What are you Looking at?

Abstract

The book, What are you Looking at? details four social experiments completed this year: mending and returning red solo cups from a fraternity’s yard, hanging a banner hand stitched with “You Have Everything You Need” in places of commerce, placing postcards in public places with a prompt to be returned to me, and en plein air painting in the Meijer Superstore. Each experiment is framed in essay form as I use interviews, photos, diaristic writing, and other documentation to reflect on my relationship to the topics at hand. I explore the relationships between worthiness, ordinariness, and what happens to people’s attention in a capitalist system through interventions in everyday happenings.