If you were moseying by Bowdoin Express, known to students as the C-store, on Monday evening, you may have seen two delirious short-haired gals wearing blindfolds and soliciting your participation in our latest project: “Yik Yak Live.” But we did not see you.
With our first undertaking a few weeks ago, we recreated Marina Abromović’s performance art piece, “The Artist is Present,” and held sustained eye contact with willing participants in the Union. We sought to explore vulnerability within the student body at Bowdoin. This time, without realizing it, we were drawn back to the idea of sensory alteration as a means to explore larger ideas. Now, we are considering accountability and anonymity.
We all know this about Bowdoin: an unfamiliar face is hard to come by (unless you’re Tessa at a hockey party). Anonymity is nearly unattainable here. So, we seek to hide. On apps like Friendsy and Yik Yak, ambiguity is the game. We get to spew our hormonal woes, our feelings of inadequacy and the political opinions we don’t feel comfortable expressing in public. It’s like yelling into a tunnel—anyone, or no one, could be on the other end. We were curious to see what happens when the invisibility becomes one-sided.
Our high production value sign read: “YIK YAK LIVE: What will you write when you can see us but we can’t see you?” We encouraged passersby to write down yaks in real time on slips of paper and place them in a container under the table. The sign also boasted some anxiously scribbled prompts: “Thoughts? Confessions? Ideas? Mean Commentary?”
“I want to see how mean people will be,” Tessa said, while Carly broke a nervous sweat.
Again, we feared no one would participate. But—who knew!—people with blindfolds do attract some attention. One Yak we received read, “Why is SJP blindfolded now?”
Our responses largely reflected the general makeup of Bowdoin’s actual Yik Yak. We had some lighthearted admissions:
“I have a dead opossum in my trash (this is true).”
“I haven’t taken a normal poop in 4 days”
And of course, “I am Kote.”
There were musings about life at Bowdoin:
“I wonder if people steal from the C-store.”
In tiny handwriting, in the corner of a slip: “I did all kinds of drugs @ Ivies.”
“I’ve made out with 3 percent of Bowdoin College.”
Some Yaks treaded into weightier territory:
“Is the gay/lesb community really small, or can I just not pull?”
“People really overestimate how accepting Bowdoin is.”
“Confession: I’m male, I have pretty terrible body image issues, and I don’t feel comfortable addressing them w/ anyone. I don’t think it’s something people feel comfortable talking about/helping with.”
Lest we forget, Carly and Tessa sat blindfolded in the Union for a full hour on a Monday, not doing anything ostensibly productive. There has been little research on the results of placing college students, completely unoccupied and unable to fully engage with their peers, in a space for an extended period of time. We entered a fugue state. By obscuring our vision, we also seemed to obscure our understanding of all behavioral norms. Volume control? Disappeared.Conceptions of time? Gone. Ability to form sentences? Dissolved.
“Do you guys feel vulnerable?” asked an unidentifiable voice.
We did. It can be exasperating when mysterious forces drag baby carrots across your face or attempt to disguise themselves by impersonating others. But maybe there was some power in our voluntary impairment. In partially detaching ourselves from our environment, we accidentally lost our fear of consequences. Despite being surrounded by people in the Union, we felt like we were sitting alone in our rooms in our underwear, irrationally confident in our perceived solitude. We wonder now if we felt more anonymous than the writers of our yaks.
Bowdoin students harbor fears about sounding pretentious, or dumb; too involved, or not involved enough; politically incorrect, or soft. Above all, we fear revealing ourselves and having someone say thanks, but no thanks. Yik Yak is a space where we feel comfortable broadcasting our anxieties and idiosyncrasies. But does it matter? If we don’t own our weird shit, then what’s the point?
Last time, we asked what would happen if people made more eye contact. Now we wonder about the opposite: what if we all just sat in a room together, blindfolded? What would we say? Would this new sense of anonymity allow us to shimmy out of our inhibited selves, or would we just find this another way to hide?
It turns out that we got far more positive than mean Yaks. We’ll end with our personal favorite:
“I wish more people unabashedly shared how much they appreciate one another. That’s what love is.”