August Highlight: "Paint by Numbers"

“Now What?”

The wonderful thing about taking in data before you know what to do with it is that you get to be surprised by the work you end up making, and the stories you find yourself telling. The horrible thing about taking in data before you know what to do with it is that “knowing what to do with it” often takes a very long time. This is especially true with a piece like IF WE WIN, which tends to adapt quickly* as it chases an evolving conversation; I often begin capturing one data point only to find out that it’s the least interesting emerging story.

Documentation is very time-consuming, so in the past, I’ve always focused on either performing or documenting and sharing. However, The Telelibrary has shown me how exciting it is when a participant can live and explore inside of the archive they are adding to, so I’ve been pulling double duty to play around with how to display some of the content coming in, both online and in person. And since I know no way of doing things but to do them a hundred times a hundred ways, today I’ll be sharing a few of my experiments. As ever, if you prefer a PDF, you'll find one attached.

If you’re not familiar with IF WE WIN, or you’d like a refresher, I recommend checking out the Archive Highlight from April for the basics before diving into this one.

Let me know what you think: which of these 3 approaches would you like to be available in-person? How about on the project website?

~

*speaking of adapting - based on early playtests, I’m experimenting with a 30 minute sample of the world of the piece, available by Zoom. Check it out here!

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Performance notes and materials, IF WE WIN. 2021

For the Philadelphia 2021 Fringe, I decided to remount IF WE WIN, an 80-minute theatrical thought-experiment for 3 participants.  In every performance, I give the participants a Pennsylvania Scratch Lottery in exchange for sharing their plan for spending the potential (but deeply unlikely) winnings. In the process, they walk through a challenging and new conversation about money, wealth, and our relationships to both. Over the course of the conversation, we generate 3 spending plans, a scatter plot of perceived income brackets, various quotes and stories from the participants’ perspective, and —in approximately 3.03 out of 4.03 performances— one losing lottery ticket.  

After conducting 5 rounds of playtesting as a remote experience, I’m reconsidering how to share this data, and what experience I can create for someone stepping into it. So far, there are three ways I’ve come to view it.

#1 In Aggregate, as Patterns, or Trends

As a person with a deep and abiding love of spreadsheets and data, it’s tempting to look to summaries of the spending plans collected for evidence of larger changes and trends. For instance, when I look at total proposed spending or participants in 2021 (so far), I wonder how it stacks up against that of participants in 2019:

It stacks up like this, apparently

But as I mentioned in a previous highlight, there are countless reasons this data cannot function as representative for any given population (participant self-selection and sample size being chief among them). Instead, my goal for aggregating or describing this data (or any large studies in the piece) is to give participants tools for contextualizing their own answers, and their own relationship to money. For that purpose, I’ve found that adding aggregated data does have a purpose when asking participants to start assigning number values to abstract concepts like “wealthy” and “comfortable.” To see how, let’s try it together - go ahead and get yourself a piece of scrap paper and something to write on. When you’re ready, write down an amount of money for each of the following questions. Try not to think too hard, or to worry about being “correct.” Instead, focus on being honest and open with yourself about what numbers come up first.

Ready?

1. At what annual income does “Wealthy” start?

2. What lump sum (transferred one time, to your bank account, TODAY) would make you “Wealthy?”

3. At what annual income does “Comfortable” start? Note: not “Comfortable” as a euphemism
for “Wealthy” used in polite company, but actually just — “Comfortable.”

4. 2. What lump sum (transferred one time, to your bank account, TODAY) would make you “Comfortable?”

Got your answers? Okay, let’s see where they fall. For starters, let’s look at the starting point for “Wealthy,” as defined by participants in 2021:

That blue dot way at the top is “$14,285,714.30,” which is how much you would need for the “1 million dollars in passive income” which the participant described (at the historic average (inflation adjusted) stock rate for the S&P 500 ).

Where does your estimation fall in this assortment of 15 people? And what might that tell you? I don’t think it makes any definitive statements about you or anyone else — but I do think it leads to a few questions and curiosities you may have about others, and about your own idea of “Wealthy.”

Speaking of vague terms with a strained consensus, let’s try “Comfortable.”

