How to {Act Natural | Feel Together Alone | Confuse Someone Clearly |Choose the only Choice | Share an Open Secret | Behave Clearly Confused | Grow Smaller | Find Affordable Caviar | Have a Minor Crisis | Nearly Miss | Find Comfortable Misery | Make an Exact Estimate |Have an Unbiased Opinion | Work on Vacation | Fall Upwards | Find an Impossible Solution | Whisper Loudly | Conquest Peacefully | Be Seriously Funny}1

“It is not enough to dislike a government; you need to know that others do, too.”

“How To” is an ongoing intervention on the Goethe in the Skyways website for the duration of the program in Minneapolis. The intervention will operate on the site as an external agent, interfering with the typical flow of the visitor and presenting him/her/them with a range of interruptions –from simple questions to more intricate time-based actions– and inviting him/her/them to take a position before being able to continue. The intervention changes over the duration of the program, responds to the current, most pressing, ongoing socio-cultural developments and events, and posts targeted questions to the informed public of the website. The response and collected user behavioral data is analyzed, measured, and quantified into an ongoing analytical feedback dashboard that connects the desires and fears of the audience and guides the continuation of the intervention itself by responding to the user engagement.

–To know something is one thing; but to know it with others, know that others know it, and know that they know that you know it, … and all the way up to the top is another thing altogether. In cognitive science it is described as common knowledge: to know that the other person knows that you know.

The concept is critical in politics, as cooperation and team-building requires common knowledge. Online common knowledge on the other hand is difficult to create as we can’t look each other into the eyes and agree to our shared common field. And with social media it is even harder to tell the motivation behind people’s actions. Are they state-sponsored agents, trolls, bots, or all together completely fabricated?

Taking the concept of common knowledge as a starting point the “How To“ intervention creates an ongoing feedback loop, where the answers and responses from other audience members are fed back into the system and revealed to the current viewer, to make visible the divide in the potential for a shared understanding. Further, game mechanisms are incorporated to encourage user participation by for example rewarding them for coming back to visit the website or by visiting the physical location in Minneapolis.

Drawing from previous work such as „Critical Mass,“ in which Lund converted an exhibition into a speculative space controlled by the visitors of the project’s website, and “Fair Warning,” in which he created a never-ending synchronized and distributed set of probing questions directed at the audience, “How To” aims to bring together and connect the visitors of the Goethe in the Skyways by means of disrupting the website.