technical knowledge, right? These are reporters and editors thinking about ways to think about subjects and thinking about ways to engage with their audience.
So this one, this is Ay-O’s Fingerbox, it’s a wood box with offset labels and a rubber opening containing an unknown object. This was actually designed by George Macunias that we mentioned before. But there’s a description, this was all from the Wikipedia page.
So he put different things into these boxes, some of them were soft and nice, and some of them were potentially sharp and unpleasant to touch but his intent was that the audience would learn to touch the box with an inquiring learning gesture. So there was a kind of experience that he was setting up through this their simple, basic object. There’s this sort of mysterious invitation, and also there’s something special about the way that you have to do it but then there’s also an enormous amount of freedom in how you can interact with the thing, as well. So, you know, getting back to these variables again, the artist is not really very present. He may be reduced to a brand. You know, Maciunas was the one doing all the branding for this, and using Ay-O as his name in the branding of all these things. It’s ongoing. You have this physical object that you can interact with, any time, wherever it happens to be but there’s this locus of experience. But I do think that there’s something essential missing if nobody interacts with this. City Piece, arguably, it’s kind of cool even if nobody does it, but this one, I think it’s kind of lonely and sad. It never gets found. So now we’re going to get way from talking about Fluxus and go into a small group discussion for a few minutes.
BRITT: So in the real world, we constantly encounter contrived experiences where there are some constraints or rules but they’re part of our daily life. We hop on a roller coaster, we go to a game room, we go to a game night, we follow instructions to go grocery shopping. So we’re asking you to think about various contrived experiences that you do every day — whether they happen, every single day, once a week, every single quarter. And to go to this exercise, number two, and tell us, also, what you found interesting, exciting, rewarding, delightful about these experiences, what you get out of them. So we’re just going to take five minutes to chat a bit and then we’re going to ask one person from your small group, whoever’s at your — if you have a lot of people at your tables, there’s two groups, and ask one person from that group to submit their responses and be the describe for your small group discussion.
SCOTT: This could be broad but it’s a specific set of experiences that can be set up like a roller coaster that we mentioned. It’s a real designed experience that you can experience. So why do you as a person seek out these experience and what do you get out of them?
So we’re going to actually continue with this for the next few minutes. Scribes, if you haven’t submitted any of this stuff, please do that as we keep talking. So from the small group discussions, could somebody from each table maybe throw out maybe one or two of the interesting, intriguing examples and if other people, as we’re talking have new things that they want to pitch in.
AUDIENCE: Kind of everyone’s having the meal at the same time.
BRITT: If you couldn’t hear that, the idea was blue-apron meal services .
SCOTT: Is there anything about the experience itself that you find particularly rewarding?
AUDIENCE: We talked a lot about about how it’s sort of it’s a weird social experience because oftentimes we’re cooking meals with the same people.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so I’m — I started doing this thing a few weeks ago. I live in New York, I have an unlimited ride metro card. People ask people for turnstile swipes, and I offered them a swipe for a picture on Instagram. And tell them, I won’t insist, I’ll give them a swipe no matter what. But this is — I mean, the goal of the project is to visualize the people who need a swipe to meet them but it’s also an encounter to see someone who has and who doesn’t and it’s both a chance to — there’s both, like, an exchange and an exploitation to it at the same time. And I need a better hashtag for it because it’s now #needsaswipe. And now it seems like it’s “asswipe.”
SCOTT: Unfortunately, we only have half an hour here.
AUDIENCE: So I would love for a lot of people to do this and it’s a great way for interacting with strangers which, to me, is a great pleasure of journalism.
AUDIENCE: My goodness. Well, we talked about going to like, participating as an usher in theatres in different contexts. We talked about — can you describe yours?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so I do Brazilian jujitsu. Like, there’s a lot of rules when you go into martial arts and you learn how to interact with the other students, and the teacher, and when you actually are fighting, and there’s a lot of competition involved. But — and there are rules that you have to play with and around so you don’t hurt yourself and others.
AUDIENCE: We also really talked about streaming video games and interacting with people doing that.
SCOTT: Okay. Good.
