July Highlight - “What makes Some Love True?”
Added 2021-07-21 23:20:01 +0000 UTCSeeing as we’ve been pretty deep in the world of finance, negotiation, and money, I thought we could all use a break from the numbers with a very different kind of currency. This month I’m looking back at a very different exchange that I ran under the umbrella of a larger project, “The Institute of Internal Certainty.” This project also represents another early model of a collaborative archive or “space” built by participants, and an experiment in thinking about the ways emotions live inside us as spectrums/seemingly-permanent-existential-crises.
All that and more in the July Highlight!
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“It is the belief of the Institute for Internal Certainty that emotional ambiguity undermines our quality of life. Accordingly, our goal is to destroy it, one question at a time.”
It is a well-established but ever-remarkable fact that a thing may become a thing just as soon as you declare it. Sometimes that transition from idea to entity happens rapidly, and permanently. Monument Lab began as a set of classroom questions shared by two professors at Penn, which in 2015 became a 3 week installation in the courtyard of Philadelphia’s City Hall. I joined their Citywide Exhibition in 2017, and as I manned their inbox in the following years, I watched everyone from civilians shopping for statues to city and state governments reach out seeking the services of a “Monument Lab,” producing citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, and participatory research initiatives nationwide to cultivate and facilitate critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.
But what happens when you create something that remains stubbornly fictional?
After completing [MISSING] in 2014, I was keen to return to a kind of creative research that involved participants in ongoing explorations. At the same time, I wanted to reflect on that process and see how it could grow, and what elements I could reconsider or enhance. I remembered my experiences early in that process, when I was trying to condense my thoughts into a central research question. At one point I met with some prospective students on a tour of my university, and they asked me about my thesis research. I explained that (like any uninspired college student trying to start an essay), I had checked a dictionary definition for “Missing,” which included separate entries on ‘to notice an absence’ and ‘to feel an absence.’ I told them my work intended to explore the space between noticing and feeling absence. I was met with blank stares.
“So what’s your question?” one student pressed. I admitted I wasn’t entirely sure, and that I felt like I didn’t experience “missing” people or places in the same way some others did; I wanted to understand other people’s perspectives on missing in order to find out if I had one of my own.
“In the end, I guess I want to know what it means to miss someone or something?”
“That’s a stupid question,” offered the student helpfully, and they demonstrated this by providing a quick and easy answer. Another student agreed, but insisted on a small addition to the answer. Yet another disagreed slightly, and tried to revise the answer. An hour and a half later, they were still arguing and sharing. In my notebook, I quietly scrawled “I think this project will work.”
At the time, I thought the best way to invite participants into messy discussions like the one above was to find a better version of “the stupid question.” But looking back, I came to believe instead that the key was to create a story and setting that allows people to ask and answer “stupid questions.” In my current work, The Telelibrary, I depend on our complicated relationship to technology to make that space; by playing a rudimentary and endlessly naive artificial intelligence, I find I engage some mix of compassion, paternalism, and antagonism that invites participants to explain anew the basic concepts the System cannot understand. For [MISSING], I inadvertently made myself that story; a young man in need of an answer who was performing an involved research process to get it. I wanted that research to continue and grow, but by the end of the 9 months I was personally very comfortable with my relationship to “missing,” having recognized the outline of what it meant to me in the stories of so many others. So as I returned to my notes in 2016, I was on the hunt for a more interesting and dynamic “story.” When a friend told me in passing that the UK was creating a “Commission on Loneliness,” an idea started to stir.
I imagined the Institute for Internal Certainty as a kind of umbrella for any number of research projects and questions - a kind of performance-action MCU). The initial website for the Institute featured numerous parenthetical assurances that it does in fact exist. In interactions with participants, I described the I.I.C. as “a fictional institute operating in the real world.” My brilliant collaborator Cassandra Flores suggested that we wear lab coats, and if ever asked why, that we reply immediately “they induce trust.” All this winking was more than just a running joke - it was meant to invite participants to play along with the game of an absurdist organization on an impossible quest to “destroy emotional ambiguity.” It was designed to be the Perfect Idiot, which could solemly ask any number of stupid questions. And our first was a doozy:
“What makes some love True?”
For full details of the exchange, you can refer to the Rules for Agreement, Author Agreement, and Instructions for Interviews included at the appendix at the end of this piece*, but this one-pager for the project written at the time covers it pretty well:
Whenever I do street work, I always make sure to work with a partner (you’d be amazed how much more approachable two people on the street are than one man with a clipboard, unless you already live in a major city, in which case you stopped reading at “man with a clipboard”). And so after a number of solo interviews as I tried to refine my form, over the course of a couple of weeks I met with various collaborators across the city in Union Square, at the Brooklyn Library, and at the 125th St. Metro North station to see what stories we could gather in public spaces.
