Assignment 3: OKAY
A life-size human figure is installed in a gallery. It is white and soft,
inviting a hug. There is a “PLEASE HUG” sign at its feet.
If the visitor gives the figure a big hug, squeezing it tightly for a
couple of seconds, it will whisper into his/her ear “Okay, I’ll
sign the Kyoto Treaty” or a similar promise. More hugging will elicit
more promises. These would be randomly selected from a library in which
prerecorded promises by persons in the public sphere (such as “Okay,
I won’t drill in Alaska”) will be mixed with recordings of
personal promises made by individuals in the gallery.
The visitor will be invited to whisper a promise of his/her own into the
figure’s ear. This promise will be recorded and stored in the library
of promises the figure in the gallery will whisper in response to the
hug.
An algorithm of reciprocity is created when visitors feel held to their
promise by the future gallery visitors. The personal connection that is
created by the tangibility of the hug transfers the “good will”
from visitor to visitor in a intimate, personable way, eliciting earnest
promises and inspiring ideas of change.
The blank figure starts a chain of small changes made on a local level
by the gallery visitors, which illustrates a process bottom-up growth.
The personal promises recorded in the gallery accumulate, and their number
drowns out the pre-recorded “wish” promises.
Many studies show that we can produce feelings and affect our thoughts
by simply reenacting their bodily expressions:
"Every interaction has an
emotional subtext. Along with whatever else we are doing, we can make
each other feel a little better, or a lot worse.
The mechanism of emotional contagion rests on two psychological facts.
First, psychologists have learned that our facial and physical expressions
affect our mood. If you make a sad face for a prolonged time you will
experience both emotional and physiological changes in effect making
you feel sad. The second piece of the puzzle comes from the fact that
humans mimic. Again, this has been demonstrated in laboratory studies.
If you smile at people they will tend to mimic and reflexively smile
back. This will in turn affect their mood.
The amygdala (an almond-shaped area in the midbrain that acts as a
radar for the brain, calling attention to whatever might be new, puzzling,
or important to learn more about. The amygdala operates the brain's
early warning system, scanning everything that happens, ever vigilant
for emotionally salient events) extracts emotional meaning from the
nonverbal message, whether it be a scowl, a sudden change of posture,
or a shift in tone of voice–even microseconds before we yet
know what we are looking at. Though the amygdala has an exquisite
sensitivity for such messages, its wiring provides no direct access
to the centers for speech; in this sense the amygdala is, literally,
speechless. When we register a feeling, signals from our brain circuits,
instead of alerting the verbal areas, where words can express what
we know, mimic that emotion in our own bodies." (from Social
Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, written by Daniel
Goleman) |
Other studies suggest that hugs trigger the release of a neurochemical
which is responsible for feelings of care and love (oxytocin), and research
on autism shows that physical pressure (simulating the reception of a
hug) has a comforting effect on humans and animals. Studies on autism
also show that we store specific physicla body states and non-verbal memories
that trigger the feelings associated with these body states.
"It is now well-established
that both animals and humans show health benefits from social contact
(e.g., House, Umberson, & Landis, 1988). Positive physical contact
in the form of touching, hugging, cuddling, and the like is known
to release oxytocin." (cf. Ryff & Singer, 1998).
"What doyletics predicts about autistic children is that they
will not store a memory of a tactile experience once they store it
as a conceptual memory. Thus the boy in the story above remembers
the PKU shot and feels angry because he recovers the physical body
states of anger that he had previously stored as physical body states
long before he received the shot. What he doesn't and cannot ever
recover is the specific physical body state or pain he felt in his
foot or anywhere else in his body while the doctor administered the
shot. If his heart had sped up during the PKU shot episode, it would
not speed up as he talked to his doctor at eleven years old. Instead,
he would merely remember the location of the shot and would feel the
anger that he had felt back then, which was an internal physical body
state that he had stored earlier." (from A READER'S JOURNAL,
Volume 1: Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin And Other Reports
from My Life with Autism, Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2002). |
Thus, simply the mechanics of a hug can positively affect us and predispose
us to a positive reaction. We intuit this mechanism and inscribe it into
this installation, even though the actual physiological reaction might
be very subtle.
The same figure could be installed in several different locations around
the world at the same time. The promises from all the different locations
will be stored in a shared online database. Hugs in various locations
will elicit promises from both local and remote locations.
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