Blue Girl

3-channel video, dibond prints, drawings 2020

‘Blue Girl’ reimagines the ‘learning test’ found within Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment, immersing the audience in the continual repetition of the correct twenty-five word pairs found in the original experiment. The word pairs: ‘blue girl, nice day, fat neck, green ink, etc’ are a seemingly unimportant part of the experiment but act within the work as a loophole or an escape route to explore alternative realities within the world of power, control and disobedience. Subverting the rational approach of a science experiment, ‘Blue Girl’ attempts to imagine the absurd, creating new narratives within the experiment as a generative, productive but irrational approach of comprehending its grave implications.

Milgram’s experiment, a social psychology study conducted by Milgram between 1961-63, tested obedience to authority figures. A memory and punishment test was used as a false pretext to observe how a ‘volunteer’ would inflict pain on a ‘learner’. This false pretext is the starting point for the work. During the experiment every time the learner made a mistake the volunteer was instructed by the doctor (both amateur actors) to administer an electric shock. The doctor, who oversaw the ‘learning experiment’, gave the volunteer instructions to continue with the experiment even when they voiced concerns about the condition of the learner. The Obedience experiment is still widely discussed today due to its questionable ethics and the horrifying results of the experiment; it was found that 65% of the volunteers would administer a lethal shock under the instruction of someone in authority.

In the experiment ‘errors’ that the learner made in the word pair recall were punished with faux electro-shocks. Milgram, however, had scripted these errors for the learner, in order to make the volunteer operate the faux electro-shock generator. Each time the experiment was held with a new volunteer the learner made the same mistake. What was seen as an ‘error’ to the volunteer was actually a scripted lie.

Please continue

3-channel full HD video, colour, stereo sound, 6’

‘Please Continue’ is a three channel video work that acts as a meditation on the seemingly meaningless list found within the Milgram’s Obedience experiment. The work brings together a series of visual associations and a close-up shot of the artist reading the wordlist, in order to build a visual network of interpretations and representations. The work explores the intersection between the rational and the poetic, pushing scientific knowledge into the realm of the subjective narrative. Through the repetition and memorisation of the word list, the work aims to open up a new alternative reality, where the threat of punishment and the power dynamics of authorities have become inconsequential.

This video is a composition of the original three channel piece.

Firm, but not impolite

2020, correction fluid, digital print on tracing paper and coloured paper, various sizes

A series of correction fluid drawings, painted on top of the instructional diagrams and illustrations of the spatial arrangement of the Milgram Obedience Experiment. In these modified visual descriptions, where the participants and textual information are obscured, the rooms have become fragmented but still identifiable. The leftover furnishings and the empty white corrected shapes allow the viewer to reimagine and reconstruct a new understanding of the spaces and the interactions within them.

Blue Girl was produced during the Error and Power Residency at Artcore Gallery and is currently exhibited online.