Story 12 - November 1st, 2016. The Brooklyn Library
[???] sat in
the front
of the room + waited
(as he spoke)
for my love to perfume around
the possibility of him + The moon
grew blank
as a seed planted
in the darkest
heart of a wish
(I think you know)
how this begins with
The awareness that there is
no end
The stories run a fairly broad gamut for such a small sample size; in addition to this poem there are a number of autobiographical pieces, some family histories, a free rambling rant or two, one religious conversion and one heartbreaking saga of love at first sight that turns out to be about dogs. There’s a definite skew towards past loves and lost loves, which may speak to our idealization of what we’ve already lost, or may have more to do with me having a knack for bringing out melancholy stories.
Story 4. October 20th, 2016. Central Park
I was going to visit a friend and have a reunion of sorts with some people that I had done a summer program with in high school. At this point, I am 20 and questioning everything, particularly if I made the right decision in pursuing the arts. When I get to my friend’s home, I find out that most of the others had cancelled (it was either too far or not a good weekend). Despite this upset, my friend had brought his roommate, Tom., After a weekend of wonderfully electric moments, I knew something between the two of us was unlike anything I’d ever felt. Three months later, we both found ourselves in London (just by chance + incredible luck). Two years later we moved to New York and started living together. Two and a half years after that, I found myself anxious about life and its uncertainties, and I pushed him out. He tried to stay, but I can be stubborn. Six months after that, I realized he was my it. Now, I’m wondering if we’ll ever find each other again, but I’m trying to trust in the journey, wherever it goes.
Story 11 - October 26th, 2016. Union Square
She was one of those happily created beings who pleased without effort, made friends everywhere, and took life so gracefully and easily that I assumed she was born from a lucky star. Though I am a retched [sic] beast she always saw the good in me. Each night I’d lie awake stare at this beautiful creature wondering why she’d chosen me to to love [sic]. She was my angle [sic]. She was my honesty. She was my hope. Ripped from my arm like a ball or toy. She was my greatest joy. Though she died her memory lives on. She turned this beast to beauty. She has left a mark on the world only an angle could. She is and will always be my Emery.
But these stories functioned as more than stand-alone narratives; they formed a landscape for a series of interviews that were full of the clumsy, thorny, and complicated ways love fits (or doesn’t) in our daily lives.
“when I .. saw him, like, .. literally my - my whole body lurched. […] And, I remember thinking like the second I saw him like, “oh shit.” ”
Author 4
“I use the word "unconditional" as a thing—the type of love that I would want. And I was recently talking to a friend about unconditional love and […] she said she didn't believe that .. romantic love could also be unconditional. She thought that unconditional would only apply to maybe family. And that, um, with romantic love we only stretch our conditions. [...] It's never unconditional, we just constantly make our conditions wider.“
Author 2
“And I guess what I want to challenge is […] the idea that everything before [True Love] .. doesn't count. Because I think it should count.”
Author 3
The instinct to provide and prompt spaces of reflection for participants is consistently one of the most important and generative impulses in my work. So often, the premise, setting, and structure of a piece is really built to support this brief moment in which someone can say something that neither of us expected, and leave us both puzzling over something new. By creating institutions and structures that stand with one foot in real interactions and exchanges and one foot stubbornly in a fictional land of infinite possibility, I create enough negative space for participants to both write and discover their own stories in every part of the piece. And treating participant stories as valuable, and regarding them as Authors of content, I affirm the power and importance of their contributions. Those familiar with my other works know the ways I often use contracts in particular to assert a participant’s creative agency, and this project was no different.
Excerpt, Participant Contract. 2016.
The story of the “Institute for Internal Certainty” still excites me, and I can imagine returning to that voice to explore new questions. Similarly, as my Patreon grows and my capacity to engage with and commit time to the archives of past works expands, I look forward to diving back into some of these materials and seeing how the stories strike me in this current moment. Keen-eyed readers who find themselves on the old archival Institute for Internal Certainty Website may even find some Live Research still ongoing … though that is a very different region of the Love Spectrum, and a story for another time.
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And that’s all for the July Archive Highlight - there are plenty more stories to dig into from this exchange, and my other projects, but only so much time every month. Be sure to let me know if there’s a piece you’re keen to get more highlights from, and I’ll shift time where I can.
In all cases, I’m keen to hear your thoughts on all of this work, and to keep sharing projects past, present and future.
And as ever, I’m grateful for your support.
Yannick
APPENDIX- Through Love, 2016.
Participant Agreement, “Through Love.” 2016
