Today was our third Site Specific Lesson, we as a class began by refreshing previous site practitioners that had been discussed in class, such as the Writes and Sites Company, Janet Carter and Marica Farqua. Both personally create inspiration to what I wish to achieve with my ideas of my site performance, mainly working on both parties’ ideas of creating tours, which can usually be understood to be miss guided. This idea of creating guided tours that detach from the normal idea of a usual guided tour is something that us as a group have been interested in from the beginning. As a group outside of lesson we have discussed these stimuli, which we have agreed as a group to research further into this idea of tours around Lincoln regarding the city Centre.
Secondly, we discussed tacit agreements which means roughly “unwritten rules which are followed by everyone.” Also the idea of non-places, these are made of places that people are to travel through such as airports, train stations or motorways. These places are the places that we use to travel to our desired location, we use these as a means to get there, they are used as part of the journey. Such relates to our groups chosen site within the city Centre.
After this reflection, we were asked to visit our sites in our group and study/play and see what could be created. Personally, we as a group felt this to be a challenge whilst we were walking and discussing our local on our way to it. However once we were there and engaged ourselves within the local we noticed many things. Firstly our local is the bridge over the canal in the centre of town, which can be described as a non-place, due to the bridge connects both halves of the high street meaning people must use it as a path way to reach there destination. Thus meaning this area is one of the busiest places on the high street. We as a group have always liked the ideas of making something that breaks the tacit agreements that we form to as 21st century human begins. We noticed the bridge as seats that are raised higher than the pavement, which argues that this platform can look like a stage, which could argue to be an ideal performance space, or a intentional one.
We also as a group like the idea of forced entertainment, we can achieved on the high street by getting people’s attention, this shows people always noticed things that don’t belong or break the usually conventions of the norm. We began by just standing out of place and seeing who would notice or question what we as a group were doing. In the space of two minutes I had noticed myself that thirteen people had noticed us as a group just staring at one object, this lead to the experimentation of what we can to grab peoples attentions. I wrote on a sign for each of our group this lead to us all seeing if people would interacted with us. We wanted to see people’s reactions and see how people would want to engage with us. I simply used the idea of a previous site to see what would happen (this was the idea of free high fives, which has been used as a site performance In prior years, which we don’t want to copy. Nevertheless, we wanted to use this to see if people would react). it seemed that people happy to engage with me in a simple action while passing through, and it seemed that people also follow a crowd when more people broke tacit conventions, people would also join in, this makes us question people now think In that space that is the norm and its ok to do that. In addition, more people engaged with me when I was stationary as well as silent. Other members of the group with my group who had more interment signs such as “talk to me”, “free hugs” and “tell me what your favorite shop is?” These signs had less success then my single action. However, they did achieve people’s interest; each sign had individual success; however, it may have been the fact that these signs were more interment. However it still increased our confidence in using the public as a stimulus or our piece as well as forced entertainment. All that is needed now is to now take this research and start to mold it towards a set performance.