EXPERIENCE

My work has looked at experiences and their relation to the event and novelty and the impact they can have on a participant.

Each situation nods to the absurdity of the “experience economy” with its scripted and staged situations, enforcing a role or encounter on its participants through elements of theatre and what Nicholas Ridout described as the “affective experience”.

From the very beginning (For Bravado) I was aware of the difficulty in attempting to create one situation that would somehow provoke and capture a number of subjective experiences that could be shared/transmitted between participants and not just present one impenetrable extension of my own experience.

It became obvious that each situation would need more than one participant, i.e the encounter, and that it would be after the staged, enforced experience that the true experience would occur.

"We have an experience when the material experience runs its course to fulfilment...Its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience". (Dewey, J. Art as Experience, 2005)

The importance of the work became its resonance. It was the dialogue with the other participant after being part of 9” and it was the the moment the phone was hung up on Say Hi From Me. By enforcing a structured experience and roles to play within it I could then create a moment afterwards, however fleeting, where the participants could share and respond openly with each other. What Are Other People Like... was to be the largest of these situations. At the end of the scripted performance in part 2, the participants are then allowed to remain in the performance space to share and speak frankly as a result of the collective situation, mirroring the scripted situation that was just imposed.