Thursday, January 25, 2007

Art Act, Number 3 (step 1)

PRELIMINARY INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Write down, in the comments section here, your own answers to the four Survey questions that you see below the dotted line.

2. Print out a blank copy of the Survey.

3. Distribute the Survey according to the "Extended Instructions" below.

4. Gather, disperse, destroy, or give back the results. And hold on to your own.




EXTENDED INSTRUCTIONS, [OPTIONAL]:

1. First, (if applicable) walk into all the rooms of your home and ask everyone there to answer each of the Survey questions.

2. Then, (if applicable) walk into your work or your office and ask all your co-workers and associates around you to answer the Survey questions.

3. After that, (if applicable) walk into the school or classes you are attending and ask everyone you meet to answer the Survey questions.

4. Finally, stand outside on a street corner in your neighborhood or somewhere in the town or city where you live and stop and ask passersby the Survey questions.


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SURREAL BEING SURVEY

HAPPY GO LUCKY #061


Hello, if you have about thirty seconds, I'd like to ask you just four uplifting and appealing questions about helping others find SUCCESS. Okay, great. Answer the questions as quickly as you can, without thinking too much about the answer. Just give me a quick, honest answer. Here we go:


1. What is your deepest fear?



2. What was the worst thing you ever did in your life?



3. When, and under what circumstances, were you the unhappiest you ever were?



4. What is the one thing that you hate most about yourself?




acspl12507 http://balloonballoon.blogspot.com, This survey may be publically distributed. Updated12807.



______________________________

see also Art Act, Number 1 and Number 2

21 comments:

flic said...

1. My deepest fear is a fear of making too much money.

2. The worst thing I ever did was throw my brother down a small cliff.

3. I was the unhappiest I ever was when I was in deep trouble once and there was no one there to help me.

4. The one thing that I hate most about myself is my procrastination.

Anonymous said...

1. Panic
2. Abandonment
3. Defeated
4. Racism

Matina L. Stamatakis said...

Hey Flic,


I actually tried this survey thing, and it was a bit hard. When I went out in public and asked these questions, they usually caught people off-gaurd.
Not one person was willing to share that kind of information on themselves. I'm wondering if others who tried this wound up meeting the same kind of responses...

Anonymous said...

1. ...that the world will collapse on itself.

2. ...sign a contract too soon.

3. ...I lived in Singapore.

4. ...I don't like to try new foods.

Anonymous said...

This is for me, but i'll let you know

1 losing my house and my possessions

2 push my father to the brink

3 when i divorced my first husband

4 are my eyes


tess

bloggin the Question said...

I'm grokking out on the art thing. I'm into the general principles, but not sure if I like this particular piece, not enough to endorse it by actually doing it, i.e. conducting the survey. I think it would be better if the survey questions were a little different, funnier. But I do think it is quite starkly suprising that the questions are so negative and personal. I think thats why I wouldn't conduct the survey. My bawdy sense of humour would do more shocking questions.
1. Have you ever been raped
2. Have you ever dreamed of fucking your children.
3....
Actually, maybe this is a terrible idea.

flic said...

matina- You are truly an artist! The "reactions" of people in this Art Act constitute but a small part of the act, thus everyone involved (like in real life) is only potentially part of the act. It's up to you, the administrator or initiator of this Art Act, to follow through all the way. Following through as per the Extended Intructions (although essentially optional because it’s such a leap to do) will build character, and it will make you an actively and uniquely brave canidate for SUCCESS.

Simply somehow imply that the Survey is serious and yet not serious at all. But also there should be no overt humor coming from your end. Just a friendly smile. Like it's like any other Survey.

The main part of this Art Act is actually answering the questions yourself! That's the meat of the act. You are encouraging yourself [and practicing to reach others to do the same when you administer the Survey] to stop and think deeply about yourself in terms you usually don't except in the darkest, quietest, most private moments in your life.

This brings us to the importance of answering the questions. Any writer, poet, painter, artist, or otherwise artistically inclined or even curious person who is interested in SUCCESS will want to sit down and answer these Survey questions. Why? Well, because we're locating the key lowest portions of our lives, and we could only go up from there. We're quite literally setting ourselves up for SUCCESS.

And that's the beauty of the Survey: there are answers to these lowly questions, everybody has their own answers to these questions, no matter who they are. And only you know the details and intricacies and histories that are beneath and behind the quick, simple (but hopefully as honest as possible) answers that you give to the Survey questions.

