The Perfect Day Project

What is it?

The Perfect Day Project is an artwork and research project designed to investigate how similar and different people’s hopes and aspirations are. By asking people to imagine and describe their perfect days I hope to be able to find out whether everybody wants different things or whether, in many different ways, people from all over the world want basically the same things. The aim is to interview men and women, adults and children, people from different cultures and religions, ethnic groups and nationalities and show that when each of us dreams of an ideal moment in the future, our dreams have things in common.

I’m hoping to find out what this common ground is. Whether it’s music, friends, food or nature, or a sense of freedom, peace, opportunity and capacity, the hope is that by identifying it I can help establish more room for dialogue based on the idea that there already exists – for most people – a common ground on which to build connection, understanding and empathy. There are differences, too, for sure, but the question that naturally arises is whether the differences are interesting and creative or are inevitably divisive and a source of violence.

Perhaps our common ground is not so much in our past experiences but in our hopes and aspirations and our differences are largely just the different ways we try to manifest the same dreams. This may seem like a simple idea but the aim of The Perfect Day Project is to find a way to express this or, to put it another way, to create a vehicle for people to experience this more directly.

Practically, the aim of The Perfect Day Project is to create a range of artworks in which each person's story is represented through a photo, text and video. (The text will be just a direct transcription of the interview.) Initially, this artwork will be a website.

 the aim of The Perfect Day Project is to create a range of artworks in which each person's story is represented

After a period of time I hope to create an exhibition that people are able to walk through and be surrounded by faces telling their stories of their perfect days, but then also able to focus on one person (at a time) and hear his or her story. Both the website and the gallery exhibition are aimed at presenting the individual stories but also the sense of multiplicity and complex wholeness of the fact that there are many voices all speaking at once.

Of course, in order to get this story and message out to people in spaces where they don’t have access to galleries or website, my hope is that there’ll be a book, with each person represented by a portrait and the text of their perfect day in their own words.

Finally, the aim is to examine all this and create an artwork that looks at the common ground and divides the individual stories into these chapters or threads and presents them as areas of potential for connection and understanding.

I’d like to interview you, just to hear your story

So: I’d like to interview you, just to hear your story, but please let me know if you don’t want to be represented on the website or in any of the artworks.

Ok. Let’s begin.

The interview transcript

What’s your name?

How old are you?

Where were you born?

Where do you live now?

Describe yourself in three words:

Now I’m going to ask you to describe your perfect day.

Fantastic. Thank you. Now I’m going to ask you to describe your perfect day. But before you begin I just want to try to be clear about what I mean.

First I’ll describe what I don’t mean. I’m not asking you to describe the best day of your life so far. It’s not your wedding day or the day you went to Disneyland as a kid. I’m also not asking you to describe a fantasy day in which something incredibly improbable happens – like you win lots of money or your hero suddenly turns up and wants to spend the day with you. And you are not anyone different from who you are now. You are not a famous celebrity or multi-millionaire (unless you already are); you are you, but on this perfect day do you have the means to go to the places you love and do the things you love with the people you love.

...imagine that you could go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow anywhere in the world and then spend the day in the places you love, doing all the things you love, with the people you love.

I’d like you to imagine that you could go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow anywhere in the world and then spend the day in the places you love, doing all the things you love, with the people you love. You can move around, go to different places, and spend time with different people. I’d like you to describe to me where you would go, what you would do and who you would do it with. The day is from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep and includes every moment in between. I’m interested in hearing you tell the story of that day in as much detail as you can. Does that make sense?

Great. What is your perfect day, beginning with the moment you wake up?

The interviewer then just asks questions to help clarify the images and events the person describes, by asking simple questions like: “Where are you?” “Who are you with?” “What’s the weather like?”