What do you want to be, StrangeR?
Category
Methodology & Facilitation Toolkits, Spatial Installation
Prologue.
Co-creation.
Design is much a part of our everyday lives as we want it to be, it can be a celebration or simply an acknowledgment of everyday actions, a practice to re-create our lives in the discovery of the new and unexpected that can emerge from the everyday.
Creative work can surface the invisible or the unnoticed if it can go beyond the self and the ego to allow energies of the environment to bring forth a work that is beyond our limited perspective. This project makes a conscious intention to build upon these forces and energies by devising methods, for participation and collaboration at different levels to occur. A living work that grows in its unpredictability while operating within the specificity of its methodology.
What do you want to be, Strange R? is an experiment that brings forth the everyday as a subject of investigation.
The everyday.
The environment which we share, the city we commute in, the neighbourhood where we locate our home, the strangers that we pass by, the objects that we use, the parts of our everyday life. The everyday is that which is the commonplace, the familiar, the habitual, the obvious, the recurring. Strangers in the city, objects in our home are part of this everyday landscape that is now deployed as the protagonists in this searching look at the everyday.
The city, the stranger and the object.
Strangers and everyday objects are seemingly insignificant occurrences in our everyday lives that often go unnoticed, they are put in that background of our activities that we have no time for, no reason to, no purpose in, can’t take the risk in engaging them. By bringing our interaction with them out of the routine into a level of creative consciousness, we may perhaps begin to see the surprise, the delight, the astonishment that we thought has eluded us forever. We become aware of new and different perspectives amidst the supposed mundaneness and banality of the everyday.
Using methodology to generate narrative.
The use of a methodology to generate a narrative in consciously engaging with the environment within which we operate and exploring the relationships with strangers. In the process mapping out journeys and collecting chance and random but yet deliberate moments, observations and encounters. Intepreting these to apply to the object in question, we begin to construct stories, as real as they are imagined, these unxepected and unwitting connections bringing out the surprising and fantastical, the funny and the strange. The object may appear illogical, yet delightful, taking on a life of its own, a second life, as it becomes animated with a character which is a reflection of the encounter between strangers. We become intrigued with the possibilities that everyday things can take on. Far from being a flight from reality, storytelling constitutes the deepening of our relationship to it.
In amplifying the incidental in our daily lives, we may begin to see the strangely familiar and the familiarly strange, affording us to look at our everyday world afresh, rethinking our attitude to that which we take for granted or seemed all too comfortable with, questioning the limits of what is possible and perhaps come face to face with a moment of revelation.
Methodology starts with a game.
Part 1
In constituting the energy of the city, the project calls for the input of the people in the city, which we now refer to as the travellers. There are two parts to the project. Part 1 is for the travellers. The focused act of mapping a day’s journey, and in the process engaging with strangers, may for a moment return the traveller to the consciousness of the everyday. It takes the form of a game with specific instructions and guides. The traveller is issued a ‘passport’ to be filled in with notes from an everyday, one of the task is to fill in their wishes if they have a second life. This wish in the second life of the traveller will eventually form the story that leads to the object, which is chosen by the stranger, given a second life.
From text to built form.
Part 2 grows out of Part 1
The journey that is mapped out by each traveller in the passport will consequently be intepreted into elements that will shape the built form of the meeting place. The passports will form the spatial construct that will set the stage Part 2. The objects to be given a second life, as a second group of collaborators, called the object translators are given the tasks of translating the wishes of the travellers in the passport onto the everyday object. As more wishes are translated and stories begin to form, the landscape will begin to fill with surprising characterisations of the objects. Each object tells a story and the built form begins to grow and transform with the stories of the everyday. These are the stories of the city and everday is a unique one.
Deriving at Strange R.
The outcome of the object is the effort of the traveller with the assortment of strangers, and the object translator. The object comes about from the questions asked to strangers. The effect is that as the traveller becomes familiar with the stranger, this encounter results in the familiar object becoming strange in the process of having the traveller’s wish translated onto the stranger’s object. Hence the object is called Strange R, dreived from the word stranger.
Second life.
Perhaps there is a wish to be something else, to be doing something beyond what this reality can afford each of us at this moment. We know it exists in our recesses which sometimes we express it in hope or desperation, and we can imagine it in the faces of strangers.
A strange R is an everyday object which, once was familiar, now seems to have a life of its own, having been transformed by the encounter between strangers.