Disrupting Expectations
An old, worn baseball cap. A laminated ticket stub. A small collection of snowman figurines. What do these disparate items appearing in random locations and dissociative environments around the world have in common? Each of these items contains within it a significance, an association with or relevance to an important or impactful moment or memory in the life of the individual who placed them there, and each item has placed somewhere upon it the words “The Foundry.”
Knockwood Institute, similar to the Foundry Project described above, which is its self a creation of the Knockwood Institute, is a real-life ARG designed around the purpose of disrupting expectation so as to cause the mind to actively engage the environment which surrounds it rather than passively moving through it and with little awareness of it as we move from here to there to perform our daily duties or with a determined focus only upon our destination point. It is call for radical aliveness, inviting us not only to stop and to smell the flowers, but to witness, explore and discover the world and the opportunities that exist all around us.
The convoluted and round-about language utilized throughout the supplemental materials is its self a disruption of expectation, forsaking the expected clarity in writing, in order to force the reader to pay attention and to focus upon it with necessary intensity in order to unravel and to understand it even as, rather than stating or arguing a position with an intent to sway or to convince the reader, as is the usual and expected approach to such materials, it consistently and adamantly insists that you decide for yourself whether to believe it or not. As it its self states, it does not want to tell you what to believe, it wants to provide you with the opportunity to decide for yourself what to believe.
Foregoing the traditional story-line structure of an ARG, Knockwood Institute disrupts expectations of the ARG formula by appearing as an educational program in which you teach yourself through your own experience of what it refers to as “the process.” True to the nature of an ARG, you must participate in order to experience this story. The story being experienced, however, is your own. As is clearly stated in the Acceptance and Induction letter: “We are not here to provide you with some intricate web-work of predetermined clues designed to tell you a story of our own fabrication. If you should seek to rely upon us for any answers, therefore, you will be deeply disappointed. Our role here at the KNOCKWOOD Institute of Higher Learning is merely that of a facilitator. Our purpose is to provide you with the awareness necessary in order that you may choose to create, and to experience, a story of your own design. Make no mistake, therefore, in the understanding that any clues that you may find, whether they are here within these pages, or elsewhere within the greater world that surrounds you, will be self-determined constructs of your own mind. Any story that you should discover along the way will be your own. It is you, and not we, who are in charge of this game that you call life. And it is you, not we, who will be responsible for both the context of this story and how it unfolds.” Even the decision not to participate, therefore, its self becomes a form of participation with very real experiential results. It is just that, as it states, the story which you experience may be one of disappointment in the ARG for disrupting your expectations of what you have believed that it should provide as an ARG, even though it does provide this very experience to those who do so choose to participate in it. You, indeed, are at the helm of the story and how it plays out.
The entirety of Knockwood Institute then becomes a meta-non-fiction, discussing its self and how it operates. It tells you not only how it is designed for you to experience it, but how it goes about creating this experience for you through your perceptions and beliefs. It provides you with the understanding of how it functions through altering your perceptions and belief patterns, by telling you how to alter your perceptions and belief patterns, if you should so choose to do so, by and through the disruption of your expectations as they have been determined by your perceptions and belief patterns. Then, and through your participation, it gives you the opportunity to provide this very thing to others, creating this disruption of expectation in others through the Foundry Project, and in essence co-creating your own real-world ARG for others to experience.
