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.

So what about now…

Looking for a project brief

Things I’ve done since I came back to college was to research Fluxus, a movement recommended by my personal tutor Teal Triggs, because of my experimental work – like my cube for manipulating language which reminds of Fluxkit (below).

I found their experimental videos very interesting which are very much inspired by music:

or video pieces challenging the video frame, like the one that shows how much time is 10 feet of video tape

 

I have also looked at the book ‘Metaphors we live by’ by George Lakoff, in order to understand more metaphors, as I found my response to the ‘Re-map Europe’ brief last term one that I would like to take further. I like the idea of the myths used to embody the truth that is so unsaid today, especially in politics. I would like to look at more myths and how those translate into today’s situations.

Also I feel I should find a way to link that to themes found in my dissertation. Keywords:

• multitasking
• speed
• efficiency
• interaction
• dialogue
• single platform
• hybridisation
• scattered behaviour

What could be visualised with the mechanism of layered-tiles I used for ‘The Future of the poster’ and ‘Re-map Europe’ projects is the idea of hypertext, so much found in the Internet. We’re becoming so much used to it these days, reading a text then interrupting the reading to watch a video, then clicking on another link – all leading to mixed information from different platforms to our brains. How much can I question our reading habits and the development of the written word?

I’m actually lost somewhere in-between projects, should I go very creatively/expressively and continue my brief responses from Design Without (leading to a very poetic concept about myths etc) or base a new project on my dissertation for the sake of following a ‘strategy’ for my MA. The research is there, I feel I should use it to create something out of it, even if it’s not too much related to it.

Other questions I can explore, pulled out from my dissertation:

Are there any forms of evolving communication I can explore/create?

If languages are political, what kind of inputs should these new forms of communication include?

Should scripts/languages change after some period of time – on their own – depending on the dominant global language/the status quo/world beliefs/technology? Should we be slaves of technology? Is the designer needed?

Other RCA ‘stuff’

A new industry project came in by Hyundai I signed up for, initially it seems a branding project for the company, but as it seems the tutors (and we) want to go beyond the typical assumptions of what branding is, through some workshops and discussions.

Also me and two other students have sent a proposal for the student-led series of talks ‘Red Tape’ with the title ‘Maverick’, a proposal challenging what kind of ethics the contemporary Visual Communicator should have, meet those designers that broke the boundaries of the traditions of graphic design and the status quo, if they’re disrupting the industry and if their rebellious behaviours can have an impact on politics and culture. In a few words it suggests that you need to be a ‘maverick’ in order to bring change as the traditional protests don’t cause any change anymore. Also we expressed that we want to go beyond the First Things First Manifesto and conventional ways of design talks.

 

Other than these, I feel quite lost for now as a lot of things started happening at the same time but I haven’t got an idea how to start my self-initiated project, making me thinking that this year will be even more sleepless, with a Work in Progress show in January ahead.

Let’s see.