research title: AN EXPLORATION OF HUMAN EXISTENCE AND UNFOUNDED PROJECTION OF IDENTIFICATION
authors: KEVIN CHENG, RALPH GUERRERO, CLIFF SIMMONS
part: 1
There Are Two Kinds of People In The World: Those Who Think There Are Two Kinds of People In The World and Those Who Don’t
–Robert Benchley’s Law of Distinction
The excerpt above comes from an early 20th Century humorist. Though the distance of time between the date of the present and the date of when that law was written is quite vast, we (Kevin Cheng, Ralph Guerrero and Cliff Simmons) believe that this Law of Distinction holds true so long as humans continue to live. Living in a city like Los Angeles, it isn’t to hard to come accross a conversation in which someone uses a vast array of typifications to describe a human being: “..some old asian lady…”, “…that black bald guy…”, “the fat one…”. How do we get from just two types of human beings (those who believe that there are two types, and those who don’t) to an overwelming list of types of human beings (Jewish, Arab, Gypsie,..). Well, we argue that these types arise out of a culture in which projecting identities onto others is something important. Despite the importance however, we also believe that projecting identities onto someone else is not only unfounded and severely misleading, but that projecting identities is practiced uniquely in different parts of the world and is not universal.
So what do we mean by this? What we mean is that we have two hypotheses. The first is that one cannot know a person’s geographical origin, religious alignment, moral compass, or etc simply by looking at them. The second hypothesis is that such ideas of geographical origin, religious alignment, moral compass, and etc are only meaningful among certain cultures and do not have the same significance to all human beings. So, how will we go about proving such an hypothesis? We could go about writing a dissertation about it, however it has been done before, especially in the field of anthropology. So instead, we will make an interactive performance piece about it in which we will create a work about the creation of work. In this process, we will be taking relics of audience members’ identity and appropriating them in the art piece. If this work of work is done correctly, then we will be successful in conveying to the audience that face and appearance shows little to nothing about a persons inner values, beliefs, and motivations. We also hope to reveal/prove that such perceived relics are locally meaningful, and have no significance outside the boundary of the preceptor’s culture.
No human being had the choice to be born. Moreover, no human being had the choice of where or when to be born. And because human beings are social creatures, many who were born into cultural circumstances, did not question such spheres of experience. That being said, to look upon someone and assume ideas about them, is misleading due to the fact that said person has the ability to choose their musical preferences, moral alignment, political beliefs etc, but they did not have the ability choose their face.
