For our final Artifact, Sophia made a hand to represent our connection to the people we were recording. She was the cameraman for our in person recordings of people around campus and Doral. We also brought some posters that survived the rain that were placed around Sophia’s job in downtown. I brought my projector and played a video of the video collage I made of about 40 videos we collected without my dad’s help. It was on loop with audio playing from the projector, with all the videos playing until the longest one ended before it looped again. We brought the table that we were going to set up at FIU before staff told us it counted as an event and we would get in trouble. These artifacts represent both the recording aspect (the hand) and the online aspect.
I got to talk to a lot of students at FIU and hear about their projects too, and it made me feel part of the FIU community for the first time, as I usually just go to my classes and leave and have never explored campus.
We want to create Fluxus type posters with instructions. We want people to be able to get off of autopilot by breaking their daily routines doing something they wouldn’t normally do. These include rolling on the floor, walking backwards, dancing, taking off their glasses, and more. We are going to create a creepy/underground poster that draws attention and hand draw on them with bright colors to attract even more attention. We will also be doing a social media post asking for people to DM us videos for a chance to win a gift card (we aren’t actually giving a gift card). Together with the posters and maybe some in person door-to-door advertisements, we hope to collect a lot of videos of people breaking their daily routines.
Our advertisement reached 5.7k accounts, and not a single one of them DM’d us with a video. I ended up promoting the post additionally on my dad and his wife’s instagrams, because he’s a micro-influencer and she’s a very famous influencer in latin America. This gave us about 30 videos and it was really funny seeing the ideas they came up with to escape their mundane activities or interrupt their autopilot. The rest of the videos came from us walking up to people and explaining our project and asking if they wanted to participate for a chance to win an (imaginary) 85$ visa giftcard. A lot of the videos end in laughter and it warmed my heart seeing all of these people have some stress relief during finals week.
April 21: Set aside table (luna has one), paper, pens, assorted art supplies, camera, and secure/confirm location for April 22. Have list of instructions written down or already printed.
April 22: Set up table with list of instructions and a camera for recording participating audience members that want to join the project.
April 22: Editing and putting together for presentation.
Our statement has to do with chaos helping to uninhibit creativity. We thought of printing a large amount of posters with Fluxus inspired instructions to jumpstart the creativity of people around the area/city. The four of us can only do so much alone, but if interested or bored people read the posters and follow any of the instructions in their way, we can spread the idea a lot more. By adding “catalysts” to some of the posters in the more private areas we can probably encourage more interactions. By “catalysts,” I mean things like chalk, flowers, colored water, washable paint, tape, and other reversible creative tools that might inspire people to interact with the posters. People also love free things, so being the person to use the chalk might be an incentive.
We want to aim for 2,000-3,000 posters. I know I can easily put up 500 posters a day as I’ve done this for concerts and bands before. If we could pick the busiest locations and stay nearby for a few days that would also be ideal, because we could take video proof of anyone doing these prompts. We would also put our tumblr or instagram on the posters so people could also film themselves when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to catch them doing these actions.
Reference Images:
Mockups:
Examples:
At the beach: make a sandcastle (will provide a shovel and bucket)
At a gas station: Pop these balloons with your teeth (balloons provided)
At a crosswalk: Cross the street holding this (a piece of foam that looks like a brick). They would put it across the street next to a similar poster.
At a lake: Feed the ducks (include seeds)
At a patch of grass: Water the seeds we put here
At a hill: Roll down the hill
At a parking lot: Hug your car
Outside a grocery store: Paint all the eggs in your carton of eggs (paint provided)
Outside a business building: Play hopscotch
In front of a hospital: Write down a secret you’ve been holding (pen included)
Anywhere: Send us your favorite song or what you’re currently listening to
On a running route: Run backwards for a little bit
Anywhere: Let some rain fall on your tongue
At a gas station: Stop the $ counter on an odd number
The prompt was to take photos of our readymade color in three nondomestic locations associated with the readymade, and three nondomestic locations not associated with the readymade.
Three associated locations:
Three nonassociated locations:
To be honest, I had no idea how to hook my projector in a portable way for shopping malls and other related locations. I also accidentally did these with the everyday monument 🤦🏻♀️ so these are not “real” images.
Here are some of the everyday monument ones since I did them: