Process
the result 
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Health and Weath at Belfast - the Space Shuttle in Blackstaff Square - used the National Lottery as a tool to penetrate the subject randomly - to explore the coordinates of the private world of personal hopes and individual values that invisibly saturates public space. These coordinates create the public but a public as Walter Lippmann described that is no more than a phantom subject to processes external to it.
At Blackstaff Square, this intervention gathered the public through the form of a lottery syndicate.
the forms (opens pop-up)
By using the National lottery, the function the Space Shuttle served was as a 'hoping' space, a concentrated outlet for the possible fulfilling of what are dispersed and isolated individual wishes and aspirations.
Participants in the Health & Wealth syndicate were mainly employed in the public sector. Blackstaff Square is surrounded by Civil Service and Inland Revenue Tax offices, as well as welfare offices for housing benefits, a Business School and the well known Europa Hotel. The square is not a socialising space, more a transitory space for moving in-between work and home.
site images of Space Shuttle (opens pop-up)
the Space Shuttle:
Location: Blackstaff Square Belfast
Dates: 9 to 19 October 2006.
The Space Shuttle was used to research the specific social and cultural environs of Blackstaff Square
central Belfast gathering information daily over 7 days.
The Space Shuttle programme was organised by ps2 Belfast
Space Shuttle
Sample 01 : William G:
Date: 11.10.2006 Belfast
Each participant has to assign 1 value on each axis to one on the other axis. These variables are rotated daily. In this sample of choices made by William G in accordance with his personal values, he has 6 lottery numbers marked in [red ]
The 6 numbers are: 3 -8-21-34-39-44
These numbers assign:
LOVE to: ME MYSELF
SECURITY to: MY STREET MY NEIGHBOURHOOD
WEALTH to: MY CULTURE MY PEOPLE
and so forth...
Health & Wealth gathers the data for its development process by projecting the 7 x 7 grid onto public space as an intervention. These are the 2 axes of the variables that we each measure our lives by as shown here (roll-over). There are also 2 further axes or variables to consider:
3/ The number of people and agents as a daily flow
4/ The amount of time in days
Health and Wealth uses the structure of the National Lottery based on permutations of 1 to 49 as on a lottery form. The lottery form is a statistically democratic grid through which all social aspirations can be channeled through in a million different ways every day. It may be seen as a form of social currency that gives & takes away - barters - in ways that both over-simplify and unify cultural complexities.
The lottery converts all possible permutations of 1 to 49 to ideally form into a pyramid; the top of the pyramid [1] symbolises the jackpot and the demographics of distribution and social development.
a short version (opens pop-up)
Health and Wealth is based on our approach to happiness. In day-to-day terms the contradiction that governs modern life is that personal security is realistically achievable only through individualism and material consumption. Personal happiness however can only be secured through social interaction and a sense of relatedness.
It is this inherent conflict of means embodied in modern culture that is played out by Health and Wealth.
a mythic utopian fable based on the workings of an omnipotent enterprise which feeds on the aspirations of its discordant peoples, spinning and winning hearts and minds, confusing past and future......
Health and Wealth
