September Highlight - “Not a Love Story”

Pictured: A Celebrated Piece of Classical Art

Greetings from mid-madness! September is a big month for me, both rehearsing and devising for a production of Citizen; An American Lyric with New Light Theatre (video to be released in late October) and experimenting in person with IF WE WIN at the Cannonball Festival for Philadelphia Fringe Fest 2021 (expect a BIG archive highlight mid-October with findings from Fringe). Come to think of it, October will be a big month too - I’ll even be debuting some format tweaks for the Read of the Week (you’re invited to share your thoughts through my Patreon Poll).

For now, in order to take a little break from all that (and because my brain is addicted to variety), here’s a quick Archive Highlight from a experimental piece I threw together a few years ago. Consider it a sketch of a research project? You could also think of this as a kind of “part 2” to the Archive Highlight from July, so if you missed that one (or want a refresher), feel free to check that out before or after.

And now, without further ado/cross-promotion, please enjoy the September Archive Highlight
~

“This is Not a Love Story”

Website Capture, Institute for Internal Certainty. 2018

How far do you need to take a joke before it becomes something else?

In University, one of my favorite artists was Krishan Mistry (@poetmistry) precisely because he had a habit of taking a silly idea and pursuing it with enormous sincerity; be it turning dinner with friends into a monthly 5 star, 5-course restaurant hosted out of a student lounge or starting with pranking friends by photoshopping their profile pictures into fake perfume ads and ending with a real-life perfume (complete with splashy video campaign), Krishan had a gift for staying power that worked wonders.

I’ve written before on my interest in how far you can develop a fictional organization before it becomes functionally real — a fascination that was definitely fueled in part by watching Krishan’s antics — but I also think taking silly ideas seriously is a great challenge for any artist looking refine their process and surprise themself.

Which brings us to Midwinter, February of 2018. I was working for Monument Lab at the time, re-scanning and re-transcribing 4500 public proposals from their 2017 Citywide Exhibition, which meant I was spending long hours in the Computer Lab at Penn University. One day, somewhere between proposal FS045 and CH1001, I overheard a conversation between staff at the lab.

“I mean, how long does a rejection last?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s forever dude.”
“What, like you can never ask again?There’s no like, Statute of Limitations?”


I’m professionally nosy, so I had already been eavesdropping on this conversation. In short, person A had recently bumped into someone he used to be romantically interested in 10 years ago. At the time, Person A had asked this woman out, and she had said no. 10 years later, Person A was wondering if they could ever ask this woman out again, but his colleague (Person B) was doubtful.

“There’s gotta be some point though, right? Like somewhere after a few decades?”

Since I have always loved doing anything except the thing I’m supposed to be doing, I decided to jump in.

“It sounds like you guys asking if there's an expiration date on getting rejected?”

About 5 minutes later, we had sketched on out the basics of a graph on Computer Lab whiteboard, which looked something like this:

A recreation sketch of the graph, found in my notes

It didn’t take us long to come to the conclusion that not all Rejections are created equal. However, it was clear that “intensity” wasn’t a specific enough metric. Rejections seemed to come in all shapes and sizes.

“If we were gonna actually graph expiration dates, we would need a whole Taxonomy of Rejections.” Person A and B agreed, and agreed that this was an essentially impossible task, and so returned to work. Meanwhile I stared at the board a little longer, letting the pile of proposals I was supposed to be scanning festered somewhere behind me. As it so happened, I had just recently done a research project on True Love. And to do so, I had just created a Fictional Organization called the Institute for Internal Certainty, whose stated purpose was to stubbornly attempt to answer impossible questions to “destroy all emotional uncertainty.”

“I can do this,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.

About a week later, the form was live:

Website Capture, Institute for Internal Certainty

In my brief time in a college 101 computer programming course, we had learned the basics for building simple “take a penny - leave a penny”-style websites, where Users contribute content and receive a randomized User input in exchange. And so while I knew it would be clumsy, I was confident I could make a very rudimentary data collection site that still managed to make an exchange with every participant, and maybe even accumulate enough data to start investigating.

Part 1? Check.

The stories that came in were predictably varied and complicated. At the time I was making this, I was very into a mapping project called what3words which divided the world into 3 meter square and assigned each of them a randomly generated 3 word “address.” As a first step to building Taxonomy, I thought I’d see what 3 words participants assigned to their own stories.

Rejecting Someone Else

“Amicable, adult, mature”

I was tending bar for a show for friends, and a patron, who was a little over-served asked me out on a date. I was a little taken aback, especially because I was in a situation in which he was a patron. He ended up following up after I'd said no via social media, but when I said no, he was AWESOME about it. I had never rejected someone and not had an immense amount of negative energy come at me. This person was just an adult - he didn't flip out, and was a human about it. We are friends to this day because of how lovely he was about the whole thing.

Were there any Details you Particularly Remember?

His positivity defined the experience - it was the best. It changed the narrative for me a lot.

When you responded to this rejection, which of the following were you most concerned about?

I had some negative experiences before in which when I rejected a person, the WAVES and siege of negativity that came after me was REAL. I was genuinely afraid of that happening again.

~

“hilarious, harmless, drunk”

He was the coworker of one of my best friends. We had all gone out as a group to  club and had been dancing and drinking. He tried to kiss me and I laughed and put my hand in his face

Were there any Details you Particularly Remember?

The laughter

When you responded to this rejection, which of the following were you most concerned about?

I wasn't concerned

BEING REJECTED

“Harsh, Physical, Unequivocal”

A new girl moved to our school - Tassi - and it was a disaster. She was a badass with short hair and combat boots, older (10!), and worst of all, Australian. I didn't stand a chance.

