Unsent letter to Paulus Dreibholz

I just wrote the following and realised it was just an exercise in procrastination:

Hi Paulus,

Not sure what the following email is supposed to achieve but here goes:

I have a very clear idea as to what I want to convey with our brief, these last few days have been extremely hectic and I am ashamed to admit that I suddenly realised my plans for tomorrow are not very developed and a bit tooinappropriate.

I am not looking for an excuse and I hope to make a good presentation tomorrow, but at the moment (22:15) it is unresolved and I am not as confident as i would like to be about it. 

Regards,

Stressed Nervous and Stressed (also exhausted) Gilad

Meaningful Exchange

I noted the following in my diary yesterday:

Avi and I talked and came up with the idea for#MeaningfulExchange

This is after today's dispiriting crit with #KenHollings where it was (rightly) highlighted that my idea for a machine which provides jokes for 1p isn't quite hitting the spot.

The new idea is as follows:
For 1p the machine would offer potential users the chance to hear a joke I harvested for £1 from a stranger. At the same time as replaying the jokes the machine will record the users reaction. It will thereafter produce a receipt which would feature their photograph. In exchange for the receipt, the uni shop downstairs will offer some small discount (maybe 10% or 10p - something related to £1/1p) for drinks bought that day. This serves as both an incentive to participate and as a way to encourage the user to have their face in the right spot. I'm not sure if I should offer drinks as then I wouldn't need the receipts for my records as the shop would need them as proof of purchase.

The idea behind this work is that every exchange in it is meaningful in a true, practical way to all the participants:

• The strangers got £1,
• the users get a funky receipt or drinks at reduced cost
• the shop gets the exposure (with me, most likely covering the costs)
• I get exposure

win win win win

A paragraph for Ken Hollings

This is sopposed to be 200 words:

Aim: 

To create a collection of jokes which is accessible to the public and in the process explore how we relate to strangers. I want to explore the idea that a fair social bargain can promote the crowd to interact with the work. 

Method: 

Turning a ubiquitous, possibly undesirable, experience into a novel and entertaining one by altering what the crowd gains from the interaction, leaning it in it's favour - manipulating a small detail and making a big difference. 

I took to the street with a big sign: 

                                                                                                                        

Picture by: Laurent Moulinat

When I see a person standing in the street, holding a sign I immediately assume he's out to take advantage of me.

So, based on the idea that successful social endeavors mean everyone involved stand something to gain I wondered what would happen if that interaction was altered - I will give that person money if I get something valuable in return! I cannot, however, assume most people have material possession they will be willing to part with, or that they will feel what I am asking for represents a fair deal. I needed to ask for something everyone is likely to have – information: a story, an advice or a joke! The advantage of jokes is that they can be consumed in bulk or individually, they are not preachy or too heavy and they entertain, they are attractive.

I collected and video recorded over 40 jokes (here are some). My challenge is to figure out how to present this collection in a way that retains any lessons and relates to the experience. At present I am considering attaching a projector to a coin slot and have a joke projected each time a penny is inserted. I think a small amount like a penny is an equivalent to the minimal level of involvement that can be expected from a person new to this project.

This is a hard bit

Background:
I have been collecting jokes from random individuals by standing in public places and holding a sign that promises £1 for each novel joke. So far I have 40 jokes

A photograph taken by Noel Cottrell

[excerpt from diary]
...
I know that this project is about social capital and interactions we perform that involve bargains. But now that I have 40 videos of random people telling jokes I feel stuck. **what am I going to do now?**
I could go for another round of asking students and friends to illustrate a joke at a time thus making the entire endeavour crowd sourced. But what will that stand for?
I could also try gathering more jokes by only asking and not offering money to allow for comparison, but I feel this avenue is too simplistic. I need to find my so what? For this project. so what if I'm making a book which is crowd sourced? Even more accurately - so a collection of crowd sourced  jokes can be acquired, filmed and edited... So what?
I will try to spell out what I think of this subject:
Together, collectively we can be very smart and sophisticated. But the fact that individually we seem impressionable needs to be explained. I believe that this can be seen as analogues to the way we try out new foods to determine how we like them. This process requires that we first taste the food, see if we enjoy the flavour. Then we eat it based on that decision, then see how it affected us afterwards. We remember this by experience and so we make up our mind. And in my case, not make up my mind and periodically try everything That did not disagree with me too strongly even If I did not love it.
I imagine that even the initial tasting involves countless nerves and biological processes. The implication to the analogy is that in order to be able to make the collective decision (which I believe changes constantly) we the individuals are acting as the nerve ending and we feed back to the crowd using our social tools. Our tools for providing this feedback are our computers and mobile phones with the internet as the mode of delivery.

If we return to the food analogy then it's interesting to note that I, at least, get most of my information about food (even food I already had) from the internet, and that this information often changes how and what I eat.

In case this doesn't make sense, I think that the choice to use my iphone as the tool for capturing the jokes is highly appropriate - I just don't know what I'm trying to say by that...

...

[end]