The desire to ‘connect’ people, communities, societies, and ecosystems is at the heart of most participatory art pieces. And despite monumental shifts in public attitudes and discourse since the early experiments of the 1960’s, Claire Bishop points out that the use of participation in artistic practice has persistently allied itself to one or more of the following three agendas:
- Create an active and empowered subject,
- (Re)distribute authorial control in order to demonstrate a more egalitarian paradigm and promote collective creativity,
- Restore a social community bond through shared experience and collective elaboration of meaning (2006, p. 12).
Participation as a practice, however, does not inherently reflect these values. Bishop later points out the increasing use of participation to accomplish neoliberal objectives like improving corporate efficiency, exploiting people for entertainment (2006, p. 11), and offloading socialized government responsibility onto citizens. Furthermore, she states,
“In a world where everyone can air their views to everyone, we are faced not with
mass empowerment but with an endless stream of egos levelled to banality. Far
from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has now entirely merged with it”
(2012, p. 277).
Additionally, Adam Alston demonstrates that much participation in theatre encourages “opportunism, the perception of personal autonomy, and favors those with the capacity to act upon it” (2013, p. 137). Finally, Gareth White notes that participation is at times extremely unethical, placing participants in “situations they did not anticipate or were not informed about and which expose them to significant public embarrassment” (2013, p. 90).
Because of participatory art’s requirement of engaging with members of the public, much of the criticism levelled at it derives from the need to elicit a performative response in order for a piece to function at all. In this way, it is not so much a linear performative gesture, but rather an intricately linked series of processes that affect participant agency by establishing a prescribed linkage of cause and effect. And while it is widely acknowledged that participatory pieces use processes rather than artefacts to coordinate aesthetic experience, there has not been any concentrated study in the artistic research field about procedural rhetoric, nor about how values and cultural biases are communicated via these processes. Game Studies, however, has extensively explored this topic due to the procedural nature of computer code and the large debate in the field about what distinguishes games from other forms of media.
In one such practical exploration of procedure, Game Studies scholar Mary Flanagan and social scientist Helen Nissenbaum advocate for a game design method that is conscientious of political and ethical values. They assert that the choices made available to participants reflect the designer’s unique understanding of the world, and in so doing express the values of that designer (2014, p. 3). Values tend to be tied to deep-seated beliefs and express themselves not so much as the accomplishment of concrete goals (e.g., weight loss) as they do the internal motivation to perform those goal-oriented actions in the first place (e.g., good health).
Examples of ethical and politcal values taken from Values at Play in Digital Games (Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2009, p. 6). Ethical values reflect interpersonal treatment while political values define relationships within and between societies.
Flanagan and Nissenbaum also note that without external feedback it can be very difficult for game designers to recognize the values they may have imprinted in their pieces without intention. Participant reception often changes the values presented in surprising ways. There is always a possibility that participants coming from different social contexts will experience the intended values quite differently or not at all. To confront this, Flanagan and Nissenbaum propose iterative design cycles alongside collaborators. (2014, p. 75).
There are several reasons why critically engaging with values in participatory art is desirable, first of which is avoiding the conveyance of oversimplified values, or value capture as coined by Nguyen (2020, p. 201). Because of their procedural nature, games provide participants with easily discernible links between actions, rewards, and consequences (Rigby and Ryan, 2011, p. 11), and this is often a reason they are found to be such a satisfying escape from the complication of everyday life. Participatory art, however, follows a tradition of less concrete or straightforward experiences than those of games, making the avoidance of value capture particularly important. An example of this would be a process wherein the participant is offered a set of choices, all of which deprive them of the nuance present in their actual views of the situation. In such a case, the participant is then coerced into playing the role of someone who agrees with these simplified values in order to progress within the piece.
Another example supporting the need for criticality when it comes to participatory processes is the possibility of broadcasting unintended values due to cultural assumptions that might be overlooked by the artist. These phantasms (Harrell, 2013) of cultural expression are formed by combining image with culturally encoded ideas (epistemic spaces) in a way that reveals a subjective worldview. Surfacing these phantasms, and using them to spur reflection about cultural biases is an exciting prospect in a participatory piece, but requires a robust prototyping phase where expressed values can be tested and challenged by participants from different backgrounds.
Harrell illustrates in Phantasmal Media how even an everyday symbol like a women's restroom sign can be revealed as a cultural phantasm when shown alongside other world views (2009).
So, while participation places an emphasis on its ability to connect people, it quickly becomes apparent that the procedures chosen to achieve that end can vary widely and express a vast array of values and cultural beliefs. Thus, engaging with these procedures with criticality and reflection is vital in order to bring the artist’s intended values (e.g., equality, care, trust, community, etc.) to participatory art projects. In the next section, I will discuss how these procedures limit participant agency in a way that is temporary, consensual, and leads to an intersubjective elaboration of meaning.
