Think You're Bored? I Made 21 People Bored And Now You Can Watch 5 Hours Of The Non Stop Boring Result.

I’m an artist and I’m fascinated by emotions.

In this project ‘Boring People’, I wanted to capture a real portrait of boredom on camera. But I soon realised it wasn’t as easy as sitting something in a room and giving them nothing to do. So I worked with psychologists to create the most boring experiments possible.. and they worked.

Here’s the experiments:

1. Pain v’s Boredom. The person is asked to sit in the studio. They can chose to do nothing, or if the boredom becomes too much they can cause themselves pain via an electric shock.

This was a recreation of an experiment by Dr Erin Westgate and Dr Timothy Wilson. It produced similar results to the original experiment with half the people choosing pain. This gives an insight into why people self destruct when they have nothing to do. Check out their studies for more boring research.

2. Time Perception. The person is sat in the studio with a clock and are told they will be sat there for a set amount of time. They notice the clock does not have minute hand and think this is the experiment, but the truth is the clock is running at half speed. They feel time is going slowly so they must be bored and thus become bored.

3. The endless loop. We created the most bored speech possible and played it on a 5 min loop over up to an hour. The speech is read slowly and in a monotone voice. It’s about legislation, but all the tangible words have been removed and replaced with more words about legislation. It sounds like it should make sense but it never does. this was the most effective experiment.

After a year of research I managed to find 21 participants to record over 3 full days in sitting from 7 minutes (children) to an hour.

The photographs of ‘Boring People’ were shown in London at the Boring Exhibition. The project also become a finalist for the LensCulture, Black and White Prize and have been featured in newspapers and in many blogs.

BUT this is the first time you can watch some of the best boring films it makes very boring viewing.

I hope you (do not) enjoy them.

More info: dawnparsonage.com