I resolved that I would ... do whatever the 9 year old version of asking her out was ... I guess say that I liked her—well anyway, resolved to do that, and I think she noticed that I was (very) into her, because at one point she called me over and said she wanted to speak to me.

I was super nervous, and stumbling over myself almost as much as over my words, but she was grinning happily. I took this to be a good sign, and thus didn't notice the kid who got on hands and knees behind me until Tassi and already given me a good shove. At some point between tripping over the kid behind me and smacking the ground with my face, I realized I had been table-topped.

Then, later, she threw one of her combat boots at me. Somehow, this felt even more definitive.”

Were there any Details you Particularly Remember?

The combat boot stuck out, for sure. Think it left a mark. There was the embarrassment, for sure, both about openly liking a girl and about being turned into a 3 stooges act. The weird pebbles of the rubbery playground-tarmac material sticking to the side of my face. Also, there was the sudden realization of how far distant this girl I was infatuated was from me.

When you responded to this rejection, which of the following were you most concerned about?

Not having my friends see me cry on the playground

Do you think that person may one day change their mind? Would you try again? And if so, how much time do you think would need to pass before you felt it appropriate to ask again?

I think now, about 16 years later, I would consider trying again, if we ran into each other.

~

“Increasing Interpersonal Distance”

We had been very close friends for years at this point. We were hanging out in my car and just talking about random things and then I told her that I thought she was cute and I'd like to date her. She laughed and said something to the effect of, "you don't mean that, you're drunk. haha :)" We weren't drinking, it was just a soft rejection. I tried clarifying, saying that it wasn't a new thought -- we held hands and such on the regular at that point. It certainly wasn't a new idea, I just didn't have the guts to make an explicit statement until then. She laughed it off and said something similar again.

Were there any Details you Particularly Remember?

Mostly that she really didn't seem uncomfortable or even momentarily phased. It felt kind of like when trump shouts "WRONG" when someone speaks. Wasn't really immediately hurt by it immediately (that came later), just kind of confused at first.

When you responded to this rejection, which of the following were you most concerned about?

Protecting my own safety

Do you think that person may one day change their mind? Would you try again? And if so, how much time do you think would need to pass before you felt it appropriate to ask again?

I would never try again, Judging by how our relationship has changed over the years, I think it would be acceptable if not desired from her for me to ask again within another year or two. But I would not, due to our growth as different people.  

~

You can read more stories by submitting one of your own (regardless of whether you choose to make it public). And there’s even an option to evaluate and describe the stories of others, should you wish to read multiple rejections, which allows me to explore a whole second set of questions: What’s the difference between how we describe our rejections and how other people perceive them? Do they view them as being more or less painful? Or as something else entirely?

But what about exploring the data? Did I find an overarching Taxonomy? Or a definitive answer on expiration dates?  

Not yet.

Qualitative analysis on research of this kind will always be tricky. There’s endless noise in the data, uncontrolled variables, and a largely self-selecting audience. I try to be clear that I don’t make representative claims with my work. However, it is possible to detect and explore certain trends and patterns, and to use them to describe the accidental community of participants that have emerged.  The trick is, you need a lot of participants to do it.   For instance, from the responses provided in 2018, it’s possible to visualize them like this:

In 2018 I leaned heavily on the brain of the great Dr. Juan Felipe Beltrán, and continue to do so to this day

Doing so, we see that the stories we’ve collected from female-identifying participants are mostly about rejecting someone older, and the responses from male-identifying participants are mostly about rejecting someone younger. We can also see that we have pitifully few trans and non-binary respondents. Insights like this can help us understand what stories aren’t yet being told in the archive. As we get a larger data pool to draw from, they may even point to themes or patterns that are emerging that could be explored.

But we’d just need more data for that. (Which you could help with, if you wanted to give it a try…)

I find these simple digital webtools interesting, and love to explore them when they are done by better artists — like “This Website Will Self-Destruct,” by FemmeAndroid. Professionally, I can’t help but want to add a performer to expand the interface and make the experience of them more dynamic, but I remain really interested in building long, multi-faceted approaches to a given research topic or question, and I hope in the future to build more quick digital encounters like this (or to collaborate with folks who do it better) to work in tandem with live and/or in-person experiences.  Ultimately, I think of this piece not as a finished project, but as a sketch, and a proof of concept. The next step for this (or a similar experiment) would be to work with a collaborator to improve the digital interface, particularly for exploring the answers of others. After that, should there be a critical mass of content, I’d love to work with a few more artists to find out what a Taxonomy of Romantic Rejection really looks like.  As for “expiration dates,” I’d say the quest isn’t too time-sensitive. About a month after launching the survey, I ran into the same staff member at Penn who’d inspired the whole project. Excitedly, I explained to him my process, shared some preliminary results, and assured him I’d keep him posted.   

“Huh?”  

He’d forgotten about the conversation entirely.   (But maybe, if I had more data, and some more time had passed, I’d ask again.)

~ ~  

And that’s the September Highlight! If it wasn’t abundantly clear the first 10 times I suggested it, I’d love you to contribute your story to the Taxonomy Project here, and share it around if it moves you. You can also weigh in on future Reading Lists, pay IF WE WIN a visit at Cannonball, or hang tight for the upcoming Reading Highlight of the month! I’d also love you to do nothing at all, if that brought you more peace and fulfillment.

In all cases, you can look forward to a pretty packed month of content in October.

Until then — thanks again for your support.   

- Yannick