Political Protest Evaluation

Today we performed our political protest; leading up to this I was quite nervous about how it would go down as we had quite a controversial topic. Also we had a very small idea which I thought might effect the reaction but actually the small aspects were the most effective. If you look at the picture on the right I had a long coat with the profiles we made up taped to the inside of it; a black T-shirt that said "H@ck3r" on it. The fact I had this paper stuck to the inside of my costume meant that I could have a reveal factor with the audience. I could also embody the seedy "Information Salesman" character by utilizing the tropes we see in traditional media. At first I found it quite difficult because the piece hinged almost entirely on audience participation and whatever they gave me is what I had to work with. At the beginning people would just walk past and completely ignore what was going on. This was hard because in order to communicate my political issue I needed them to start talking to me! 

Eventually however the Y11's started to come out and because we had mostly made profiles of them along with their friends they were way more interested in affairs that concerned themselves. There were some brilliant moments when I actually found the people on the pieces of paper I'd be "selling" and striking up a little debates about personal information and my right to sell it with out their permission. To which I retorted things like "You put it out on the internet; you share things we've total strangers; If it's out on the web I have a right to take it". It was amazing to see them absolutely freak out when I told them really obscure information like their Mother's Birthday or where they were on a particular date or names of cousins. How easy it was for me just to find it out and spread it shocked the audience and created a ripple effect where they would tell their friends which made more people come and visit us to see if we had information on them too. Even teachers were worrying if we had private information on them. I believe the audience were truly listening and considering the issue we were trying to get across. There was also a moment where the interactions I had made me think deeper about the issue. When someone asked me why I want to sell other peoples information I thought about advertising companies and how they pay loads of money for people to build up social profiles so they can sell products to consumers online. It was nice that I could provide reasons as to why I was protesting and change and adapt them to different people. 

I feel like if we had more time we could have made it even bigger. We could've sourced more information on students and study the links between friends and exploit that. It would have been have had a further out reach if more people felt like it personally applied to them. Another difficulty I found during performance was implementing the facts and figures I'd researched and relaying that information. As I was playing a shady character it felt wrong to suddenly say "1.5 million people are effected by cyber crime per day". If I was to do this again I would find away to deliver this information with affecting the performance; maybe that could be through interactions within my group or placards or maybe even information and statistics on the profiles I was using.  

Finally I got some feedback from Stuart Worden that I feel encapsulates the entire point of why we protest. He said how he liked the issues we were tackling and the overall execution but he felt like we didn't provide solutions to the audience. Once we shocked and educated however we didn't take it any further than that. He thought we should give answers and ways to deal with the problems we were presenting. Fur coats are bad yes... so what do I sign? Where do I donate? How do I change my privacy settings? If I was to do it again I would make sure to leave the audience with ideas of not only what the issue is but how to solve it.