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Activist Fatigue

Welcome! Let’s play a game! Don’t worry, your job is easy. We’re all in this together. See those cards? They have a number and a script. When your number is called, please stand and read your script aloud. Now the objective of the game is to change the visual into a clean, crisp image. Not just a little shift, but real change. Time matters. Anna is your clock and will be doing jumping-jacks until you complete all of the tasks. Don’t be mean to her, we’re all in this together. Let’s begin, #1 you’re up. This interactive game aims to evoke the audience's’ attention to the social issues going on in contemporary America. In a time of executive orders, rhetoric, lies and possible interference in our daily life, I want to create a meaningful voice by the medium of art. Inspired by the artistic activism of Guerrilla Girls, we designed this system as an interactive prompt for further discussion. Each participant will receive a card with a list of scripts that are numbered. When their number is called, they need to stand up and read the corresponding script out loud. Each script contains a factual statement and rhetorical question concerning a specific social issue, such as gender inequality, minority group rights, social health insurance, etc. On screen, they will see a blurry black and white image, based on a picture of struggling people, which is fragmented into overlapping rectangles that are dispersed across the screen. When the participants take turns to read the script out loud, the Isadora software program will capture the volume of the sound. When the reader’s voice volume is loud, the rectangles on screen begin to align with each other, like when pieces of a puzzle come together. The goal of the audience is to read aloud until the fragmented rectangles form a whole image that is clear and bright. Furthermore, I sit in the backstage to control the program manually to adjust the color of the picture. If the participant sounds angry or confident, I will change the color of the image to red. If the audience’s tone sounds unconcerned or if they hesitate, I will change the color to blue. In order for the participants to feel the urgency of these social issues and their impacts, we installed a human time-clock - our group mate Anna performing jumping jacks - into this “pressure cooker” ecosystem. She steps forward a little bit and falls on the ground after all the participants decide to give up reading the scripts.