It’s fair to say I’ve been neglecting my Ko-Fi page for quite a while. Far longer than I thought. But whilst checking it out I found a project that I’d completely forgotten about.
It was exactly two years ago. I often stay overnight in hotels for work and on that particular occasion I had a sudden realisation that I never use hotel wardrobes and wondered if anyone did.
So I thought I would create a character and hide it in the wardrobe along with a surprise and wait to see if anyone finds it.
My first thought was how would I be able to pull this off? With limited IT and no access to a printer it would have to be old school. Which is fine, but I can’t draw very well and my writing isn’t that neat either. And I didn’t have much time.
So I drew a very simple superhero character and wrote the gist of the idea – a couple of words at a time taking photos as I went so that I could stitch into a video using a glitch app for extra ‘character’ – to promote online.
So I left the note and surprise in the hotel wardrobe, posted the video and waited. The kicker is I never found out what happened. It could still be there or might have been found the next day by a guest or cleaner who binned the note and gleefully accepted the freebie. Or binned that too.
This is the surprise and where I left it:
And this is the view from the hotel window, in case anyone recognises the location.
Who knows, in the future I may try another project. I will definitely need to incorporate a few learning points –
- It may sound stupid but I didn’t make a note of the room number. Will definitely make a note of it in future although the chances of someone doing something similar in the same hotel are probably somewhat limited.
- A hotel wardrobe is a very niche location to hide something. The chances of anyone finding it are very limited compared to other, publicly accessible locations. It’s also likely to be a niche audience, most likely business travellers or possibly a family. Maybe not the best audience for such an art project?
- I did question the appropriateness of what I hid but as far as I’m aware you have to be 18 to book a hotel room in the UK so it was age appropriate in this instance, I would choose something more suitable for an accessible public location.
- Promotion across several social media channels are needed to make it as widely know as possible given the above. This assumes the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ theory holds up in practice although I have seen it could be seven. Or maybe eight.
- I also need to make contacting me easier, it had my Ko-Fi details on the note as you can see above but appreciate it may have looked like a scam so will have to think how to make it easier to contact me next time.
So keep an eye out. You never know. Could be another hotel wardrobe – or somewhere entirely more public.
