Ideas Marathon Day 5-The Hopscotch of Capitalism

Delayed post due to RCA Halloween party (and a horrible hangover)

My presentation for the Playground typology:

Playground. It helps children develop physical coordination, strength, flexibility as well as providing recreation and enjoyment, to explore and to recreate.

For example sandbox, to construct and destroy the world in three dimensions

I started interpreting the playground games different. For example seesaw

could mean this

Or balance

or justice (Dike, Goddess of Justice)

or this

or this

or the merry-go-round could be associated

with this

the swing

you know when someone is pushing you

it’s like that friend in the government that is ‘pushing’ you to get a higher position, a promotion, without really deserving it

So indeed children learn how the world works through the playground

I created a hopscotch:

The hopscotch is played by throwing a small stone on one of the numbers, you hop to the stone, you collect it and then you return. But the biggest challenge is your stone to reach the biggest number (number 7)  and hop back.

My hopscotch teaches people about the 7 new social classes of the Great Britain, as resulted from The Great British Class Survey by BBC. I asked 1-2 volunteers to play and then I revealed them what they got. They aimed for the biggest number as we everyone in society aims for the highest class. The red colour represents the economic capital each class owns, the yellow the social capital and the blue the cultural capital, according to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory which BBC’s results are based on.

 

 

And this is the end of Ideas Marathon!

It was a good warm-up for the second year and I hope I will get as decisive I was the last week. Due to the short timescale of each project I had to be very systematic in order to present something at 4pm every day. Some of them were 6-hour outcomes which is very impressive. It was usually some brainstorming at night, research from morningish until lunchtime and then 2-3 hours producing. It was good to see myself in a position where I was setting deadlines to myself, even if it wasn’t the best idea I had until lunchtime, I had to go with it and make the most of it as I didn’t have much time to test it.

Weekend, a bit of relaxing.

Ideas Marathon Day 4

So… Prison!

Today I have arrived very late at college (blame southeastern) but around lunchtime I got together with a Greek girl from the group to merge our themes – hers was chicken coop, which in a way is a prison.

Thinking process: Alcatraz, crimes, psychological prison, prison bars, cigarettes (prisoners always smoke – they have nothing else to do, and always the visitors take them cigarettes), numbers or barcodes of prisoners, stanford experiment, forms of control, control of thought, limit of freedom (racism, sexism, ageism, poverty).

Trying to combine prison and chicken coop I remembered the torturing the British were doing to the Cypriot revolters in the 50’s which was hot boiled eggs under armpits, so my idea was to invent new tortures with eggs.

What kind of gifts the visitors could bring them?!

Regarding chicken coops and the whole things about free range – I heard that they actually place a picture with green landscapes on the door of the chicken coop to cheat them they’re outdoors.

We were going towards a ‘protest’ the chicken could do as a prisoner in the chicken coop.

So came up with this letter Jack the chicken would send to humans 

 

This was supposed to comment on the abuse of the animals, and actually Tyson Prisons in the text is Tyson Foods, the supplier of KFC and Colonel Sander the man who made KFC and the tortures mentioned in the text are tortures I found on the PETA website about what happens in Tyson Foods.

VIDEO HERE

This was a really fast outcome (a 2-hour one) but we tried to make it political and it actually started a conversation around ethical treatment for animals.

And my typology for tomorrow is playground, the last one!

Ideas Marathon Day 3

Today’s guest was Francis Brady a UAL graduate working with sounds, video, text and technology. One of the soundscapes he played to us today was this, a description of a staircase through the language of geometry as some kind of universal communication. He’s also making interactive narratives which I’m getting very much interested this last month, as part of my research.

