hacking piccadilly circus/
CRITICAL INTERROGATION OF PRACTICE.
2016
London//Central Saint Martins
3 days project
Tutor// Steven Hayward
Group: Chang Cathryn, Fu Yao,Charmain, Taousiani Stella, Stolz Lisa,Kiang Edwin Idris
Design a service or an experience that is a development of your dérive. As a starting point you might consider alternative guides to ‘secret’, or unfamiliar aspects of London which already exist. Experience an unexpected place in an unpredictable way. Suspend normal expectations and filter devices. It is like being a child, a creature that has arrived from another planet, or someone in a foreign city who has lost their passport and their mobile phone.
Spirit of place, the palimpsest, space as discourse, dérive, Situationism and psycho-geography, hacktivism, social psychology, observer-participation, ethnography.
URBAN EXPERIMENT
In practice it is very difficult to suppress norms and expectations- they exist to protect us, and help us to survive. After receiving the area of Picadilly Circus and Oxford Street in London through a dice game, our group had to build an interpretation of the derive. All the members of the team had been quite familiar ith the area and hadd a similar perception about it. We decided to play a game to "hack the city, to create our own derice, act in a way that in a way is normally insufficiend illogical or even dangerous. We experienced the city using methods such as being blindfolded, walking backwards or looking up in he sky. The sreet artists, the mannequins in theshowcases, the beggers, the crhistmas decorations, the huge screens were all perceived as different performances with the same audience: the visitors of the area.
The basic idea was to create a new type of performance, an interactive performance which functions as a reflection of all the incomes and key ideas we gathered from the site analysis of the area: Piccadilly Circus, from of the most commercial areas of London.
The mannequin becomes a performer, comes out of the showcases, into the urban environment and lets people interact with it and lets the audience become a part of the performance too. In order to attract the attention from the audience, the mannequin is a naked vulnerable persona that asks for help/sympathy by using the phrase “Dress me Up, I’m cold”.
The persona of the mannequin is named after Twinkles: A children’s game where children are invited to dress their doll up with cut-out clothes. In the same way Mr Twinkle’s asks the audience to dress him up using wasted plastic bags.
