Week 6: Locate, explore and record
Experiential drawing, capture, writing, recording, play, photography’.
In this week’s lecture we ask you:
How do I use the unnoticed?
How do I use recording tools to capture information?
How can you really look at something from multiple ways of seeing?
How can you capture and record in multiple ways?
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
“Seeing comes before words”
Seeing gives us our place in the surrounding world and we explain that world with words.
I like that in John Berger’s interview he says that ‘drawing is a constant correction of errors’, it’s a good way of describing the design process. When producing a piece of work you’re forever correcting things which don’t look right: the size, the colour, the order, etc., going back to last week’s task, which stage did the error occur? During research, production or execution?
He also says that there’s not really a point where you think that there’s nothing more to correct, we can relate to this in that when we revisit a piece of work or see one produced a while ago, there’s usually a part which we think lets it down.
The process could go on and on but as said by Facebook: Done is better than perfect.
The Situationists
Make daily life a creative, continuously original, delirious, ecstatic experience.
Originally the Situationists was primarily an art movement but gradually their focus became more political and they began to react against the commercialisation of the art world, favouring more spontaneous methods of working. Parts of the film shown in Susanna’s lecture this week show the ways the Situationists responded to the state of society with quotes and phrases from various publications shown on posters and through graffiti, with exhibitions and comics and also their roll in sparking the student riots in Paris in 1968.
Reactions to the state of society are always happening: the anti-establishment and non-conformist views shown on early Vivian Westwood t-shirts, wearing clothes with deliberately offensive slogans and images started out as a way to protest in a much more innocent society than today, everything which normally stayed hidden was shown with a vengeance. Music lyrics using language intended to shock and disgust different levels of society, swearing on the TV and radio brought absolute uproar.
We still see graffiti, fly-posting and demonstrations all as a way of getting different views across, but we’re a lot more hardened to it. Talk-shows on on the BBC even ‘may contain offensive language’.
‘Girl Chewing Gum’
John Smith
Love this… Describe it to someone and they’re likely to think it’s the dullest thing available – someone talking over a film of random happenings on an everyday street – but whether it’s meant to be or not, it’s a lot of fun to watch.
It reminds me of the old newsreels when the voiceover was added to the film after the event and the narrator sounds much too enthusiastic.
The voiceover sounds like a movie director shouting the instructions at the cast and their vague looks at the camera make them seem like it’s a rehearsal and they’re all still learning the directions.
“This young man has just robbed the local Post Office and is attempting to appear inconspicuous…”
Charles & Ray Eames: Powers of 10
Made in 1977, the images must have seemed unbelievable.
These images are/would be seen as nothing special or out of the ordinary today, we’re all used to TV documentaries with extraordinary graphics and with Google Earth putting everywhere at you fingertips – imagine 1977…
My own quick version of Powers of 10. From my studio and back again.
Reflection
It takes a lot more to shock and surprise people in our society now, we can see everything which happens everywhere, if not on the news then on the internet and social media.
If a message isn’t intended to shock but to amaze, well, it’s likely you’ve seen something similar somewhere at some point. Remember that thing from…?
Perhaps we’re more of a dismissive society than we used to be, because of global media? We see images of war, famine, neglect, etc., every day so can we still be expected to react in the same way as people in the 1970’s for example?
Week 6: Workshop Challenge
Identify your chosen geographic location. Select a street nearby to you within 1 or 2 miles from where you live.
Document it, explore it, evidence it.
Come up with something unique to your street.
Present your interpretation of your street in the media and format of your choice.
I was originally going to set off in no particular direction and see where it lead, photographing on the way, taking ‘the path of least resistance’, and recording sound as well as images as I went. But because the ‘unplanned’ area was so large I found I was actually thinking of where to go next rather than things being found along the way, I changed tactic and focussed on one street.
Images from plan one.
Sound recordings – trial run
Recording a soundtrack of what goes on outside the studio, chose to do an AM, Noon and a PM recording to compare the different stages of the day.
Second thought: High Street is closed for road works so the traffic is being diverted making it pretty quiet outside here, moving to a busier part of town…
New Location: Castle Street, Shrewsbury
Chose a busier spot: Castle Street is the only land-entry into town, the rest is accessed by crossing the River Severn. It’s the main route in to town from the North so a much busier place to document. The start point is High Cross at the top of the hill, the original site of the town gallows before they moved to the prison.
I’ve never noticed the plaque marking nobility who were hanged at this spot.
The new plan was just to walk down the hill and see what I could find on the way. I wanted to capture small details on buildings and objects to create some abstract shapes and comparisons. There are a lot of different era’s of buildings along this route, from Mediaeval timber frames to the 1980’s so a lot of textures to photograph.
Sound: Castle Street, Shrewsbury
Soundtrack from noon outside the Coffeehouse, Castle Street. You can hear the people inside, traffic passing and deliveries being made.
You can hear when my lunch arrives around 52 seconds in.
Compilation of Image and Sound
To illustrate Castle Street I created a montage from some of the images and used it to create a poster, I chose blue as it’s the town colour. Adding an image of the graph showing the levels of sound brings the sound onto the visual. The titles are aligned to the loudest point of the recording, as a motorbike rides past.
Reflection:
Nobody takes any notice when it’s your phone you’re using to take photos, but people stopped to look at what I was photographing when it was an SLR camera.
I overheard people start talking about the timber frames I’d just photographed and the grooves worn into walls and carvings, asking each other what I might be doing taking photos of those things.
At one point a woman called her two children back to look at one of the fire switches I’d just photographed, she started to explain to them what it was and what it was used for, they hadn’t noticed them before.
We walk around in our own bubble most of the time, trying to avoid people and things when we feel busy. I’ve lived here for 16 years and started to see things during this assignment which I must have walked past a thousand times.
Don’t walk so fast in future…
