“Would everyone lie down on the floor, please?”

It’s not your average scene in an academic building on a college campus—students racing around in paper crowns and face paint. The room goes completely silent for 20 seconds, then returns to whooping, chatter, and singing. Everyone lies on the floor, everyone gets up. It may be unusual behavior in general, but it’s just another evening by the standards of an Oliver Herring TASK party.

Oliver Herring, a distinguished contemporary artist featured in the PBS series Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, has been helping groups hold TASK parties since 2002. Born in Germany, Herring has a BFA from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and works with sculpture, photography, and video.

The basic structure of a TASK party is that participants write tasks on slips of paper, fold them, and place them in a box. The tasks are then drawn by other members of the party who must perform them. Activities can be done alone or with a few others, or they may require all members of the event to participate (e.g. Get everyone to be silent for 20 seconds).

According to Herring, “TASK’s open-ended, participatory structure creates almost unlimited opportunities for a group of people to interact with one another and their environment.”

Creative writing professor Dinah Ryan met Herring during spring break through her work as a critic. With the approach of this quarter’s “Writers and Artists at Work” course, the meeting was serendipitous.

“The basic idea of the Writers and Artists course is that the working practices of writers and artists are influenced by critical thought,” explains Ryan. “Or more simply, it asks, ‘How do ideas determine the way people make things?’”

Senior Courtney McCall, who took the course last spring, enjoyed it so much that she audited it this spring. McCall served as the point person for the TASK party, running class one day, explaining the project to classmates, and arranging logistics. She also e-mailed back and forth with Herring, who graciously agreed to a 50-minute phone conference with the entire class.

The students in the class enjoyed the opportunity to work firsthand with Herring. ”Everyone fell in love with him,” says McCall.

During the conference, Herring encouraged the students to make the event as welcoming as possible and to gather as many materials as they could. Class members brought cardboard, paper, markers, face paint, a set of rollerblades, a camera, makeup, benches, pillows, confetti, and even a Principia go-bike.

The end result was a raucous two hours in Holt Gallery. Students ran platoons, sang favorite songs, told lengthy stories, and even proposed marriage. More important, students thought in new ways, interacted openly and honestly, and learned new things about themselves.

After pulling the task “Find six people and build a pyramid,” Ryan immediately dismissed the idea of forming a human pyramid and instead found six people to help her build a large pyramid out of smaller pyramid-shaped objects. “It pushes you past the threshold of your habitual thinking,” says Ryan.

“So many people involved themselves. And people weren’t judgmental,” comments McCall. “It was wonderful being with everyone—just as bold, just as open with every single person.”

Both McCall and Ryan consider the event a success.