For the duration of the Fall 2014 semester (i.e. from September 27 to December 12, 2014) I attempted to meet and memorize the names of all 4,171 currently employed and enrolled students, faculty, and staff at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

APPROACH:

Having jumped into the project just one day after concieving the idea, my approach was largely improvised and subject to change throughout it's process. I began simply by approaching strangers in the public spaces of the school and asking if they had a minute to talk with me. Depending on the week I would ask a different question and/or initiate some kind of an exchange with each person as a way to structure and ease the interaction, at least initially. This being said, the goal with each attempt at communication was to make a genuine connection and ultimately break down the barriers to substantial exchange of knowledge, ideas, wisdom, etc.


Examples of Prompts for Exchange

1. "What is your Dream?"
2. "What's a question I can ask you the next time I see you?"
3. "What is one thing you Need and one thing you can Give?"
4. "What kinds of questions should I be asking people when I meet them?"
5. "Can you impart some knowledge or wisdom on me?"
6. "Can you tell me a story?"
7. "Would you be willing to exchange this object [which I recieved from the last person I met] with something of yours?"



Logicstics

Making weekly mathematical calculations as to how many folks I would have to meet per day during the following period to stay up to speed with the goal of completing the quantitative aspect of the project, I would have to budget my time carefully during each day. With a beginning goal of 40 new connections per day, this meant that I would be spending virtually all of my free time before, between, and after classes approaching and meeting new folks.

The second challenge was the aspect of memorizing each person's name. The primary tool I used for this was a series of pocket-sized notebooks in which I would record their names and tidbits of info about them to help me make an association for the context of our interaction. For the first couple of days I resisted the idea of taking photos with them as I thought that this could potentially detract from the comfortability and hence fluidity of each interaction, but ultimately I realized that I was going to need repeated visual cues to establish facial recognitions on such a large scale.

Camera Phone	Notebooks and Pens	Laptop
Used for capturing images to be used as digital flashcards in order to practice facial recognition	Used for recording names and information to associate with each participant	Used to calculate weekly target goals, brainstorm for tactical/theoretical shifts, and practice memorization

Quantitative

By the end of the semester I had met 2601 new people (approximately 62.3591% of SAIC's Fall 2014 Semester population). Beyond this, I estimated another 100 people currently enrolled or employed by the insitution who I had met and memorized the names of before the project's initiation, leaving me aquainted with approximately 2700 people alltogether (or 65% of the school's population). The arc slowed down dramatically about 12 weeks (or 80ish days) in, i.e. 2548 people (or 61.0885% of the school's population) were met in the first 79 days (or 75.9615%) of the semester whereas only 53 (or 1.2707% of the school's population) were met in the last 25 days (or 24.0385%) of the semester.

Qualitative

One of the most successful aspects of the work was the way in which it shifted my relationship to the physical and social spaces of the school. At many points throughout the semester I found myself suprised or even astonished at the way in which the

POINTS of THEORETICAL INTEREST:

Live Social Networking

For several months prior to the start date I had been meditating on the idea of a Networking Project. Theoretically, I thought, there should be a simple engagment through which one could deploy the ethics and expectations of a professional culture pervasively influenced by the myth of the Networker and her social opportunism (which ostensibly potentiates her success while simultaneously diluting her substance) against themselves in a way that could critique the efficacy of those constructs and reveal the contemporary condition of humanity to be in precarious balance while simultaneously achieving a state of hyper-liveness and therefore subject it's participants to re-humanization.

Becoming a Conduit of Ideas and Information

Performing the Genuine

Collapsing Hierarchies

The Power of Attention

Re-Privelaging the Subject

Moving Towards the Medium of Reality