Dark Talk Time (DTT) is a project which hosts intimate live conversations between blindfolded, anonymous strangers, in order to create surprising moments of deep human connection. In a second iteration, it functioned as a phone project. With co-presence, and without seeing their interlocutor, participants engage in empathetic and nourishing discussion.
Dark Talk Time was first shown at the Association for Visual Pedagogies Conference in Melbourne, in 2019. Here is the abstract (at this stage it had the working title, Regard).
At this time, Ben, Jalen and Sarah worked together on the score of the interactive event, which was written as a script:
Later, we recieved some feedback by email from one of the particpants:
Our reflection on hosting the project culminated in notes as to how to change for next time:
No documentation was taken of the event itself, to preserve participant anonymity and for ethical reasons to reduce their ability to be re-identified.
Feedback from the sessions
Once we started doing actual sessions on the phone people gave us feedback on their session in the last question “what will you take away from this session”:
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“What will stay with me is not so much what we talked about, but how our relationship between you and me, which is only 3/4 hour long, how it can develop and how the feeling of interaction changes over time that we’ve been talking, and how we’ve been able to move quite smoothly from one thing to another and share things between us. I feel a good feeling, it feels nice, to interact with you. If I would compare this to interacting with a friend that I know quite well, i wouldn’t have as rich an experience because we’d be continuing on with something we’ve done before. Whereas this is all new, I’ve learned things about you, somethings that are nice and warming and fun and funny, and other things that are more tragic and difficult, and I’m really impressed and surprised at the range of things we talked about.”
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“Sometimes I reflect on conversations I’ve had with my best friends, or other conversations I’ve had with couples that I’m just getting to know, and its sometimes makes me want to challenge myself with my best friends more, rather than just the bullshit day to day about ‘hows your partner’ and this kind of thing. And sometimes I dig a little deeper, because these are perfect examples, because we are social beings who are good at expressing ourselves if we do it enough. And I think human beings, in this day to day, not being our fault, because its a lot easier, we can get lazy with our social interactions. Because its tiring. You’ll come out of this conversation, and you’ll probably feel a bit tired, and maybe a bit energised.
“I have to remind myself that sometimes I need to do this a bit more with my best friends. Because they know me the best, but they don’t know whats going on in my head. But someone who I’ve just met knows a lot more.