A 1969 Experiment in a Locked Room Changed Art History | Hacker News Reader

A 1969 Experiment in a Locked Room Changed Art History

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Excerpt from the title:

> A 1969 Experiment in a Locked Room Changed Art History

And some quotes from the article:

> The project doesn’t have much of a legacy

> [...] it may well have inspired shifts in art education and art-making.

> It’s unlikely that Locked Room had an impact on larger shifts in art education

Well what is it? Did the experiment have any lasting influence, or did it not? The article is all over the place. It's like the author himself doesn't even know what point he's trying to make.

To be honest this article seems like a presentation, maybe someone else may find an impact it had as the author wasn't able to

You guys ever realize this stuff just skips you by? I had to re-read the article headline to see it said that. If you were to have asked me to summarize the article I would not have been able to describe any confusion around this and would have described it as straightforwardly non-influential. But how? Have we co-evolved alongside weird headlines to just shove that into the /dev/null of our memory? So that when we see text that's interpreted as filler we just instantly discard it?

For instance, just trying out a quick recollection of the thing from memory, I have:

"Teachers, upset with fixed pedagogy, decided to run a performance art project on students which they called the Locked Room. Students would show up to class at 1000 and leave at 1630, allowed to leave only for tools. The content of the room would be varied and sometimes students would show up only to find their stuff moved around. Some students didn't like this, and some remember it as having been a bonding experience. Eventually that class was split into streams with one being traditional, something that a filmmaker called Tony Hill took. It overall didn't have much impact. They did have outdoor sections, one of which had students blindfolded or something."

Reminds me of a comment on HN which I saw where someone said "If I were to start a class on X I would first tell students 'X is the most important thing you will learn'" and my first thought was that students would instantly /dev/null that because it's like a telomere for knowledge. A signal that information is about to follow but that the signal itself is not meant to be recorded. So no student would conclude that X was the most important thing they would learn. But all students would have exited alternate thoughtstreams and the length of that sentence gives them time to sync to the lecturer.

I'm sure linguists have some obvious term for these header/footer bookends. Sometimes you get a long article in The Atlantic and it's almost all header/footer and you suddenly notice but otherwise you just bite through the bun to the meat without even noticing.

The term "phatic" is somewhere in the neighborhood of what you're talking about, I think.

Thanks, that's useful.

http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

>I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?

>[...]

>But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place? A combination of my own experience and other things I'd read. None of which I could at that moment remember! And eventually I'd forget that Hilbert had confirmed it too. But my increased belief in the importance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from this book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it.

A somewhat more 2020 way of looking at it is to consider NN training. A image classifier might ingest tens of gigabytes of input to produce a model megabytes in size. Reading any given article, though it be thousands of words in length, containing much "information", will only nudge the strength of a couple of connections in your existing neural net. And if you're lucky, commit a single fact to long term memory.

That's a pretty good point. Thank you. Something I think about often is how wrong data still adjusts the weights and moves your position disproportionate to its true likelihood.

And of course it hardly explains what they did. If you lock up a bunch of art students for 8 hours a day for years, surely they do something. (Like glue Pixie cups to their faces, judging by the photo.)

In 97 I was studying in the 2nd year of electrical engineering high school. Every year we had to spend one week in internship at some company. I was with 2 other classmates in some company that did ISDN networks. On the very first morning boss brought notebook with 10 minute PowerPoint presentation on ISDN, told us to watch it and left. We watched it in 10 minutes and waited. He returned 8 hours later and asked us what have we learned. The notebook screen was black so he pressed the spacebar, screensaver went on (pipes from windows 95). He giggled and asked: did you change the screensaver? Get the fuck out of here! And they never let us into the building. We spent rest of the week slacking off in the town.

what?

He got kicked out of the building where he was doing his internship for changing the screensaver on the computer they were using to watch the training session.

electrical engineering high school might mean the German "Hochschule", so college or university.

It was not University but high school (15-18yo). In Slovakia we have gymnasiums (for students who want to go to university), trade schools (plumbing, machining, cooking, etc) and then also high schools with specializations (e.g. electronics, accounting, transportation), we were drilling Kirchoff since day 1.

Not good to experiment on students. I think they should have been a lot more upfront with the students about why they were structuring the class that way, and what they expected from the students. That would have given students a better starting point.

My own art major was similar, although better described as an Open Room instead of a Locked Room. You show up when you want and make what you want with zero guidance from the department faculty on whether you are wasting your time. Every two weeks you get to stand up and present your work to the rest of the department during group critiques, which were the only real thing that was mandatory.

Transitioning to that style of education takes at least half a year, but its actually great training for work after school.

> Not good to experiment on students.

Ideas of consent have changed a lot over the succeeding decades. (Not to argue with you, of course, just to point out that it would have looked different at the time.) The 3 Christs of Ypsilanti, for example, was only a little earlier.

Reading this piece I think of some questions I'd like to ask the organizers of this experiment:

- What did the tutors want to accomplish?

- What did the students actually accomplish? What feedback did the give at the end of the experiment?

- Was the experiment itself an art performance? Maybe one of the "oldest" ones?

That which does not break you makes you stronger? It was the era of pop art, experimental art, "happenings" and I could believe in the zeitgeist of this experiment. Consider that for millenia, fine arts demanded students attend dissection right up until the same timeframe. I have met Artists who would have thrived, and others who would have died in there. It was too judgemental maybe.

And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice.
And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden."

"And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

what better place and time is there to crack open a few heads than art school in the 60s?

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