Today’s group exercise was based on Crosstalk, a workshop which was originally designed and tested by a group of artists in Malmo, Sweden. Crosstalk uses the arrangement of pedestrian crossings and traffic lights at a road intersection to provide the structure for a conversation in which information is passed between participants in a fragmented manner, facilitating the group “unlearning” of conversational habits and tropes.
To perform Crosstalk, each participant must stand alone at a different pedestrian crossing at the same road intersection – typically this would be four participants, one on each individual crossing at an x-shaped “crossroad”. Working in isolation, each participant writes a note, question or prompt on a post-it note and sticks it to the lamp-post situated at their crossing; they then cross the road at the signal, leaving their note behind. Each participant now arrives at the note their predecessor wrote, which they then remove from the crossing and replace it with some kind of response, before crossing at the next signal to the next note, and so on.
In this way the participants move around the crossroad reading and responding to each note without speaking to any other participant directly and with only a limited awareness of the context of each note they encounter. This routine may continue indefinitely, according to time and resources available.
Our own version was slightly different as, due to the weather, we opted to perform the exercise indoors in the Sculpture Court of the college, using the pillars of the room as our “crossings”. This meant that we did not have the rhythm of an actual traffic crossing to help us maintain the structure of our movements, and as we also had more participants (approximately 10-12 compared to the intended four), we ended up moving between the crossings at a variable pace, overtaking each other at points and bottlenecking at others.
Despite these issues the group quickly generated a multitude of different questions and prompts from a single starting point (“what is this place for?”). My own initial responses continued the theme of “place” however with each successive contribution the theme of the “conversation” diverged in different directions, ranging from observations (“today is raining”) to decontextualized statements (“I agree with you” or “I don’t think so”) to questions (“does everyone like art?” or “do you believe in God?”).
This exercise was clearly a useful way to generate unexpected ideas and suggestions, any one of which could then be used as a starting point for further action or research. The original intent of “unlearning” conversational habits was evident, as the design of the exercise caused us to approach communication in a much different way than we usually would; each individual contribution was at once isolated and connected, and there were no “right” or “wrong” ways to contribute; no one was either dominating the conversation or shying away from participation; and there seemed to be no identifiable “authors” separable from the overall group.
Following this exercise, we returned to our Basho groups to begin building our own “unlearning” formula based on the Crosstalk model.
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