So my typology for today was communal shower…! Here is my process/research/presentation. Before I have started my presentation I said that we’re all going to have a communal shower in that room, so I have given each one of them a wet tissue but I told them not to use it until the end

This is the original communal shower

and this how communal baths were in ancient Greece and the Roman empire

In ancient Rome baths were a place not only for washing, but a place for socialising as well. Today, that our world has developed, and everyone got more private, everyone has their own shower or bath. But when people shower in communal showers today (at the gym, at the school etc) it’s becoming a bit awkward. So people are mocking each other, people have unexpected erections, people are insecure of being stripped down, people  try to not let their eyes look at something they shouldn’t look and so on.

Shower is also a way of distinguishing social classes, shower at night, after work, is associated with working class

Shower before work is associated with white collar workers, bankers etc

Shower also means a mass of small things falling or moving at the same time, overwhelm, overload. What kind of ‘showers’ do we need today, after all these showers of lies, propaganda, the information media shower us, what kind of communal showers should we create today? Knowledge showers? reality showers? Honesty showers? humanness showers?

and then I thought about Rene Magritte’s Golconde which looks like a shower of these suited men but then there’s the question, are they rising? are they falling? are they floating? And actually the artist questions reality and the monotony of business life, because he was dressed like on of these men and he was living in an urban space like this

I was mainly thinking of shower in an ironic way. What kind of ‘shampoo’ does each person use? and what does each person want to shower himself/herself from? for example the banker is showering guilt? the engineer is showering artificiality? the lawyer is showering lie?

Pontius Pilate, which is an obvious association with washing, he washed his hands free of responsibility for the execution of an innocent man

 

and then catharsis in ancient greek drama as cleansing, the effect of tragedy on the audience, a metaphor used by Aristotle

 

So I’m finishing with a conclusion, a ritual and a question

 

Overall my presentation got some good feedback and everybody enjoyed it, I think I’m getting into interactive work – that’s a test probably, for my MA project.

The only thing is that, I wanted to get metaphorical responses from this project (I mean the things that I asked them to write on the tissues) instead I got back things like ‘Dirt’, ‘Chocolate’, ‘bacteria’ etc, only one was a metaphor which was ‘achievement’. I was expecting responses as in ‘shame’, ‘guilt’ etc but I should have probably made it clear in my presentation that I’m taking a metaphorical approach.

And tomorrow’s typology is prison! I’m actually a bit excited for this.

Ideas Marathon Day 2

So my spatial typology was hospital for today and I started thinking hospital as a strange, depressive place – I would like to subvert the idea of it or bring some happiness in it. What if hospitals had happiness emergency kits. I started thinking about what kind of objects being happiness to us.

I stumbled upon an article talking about the debate of materiality (gaining happiness from objects) vs experientialism  (gaining happiness from experience) and I agreedthat the experience makes you happier than the actual object. The article says that it is psychologically proven that being attached to an object is a sign of personality disorder, narcissism, social anxiety, dissatisfaction of life but experience is a lasting thing, could be shared, it can be lived and it’s more natural. Also shared experiences, like trips are sometimes memories of life.

So my aim was, instead of creating a tool kit full of objects of happiness, was to create something that by experiencing it, gives you pleasure or it has a distressful feeling. It could be placed in the waiting area of the hospital, next to each chair of the waiting room so that people who wait for bad news to have something distressful to keep them busy.

So I had these little ball things, which I don’t know how they’re called and I created a box which people can use to put their hands in and get a distressful experience.

And these are some reactions I got from people (at some point I’m saying something I don’t understand, please ignore):

People seemed intrigued by this idea, some people found it disgusting, some knew the material I’ve put inside but overall there was a positive response.

 

And for tomorrow I’ve got… Communal shower. That gets weirder.

Ideas Marathon day 1 (or zero)

So I signed up for  AcrossRCA for this year too. AcrossRCA is a week of interdisciplinary projects for the whole college. This year I signed up for ‘Ideas Marathon’, which is about representation of spatial concepts through any medium – photography, moving image, performance, dance, food, manifesto, ritual, installation, collage, narrative, poem etc etc. It could be anything.

