Everyone wants to make a mark, but not everyone is brave enough to do it. Everyone wants to be heard, but not everyone is brave enough to speak up.
Things like PostSecret are great, but without a prompt they’re often a forum for an awful lot of grief and trauma. This is fine and all, but if we’re gonna make our way over this abyss on the tightrope of our imagination, we have to keep our eyes on the prize: joy, health, wholeness, and love. This is why the prompt is so important.
If you provide them with the right prompts, the general public are amazingly inspiring. If you give them the wrong prompts, they’re awful. If you don’t give them any prompts, they default to drawing penises.
People want to interact with stuff. They want to participate. They want, more than anything else, to leave a mark. Why do they write graffiti? Humans have probably always done this – there’s the “high bar” qualifying mark to leave behind, like the effort it would have taken to crawl deep into a cave with a tallow taper and make a beautiful painting of a bison – but there are many many more “low bar” marks, the vast majority of which haven’t persisted. Little boys write their names in the snow with their pee. People carve hearts and initials into aspen bark. There’s a wall in Seattle where people have been putting their gum for decades and it’s turned into an unintentional work of art. So how do you give people some kind of forum for physical engagement, something to leave a mark on, that might persist for ten millennia? What kind of practice could catch human attention for that many generations? What kind of artifacts could you make? And how low could you set the bar?
I think it’s very important that the bar is set very, very low. You would need people to want to engage no matter what language they spoke, what culture they were from, what gender they were, what age they were, or what level of intellect they had. If a person has the ability to move at least some part of their body and form some sort of agency, I want them to be able to participate in these projects. I want this to be fun for everyone. So, how do you do that?
Well, in the spirit of “it turns out I’ve been accidentally doing this my whole life” – I started doing casual interviews of my friends back when I was about 12 years old. I started a binder of “personality files” – the questions I asked weren’t very interesting or detailed, just along the lines of favorite color and celebrity crush, but people really loved being asked, having the opportunity to disclose, and then knowing that their answers were being logged.
Over the years I kept coming back to this concept of the low-bar interview and working it in different ways. Eventually the first year I went to Burning Man (2007) I conceived this participatory sculpture called The Green Duck, which was a big basketwork duck sculpture made of tree branches. I was part of an online community forum at the time and got people from all over the world to send me strips of tee shirt cloth with “messages for the Duck” written on them – I’d tie the strips of cloth to the Duck to make “feathers” over the empty basketry. It wasn’t a very good prompt, but I got cloth messages posted to me from as far away as Israel and France. I left a bucket filled with blank cloth strips and sharpie markers by the Duck out on playa, and people wrote things and tied the feathers to the Duck all week, and we pitched the sculpture in a burn bin at the close of the event. It was a great deal of fun and I learned a lot.
But the biggest thing I learned that year was that I wasn’t the only one with the idea to provide a sculptural forum for this kind of written participation. I had never even heard of the Temple at Burning Man before I went, but it blew my mind and was the main reason why Burning Man turned into more than just a “bucket list” thing for me. I could not wrap my head around the fact that people had (a) written all over this gorgeous structure, with not just permission but expectancy from the designer and builders, and (b) had schlepped ALL SORTS of gear out into the desert to burn it, release it, let it go. I remember vividly there was an entire real zebra skin in that burn. Who would burn that and why? I have no idea, but up it went on Sunday night.
I got into designing and building burns, starting in 2012 with “The Secret of the Bees” for the Circle Of Regional Effigies. By 2015, kismet had dictated that I’d become a Temple designer myself. My Utah community needed Temples, and I had the chops to create them, so that’s what I did. By 2017 I was burned out and physically suffering, and had to step down from the crew that year. Temples are awesome, but they are in the end about grief and release, and I’d had enough personal grief in my life that I couldn’t handle channeling it for everyone else as well any more. I realized if I was going to heal my body and deal with the old traumas that were riding me, I was going to have to figure out how to channel and invoke people’s joy instead of their sorrow.
So I embarked upon a series of much smaller and less ambitious “tag hanger” sculptures which I presented at the Illuminate festival in Salt Lake City. I asked people to share their dreams, their heart’s desires, and whatever made them grateful—to write their answers on tags and add them to the sculptures. I put a labyrinth and a dragon sculpture in a room at the end of the Dreamscapes immersive art experience (somewhat like MeowWolf, only made mostly out of trash and recyclables) – and after visitors had trod the labyrinth, I had them write what they wished they had the courage to do and hang it on the dragon. Wow, did I get some heavy responses.
The Roots Network
For my next installation for Dreamscapes, I expanded the vision of the rooms and changed the prompts yet again. We had three rooms built out, and a toad sculpture in each room asked a different question for people to answer on their tags. The first toad asked “what inspires you?” second one asked “what makes you happy?” and third one asked “what’s your legacy?” These prompts got some really good answers, and I think that having three of them in a row got people’s creativity flowing in a way that just a single prompt didn’t. At the end of the run, I saved all the tags and I’m slowly building an online Oracle with them. When it’s finished, you’ll be able to ask a question and receive a picture of someone’s random tag as your answer, sort of like a massively multiplayer magic 8 ball.
So I’m designing participatory future archaeology, and my question is, what’s a good prompt to give people to create messages to send 10,000 years into the future? You want it to be relatable, you don’t want it to be so “important” that people go into vapor lock. You want something that sounds accessible but can be interpreted very deeply. And of course you will still get people who draw penises and write “pee pee poo poo,” and that’s fine too. If there are humans with digestive tracts 10,000 years in the future, I’m sure they’ll still appreciate poop jokes.
Premise:
The human species is alive and thriving 10,000 years from now.
(a) You get to ask those future humans one question. What do you ask?
(b) You get to send them one piece of advice. What wisdom do you think will still be valid 10,000 years from now?
I’ve been testing prompts out on social media, and I think now that this kind of a big mental leap to do in one shot. I’m also mulling over doing something like Neal Stephenson does in Anathem, where we take it in stages—say, 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, 5,000 years, and then the full 10,000. I like this idea of getting people to weave a network of communications back and forth to all those different zones of futurity.
