The Box: Pro Grip (How to be Humans), Jordan Baseman

This exhibition closes on the 21st October 2026.

This is a film being shown in the media lab that runs for 7 minutes and 9 seconds.  It shows across five screens but there are only two versions, so it is fairly easy to watch.  There are two aspects to the film.  The audio and the visual.

The audio is an interview with Dr Gray Atherton, a psychologist from the University of Plymouth.  In the interview, she talks about how children learn to make associations and connections from a very early age.  Connecting with others is vital for our survival.  Babies learn to recognise smiles before they learn to recognise anger, they learn to smile early.  We need others to survive, we need to connect, we need to bond.  We learn to recognise genuine affection.  We do all this long before we learn language.

The visual is taken from Pro Grip, the UK arm wrestling championship which was shown on TV in 1990.  It's a curious film, something I know nothing about.  The hand placements are very very precise, quite technical seeming.  I guess this was to ensure that neither participant had an advantage.  Beyond this incredible focus on the hands, everything else was pantomime.  The arm wrestlers displayed an incredible range of emotions and not all of them felt genuine to me and I couldn't even begin to discern what they all were.  They were very extreme.  I am sure some of it was to fool their opponent, some of it was to gain an advantage, some of it was very much for the audience.

I admit, facial expressions are something I struggle with.  Absolutely, I understand smiles and joy.  I think there is a huge gulf between genuine happiness and the polite fiction that greases the wheels of society.  I feel that difference acutely.  But beyond that, it can get tricky for me.  I remember looking at some materials for Early Education that were cards with people with different facial expressions on them in a job some years ago.  I realised, I could not differentiate all of the emotions.

So I very much understand that what other people might take from this film could be very different from what I might take from it.  

Much of the emotion seemed, pumped up I guess.  There was more aggression than joy to me.  Even when they won, it felt too much, not quite right.  It was an extreme show, almost a caricature.  Fuelled by adrenaline.  I wouldn't want to be confronted by anyone displaying so much extreme emotion.  Just too much, too confusing.  It is not a great way to communicate to me, it takes too much processing for me to have a clue what's going on.

But the audio, this I understood.  A quiet, logical discourse.  This works for me.  I am much better at this way of communicating, of learning.  I think it's an interesting thing, the difference in how a neurotypical person and a neurodiverse person might see something like this.  We all have different strengths and weaknesses.

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