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]

A project concerned with meaningful exchanges bargains respect and social capital.

The project that I am currently working on will be the first self initiated brief as a part of unit 10 of my degree. I have not made any more progress on my previous work, but I have decided to put that on hold because I am incredibly interested in this project, and I don't think I can do much for the 'science book' at the moment.

 The basic principle and the inspiration for my project is how to transform uncomfortable or unwanted social interactions into rewarding and meaningful ones. When I was 15 I was in Los Angeles and as I was walking into a McDonald's a beggar asked my cousin for money. I cannot remember whether she acknowledged him or ignored him but she did not give him anything. It struck me as curious I asked her why did she do that. She told me something along the lines of 'he's only going to use it for drugs '. At that time I was living in a kibbutz in Israel and this was one of my first encounters with a person in  such a situation. Nevertheless, since that experience my attitude towards such requests from beggars was pretty much in line with my cousin's.
While studying for my dissertation I came across the notion of social capital.  I made a connection between two observations in this field. The first is that the more individual members contribute and support their community the better the community becomes. Or in other words, that just because you help to somebody else in your community the chance of somebody entirely different would help anyone else who needs it is increased.  The second observation is that when people interact socially, they  form some kind of agreement, a social bargain. So friendships for example is a kind of 'be there for me and I'll be there for you' type of agreement.
I had a realisation that relationships and interactions which I deem meaningful all make me feel I am getting something out of them. I then started thinking of relationships I did not rate meaningful which is where the beggar incident popped into my mind. It was almost funny to find myself in a situation where I am thinking 'what can I get out of a beggar? '.
What can you get out of somebody who has no material possession? Who is so desperate that he is asking me for money… Up until that point my reason for not giving money to beggars was that they might use it for drugs, or that I do not know what no use it for. So I started asking beggars for that information, but  in order to make it meaningful even if they are lying I would video their response.

Traded £1 with a homeless so he'd tell me what he'll do with it #BeggingBargain @camdenTalking https://t.co/doJXyUXxXD
— Gilad Visotsky (@v_gilad) August 19, 2013

Suddenly, I was 100% okay with giving the money. It's almost like it didn't matter what they would do with it because they did something for it and therefore the money is theirs.

 To tap into this kind of conditioning in my brain and to manipulate it felt pretty amazing.  I introduced a tiny change to an existing occurrence, and since my outlook of people has transformed. Because I now look at beggars as individuals with  something which is potentially personally valuable to me.

 for my project I want to use this premise and create something, I don't know what, that is engaging and nonjudgemental. I don't really have an opinion as to what needs to be done about the homeless people, beggars and the likes. But there are real steps that if taken (judging by my own experience) can change the way that we look at other (marginal?) members of society.

Designing my quantum book.

I am in the progress of designing a kind of book which produces pages for the reader to observe without disclosing information as to the coming page's content. To achieve this the book will allow the extraction of desirably one page at a time.

Side view

Bottom view

Side view of the internal mechanism

I am planning to use wood and foam to create the book. paper can then be inserted into the box. I am confident that there are issues I am not taking into account. These may have to do with how paper reacts to foam or how narrow the bottom opening is, as it may be too narrow for pages to be extracted or so wide that pages simply fall through. I hope that by producing a prototype I can better identify and address them. My chllange now is o find the time and figure out how to produce it.

My not-so-amazing mock-ups for tomorrow

For my first Unit 10 project, I need to come up with a design for a book based on Quantum Theory. Inspired by the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. I want to make a book that produces pages at random based on input from the user. In such a way, one cannot know which page he or she will read next.

My paper mockups

The 'Smint' book, produces a page at random when a button is pressed

The sphere book, contains multiple rolled up pages to be pulled out at random

I am not entirely happy with my mock-ups but I hope that after tomorrow I will have a better idea how to proceed! Fingers crossed!