Knights of the North Park

Overview

Within a social stratosphere, there exists in-groups and out-groups. Within our in-group of inner social confidants, we usually have our intimate family members - perhaps not those people we like best but with whom we share an intimate bond that has been created because of time and proximity. Outside this group, usually lies the second tier of intimacy - often times this is our relationship partners and closest friends. Usually this includes the people with whom we share everything but who do not know us as long or as well as our families do. Next we approach the close friends group, then possibly good co-workers, colleagues, and as we go out from our inner group we reach professors, acquaintances, and finally the people who you see around and you only connect to them through eye contact (commonly known as familiar faces).

This sphere consists of our social in-group. Within the out-group, lies everyone else, commonly referred to as "The Public." The distinct division of communication between the out-group and the in-group is one of the primary investigations I am interested in. In order for communication to happen between these two groups, a vast library of information must be translated from one culture system to the next. Although the language divide between these systems can easily be breached, as a system becomes more specialized, it distances itself further from being understood.

Knights of the North Park is a video documentation of a social experience effected by Jamin Hall, Michael Evans and Wayne Madsen. Over the period of four months, between the last winter storm and mid-summer, these three artists trained themselves to infiltrate and become a part of a local group from a national medieval fighting society. Written below are the accompanying journal entries providing documentation of the process.

We began our journey by reading the group rule books in order to assimilate ourselves to the language and the society's social norms. What we found out was that not only did we need to understand the rules of the "sport", but we needed to look like the others within the group by dressing in medieval clothing, carrying weapons. But most importantly developing a back history for the character we acted out. Over several months, we assimilated ourselves in this group, fighting alongside people with character names such as "Gobo," "Andric the King," "Thornbrier," and "Bacchaus, Rider of Rohan."

We created character names and came to identify ourselves in relationship to this fighting society because we had taken upon ourselves the language and norms of this culture. What evolved from this set of experiences was documentation on film of the art project. Beyond this single documentation, though, unfortunately not much exists as evidence of this passing from the out-group into the in-group of this strange group.