This project explores different ways of creating disruptions that interfere normal patterns or norms of a campus site.
BACKGROUND This project took place at the Grieg Garden on the University of Washington Seattle Campus. The Grieg Garden is hidden in the bushes that you can only access to through walking paths.
A view at the Grieg Garden
During my observation period, I noticed that people shared this place for various activities: reading, taking pictures, resting, chatting, and smoking. Interestingly, I never noticed that people smoked at the garden until I came across the smoke smell. And then I discovered tons of cigarette butts left on the ground that were not visible to me at all in the first place.
Cigarette butts near the bench
INTENTION I collected the cigarette butts from the Grieg Garden for the previous project Embodied Map. In the current project, I wanted to bring these unwanted evidences on the table to remind people of the phenomenon of people smoking on campus and as well leaving the smoke butts behind. However, threatening the smokers was not the intention as this place had became one of their secret places of smoking activities. I then decided to use a more gentle fashion to intervene their behaviour: hand-building ashtrays from the cigarette butts that were collected on the site, and offering the recycle ashtrays for smokers to use. In this way, stopping smoking behaviour was not asked, but taking a second thought while smoking or before tossing the butts was unconsciously introduced. The whole act of recycling and hand-building behind the objects became a reminder that generated people's reflection on smoking and littering behaviour.
EXECUTION This project took place during different days. Besides the cigarette butts I had collected for the previous project, I went back to the site to gather more. People in the garden were watching me collecting, and a couple of them seemed disgusted with the butts. There was no direct interaction between us. On May 23rd, 2016, I set up a workshop station at the garden to build the recycle ashtrays. (And yes, I misspelled the word "ashtray" on the sign...!!) Starting from collecting the cigarette butts, I then used super glues and plastic sheets to construct the ashtrays. The station also had a bag for people to donate cigarette butts. I started at 6pm and the performance took about one and a half hours. Unfortunately, I was the only one in the garden during the whole period of time and thus no interaction with audience was record. Perhaps it’s because of the cold weather and the time of the day.
I made a second attempt on 27th May, 2016. I set up the station in the morning and left it with 4 built recycle ashtrays, a donating bag, and a sharpie for 8 hours, and I repeated the workshop performance during the last 2 hours. The intention of this modification was to see how people would react to it throughout the day. I also placed the signs on the benches to direct people to the station.
When I returned at 3PM, 3 out of the 4 recycle ashtrays had been relocated on or by the benches. One of them had new cigarettes in it. There was also a smoke butt in the donating bag. I sat on one of the benches for an hour to observe people's reaction and interaction with the objects and station. Most of the people stopped by the station for a few seconds and left; one group of smokers used the ashtray while they smoked. I started the performance at 4PM. During the performance, a few people stopped by the station, but, again, there was no direct interaction between me and the viewers.
In the end, I felt happy and excited that people did recognise the smoking phenomenon through this project and also use the ashtrays for smoking. This definitely created a disruption of the normal patterns that people were blind to smoking and smokers takes that for granted.