Yes Please Don't Tickle Me Yes!

You enter the exhibition space, a stifled giggle erupts and is quelled at the mere thought of your presence. You look and there in the space, off the walls but not in the center is an object? It is a rather large object, perhaps it is a room? It has an opening, standard three feet wide for you to walk inside, and the walls are taller than you so it must be a room, but the fact that all four walls are visible and that you can see the whole thing at once from inside the exhibition space makes you think that it is an object, it's standardized fabrication qualities make it look like an art object, but maybe it is just a room after all.

You move towards it and it erupts again, did it shake a little? No probably not. It's inviting like a jamboree at a faire, it's padded and you imagine jumping around in it. Or maybe it's padded like a room in an insane asylum and you imagine jumping around and punching the walls and letting lose your frustrations on it. Or maybe the tough leather-vinil fabric that it is covered in, reminds you of some forgotten, violent sexual fantasy.

The room can't handle the close inspection, it starts giggling and shaking just a little, and when you go inside to see what is around the bend of the entry way, it really lets loose. The more you move, the more it cracks up, the more people inside the more impossible for it to keep quiet and still, like a proper space-object.

Yes Please Don't Tickle Me Yes! has funky curved planes inside inviting one to sit or lay or climb upon them, but the more you climb, the more people there are, the crazier the room gets. It laughs so much that it sounds like laughter of pain. It was happy laughter when you came in but now it's hysterical. Other visitors are leaving the room uncomfortable with the sounds, evoking contact, the padding now evoking flesh. Was this a trespassing of somebody's personal space? One can trespass onto private property, and into someone's personal space, one can presume too much about the closeness shared between two people but which was this? Wasn't the room a space? Or did you just have an intensely intimate, quasi-emotional encounter with architectural space?

You are alone in the room and it is still cackling but not as hysterically, ultimately perhaps you feel uncomfortable too, the way one tickles one's little brother until he cries, and then your greedy pleasure becomes embarrassing, like some psycho-physical boundary has been crossed. Here too you are the one who causes the submissive laughter, but the room surrounds you and the laughter seems to be coming from inside it's body of walls and padding, it's invisible and unimaginable internal order.

You leave the room.

Once outside again, you look at it in a different way, you have been in the belly of an animal? The object is calming down, catching it's breath in between it's last remaining cackles. But more people are coming into the exhibition hall. An elementary school class, they see a playground, they storm the object, bounce around, laugh and scream, and the room's laughter is it pain or pleasure now? Is it torture or part of the general wallah of the playground?

General Description

A room/object that stands 8 feet tall with no ceiling, but with a floor. A 3X8 foot opening in one wall for the entrance, some curvaceous sitting-lying shapes inside for accommodation. The walls and "furniture" are padded (we will see with what, perhaps stuffed animal padding, maybe just covered in fabric), they are covered in the thick, vinyl-like, flesh-like fabric, in different colors. It is inviting and designy but it references skin and flesh. Inside the walls are 2 speaker facing in and two facing out, and a sub-woofer facing out. The sounds will be muffed by the wall-skin, rooms do not have mouths to speak, they will be rendered more real by being part of it's anatomy. There will be a camera in the ceiling, inside a colorful camera-dome, with a colorful happy color wire (like neon green) leading to the room. There will be another one somewhere else in the exhibition space observing the art object-room to track tickling anticipation from the outside. No pretending, there will we clearly visible wiring, where necessary and none where it does not logically make sense. The computers (2) which will be controlling the processing, will be safely housed within the room/furniture like shapes structure.

Yes Please Don't Tickle Me Yes! is an investigation as to weather architectural space can display emotions and cause those within it to have emotions too. It is also an investigation into the physical relationship we can have with laughter, when the cause is not psychological, but a reactive physical one (as that makes more sense with machines), and when the laughter is not of pure pleasure but also of pain, of comparing space to a body, and being inside a space to being inside a body, and how that might make that body feel.