AUDIENCE: We talked about a bunch of different experiences but I thought we had a really interesting interesting contrast between two of them. I had brought up visiting a Civil War battlefield where the whole participation in space is the gimmick, but participation in time is a little fuzzier because it’s not interesting in 2017 if someone has to take a wee break every once in a while. But the time, a 150 years ago was chaos. And participation of the artist would be petrifying, we are glad that they aren’t there. And I think looking at a place that’s currently not happening was interesting.
AUDIENCE: I actually used to live in Minneapolis, and I came to my old book club and I talked about that experience of feeling the hesitation to have these people — I wonder if these people remember me, I haven’t been here for a few years, and what are these people like, but showing up to my friend’s house, it was my going-away part and I kind of felt like transported in time, and I know that they’ve changed within three years, and my life has as well, but feeling that moment is interesting.
AUDIENCE: It’s kind of revisiting your own experience, versus revisiting the experiences of people who is great grandchildren that you met with.
AUDIENCE: We had a couple of different things. Like, using a bike share, CitiBike. You can just look at the app and see how many people are left. And going to kind of feeling like you’re racing time before they charge you for four times. Kind of going with the grocery shopping theme. We also had the experience of, like, cooking for friends where you’ve got where you’re going to the grocery store but then you also need to pick up the ingredients to bring it back for your friends, as well. And then kind of in contrast to that, the game of seeing how long you can go without going to the grocery store and kind of what combinations you can come up with, you know, just to kind of go with that experience.
AUDIENCE: I would say ours probably would fall on the mundane side of the scale respectively. Simple pleasures might be the umbrella. We talked about hiking with friends, camping, sailing, going to lunch with coworkers, city exploration. Just sort of the joy of discovering new things together.
AUDIENCE: Eric’s example of a date night with his wife is a good one.
AUDIENCE: Don’t anybody tell her that!
AUDIENCE: Because it’s — well, you go ahead.
AUDIENCE: I mean, it’s sort of like a contrived experience, right? You’re going somewhere else when you could be having the aim amount of fun at home. You’re spending more money than you should, or you could be eating in just to sort of create, you know, the romance feeling that you, you know, want. So that — making that event you do all these special things. I mean, anything. And then I started snowballing and thinking about diamond rings, or that kind of thing. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So we talked about going to music festivals, or in my case, I recently went to an anime convention which was totally wow, it was different. And part of it was, at least in my case was entering this totally different world where everyone is so passionate about their thing and they spend so much time and energy and just seeing them dress up and light up other — it’s kind of like being a kid again, you know? So…
SCOTT: Okay. Cool. Thanks, everyone. So we’re going to move on to another exercise now. And I guess what I want you to take going to this next part is — so we’ve now thought about — and hopefully we’ll continue thinking about what kind of experiences other people stage for you that are valuable for you to engage in, what you want, what kinds of things you, you know, you want to go out there and seek, and interact with. And we’ve thought a little bit about how we can intentionally set those things up in your own experiment. So I want you to keep both of those things in mind. Now we’re going to move on to manifestos. So I really, really like manifestos. I’ve always really, really liked manifestos. This is George Maciunas’s Fluxus manifestos in 1963. Most of the Fluxus artists didn’t like this manifesto at all, and refused to subscribe to it, and refused to participate in that. But what I do like about them is they’re aspirational, they are inspirational. They’re really about, like, invigorating a group of people, and trying to get people behind a set of ideas which may be not very concretely defined. There’s room for experiences, participatory — there’s definitely a participatory aspect to it, right?
This is Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto and they do these puppet art performance, and have been for years and years and years. And this is a little chunk of text that’s hard to make out from one of Maciunas’s Fluxus manifestos. But something I can talk about here, he can say that the artist must demonstrate his own dispensability, I ams demonstrate self-sufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can substitute for art, and anyone can do it. He had a very experimental, socialistic program that he was doing, but a lot of it was about democratizing this process of art-making and involving everyone in the creative action. So what we want to try is we’re going to take… take some minutes — five minutes. We’re going to come together in these small groups again and we’re going to try to collaboratively create a manifesto for — we’re going to think more about journalism, making interactive stuff again. But, you know, maybe it doesn’t have to zero in on that. But the idea is, again, you can all be scribes on this, discuss amongst yourselves and I want you to pitch in some of these short, pithy calls to action that you might find in a manifesto that you think would animate you in your sort of day to day work going forward, but what kinds of experiences you want to create, how you stage them, what you’re trying to offer your audiences, the people who might want to participate. Britt and I both took stabs at these. Both of them are still evolving. They’re on the site. If you click on one of these, Britt. There’s Fluxkit manifestos, Scott and Britt if you want to go and check them out, and tear them down, elaborate on them, that’s cool. But if you want a slightly more concrete sense of what we’re talking about. So that’s your challenge for the next few minutes.
