So, for the site-specific intervention side of the brief, I wanted to have people participate in a task or vote which was seemingly random, inconsequential and nonsensical.
I decided to set up a dress which would hang alongside a pair of scissors in the foyer of my work. This is already something which is placed in an unconventional place given I work in a bookshop. To push this further, I would ask people to cut the dress- something counterintuitive and mundane but odd.
I set up a question next to this which asked what method they used to cut the dress. There were only two options which I can only imagine made people think they had to choose between the two – and everyone did.
I can’t know if had the only accompanying instruction read “CUT THIS DRESS” the result would have been different. The necessity to note which method you used I think made people contemplate the point of the task more. Is it some kind of personality test perhaps? Or am I being observed? I did watch casually as people partook and noticed that it was primarily people under about 25 and people in groups who chose to interact with the intervention. I would’ve liked to gather better data by observing this and asking people questions about their lives to see if there were unseen factors which impacted people’s decisions. For example, one method had almost twice as many votes as the other: was this because it was the easier and more intuitive of the two or were latecomers influenced by what the people before them had done?
Ultimately I decided that I should let it play out on its own. So I tried not to appear focused on the people who partook, nor did I answer any questions like, “why is that there?”, “who put it up?”, “what is it for?”, or ‘what’s the correct way to do it?”. But I was fascinated as to why people chose to participate; it’s such a trivial and arbitrary request “CUT THIS DRESS”, and yet if I saw that somewhere I know I’d do it.
After the intervention, the dress is almost entirely stripped of its purpose. But how interesting that it’s been cut up without rhyme or reason by 17 strangers just because a sticky note instructed them to do so. With no discussion or collaboration, it retains a part of its functionality; no one cut the straps, no one cut it in half or cut it down, or did anything that would stop others form being able to take part down the line. Nor did anyone stop the dress from essentially being a dress.