Not sure how to do this….When i was talking with Fiona over Summer, she was saying to look at things that I see in projects, and identify or try to identify stuff in them that I think works, so maybe bits of process and so on…

I guess I have a couple of things I want to do, and maybe this is top down way of doing things but I want to make note anyway…

Performance (design)…

I don’t mean performance in terms of an art, avant guard, performance. I am talking about performance in terms of research… i was reading about a Sophie Calle piece where she was working in a hotel as a maid, and kind of used her powers (keys) the job gave her to probe around in peoples things; documenting them, and thinking/speculating about what they mean or what they are doing. I think this is incredibly interesting; where these jobs allow for a certain amount of intimacy with someone/somebodies things. 

I think this has obvious ethical problems, but is also quite an important thing for a designer; to be looking at how people are acting in such an intimate, sort of voyeuristic way. I guess like **** said, if you are not eavesdropping on people’s conversations you are not a designer.

I want to try to investigate how we can use these jobs to engage with people and see things we don’t see otherwise.

Another example of this is Lucas Murgida, and his performance called 9/10. 

The name of the performance is 9/10 because Murgida wanted to check what would become of the often-quoted phrase, ‘Possession is 9/10 of the law’ when private property is placed in a public space. As he wrote: A person is not sure how to look at the object at first, but will usually fall back on the golden rule of U.S. culture (finders keepers, losers weepers) and claim it to be theirs. I am hoping to subvert the “finder’s” personal space by claiming it to be my own public space.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/09/conflux.php

He attempts to investigate a concept through the use of an object which becomes the vehicle of a performance, but essentially is just a research tool; the object has a hole in it so that he can take pictures, and he can then collect this data of how someone takes ownership of the piece but with him as part of it.

I do think however there is a definite problem with performance design becoming to much of a gimmick, whereby the over arching concept becomes blurred by an attempt to do edgy things as part of the performance…. This is maybe the strength of Murgida’s in that after he has gathered this information he attempts to slip out of the building he has been taken into unnoticed.