This is an experiment on the ways in which experiences of proximity, both in the private and public sphere, are shaped by emotional and data vulnerabilities, as well as an attempt to develop practice-based research methods. Having recently been distanced by a move, the two of us no longer have access to shared physical environments. Technology has facilitated the maintenance of some forms of closeness, but inevitably our perceptions of distance have shifted as our communication has become increasingly mediated. This guest room enables us to create a different kind of meeting place in which to investigate and attempt to cultivate propinquity.

 

From August 16-September 14, 2016 we will inhabit this room, accessible to anyone, as research subjects. Our presence will include live-streamed hangouts—attempting a series of progressively vulnerable actions, conversations, and exercises—as well as a public archive of the data we mutually generate over the course of these weeks, including the entirety of our text-based communications.

 

Interpersonal vulnerability has been recently embraced in both academic  and popular culture  contexts as a quality to be embraced and as a potential catalyst for closeness. Simultaneously, among growing privacy concerns on individual,  corporate,  and state levels,  the vulnerability of information maintains a negative bias, representing weakness and openness to harm. This experiment seeks to examine the potential outcomes of making both our selves and our data vulnerable, and to explore the effects of vulnerability on the ways in which we experience emotional distance.

 

Our research questions include:

• In what ways do our vulnerable actions affect feelings of closeness?

• Is there value in making our feelings and data more open?

• Are power hierarchies complicated by giving our most private selves willingly—to each other, to the corporations that capitalize on them, and to the public?
   

 

   A state of closeness in place, relation, characteristics, and time.

   e.g. the work of Aron et. al

   e.g. the work of Brown.

   e.g. camfecting, the hacking of webcams.

   e.g. the organizational doxing of Ashley Madison.

   The most obvious e.g. being the NSA revelations.