Assignment 1: Meet in the Middle

Quick introduction. My name is David, and I and my wife Lucy had made up our minds that we wanted to tackle every Art Assignment as they came out each week.

The youtube channel where you can find all the assignments is here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/theartassignment?feature=watch

Ok, on to the first assignment. Its an interesting one, and definitely not the sort of thing either of us had expected. The break down of the assignment goes like this:

1. Pick a friend
2. Work out the geographical midpoint between your location and friend's location
3. Agree on a place and time, and who will be bringing what to meet at the midpoint.
4. Do not communicate with friend in any way (be it electronic, natural, of supernatural) until the day you meet face to face.
5. Record experience.
6. Upload it and share.

By proxy of the fact that you are reading this, lets assume that step 6 was completed without incident and so requires no further explanation. The only thing I'll comment on in regard to step 5 is that we split our duties in recording down the middle, I am the one doing all the writing, while Lucy took photographs of everything.

So, step 1 was pretty easy for both of us, having decided we wanted to do these assignments together, the obvious choice was made. Though it did create a bit of a problem for step 2, namely that, as a married couple, we lived in the same place.

We share a flat (also known as an apartment), but it just so happens that our computers and workspaces are at complete opposite ends:

My space is in the main room, complete with poster, Rubik's cube, printer and printer guardian spider...

And Lucy's space is in the bedroom decorated with the obligatory potted plant.

Because the flat isn't all the big, it would be rather difficult for a satellite navigation tool to properly pinpoint the difference between us, so instead we resorted to more low-tech approach:

Tape measures!

We went around every wall, nook and cranny in order to create a scale model floor plan were we could pin point our respective desks, and draw a line between them.

The first thing Lucy would do is make a very quick crude drawing of the room we were focussing on, then we would get to work finding out the measurements of each wall, then finally I would take these numbers and make an (almost) scale drawing.

This is the "crude" drawing of the hallway, the rooms which has five doors (main room, bathroom, utility room, bedroom and outside (starting at door and going clockwise)).

This is the "scale" drawing, one square is meant to be equal to 20cm

These drawings are as to scale as two people who have no idea what they are doing can get. As I put the last line down, I noticed that a couple of 20 cm squares were missing in action, meaning we had a rough error margin of 1-2 squares for some rooms. We attribute this error to the fact that not all the angles in the house are probably right angles, and that we had a lot of furniture to circumnavigate in order to get to the wall, and that we did quite a lot of rounding, and that the pencil wasn't all that sharp, also one time the tape measure just snapped back and managed to cut my finger, and did I mention we had no idea what we were doing?

Regardless of the errors, we were finally able to finish our almost-to-scale floor plan, (seen above spanning two pieces of paper, our flat proved to be a lot longer than we thought!)

And there we go, we worked out where we sat, drew big circles around were we guessed our chairs would be, then drew a nice straight line between them, and this is the result.

Our half way point turns out to be just outside the door to the flat...

With the hard part over, we decided on our plan. We decided to meet there on Sunday, each of us having bought a light supermarket lunch for the other person. We had to be very careful when we officially agreed on these arangements, because that would mean the start of our full stop no contact until the meeting time. So we decided to not agree until midnight, giving us a full twelve hours of non communication.

I spent the night on the sofa near my computer, and she spent hers on the bed. The next morning we left the house at different times, went to different shops, and met up at the door three minutes ahead of schedule.

I gave her a chicken tikka masala sandwich along with a doughnut and lemon orange water, she gave me a southern fried chicken wrap in addition to some thai sweet chilly crisps (also known as potato chips) and orange juice. We ate our lunch on the stairs near the front door and told each other how we spent our morning.

I suppose this isn't the "expected" way this challenge is meant to play out. I suspect most participants would have quickly found their midpoints via satellite navigation, whereas the hard part was actually getting there and hoping the other person would get there too. In this regard, we've probably turned the challenge on its head, making the location of the midpoint the goal and the meeting without communication just another step.

However, we did follow the steps to the letter, and had a lot of fun doing it. Plus, now we have a semi-useful floor plan of the flat drawn over two separate sheets of paper! Pretty good result if ever there was one.