
Hello. For my first post I would like to brush over research I have been doing for my first project in Cybernetic Performance. First off I read about Allan Kaprow’s The Happening. The piece involved several stations of varying performances in which the audience could view, but only in the order in which they were instructed.
Our assignment, essentially, is to create a performance in the same vein as The Happening in which instructions are given to the audience. Being the maverick that I am, I intend to push the concept of instruction within my piece. While my vision is not as of now concrete, I have been developing my thesis based on a couple of interesting sources. Instructions, as they exist, come in many varieties. They can come in a manual from Ikea, from a professor at a university, or even from your sexual partner.
So I set to the internet for interesting takes on the concept of instruction. I ended up landing on the dominatrix as an interesting topic.

It turns out there are a good number of guides out there on how to being a dominatrix. In fact, there are a myriad of books written on the subject such as Sassy and How to be Kinky: A Beginner’s Guide to Bdsm. I have included a link below. None of these sources have explicit instructions, such as an Ikea manual, but do list out steps and ideas to follow. Looking at the various guides on how to be a dominatrix, something I will most likely leave out of my performance, I have started to get the idea of using a variety of subjective and concrete instructions in my work.
The same goes with the Stanford Prison Experiment. This has always been an interesting experiment to me and a lot of people around the world. For those who are unfamiliar, the experiment involved two groups of students who were chosen at random to play the role of either prisoners or guards in a makeshift prison. The experiment showed that the group who were chosen as guards began emulating aggressive behavior and began feeling actual contempt for the students labeled as prisoners. Here is a similar approach to instruction. The creators of the experiment gave the student the initial set of instructions and the rest can be interpreted by the subjects themselves. This furthers my thought process in the direction of giving instructions to the audience which can be interpreted in different ways.

Here are the links to the guide on How to be a Dominatrix and the Stanford Prison Experiment:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Dominatrix