BRITT: We also have a question on the forum — some thoughts for your manifestos so if you can — do exercise number three and number four, that would be great. Feel free to add stuff collaboratively, but if you want to add things on your own, that’s good, too. Sorry, keep going! So if everyone could submit your responses, that would be great. But we’re going to move to the next section of the presentation. So I hope that you can all now see some responses from your peers and colleagues from the room.
SCOTT: And if you go to Fluxkit.site, there’s a list of individual pages that will show a list of all the stuff that’s coming in. So we’ll show that, too.
BRITT: So we’re going to move to the last section of our presentation, and we’re going to leave timeless at the end for you to sort of revisit any of this. But as I mentioned earlier in the beginning of the presentation, we’re going to talk about instructions not only to each other, but also to the audience. George Brecht one of the Fluxus artists had this very compelling quote, “it seemed to me that from the viewpoint of nuclear physics, you could hardly consider the structure of an atom without feeling that an object is becoming an event and that every event is an object.” And I thought that was very interesting put both in the context of time based and object based artwork.
So Fluxus artists, early in the ’60s wrote these elaborate scores for other artists to perform their artworks. However, often, what happened is that a score would never be performed by the artist who wrote it themselves. So the performance would always work different based on who ended up performing and how, and how they interpreted their work. But, eventually, artists started to feel constrained by these very detailed instructions and they want to perhaps get something a little bit different out of the instruction based or score based artwork. So you’ll see this example here, Water Yam by George Brecht, is very pithy, and one example is, lamp: On, off, off, on. So essentially, they’re small events that are specific to an object or place, and a performer could decide to interpret them however they wanted with lots of freedom. And also, in this case, since it is published as a book, anyone could actually perform these events, not just another artist. And any of these non-identifying public member could pick up this book, and perform it at any time. One example that comes much later on as a result of decades of work in this genre is Jonas’s Instruction in 2002. Dance with a large piece of chalk, mark up the nearest surface and pay attention to the movement of your feet. That can mean a lot of different things. So what we want to do here is ask you to write an instruction for a colleague for another news nerd who will be creating an interactive.
So what does that look like — or what do you hope that it would look like for them but also leave room for them to interpret and print their own flavor into it. Make it something of their own, as well. We have not only a question on the form for this but also you’ll see sheets of paper on the tables. This — any question — any form field on these sheets of paper is optional. You don’t have to put identifying information if you don’t want to. But our ambition is that everyone will submit one instruction, bring it up to the front of the room by the end, and if you actually filled one out and submitted one, you can take someone else’s instruction with you, and if you choose to actually manifest and implement that instruction at some point, we’ll be able to accept those static field — static pages and slip and post them on the site. I think that’s it, yes.
SCOTT: We’ll work out the details of that part.
BRITT: We’ll let you know what we’re going to do for that. But for now, if you could just take another five minutes — five minutes.
SCOTT: Yeah, and I think since this is solitary work rather than trying to reconvene everybody, at the end, and, you know, send you all off. You have a little time now to work on this. If you don’t choose to, you can start making your way out. But we’ll sort of thank you all now for participating in this and doing this with us. And hopefully you’ll stick around and do this. So hopefully you’ll stick around and talk more about things you want to talk about. So thank you.
Yeah, if it wasn’t clear, if you could all enter your instructions to the form, as well. And those identifying details at the top, you know, picking up those instructions and describing them to the person who made them, but, again, that’s optional. So it is now 11:15, just for your own planning purposes. Stick around if you want to.