Calling Card: The Box | Melinda Kuei

As you may recall from my previous post, one of the feelings I wanted people to experience was "discomfort". I wanted to evoke this emotion by making the audience feel like they were constantly being watched and have the prickly sensation at the back of their neck. Due to the short time frame we were given to execute our ideas, I had to make several adjustments due to time and budget limitations. I was inspired heavily by the feeling you get when people crowd around you and it's worse if they're all staring at you. So at first, the scenario I was imagining was a dark room and the person would enter to see a ring of mannequins surrounding a table with a box on top. Inside the box would be several pictures of different paths to get to the current room, and the last picture would be of the ring of mannequins the person is currently standing in.

In the end, I settled for masks to replace mannequins as mannequins are much pricier. After viewing the room I was to set up in, I decided to get black cloth to section off the area, since it couldn't be pitch black and had several chairs in the room ruining the atmosphere. Since I was unable to set up the room beforehand, I ended up taking random "stalker" pics instead. Although there were several changes made, after witnessing people's reactions the day of, I'm relatively satisfied with the reactions I got!

Below are a couple photographs of the setup.

This is what people see when they first enter the room:

creepy row of masks

innocuous box sitting in the middle of a large wooden table

jk

It was a fun experience. Even though I spent a lot of money on this project, I learned a lot about eliciting predictable responses from the audience and how to deal with short time frames and plan B's and C's.