Richard Rinehart | Reading Class

From Rhizome:
Artist ->Richard Rinehart
Reading Class is what Joseph Beuys called "social sculpture"- engagement with the intangible elements that shape our lives. Reading Class uses social software to explore the social question of class. Specifically, Reading Class is a multimedia game built inside an Internet blog; a blog being a set of standards and software used for online personal journals or conversation. Reading Class explores the idea of class as an semi-emergent taxonomy, a self-organizing system, by taking participants on a journey of cultural choices and values where their own class identity is measured against fixed scholastic markers and against the relativistic play and perception of other participants as measured in real-time (the taste culture choices you make while you play affect the final class score of other players during this project, and vice versa). Reading Class strives to be journal and discussion forum - a cultural engine for revealing, exploring and critiquing social class. [more] [Rhizome.org Artwork]

This piece attempts to engage the user in the exploration of their own social class through a series of questions. The answers to the questions attempt to quantify the social class of a user based on their answers. After a user answers a question, a summary of what type of class each answer is from is provided. This piece is a combination of the examination of class through American ideals and perceptions.

Some of the most interesting perceptions of class brought up by this piece include:
-The presence of televisions in living rooms. The more obvious the presence of a television, as far as display and being turned on in a living room, the lower the class level of the people in the household.
-People with two car households tend to live longer than households with one car
-People from higher classes will tend to have expensive relics from religions that are oppressed and that they would never practice
-People with money will make statements that rank cleverness as priority over wealth

The appearance of sailing as an experience in relation to higher classes is prevalent in the quiz.

Users are invited to make comments after every question in order to produce a dialogue about a specific theme in the test.