Whoa! Damn.

Being a teenager is a decade-long social experiment. As both a teacher and a video artist, I accept my active role in this experimentation.

I took my teen-age video production students to the gallery to encounter the 5 videos in the ACTING OUT: Social Experiments in Video show. As a group we all watched Javier Tellez’s piece, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See. We all witnessed each blind person “see” the elephant for the first time. A couple of them shared the same first word, “Whoa!” and two others, “Damn!”. Then we see how the relationship develops for a minute or two between the person and the elephant. One person didn’t want to be near it for more than a minute; another fell in love with the elephant and his energy, while a third demonstrated how most of us are so out of touch with our sense of touch, as he caressed the elephant and described the skin in ways we would never understand.

I observed my students watch the videos in this show for their initial viewing. “Wow!” “This is whack!” “Everything in this museum is crazy!” “That’s cool.”

How and what we perceive can often initially be summed up in one expletive. We have a gut reaction, and that initial reaction, whether voiced or not, can be put into a word. Soon, almost immediately, however, our reaction is mutated as a steady stream of associations, assumptions, and expectations pours in to mediate our experience. That point of transition leads to either deeper knowledge and understanding or to a lack of interest or even a violent negative reaction and non-acceptance.

We left the show and returned to our classroom. I tried to mediate my students’ experience by having a discussion about their reactions. I’m not sure why I was surprised, but they commented rather eloquently:

“People only see things from their point of view; the greatness in people comes out when they are challenged.”

“We get to see why people do things and under what conditions. Humans demonstrate their morals when we witness how far they will go for something, whether it is for money or for personal exploration.”

“The situations in the videos brought people’s day-to-day issues into a focus that wouldn’t otherwise happen.“

“Most situations are power struggles; it’s all about dominance and inferiority.”

Because our lives are saturated with video, consumerism and marketing we are immersed in a culture of inauthentic experiences, situations that are created or staged for the purpose of presenting to a media audience. The prevalence of video through reality shows and YouTube culture has normalized these inauthentic experiences to the point that audiences have stopped questioning the validity of this presented experience. Disbelief has been involuntarily suspended by our culture, and no more strongly than by the digital natives. As a result, those who “perform” in these social experiments, and those that view them are having genuine, authentic experiences and reactions.

Up until experiencing this show and my students’ reactions to this show, I had seen this as a negative.

Today’s video artist has the benefit of decades of video genres to play with or to ignore. Hinting to these genres allows audiences a pre-understood entry point. The beauty of all of the pieces in the show is that the artists mediate the experience in very different, yet subtle ways through their craft. Some are more heavily edited, some more pre-produced. Artur Żmijewski’s Them has a reality-show feel to it, but digs into experiences and emotions much more globally consequential than The Real World, while Johanna Billings Magical World teeters on music video format, therefore drawing increased attention to the lack of glitter, glitz and self-pride that you would see in most music videos.

My students were not concerned with the concept that these were constructed situations. They were able to enter them easily with their video-watching skills, and thus able to accept them as human experiences, appreciating the role of the artist, and responding genuinely to the narratives that played out on the screen.

The 6 people who experienced the elephant for the first time were having an authentic experience, albeit crafted by the filmmaker. Interestingly, those 6 people who can’t “see” know much better what an elephant looks like than most us because of this experience. And we all benefit from their experience and the artist’s decision to create the piece.

I doubt that my students of 10 years ago would have been able to navigate both an immediate reaction to Tellez’ piece along with the in-depth, thought-provoking dialogue afterwards. Teens had different relationships to art and media then. Now, however, my students have allowed me to see the show much more fully since they have experience looking in ways that I don’t. Although I might be considered the “artist” for taking them up to the show, I am also now a more willing subject in the experiment.