Finding the Lost Art

‍Crafting a collaborative creative process

The Lost Art of Letter Writing is beautiful at first glance: a set of specially-made cabinets, adorned with an array of stationary, lamps and stamps. There’s soft wax and nice paper, pencils and lightboxes.

Once curiosity has drawn you close, you can sit and join a quiet creative game with strangers. And if you’re lucky, there’ll be a letter for you at the end. 

This is one of my favourite Binge projects because of the way it invites and directs the audience. But it took a careful process to come up with a version that was inviting, safe, and produced a satisfying end product: a letter that someone might really want to read.

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A first draft

The concept had its roots in a performance game we called ‘Posties’. It was pretty simple: we set up a desk with stationary at a party or event, and invited people to write and address letters to an imaginary category of person  - ‘someone who is wearing a checked shirt’ for example.  Roaming clowns(!) dressed as posties delivered these letters to people who matched that description. 

It worked well in smaller groups of trusted people, but there were a couple of issues with this original idea as a public event, as you’ve probably already guessed (aside from the notion of 'roaming clowns'). 

One is the size of this creative ‘ask’ - how do you prompt someone to spend time writing something fun or meaningful?

The second was content moderation. Both the addresses and the messages had the potential to be hurtful. Although we never had any real issues (that we know of) we became aware we were skating on thin ice. At the very least, who wants to be handed a letter addressed to ‘someone who looks really tired?’ 

So we set out to solve these two main problems - content quality and content moderation - in a new installation to be presented at the Performance Arcade in 2023.

Inspiration

Further inspiration for this work came from an activity in Te Papa’s Surrealists exhibition called the dream bureau. It was a simple idea: write down a recent dream, and file it away under a key idea (water, animals, monsters, etc). We really admired it.

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It’s quite hard to formulate this sort of passive, unfacilitated activity. In my experience, many ‘visitor contribution’ museum installations fall a bit flat, for couple of reasons: 

The first is the question of where your contribution ends up. Will anyone read it? Or will it just gather dust in a drawer? 

The second issue is the quality of the creative prompt. Often these are hopelessly broad, e.g. ‘what does "community" mean to you?’ (get ready to yawn).

Further, such activities quickly become paper wars, where interesting submissions are buried under masses of low-effort scribbles. 

In the dream catalogue however, part of the game was organising and filing things away. It was fun to fossick through and find things in the drawers. This cataloguing was inspiring to us, because it made exploring the content fun - not just the writing of it. 

It also addressed that second problem: the content itself (people’s dreams) was specific, personal, varied and surprising. 

We drew on these principles when we created our work, and we wondered how we could go further to maximise the quality of the content and the impact on the recipient.

Binge has always had the attitude that if you want the public to contribute creatively to what you’re doing, to go out on a limb, you need to give them really clear parameters and instructions. 

So, we looked for ways to guide people and minimise the sense of risk in each step of the process.

‍Addressing 

First up: addressing an envelope. We made this a self-contained task. In order to give a framework, we settled on a small number of address templates, and we asked people to fill out one envelope or several.

We landed on four templates:

To a ____ person working on their ____

To a ____ person who has been ____

To a ____ person in possession of ____

To a ____ person who has been ____

For those who felt stuck, we offered big spinning wheels of possible verbs, nouns and adjectives (one of designer Lucas Neal's many clever touches).

What next? This was the twist: rather than adding a letter to the envelope, the addresser passes it to the other side of the cabinet ...for someone else to pick up.

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Writing

We deliberately placed the writing station on the other side of the installation from the addressing station. That's because we wanted people to write letters that fitted with existing envelopes - not ones they’d addressed themselves.

This way, they started with a clear and unique prompt, and were thus absolved of full responsibility for what they were doing; in some sense, they were just continuing someone else’s project, not going out on a limb. 

To support this task, we provided a barn-door style flipbook offering a range of voice/style/format combinations for their letter (e.g, unsolicited advice / about ghosts / in the style of Charles Dickens). Again, this was an optional guiderail, which a lot of people latched onto. People like parameters!

We allowed them to write short or long, poetically or directly, to sketch or draw. When they were finished, they put the letter in its envelope and passed it back to the other side - unsealed. 

So at this point, we had an addressee, and a letter that we thought they might like. Almost there! 

Moderation

Here was the last real hurdle - yes, we wanted a sense of creativity, boldness and anonymity to the letters, but we also needed to keep people safe, particularly kids.

So the last station (back across the other side of the installation) was content moderation.

Here, the prompt was to read a stranger’s letter and check if it had any sensitive content, or if it was likely to upset people. If it was really bad, it could be binned (this never actually happened), and in other cases the envelope could be stamped with appropriate stamps, to help describe what type of letter it was.

Collection

The final stage was to send the letters down a short pneumatic tube to a display area, where they could be picked by people who felt they matched the intended recipient (it wasn’t our job to ask why).

Performance

The final element was the role of live performers (I was one of them), who took on the role of post office workers. It was our task to set a tone and to encourage people to get properly involved. 

As performers, we adopted a direct and straightforward, task-based approach. This is a mode of performance we love and which goes back to early Binge shows like  Whales. It’s about adopting a slightly high-status attitude toward the audience, which suggests that the (silly) task is actually important, banishing the idea of awkwardness or embarrassment. 

So, instead of saying ‘would you like to try writing a letter’ (or even worse ‘can you participate’), we would try and start with statements like ‘we need some envelopes addressed, are you able to work on that?' The idea was to keep the instructions as matter of fact as possible, and demonstrate that we were treating the task as real, so that they have permission to do the same. 

That applied to all the stages - at the collection station, we gently but firmly enforced the idea that people should only take letters that ‘are addressed to them’ (i.e, if they feel they match the description on the envelope) - if none fit, they should come back later. 

My observation is that these facilitators played a big role in helping people invest and create good letters.

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When was the last time you wrote a letter?

We were gratified to see how broad the appeal of this activity was - older people enjoyed talking about letters they’d sent or received; younger people (as well as taking the writing seriously) were fascinated by the tactility of the stamps and wax. 

Some people were quite emotionally moved by the letters they got, and often expressed a feeling that their message was somehow meant for them. Lots of people talked about wanting to write more letters in future. 

We were really happy to be able to offer these small gifts - products of carefully crafted randomness. 

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Devised by Joel Baxendale, Ralph Upton, Oli Devlin, based on a concept developed with Rachel Baker and Claire O’Loughlin

Designed by Lucas Neal

Produced by Eleanor Strathern

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