INCIDENTAL COLLABORATION

serendipitous meetings moving into full-on collaborations

BUT! I'd like to redefine incidental collaboration as an operational definition of the small rule-based interactions that people use to move around through & into spaces with each other. 

INCIDENTAL COLLABORATION: meeting a colleague from another department, getting excited over the water cooler about each others' work, creating a full-on collaborative project out of that

ALSO, 

INCIDENTAL COLLABORATION: playing chicken with someone on the crowded subway stairs

a grammar of social connectivity

create a series of experiential exercises that draw attention to already existing connections to others & the emotional opportunity content of those connections

Putting the project in perspective

key question:

How do the physical collaborations we enact in the every day connect us to each other & to larger social systems?

Can drawing attention to small, universal collaborations between strangers(?) via artistic tools & environments create awareness of & investment in collective experience?

Personal, emotional & intimate intervention, via interpersonal means, with impacts on individual conceptualization of group membership & global change via seeding ideas into the minds of people who have some impact on the intellectual conversation around social design & policy?

Now -> Next -> Future

the existing conditions (in the US) of disconnectedness, hyper-individualist thought, apathy towards the systems to which we contribute, ennui, a sense of helplessness, facelessness of the larger system, a lack of emotional connection to the larger group (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities)

simultaneous atomization & connectivity

next: 

bring people into emotional attentional contact with the mechanisms of the social systems that keep us together

future: 

people can act more often personally with an understanding & regard for the larger scales of their social effect, 

an intimate emotional awareness of the connectivity that exists & act with regard to it in order to better

physical analogues of social interactions, a series of designed meetings. 

design a meeting.

(public umbrella)

PLEASE DO NOT HOG THE PUBLIC UMBRELLA

social magic

I'm looking at human magic. Social magic. The relationships between people, the power they have as embodied in but not defined by the people in them.

Coercion & cohesion & cooperation

group identity, group intention, group formation

i'm making videos & installations about being with other people in long term cooperative relationships, whatever kind of cooperation it is, productive or destructive.

Groups as "hyper-individuals"