You, Watching Me, Watching You, Watching Us is a party about the edges of what it means to be sensed, measured and quantified by machines. Sensing machines are everywhere. As we move through the day, electronic sensors and computers adjust our thermostats, count our steps, change the orientation of an image when we rotate our phones. There are more sensors in the world than there are people: in 2020, thirty to fifty billion of them (compared with 7.8 billion people), with more than a trillion expected in the next decade. What are the affordances and limitations of these trajectories when we add in the element of consent-based surveillance or slippery identity play.

A party is a platform, a technology. It is an exercise in collective space-making and collective skill-sharing (how to wire speakers to how to share production tools). How one goes about making a party and through that making of a party is a co-creative process.

This project is an exercise in how one constructs parties as a form of narrative environment and spatial practice. It asks how we occupy space, with what bodies, and questions the limits of legalities surrounding risk, organisation, permission, and joy. Our task was to design a party that encourages social interaction, stranger danger, and fun while also including a critical element dealing with the shifting technological dynamics of our time.

Prompt : The party is set in a speculative near-future or alternate present timeline and delves into the realm of speculative fiction, where your guests willingly participate in a thought-provoking exploration of themes like familiarity, belonging, intimacy, and more.This narrative unfolds in the aftermath of the enigmatic 'X event,' which left behind a society plagued by alienation, loneliness, and a pervasive sense of malaise.

The Party Brief is a section of the Narrative Environment’s MFA program that lasts two weeks and invited visiting fellows to guide these grad students through the project.

Alongside two other producers of the Party Brief, we began the two week long Party Brief with lectures on co-creating, sensing technologies, live action role play, and how do we as designers facilitate empathy, connection and joy through spacial design? 

We prompted the students in Narrative Environtments with questions like :

• Who are we at this party? Who are the guests? Are we all the same? Are we different? How are we sharing our differences?
  
• How can space be a responsive environment? How can you integrate sensors into space? 
• Are we human in this space? Are we animals? Are we a new breed? Are we machines?
  
• Does everyone have to participate the same way? Is there a way to watch, a way to influence passively/way to perform?
  

        

                                                                     ︎︎︎Concepting Miro Board︎︎︎

                        

Following our lectures, we had concepting workshops, work time, and LARPing workshops which encouraged the students to think about games, play and performance as a means to fulfill their prompt. 

• Chance, Competition, Movement, Embodiment, Mimicry (Simulation)
• Roles
  
• Social behaviours, technological interventions

These workshops were comprised of various improvisational games varying in levels of teamwork and participation pressure.