What is the content of the work and who is creating it?
Our work is a collection of people’s secrets.
We asked strangers and our followers on Instagram the same question – what is your deepest, darkest secret?
Omegle responses:
Instagram responses:
Where does this work take place?
One of the 2 online platforms that we used was Omegle, which is, as quoted on their website:
Omegle (oh·meg·ull) is a great way to meet new friends. When you use Omegle, we pick someone else at random and let you talk one-on-one. To help you stay safe, chats are anonymous unless you tell someone who you are (not suggested!), and you can stop a chat at any time. Predators have been known to use Omegle, so please be careful.
We asked strangers to share with us about their deepest, darkest, secrets.
We also used the questions sticker on Instagram, which is a photo and video-sharing social networking service where we connect with our friends, families, acquaintances, or even celebrities. The intended audience of using Instagram would be our followers, who could be our friends or acquaintances, or simply, people that we know. The questions sticker on Instagram allows us to ask our followers any question, or vice versa, and post the response on our Instagram Story without their Instagram handle and their profile picture. We did not use the feature of posting the responses on our Instagram Story as they are meant to be “secrets” (but since they are on OSS I guess they’re no longer secrets…….:)…..) We asked them the same question – what is your deepest, darkest secret? and got very different responses.
How does this work involve social interaction?
We ask strangers and friends a question through online platforms and receive answers that add to our collection of secrets. On Omegle, the anonymous people had responses that would include:
1. telling us their deepest darkest secrets (mostly, if not all sexual)
2. asking us back what our secrets were
3. would only tell us their secrets after we shared ours with them
4. ask if we had same/similar secrets as them
5. leaving the chat before answering.
On Instagram, our followers (who knew us) gave us responses that would include:
1. nonsense
2. inside jokes
3. stories that were funny and disgusting
4. ignore our stories and not respond at all (which could mean that they could have REAL secrets but just unwilling to tell us)
The social interaction that we had were the exchange of information that we and the responders had. We triggered the responders to think about what their secrets were (no matter they answered or not), and in exchange, they gave us a response to contribute to our collection.
How is your crowd-sourced project different from one that is created by a single artist/creator?
The different responses we got from this project were a result of different experiences from different people living very different lives. If only one creator shared their own deepest, darkest secret, it means that there will only be one response in our collection. The social interactions that could result from that would be reading it (one-way interaction) or leaving comments about it (two-way interaction) which does not contribute to the collection of secrets (unless they willingly share their secrets). Having a crowd-sourced project like this creates a variety of responses, and as questioners, it also makes us wonder about the psychology and reasons behind why strangers are more willing to tell us their secrets than people that we know or trust. The responders also play a vital part in this project as our collection comes from their contributions.