Planning for the Table Top Sale

After our group meeting on Monday we arranged to meet again the next day to plan what we were going to do for the table top sale on Thursday. We knew we didn't really want to use the opportunity to sell anything, but instead interact with the public with some kind of game to do with our theme of 'Fear'. Only me and Viki made it to the meeting so we went ahead as there wasn't really time to wait until Wednesday as we needed to pretty much have it sorted by then. The main question was "What do we want to get out of the experience?"  Did we want physical material to work with? Opinions? Reactions? Or just the experience of interacting with the public? I think we wanted all of the above to some extent.

So Viki and I came up with a game using an origami fortune teller (inspired by the ones at the Escape exhibition at 2022NQ) as the starting point, containing 8 different instructions. We wanted every aspect of it to be fun and playful and not just straight forward, obvious, boring instructions. We came up with 3 categories for people to communicate with us. Drawing, Talking and Writing. We also didn't want the game to be a scary experience, but more to approach fear in different ways and see how people would react to that. For some people just playing a game with strangers would be something that would make them feel uncomfortable. So we came up with a mix of instructions that would test peoples confidence, push people out of their comfort zones, but ultimately just have a bit of fun.

The Instructions we came up with were:

Draw yourself with your eyes closed- maybe this will reveal the persons true vision of themselves?

Draw yourself with your eyes open- maybe reveal a distorted image that the person wants people to see themselves?

Draw something you associate with fear

Write down: A fear you have; A fear you have learnt; A fear you have overcome

Answer a series of hypothetical questions about doing certain things with or without a mask on - we wanted to find out whether being hidden would affect peoples ability to do something that ordinarily might embarrass them. I was influenced by Derren Browns experiment about gang mentality and being anonymous.

Write a work with the letter R in it followed by a synonym of that word without the letter R- this is related to Viki's ideas about her fear of the English language and not feeling confident to speak at times for fear of being mocked. Also her fears in her own language (Spanish) and avoiding letter R as she cannot roll her tongue for the correct pronunciation which she was is made fun of for by her class mates.

Pick either an English or Spanish tongue twister to read out of a bag- Viki made a video of herself saying a Spanish tongue twister with the letter R over and over to see if she could feel more comfortable.

Tell us what your best quality is and then what your friends would say your best quality is.

For the instructions requiring the players to speak, ideally we wanted them to let us film them or record them with a Dictaphone  but realise that some people would not be comfortable with this. So we planned to make a selection of celebrity masks for people to wear if they wanted to. We wanted to see whether this would affect people confidence, being behind the face of someone the media tells us is beautiful. This links with my ideas of distortion, as we are fed a distorted idea of perfection on a daily basis by the media and I wanted to see people reactions to this.

The next day on Wednesday Vicky discussed the plan with the rest of the group at a meeting and everyone seemed to be on board. It would have been better if the rest of the group had been involved with the planning the day before but as we had a deadline for Thursday there wasn't time to wait. 2 members came to the meeting who had not attended the last 3 which was good, but at the same time, we had worked on so much this week that it was going to be difficult to fill them in completely and make sure everyone was happy with every element and it wouldn't be fair if they wanted to change something when they hadn't been involved from the start, although I doubt they would have wanted to anyway. Vicky suggested that instead they test some of the questions out on people around campus. She told me later on when I got there and I think it was the right decision  all though I probably wouldn't have been able to say that to them myself. But I care way to much what people think of me and can't handle anyone thinking anything negative about me, so that's why I could never say anything. But hopefully this experience will help me not to care so much. She said they didn't seem to have a problem with it and understood the reasons why. It's really difficult to make that kind of decision as you don't want to push people away but if they haven't attended a load of meetings and haven't made an effort to engage and contribute to the planning of the project then I feel it's only fair.