Familiar Strangers | staging design : ipsitarajak

Guided by : Dr. Jignesh Khakhar, Shobhan S, Zubin S, Rashmi B | Videograpghy guide : Vishal Ranpura

Time alloted: 6 weeks

Abstract

We had exchanged smiles and nods during our commutes for a few months, but never
talked. For the past couple of days, I didn’t see her.

Anonymous people often become familiar faces in our daily lives.

Was there an unacknowledged bond built on the smiles we had passed? Do the faces of strangers become part of our physical setting in a city?

A familiar face has been missing from my co-commuters. How does the absence feel?

There might be new ones soon to grow familiar with.

‘Familiar Strangers’ is a public installation to contemplate the feeling of familiarity and belonging among the people we know by face. The installation provides food for thought each day and grows in the minds of the viewers the way our relationships with them evolve.

Concept Note

Urban settings let people be both anonymous and familiar with one another at the same time. This is the asset of living in a city.

It is impossible to imagine that we know every other person in a busy city street; the essence of urban life would fade away otherwise. It is equally impossible to recognize every other person we come across.

89% of people could recognize at least one co-commuter in a week they had seen, and an average commuter could recognize four people they had conversed with, in Milgram’s 1972 experiment on the phenomenon of ‘Familiar Strangers’.

We might nod at a stranger repeatedly seen at the grocery shop we go to. We don’t know anything beyond their physical features,
appearances, or the settings we share. Relationships with these familiar faces are grown from sharing a commonplace with having eye-to-eye contact and exchanging gestures, mutually agreeing to not interact further. Like places become familiar upon going
multiple times, faces also become familiar when seen repeatedly. With the familiarity of places and faces, there grows a sense of comfort and belonging yet there is a sense of being part of the crowd.

Is it uncomfortable if we are not surrounded by the set of familiar faces we recognize?

We are strangers together in each other’s lives with little glimpses of our imaginations and perception of them and vice versa. With time, they become familiar strangers, neither friends nor acquaintances.

What happens when we see these familiar faces in a different setting?

Do they observe, imagine, and fantasize about us the way we do?

In the week-long installation, the moving texts evoke viewers to their encounters of similar experiences the way invisible ties bind strangers. As the days progress, the space is transformed with people pondering upon this connection of regularity, contact, and the public space, letting this omnipresent relationship surface in the context of our campus.

Journey

Genesis:

Activating a public space – but not another playground or park.

Giving life to the street furniture!
I wonder what if the chair wants to talk to me? Might creep out people.

Iteration 1 : Activating a public space – but not another playground or park.

Note on Iteration 1

Iterated to give a sense of enjoyment in everyday life.
It was inspired from the game of connecting the dots to make boxes that we played as kids on our notebooks. Similarly, as a person walks, the colourful square planes will be formed with the footsteps.

The lights around the bollards and the path are activated only when two or more people come from either side and as they cross each other colors of planes get exchanged.

It could give a feeling of childhood experience of playing such games on the streets

There was a question of how lasting the feeling of delight will be? What will be the degree of impact?

The pivoting question was ‘Why consider activating public space through an experience of play*?’

Play might initiate interaction with unknown people. The aim is not to set conversation between complete strangers.

Articulating character of urban spaces, with keeping in mind the learning from previous prototype that it is not about creating room for active interaction between participants like in a game but staging/ alter-staging the feeling of living in urban areas.

‘unknown people’ and ‘complete strangers’.

Taking in hand Jane Jacob’s concept of ‘eyes on the street’ and with my personal experience of living and travelling alone in various cities.

‘I liked being anonymous’, I thought to myself. I enjoy the anonymity a city offers.

Urban Anonymity
Do strangers enjoy interacting? Differs from person to person, time to time, need to need.

These were the final keywords that defined the content of the staging Experience Design.

*play not to be confused with playing games, but a feeling of delight!

Reflections on Iteration 1

Iteration 2: Conceptualising the Room

Note on Iteration 2

1: 10 scale model of the Room.

The room depicts how we dwell in cities. We observe the people around from a distance but don’t really set a conversation with them. The longitudinal glass box in between the trapezoidal mirror
cubicles is depicting an invisible shield that city dwellers create increasing the sense of isolation. The inside face of the outside wall that has no mirror, have glimpses of people’s lives in form of moving images in small screens. Once we enter in the room, stories in the other cubicles are slightly visible, but not on totality.