The answers are the beginning of something large and creative (and for yourself only, really). You will see what I mean more clearly in Step 2 of Art Act 3. So the answers to these 4 simple, uplifting and appealing Art Act Survey questions are actually the basic building blocks, or the springboard, or the core, of what you yourself will use in order to make yourself a SUCCESS. But first, answering these tough questions as honestly as possible is Step 1.

Great work, matina!!

Becky said...

1. being alone in a body of water.
2. i've never told a soul. i will not share here either.
3. i was married...for 12 years.
4. that i'm critical of myself.

Anonymous said...

1. Not making any difference in this world.

2. Told my gf I was cool with her seeing other guys when inside I wasn't cool with it.

3. I was rejected from a work place that I really really wanted to work at.

4. I hate that I tend to overanalyze things.

flic said...

helga von porno- I have to admit, I love the way you talk!

The questions to the survey cannot be outright shocking, or obviously ironic or overtly funny. Because it then just stops there. "Okay, that’s funny, I know I’m not supposed to really answer those questions. That person is just looking for shock-value."

The questions have to come off, like you say, “quite starkly surprising that the questions are so negative and personal.” Yet they have to be answerable questions. They have to be questions that are so negative and personal, and questions we normally don’t think about answering. At the same time, they have to be questions that are open-ended, that require more than a “yes” or a “no.” Not just to be wordy, but to ask yourself/ourselves to think about the answers for a moment.

Thus there has to be a balance there: there are no answers to the questions (because we don’t usually think about them much), but also there are answers to the questions (there has to be, because of the nature of these particular questions, yet we might not know or admit them right away).

So on the one hand, these particular survey questions are serious questions, yet on the other hand, the down-right negativity and personalness of the questions strick one as “Is this person really seriously asking me these bizarre-yet-possibly-very-real questions?”

I love your suggested questions though, and the sentiment behind them. And I also like that you are looking at things in terms of art!

Infinitesimal said...

1. What is your deepest fear?
this question sucks and i am not going to manifest fear


2. What was the worst thing you ever did in your life?
twist the legs off of a turtle (or tried to) i thought it was dead, i wanted the shell, i was seven, i still cry over it.


3. When, and under what circumstances, were you the unhappiest you ever were?
see answer to question number 1... live for the moment, not in the past



4. What is the one thing that you hate most about yourself?
hmmmm, i'll go for this one, and say.... lack of .... nope, can't say I hate anything about myself. my Dad taught me not to hate anything/one unless it was deeply warranted. you should have used the term dislike, i would have responded to that.

flic said...

infinitesimal- [I'm working with the idea that "dislike" is a synonym for "hate", and vice-versa of course. And the definition of "hate" is "dislike strongly".

So, the idea with the semantics here is "out of the thing(s) you dislike about yourself, what's the thing you dislike most, thus dislike strongly. Hence the word hate. And so out of the thing(s) you hate, (or dislike strongly), about yourself, what's the thing you hate, or dislike strongly, the most?" The word "hate" also works to put a person off-guard (or to probe deeply) in regards to answering the question.]

But all that's neither here nor there! So what would you have said if I said "dislike" most instead of "hate" most?

:)

Infinitesimal said...

the thing i dislike most about myself i think, off the cuff, as you said, without much thought to it.... is.... the lack of a strong sense of confidence or fearlessness. i am very confident, and fearless, but not as much so as i would like to be... that of superhero proportions!!

carrie said...

1. failing to convey my love to the people i love.

2. steal money

3. my dad died

4. insecurity

flic said...

A special thanks to everyone who participated. Step 2 (of Art Act 3) will be posted some time soon.

Patient Anonymous said...

I found these questions kind of interesting. I will refrain from answering for a few reasons, however, one thing tht I felt when I read them was that I instinctively thought that my answers could change depending on my mood/thoughts. I could go back at a later date and my answers could/would be completely different.

flic said...

patient anonymous-That makes this exercise all the more interesting for you. What you could do is write down the answers the way they are now. Record your time and date of answers.

Then, at a later time, write down your new "at the moment" answers (without trying to think of what you wrote for the answers before, and not looking at the answers you already wrote.) Do this "time lapse" answering of the questions as many times as you can/want over a period of time. It would probably prove to be quite enlightening to compare the variations. You could end up writing an entire opus work using this single exercise!

Jesse said...

1. My largest fear, generally speaking, is the sound of white people's voices behind me.

2. The worst thing I've done was quitting my job, walking away from a guaranteed $40,000 rental property fixer-upper mortgage to go back to school in Lawrence. Absolutely the worst thing.

3. Unhappiest? Right before going back to school in Lawrence.

4. My self-loathing is incomprehensible to your readers, here.

Anonymous said...

You write very well.

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