The first day started with the description of the week and some references which could be found on Ideas Marathon blog and then each one of us talked about 3 images of our work (which we have sent from the night before). All of them had something interesting to present, although two projects I was really impressed by were the ones by Pauline Emond in Printmaking and Scot Kaplan in Sculpture (the AcrossRCA project I signed up this year has representation of 9 departments of the school).

Pauline brought to the session a ‘lamp stone’, which was basically a lamp made of stone, an intuitive action after looking at the lamp of her room for long time. The stone material actually represents the heavy thoughts she had about the lamp and she also had plans of making it in large scale too.

Scot Kaplan’s ‘Control Room’ is a room where the subject (Scot) is inside without the ability to look outside – there’s one way mirror which allows the outsider to view inside but not the insider to look outside – and lets the viewers to ask questions or request actions for the time of three minutes. The viewer basically has the total control of the subject and the whole project explores social behaviours. Scot said that 90% of the time he was asked to get naked or to answer to very personal questions, which reveals many things about the society we live in today. Links saying more about his work: 1 and 2

For my presentation I showed my Rubber band typeface, Drawing by touching and The future of the poster. People were more interested in the typeface, the sounds of it and the performance of the letterform. Also the Drawing by touching project raised questions such as ‘Would you flatten the objects so you can draw only the shape of it?’, ‘Would you speak while you were drawing to say what you experience at the time you touch the object?’, things I haven’t thought until now and I found them really positive comments. It was a good group to show my work to, as they all come from different departments and they have different things to say.

For the first day, I had to pick one space from a list of one hundred spaces and represent it in any medium. The rest of the week is essentially this, picking one word on one day and presenting your idea on the next day, and then at the end of the next day you pick another word etc.

So have chosen the word ‘observatory’ for the first day. First of all I thought of observatory for galaxies/stars/sky. I remembered ‘Another Earth’ film which says the story of a girl winning a trip to the twin planet of Earth, but at the end of the story the film is about finding someone’s self and not about the life in another planet. At some point I left it there and went to wash my new trousers which was over dyed and I couldn’t mix it with the other clothes in the washing machine (how ridiculously they make trousers these days, just prints and paints who get damaged in so short time). As I washing it in the bath tub became all blue and when I unblocked the bath tub to leave the water to go down, I noticed that the soap with the blue water going down looked like a galaxy: the dark blue colour could be the sky, the bubbles of the soap could be the stars/planets etc.

It’s a shame I haven’t taken a video out of it but I’ve taken a picture before I unblocked the bath tub:

Then I remembered of the coffees I make at the cafe I work for and the latte art that sometimes looks like a galaxy too with its bubbles. Then I remembered the theory of resemblance of Michel Foucault in his book ‘The order of things’ in which he talks about how our eyes or face or anything could be like the galaxy and basically humans as concepts are reflected everywhere in the universe. So my end point was to make a telescope that when you look into it, you actually look to yourself looking into it. I found it ironic and funny and even surprising to look into there in order to look at the universe but instead you look at someone’s eye staring at you and after 2-3 seconds you realise it’s you! And that’s the universe, you. My idea actually suggests that we should look to know ourselves and humans in general and later look at the whole universe.

Reference I got for my idea was James Turell and his spaces for ‘private view’ of the sky

 

So that’s that, and for the second space I’ve got is… hospital. One of the students had hospital for the first day and she was talking about the smell of the hospital then one of the tutors talked about the opposite smell which could be a bakery. Then I imagined walking into a bakery and instead of stepping into the pleasing atmosphere of a bakery, the shop is really silent, the sales assistants wear breathing safety masks and gloves and suddenly there’s an emergency: a croissant bleeding chocolate. Everyone is running, everyone’s alarmed to rescue it. ( I stopped there, because it seemed better to pay attention what the others were talking about than mind-travelling).

I might make another post for my idea tomorrow, it seems quite exciting.