How to {Act Natural | Feel Together Alone | Confuse Someone Clearly |Choose the only Choice | Share an Open Secret | Behave Clearly Confused | Grow Smaller | Find Affordable Caviar | Have a Minor Crisis | Nearly Miss | Find Comfortable Misery | Make an Exact Estimate |Have an Unbiased Opinion | Work on Vacation | Fall Upwards | Find an Impossible Solution | Whisper Loudly | Conquest Peacefully | Be Seriously Funny}
“It is not enough to dislike a government; you need to know that others do, too.”
“How To” is an ongoing intervention on the Goethe in the Skyways website for the duration of the program in Minneapolis. The intervention will operate on the website as an external agent, interfering with the typical flow of the visitor and presenting him/her/them with a range of interruptions –from simple questions to more intricate time-based actions– and inviting him/her/them to take a position before being able to continue. The intervention will change over the duration of the program and respond to the current, most pressing, ongoing socio-cultural developments and events and post targeted questions to the informed public of the website.
To know something is one thing; but to know it with others, know that others know it, and know that they know that you know it, … and all the way up to the top is another thing altogether. In cognitive science it is described as common knowledge: to know that the other person knows that you know. The concept is critical in politics, as cooperation and team-building requires common knowledge. Online common knowledge on the other hand is difficult to create as we can’t look each other into the eyes and agree to our shared common field. And with social media it is even harder to tell the motivation behind people’s actions. Are they state-sponsored agents, trolls, bots, or all together completely fabricated?
Drawing from previous work such as „Critical Mass,“ in which the artist converted an exhibition into a speculative space controlled by the visitors of the project’s website, and “Fair Warning,” in which the artist created a never-ending synchronized and distributed set of probing questions directed at the audience, “How To” aims to bring together and connect the visitors of the Goethe in the Skyways by means of disrupting the website.
