‘THE DATING PROJECT_the game’ follows on from the ‘THE DATING PROJECT’. In the latter, the focus was upon setting up a laboratory of performative experiments in order to explore the potentials of the instructional video as a means through which to choreograph encounters between strangers, and to interrogate the ethical issues surrounding consent, trust, agency and responsibility that accompany such setups.
‘THE DATING PROJECT_the game’ focuses on unravelling the question of who writes the rules of such encounters, and from what biases and assumptions about the world are they written. As Langdon Winner states, many of the technologies we use on a daily basis are ‘almost invariably linked to specific ways of organizing power and authority’. (1)
The project will therefore set up a series of five workshops with five different target groups in which each group will be prompted to write instructions, rules, and protocols for encounters based on their own worldviews. The five workshops will take place in a nursing home, a secondary school, an amateur theatre group working with actors from diverse ethnic backgrounds, an inclusive dance class and a train station. These workshops will act as case studies in examining the dominant narratives present in these spaces, and in examining how participatory processes can reshape these narratives, offering other ways of experiencing the spaces we collectively inhabit, illuminating voices and perspectives that might usually go unheard.
(1) Winner, Langdon. “Do Artefacts Have Politics?” in Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136).
