Carte blanche to Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard | Where has all this time gone?

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us their vision of the world around us. This week, we give carte blanche to the novelist, playwright, actor and director Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.

The story begins when I am tied up like a ham. It’s a Christmas story.

It’s set in 2019. It’s not quite Christmas yet. A Friday evening, around 7:30 p.m. I’m working. I know I’m going to do a live radio report, but I don’t have any information other than an address. When I arrive there, a kind of place organized like a mix between a yoga studio and a karate center, I learn that I will serve as a guinea pig for a workshop on the art of Japanese bondage, or kinbaku. People who are trying to get attached, basically. It’s not my cup of tea and that’s a good thing: my shock is an integral part of the experience.

The idea with this radio segment is to reflect the diversity of experiences that are offered publicly on Facebook and to test my openness to the unexpected. I have pride. I rarely say no. So I agree to participate in the experience and my very kind and very expert instructor ties my wrists and ankles together, immobilizing me in a kind of half-bridge, a position in which I speak to the facilitator about my show on national radio.

It’s been over four years since it happened and the memory of that moment is still very clear. It didn’t strike me because it turned me into a big kinbaku fan, but rather because it was a damned change from a usual column sitting in a Radio-Canada studio.

I’m coming to Christmas soon, I swear.

It was I who proposed the idea of ​​doing a segment in which we launch a collaborator into an experience chosen at random, inspired by Max Hawkins, a software engineer and contemporary artist who has been exploring an approach based on chance since several years.

During the pandemic, he co-founded Dialup, a site connecting random strangers who wanted to talk on the phone to break the loneliness (I tried it, it was really nice). He contributed to the collaborative work must, by Hans-Ulrich Olbrist, by suggesting to his participants to create a conference call with all the people in his contacts who have the same first name. He created an app that calls an Uber to drop him off at a place he’s never visited within a certain radius of his home.

And from 2015 to 2017, he lived letting his daily life be 100% guided by an algorithm of his creation: where he lived, the places he visited, the events he attended were all chosen by software that he had scheduled and scoured the offer of public events on Facebook to build his calendar. An experiment that took him from the United States to Vietnam to Austria, which made him take dance classes and become a volunteer for a soup kitchen, then which made him network for young professionals, attend a high school orchestra concert and celebrating Christmas with strangers.

That’s not where Christmas comes in yet, but it’s coming, I promise.

One of the conclusions Hawkins drew from his experience was that by letting his schedule be decided randomly, he ultimately felt freer. The obligation to follow the algorithm, the chance, forced him out of his comfort zone in a way he would not have allowed himself otherwise.

I’m arriving at Christmas.

Like at the end of every cycle, every time a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, every Christmas ends, I can’t help but wonder, today: where did all this time go? ? We wake up the day after waking up on the 1st^er January, you blink once and there you are, on the evening of December 24th with eggnog in your hands.

Unless we had the genius to find the formula to slow down time. Even if it wasn’t necessarily his intention, perhaps it’s Max Hawkins who knows this secret. This time disappearing between the first and last day of the year, we would in fact lose it in all these moments when we live on autopilot.

The density of new experiences would affect not only our perception of time, but also our mood. No need to leave your life completely to chance and end up in Austria to benefit from it: the simple fact of discovering new corners of our city would be beneficial.

Now, onto Christmas.

Christmas often bores me. Not that I’m grumpy or that I hate the holiday, but the obsession with Christmas traditions tires me: when they are repeated in an almost mechanical way, they often mean that Christmases end up becoming almost interchangeable, a kind of magma shapeless that means almost nothing, like a series of Hallmark movies where the variations are so minimal that it’s hard to tell them apart. Except when the plan goes off the rails. They may not be the best Christmases, but they are the ones we remember.

I wish you one where the unexpected happens, the best and the worst: a turkey that burns, a guest who has to leave New Year’s Eve for the hospital because her water has just broken, finishing the exchange of gifts at the candle due to a power outage.

And if the unexpected doesn’t happen, provoke it. Tonight and all year. You’ll find you blinked less quickly next Christmas.