Senseless
Among the more unique projects of the week...
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October 23, 2007
October 16, 2007
Synchronicity - Project V
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Carl Jung coined the term in a 1952 paper entitled "Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle.” Borrowing ideas from the field of Quantum Physics, Jung believed that mind, matter, past, present, and future exist in a meaningfully connected continuum. He outlined three types of synchronicity:
- The meaningful acausal coincidence of a psychological event and an external observable event, both taking place at or around the same time.
- The meaningful acausal coincidence of a psychological event and an external observable event, the latter taking place outside the individual's range of sensory perception.
- The meaningful acausal coincidence of an internal psychological event with an external observable event, the latter taking place in the future.
For this project, we loosely embrace some of these Jungian concepts to create a performance. Although we lack the ability to produce a “psychological event” in the minds of others, we are able create an organized and observable series of connected external events. We would need three elements:
- A large coordinated group of casually informed performers / observers with mobile phones
- An Asterisk server (an open source telephony system and toolkit) (http://www.asterisk.org/)
- A meaningful event
For our performers, we tapped the usual source of willing participants: the ITP student listserv. However, turnout was so poor on our first attempt that we had to reschedule and cast a wider net by posting a message to Craigslist. Our participants were given as little information about the project as possible. Directed to http://www.mysteriousevocativewebsite.com they were told to be at Washington Square Park at a specific time and that they would then be receiving a phone call asking them to repeat a simple phrase and answer a simple question. In the end, we had roughly 20 willing subjects.
The asterisk server would provide our (meaningful) synchronized event. The plan was to call all of our participants at exactly 5:30 on 10/10 with a prerecorded message; hopefully, they would be in the park on schedule – resulting in 20 people answering their phones at the same time within the same space. We also configured the system to record each phone call. We choose a relatively simple and benign instruction. The message played:
“Hello, welcome to project V. Please repeat after me: OK, I’ll see you on 11/11. Good. Now, make a wish out loud when you hear the tone. [beep]”
In numerology, 11 is considered a master number and represents impractical idealism, vision, refinement of ideals, intuition, revelation, artistic and inventive genius, the avant-garde and, androgyny (among other things). When broken down into the equation 1 + 1 = 2, we have the two of duality. The combination of 11 and 11 (or 11:11) is thought by numerologists to appear more often in our lives than can be explained by chance or coincidence. Self proclaimed physic, Uri Geller is an outspoken proponent of the mystic powers held in 11:11, and so the notion has been largely adopted and entertained by New Age community. At any rate, the combination was more meaningful to us if only because of this cultural pretext. The theory was that people would be more likely to hear this combination of numbers and form associations.
In the end, perhaps all of our hocus pocus and shameless exploitation of numerology served to curse us. As you will note in our documentary video, no one actually received and calls because we broke the Asterisk server. This was really too bad - because I was getting excited. Hopefully, our stars will align and we will have another go at this or a similar project in the future.
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