Again we have an outlier - that green diamond way at the top is $25,000,000. “ I grew up very poor. There will never be an amount high enough to leave me comfortable” - Vanessa, Session A004-17

All together, the spread looks like this

You may have noticed the scale of these charts has been logarithmic. There’s a few reasons for that, the first being that without that scale, they’d look like this—

—which is to say, basically unreadable. But I also think the Logarithmic scale actually captures something deeper about the ways we imagine large numbers: poorly. Absent a sense of scale, we really fail to appreciate the vast differences between sums, and instead we collapse or squish all the numbers we are imagining into a kind of conceivable space. It’s one of the reasons why graphs showing income distribution always appear so striking; it’s one thing to know that Jeff Bezos is much wealthier than you are, but another thing entirely to scroll your mouse the distance that drives that home.

Again, these numbers aren’t presented as representative, but rather as some version of an answer to that irresistible question: “what are other people saying?” That question is a guilty pleasure that helps make the experience more fun (or at least, survivable), and by giving participants various lenses with which to see their own relationship to money, and different contexts to compare it to, I can keep inviting the kinds of reflection this piece is built to support.

#2 As Documenting a Conversation

One of the most exciting things about facilitating IF WE WIN is the way that the combination of participants can result in entirely different conversations. It reminds me of a very strange and surprisingly adventurous article Esquire magazine did in 2016, which asked frank financial questions of four men at four very different incomes (though of course, I wish those four men could have spoken to each other directly). While some of my most interesting conversations have emerged from groups of participants living radically different lives, I’ve found rich and difficult conversations have also come out of groups that turn out to be surprisingly similar in circumstance, if not outlook.

Playtest #2, June 4th 2021 | 00A-015

Participants:

“Susan: When it comes to my particular lifestyle, you’re either — it’s rare for there to be producers who are like “I’m doing pretty good.” Like, that’s not really how it works. Because either you’ve made a shit load of money or any money you do make you’re reinvesting in your company.

[...]

Jim: Also, side-note, this is a quick digression. Uh, I’m guessing these are three artists you’re talking to, would that be a correct assumption?

Yannick: Yeah/

Susan: Yes/

Sarah: —ish.

Jim: a bit of an odd sample size there. This isn’t like we’re — we’re generally okay-ish with being broke and we’re used to it. Different set of expectations than say, than like, … a real person.”

Spending Plans:

“Would anything change in your life if [there was no chance of being wealthy, as you define it?]

Sarah: It would change my work ethic. A lot.

Susan: Yeah, I mean honestly if it was like “it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’re always going to be broke, it’s like “okay cool I’m going to stop doing things that society tells me are better, or the right way to earn money.” and I’m going to be like “Cool I’m going to lean into being broke,” and then do the things I want to do anyway. And stop trying to do them in a way of … where it’s for monetary gain, and more like, because it’s purely indulgent, or because it has impact on the world or wherever.

Jim: Doesn’t matter to me at all. Doesn’t register to me at all. I just—I go in and work my hardest to make the things I want. […] I don’t care. I, I don’t expect to, I honestly expect a struggle, and I find my joy from … process, honestly. And self-discovery. That’s my payment.”

“How likely do you think it is that you will ever be comfortable, by your own definition?

*onscreen, each participant in the group gestures to represent 0-100*

Jim: Pretty good guys!

Yannick: Yeah, that’s quite a page turn from where we were.

Jim: That’s the hope, and it’s the hope that will kill ya. I’m from Cleveland, that’s  our motto.”

#3 As artifact of an individual 

This project began for me the first time I found a spent scratch-lotto ticket on the ground and felt curious. Who was this person? What could winning the lottery have done for them? What will they do now instead? The more time I spent with this ticket, the more I started to notice others, and I started to feel like these tickets represented an odd, unshared, and ultimately intimate part of someone. It was a window into someone else’s fantasy of what money could be. The performance of IF WE WIN is about what happens when people choose to share that part of themselves with each other. But when the venue offered me a space I could turn into a gallery, my impulse was to return to the thing that inspired the research project: what it feels like to find just a piece of someone left behind, and wonder.

~

That’s all for August! If you want more IF WE WIN, get tickets for the in person experience here, or sign up for a 30 minute zoom preview here!

Otherwise, if you want more of something entirely different, stay tuned for September.

And no matter what — thanks again for your support.

- Yannick