Drinking Blindfolded in... (I shit you Not!?)
'Drinking Blindfolded in' is the collective name for a series of interactions made in various European cities over a period of five yearts. This is one of the earliest SPART works. It was 1st conceived of as a means of getting beyond what I then saw as 'the problem of the visual’.
Put simply, my background is visual art and my main reason for being interested in visual art was because of its potential to communicate complex ideas in a simple quick and effective way. After much work with visual mediums, I wanted to get rid of the mediation of the artwork, which inevitably led me to work with performance art. But for me performance art was still problematic because people were coming to watch a visual phenomena. With my work I wanted to obliterate the divide between myself and those who had come to take part in the work. I also wanted to obliterate the divide between art and daily life. I wanted there to be no divide, so the 1st thing I felt I had to do was tone down the visual aspect of my work and concentrate more on the 'aesthetic’.
It is important to understand what I mean by 'aesthetic'. The word aesthetic literally means 'sensation'. The meaning of the word is Greek in origin and is one half of an old epistemological divide between 'conception' and 'perception', between what is sensed and what is conceived. Therefore aesthetics literally means that which is sensed: the word is not limited to a question of the visual or of taste. The definition of the word aesthetics as we now understand it can be traced back to German Philosopher Alexander Baumgarten who through his book Aesthectica (1750), proposed aesthetics as a critique of taste. For me, many of the problems of contemporary art can be dispensed with if we take Baumgarten's philosophy as an epistemological corruption and adopt the original Greek epistemology as a theoretical lens for understanding art. Anyway, enough philosophical ranting. Basically the work was devised as a strategy to get round a lot of the problems created by focusing on the visual instead of on the aesthetic. And also to get round the divide between art and daily life.

What Happens in 'Drinking Blindfolded in’
About a week before I arrive hundreds of flyers (handbills) are distributed throughout the city where the event will be. The flyers inform people that I am a SPARTIST from Northern Ireland and I'm coming to drink blindfolded in their city and I want to meet them for a drink. The flyers inform people why I am doing this and offer them a range of conversations and bars to meet in for a drink. The flyers provide a phone number so that people can phone to arrange a meeting.
When I arrive in the city I work out a timetable for blindfolded drinking meetings. I then go out and hand out some flyers myself and explain to people what I am doing. Each day of the performance I put on a blindfold leave my hotel and head off into the night Drinking Blindfolded. I normally convince some people to help me negotiate my way around the city blindfolded. I like convincing people I meet for a drink to take me a long to my next blindfolded drink. Each night after I am finished I go back to my hotel, normally very drunk and begin to write down what has happened as I remember it.

Thoughts About Drinking Blindfolded
Drinking blindfolded is a very strange experience not least because of the visual hallucinations one has after spending 6 or more hours blindfolded. You also need a hell of a lot of trust in human nature to let someone you don’t know lead you through a strange city to place you’ve never been to. That said it is an enjoyable experience. Although sometimes I would like to see some of the people, because all I remember them by is either their voice or some comment they made to me. It’s strange to think that I will never ever see the people I met though. With regards people I have met while drinking blindfolded there have only ever been a couple of people I have not enjoyed talking to, and that was mainly because those people we aggressive towards me because they expected something else. But all in all I have enjoyed making this work, but perhaps not the hangover the morning after.

Future Plans for Drinking Blindfolded in
At present I am in the process of going through the written documentation from these events and turning some of them into a book to makr the completion of the project. This is a long process because their is so much written notes form these experiences and I need to edit them down.

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