Dear Bryan,
Please excuse the lengthy and unsolicited email. I know it's long past the time that you were actively working on the Surrogate Graduate Project, which I stumbled upon recently through some mysterious hints at 826NYC.org, but I share your interest in philosophy and the project is totally fascinating for me. If anything perhaps my comments below will be entertaining (dare I say, interesting?) for you to consider.
Your project reminds me of my fascination with artistic or intellectual groups (the Beats, the Inklings, the Bloomsbury Group, etc.) and I often wonder how these associations influence the writers'/artists' eventual products. Having spent most of my life in North Dakota, I felt a real vacancy of inspiration in my immediate surroundings - my community seemed lacking of any radical kind of creativity - and I sometimes felt that I lacked the motivation to create because my neighbors and friends lacked any motivation. I wanted to find people who I could challenge and who would challenge me as well. I've continued to strive for that even today, and I think that sharing inspiration with other can be an important and human (hopefully benevolent) motivating force for inspiring creation.
Your project brings these ideas to my mind. Your emails and the final interview illustrated a great tension that still existed between you and Andrew, even near the end of the project, and it made me wonder if it was on account of some general cultural sense of independence in America; perhaps some miscommunication about the nature of the project or even oppositions in personality and perspective; probably there was a very real confusion about who was using who in this situation, and how each of you were wary of being taken advantage of. Of course, your position as instigator of the project seemed to offer a position of power over your surrogate (even the nature of the words implies a power relation that favors the Host [i.e. primary subject]), but because you pursued it in such a relaxed, nearly haphazard manner, it gave some power back to Andrew to question whether he would be obligated to finish the project in the end. The project, which generally appears to exercise a traditional power relation of host-to-surrogate, was complicated by the way you undertook it without asserting a traditionally strong role of authority of host over the surrogate.
Outside of this, I also wonder whether there was a counter-surrogacy going on at the same moment, with you occupying Andrew's role as a non-student, an outsider observing someone who is going to art school for an MFA. Clearly, there were much fewer responsibilities foisted upon your surrogacy role - if anyone did make obligations of you it was you yourself in your conception of the surrogacy project - but I cannot help but notice how the project affected your own sense of involvement in the MFA program you were enrolled in and which Andrew was being your surrogate for. As soon as you provided a surrogate for yourself as the student, that role ceased to exist, because neither you nor Andrew were willing to take on the real or full responsibilities of that surrogate. Nor was there any expectation that he should become who you were as the graduate student. (questions include: was Andrew a surrogate for you, for you as a graduate student, for a name on the student roster, or for any student of any sort?) These are side-questions which are important as well.
As evidenced by the interview, there was much awkwardness between you and Andrew even at the end of the project. More projects such as this may do more to illuminate the possibility of such interpersonal/group communication on a level that is realizable (perhaps even comfortable). That might be true or it might not. I'd like to think that the project challenges the idea that we must continue to remain apart from one another, or that our culture will necessarily become more fragmented and more individual. If there are other successful instances of such "surrogacy" projects, it may encourage us to pursue occupying the spaces of each other more and more (less concerned about the boundaries represented by same body, same mind). As you said, this project was about an individual occupying two places at once - well it may also be about a very uncommon desire for two people to occupy the same place at once. Just think what this means for the push in our demanding economy and demanding personal lives: how many other people like these will take up this idea of surrogacy (e.g. work-sharing) as an ideal solution to the new world!
Jez
P.S. One more note of interest. I was really interested in the events of the photo crit class surrounding the negative reactions of most other students. There was evidently a sense of envy there (claims of "I could do that"), perhaps feeling maltreated (being treated as part of someone else's art project somehow undermined their own ability to create art - they could only create things within the context of being an accessory to your performance project; not to mention they were being unwillingly co-opted into a student's performance - some social taboo had been broken among students whose classroom experience is not to be documented as their real work); perhaps even some sense of exposing the performance relations of real life (feeling as though their own activities with relation to the surrogate would amount to performance would undermine their ability to be educated without feeling it was being "staged" or having the distraction of such an outsider observation).
This last one fits really nicely because of how the reaction to the other "outsiders" in that photo class reacted with some sense of pleasure and interest in the project - clearly the outsiders were feeling a new sense of power at someone reversing the power relation that had been (howsoever unwittingly) applied over them and their obstructed experiences of the class. In this moment, Andrew's presence exposed the outsiders which existed within the group and who were, up until that point, clearly under the dominance of the insider/outsider relation. People don't like being exposed, especially when they think they've got nothing to hide!
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