We took to Lincoln high street to experiment with some of our slogans to entice social interaction, we got a good variety of responses to the signs and it made it clearer which signs will be good to use in our final performance. We tested the signs; “Can we hug?”, “Can I compliment you?”, “Can we high-five?”, “Can I help you?” and “Can I lend an ear?”. The latter two being the worst received as the public did not seem as if they wanted to interact with us whilst holding these signs, whereas with the first three we had a lot of reactions and interactions. When holding the “Can I compliment you sign” I personally had a great reaction from a member of the public, a man came up to me and asked what I was doing because he had been watching us with a few of the signs, I explained what we were doing and he said “I don’t normally go out of my way to talk to people, but you really interested me and made me want to talk to someone new” he was impressed with us and then he left smiling. We also managed to get a lot of high fives and hugs from various people as they walked through the high street. Sadie Plant states that the “[situationist] movement stands in a less distinct line of pleasure-seeking, libertarianism, popular resistance and autonomous struggle and its revolutionary stance owes a great deal to this diffuse tradition of unorthodox rebellion.” (Plant, 1992, P.1) By creating the interaction in society we feel as though we are part of the situationist movement mainly partaking in pleasure-seeking and libertarianism as we are liberating society from social norms and also just trying to make people feel that little bit happier.
We tried our signs on two separate occasions, on both days we got a wide range of reactions, on the second day we had a lot more people hug us, 3 separate people told us that we had made their day in doing so. One lady after hugging me and me complimenting her then asked if she could compliment me and told me she loved my earrings! By getting these responses in such great variety we are able to see that using these 3 signs on our final performance day would be highly successful in breaking society out of their everyday routines of ignoring and being unaware of the people surrounding them. We our now developing a fourth sign to use as the other two we prepared did not work in reaching out to the public, when decided on our final sign we will then take to the high street again to test the response we get from this final sign.

In Sadie Plant’s ‘The most radical gesture’ she states “The situationist analysis of contemporary capitalist society was simple and effective. Its express purpose was to transform this society, and it remain.” (Plant, 1992, p.1) By reading further into the situationist movement and the group known as The Situationist International, we were inspired to make our piece in a way that could allow it to some what transform and reform society by liberating it from its normal expectations. We plan to have four banners that are double sided with one side proposing a question that will invoke social interaction it people in the city, whilst the other side will be more thought invoking with a quote that people will have to stop and read and really think about. These quotes are yet to be decided but are well in the development process. We have already begun to test the interacting sides on our site with the phrases; “Can we hug?” “Can I compliment you?” and “Can we high-five?”.

Testing out a sign in the high street.

We will continue to test these to see what responses we get. In everyday life people walk the streets not paying attention to each other or interacting with other people that are around them, with our banners we hope to change this if even for a day, thus liberating society from their normal everyday lives. When testing our interaction phrases we already started to see this liberation happening as people began to stop what they were doing to come hug, speak to or high-five us. An important concept of situationist theory was counteracting the spectacle; moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening authentic desires, and the liberation of everyday life. Therefore we take great inspiration from this movement and hope to put this into practise within our final performance.

Plant, S. (1992) The Most Radical Gesture. New York: Routledge.

After reading ‘A Sardine Street Box Of Tricks’ we were inspired to drift through the city and look at our site in new ways that we had never seen it in before. It told us to go on “destination-less exploratory walks (what the mid-twentieth century situationists called ‘drifts’ or ‘derives’.)” We walked from the bottom of the high street to the top of steep hill and really took into account everything we were passing and took photos of things we had never noticed before. We became absorbed in our site and really started to feel like we were getting to know it. By gaining this new found information on our site we began to feel like we were part of it. I started to feel moved by certain things for example the discovery of a ‘Roman Portico’ hidden on the side of an archaic building made me feel as if I was living in historical Lincoln or as it was known ‘Lindum Colonia’ and began to really excite me and make me want to learn more about the discoveries of archaic architecture or artifacts around Lincoln. We will be able to use this newly found knowledge of our site in our main performance as it could help induce the type of Liberational quotes we use when it comes to writing on our placards, the way the city moves in certain ways at certain times may also influence our synchronised movements that will occur during our performance.

Crab Man and Signpost (2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. The Blurb.

Whilst reading different chapters from different books and looking deeper into our site we are beginning to develop our ideas for performance. We have decided to use the high street in its entirety for our performance so are therefore looking into the history and archives of all areas of the high street to help develop the context of maybe some of the quotes we may use on giant speech bubbles/placards. We want to be able to see the high street in many different forms so will be combining our knowledge of historical happenings with our observing of occurrences in present day high street to influence our different synchronised times when performing our piece.
One quote that highly interested us was that of Guy Debord in ‘The Society of the Spectacle’; “There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channelled into a global construction of the spectacle. So what is referred to as “liberation from work,” that is, increased leisure time, is a liberation neither within labour itself nor from the world labour has brought into being.” (Debord, 1995, p.9)
I feel this quote is appropriate for our performance piece because it discusses the fact that all ‘real activity’ is banned in the ‘spectacle’ meaning no one is able to behave in a way that is seen as original activity that they thought of themselves instead they act in a way that society expects them to. We will be exploring this by breaking social expectations and liberating society from social norms.

Referenced:
Debord, G. (1995) The Society of the Spectacle. Translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.

Reading ‘A Sardine street box of tricks’ was very interesting and could be extremely helpful if what you want to do is make a guided tour of a specific street within your site especially if like ours it is a wide site i.e the high street. The phrase used to describe how to make your own mis-guided tour is “turning these street into their own limitied myths and sharing them around.”(Crabman and Signpost,2011) I found this a great quote as it shows you can use everything about to the street itself to turn it in to a ‘myth’ and take people on this tour to share with them the secrets of the street and how you percieve it.
In our group we have decided to observe the way the high street moves and at what happens at certain times in the day, doing so we are using the idea the situationists called ‘drifts’ or ‘derives’ in which you walk along the street and allow yourself to be drawn by different atmospheres and ambience’s attending to people’s emotional responses to places as they pass through them. By looking at the different emotions in different places and differe occurrances throughout the day in the high street we are also looking at ‘psychogeorgraphy’.
Although, we aren’t creating a ‘mis-guided tour’ of our site we are using some of the ideas we liked from a sardine street box of tricks.

Referenced:
Persighetti, S., Smith, P. (2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. Plymouth: Blurb Inc.