Reflections on Iteration 2

It is not about telling stories of the lives of the people we see everyday but it is about the habit of imagining stories looking at the people we know by face. The relationship we have with these people we see regularly is in our imagination and to some extent the greetings we exchange. They are strangers, yet familiar.

The representation of the room was taking away the crystal clear depiction of our thoughts we produce and sense of familiarity that we feel in known crowd, yet being anonymous.

Before casting faces of guards, to validate the idea and the feeling the face and texts impart on the observer, explored the content of the texts with the face cast of different people to test different ways of representation and range of content of the prompts in the line of familiarity and anonymity.

Surprisingly, the focus was mostly on the texts and the inner thoughts and faces were hardly playing any role. Hence, eliminated the idea of using faces.

Iteration 3: Faces as artefacts

Note on Iteration 3

Now, the concept of content: familiar strangers was articulated with two previous iterations.
As one leg of the triad of Staging Experience was finalised, began exploring representation and technology.

Identified such familiar strangers on campus: The guards and the other staff around the campus whom we repeatedly see but don’t know well. It was surprising to know that they were aware of where we moved, stayed in the capmus, that too in such a short span of our stay in campus.

The idea was installing POP cast face of any one of the guards at different places of duty in the campus throughtout a week. As people pass through those faces, questions or statements will be prompted on small LED screens. The texts will be related to the relationship we hold with them within the campus. The participants would eventually recognise that particular guard elsewhere on duty and experience meeting him in a different setting than repeatedly seeing his face.

Why cast a face and not a picture?

Hanging a photo might deviate people to focus on the quality and making of photographs.

Cast faces on wall define the familiar Strangers are embed in our society which tend to notice when absent and ignore when present. The reason to cast the faces in POP was to seem like the cast faces are merging with the environment of white interior walls of the built environment.

representation - texts

technology - projection mapping

content -
familiar strangers

Representation

Technology

Content of Texts:

As the conversations mattered, the heart of the project lied in the content of the text, as reading the texts will make the observer/ participant travel through their experience of having Familiar Strangers and their importance.
Each sentence is designed to play on loop for a specific time of the day and as the days proceed, people recognized and talked about their experiences and about could relate to movies they have seen.

Fontstyle and Colour of Texts:

After a lot of iteration of easily recognizable fonts, Sans Forgetica was chosen because it is designed to retain the information someone reads. As one observes the font, the mind connects the gaps in the font the same way we try to fill the spaces with the people we repeatedly see.
Sans Forgetica suited the best as it doesn’t give the feeling of advertisement. It borrows people’s attention time to read and resolve in their mind as they walk by. Black and white colour scheme had been chosen to keep the focus on the content of the text.

Scale and Space Selection within the campus:

As familiar strangers, exist throughout in our everyday lives, from our socities to our workplaces, it was justified to scale it up to public space. Within the campus, after projecting at different places and considering the footfall, the canteen area was the most suitable space for such a week long installation.

The canteen block, the transit campus, and the courtyard in between make the space. A space where the whole community come together to spend time. Hence, the walls of the canteen block was mapped and projected on.

Projection Mapping was done using one projector, animation of the texts were designed projecting iteratively. The projector was kept on a designed podium near the trees so that it is not the first
element visible to the observers.

Reference and precedent study

The Fun Theory Campaign by Volkswagen; The Trash Bin and The Piano Staircase

Playable City Projects, produced by Watershed, in association with British Council.

Paulos, Eric & Goodman, Elizabeth. (2004). The familiar stranger: Anxiety, comfort, and play in public places.

Milgram, Stanley. 1972. “The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity”. in The Division 8 Newsletter, Division of Personality and Social Psychology. Washington: American Psychological Association

Will Hill, Charles Harrison, Dave Beech, and Aimee Selby, Art and text, London, 2009.

Works of Jenny Holzer

Note: The documentation of the project was a team task. It was indeed a cinematography workshop, learning and assisting in each others’ shoot process. The documentation would have not been possible without the guidance of Vishal Bhai, support of my friends Sangeeth, Jagath, Anshul, Sumit and Ujjwal (Cinematography and sound) and presence of my friends, Neena, Arvind, Yadu, Devanshika, Himank, Antara, Aditi, Divyanshu, Aswin, Anjana and Amey.

representation - texts

technology - projection mapping

content - familiar strangers

content -
familiar strangers