Our Project and the Public Sphere
This first inner public sphere functioned as a safe zone among us four. As a start each of us wrote a creative piece significant for this project and we digitally footnoted each others’ work on scalar, creatively and scholarly to establish bonds among each others’ connotations/associations (or even metaphorically “minds”). This was the most time consuming but most intense process. After establishing this basis we started discussing the potential ways to open this inner circle to wider audiences.
First we discussed of making a simultaneous and moving performance piece with our texts where we would use the space as the analog version of scalar. This would have made the public sphere metaphor very visible through the analogy of a market place where the buyers would chose among sellers based on sellers’ performances and the quality of their product. Then we realized this would actually be way too confusing for a twenty-five minute presentation. The most significant thing that separates cacophonic chaos and a market place is the organic social patterns that are developed through time, and obviously our audience wouldn’t have had enough time to establish that collective organic pattern in their minds in only twenty-five minutes. So we decided to make a script based on our scalar project where we interrupt each other’s creative pieces with our own creative connotations. This ended in a script which is layered like an onion more that the network universe of scalar, which is somehow also more fit for the analog universe of our embodied minds.
Then we made the presentation to our Performing Failure classmates and documented the process. As the last step, we uploaded this documentation to our final polished version of our scalar project and opened it to public access. This way people who have not been a part of this process can have sense of our end product if they chose to and become a part of the open ended dialogue that we tried to initiate.
So why was this three layers of making the public sphere significant? I believe it was also an experiment on the potentialities of making a platform of discussion among people who desire this discussion but lack the basis of a common background. To establish this communicative action (in Habermasian terms) we first needed to deal with each others’ set of references, taboos, traumas, “ground zeros”, “common senses”, “absolute neutralities” and “normals”. Everything that we took for granted, everything that seemed established should be explained again to each other to set this potential platform of discussion. And if poetry cannot do it, what can?
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