Many of our works have high thresholds to entry: sometimes novel structures or difficult ideas; sometimes ways of using everyday devices just a little ‘off’ from what we mostly use them for. In all of this we need to know you are alright; that you can navigate; that you can get along with the rules and stay within the world or frame of the work enough to have a successful experience.

In most of our works there is inbuilt learning, tutorials or early moments where you find out how to behave, how to take part, without obviously feeling like you are acquiring essential knowledge.

It is crucial for us that you do not feel dumb or silly for not understanding how to do it, but also, that you are not given a school lesson – again, another familiar method where you can feel bad for ‘not getting it’.

We call our method ‘The Red Spot’ and it takes many forms depending on the project.

We developed it during Uncle Roy All Around You at the ICA in London in 2003. It takes the shape of a task right at the start of the work which we give to each member of the public.

It was the simple instruction “go to this point in the park (Green Park in fact) and tell us when you are there (by sending a message that you had arrived – self-reporting your position)”. We could check via our orchestration tool that your device was in fact where you said you were; and then we knew you could do more, that we could build your experience from this foundation.

Over the years we have developed this so we are able to set projects up and then run them remotely from the other side of the world: knowing where people are, how they have been able to begin or progress through a work. In Rider Spoke we ask people to “Give yourself a name and describe yourself” so that we can see if people know how to use the recording buttons on the device. In Ulrike and Eamon Compliant it is an instruction to go out onto a bridge, with one of us watching to confirm this task is followed.

The Red Spot is about care for the audience and the work, it is about immersion and in-work learning.

– Ju