This week has been a stressful one! There has been much biting of tongues and Facebook based venting!
It all began with our lecture
with Anne Douglas. Anne's work is based primarily takes on a curatorial role is excited by the process of bringing together completely
different fields such as fine-art and science bring the audience an exciting artistic experience. One question she got us to think about in the lecture was that can
a collaboration be successful even if the outcome is not? Her argument was
Yes, it can. This is because collaborations are all about the sharing of skills
and knowledge and therefore much can be gained from the actual experience of
collaboration. If the end product is successful then clearly the collaboration
worked well, but all in all it is a process of trial and error.
With this in mind, Anne Douglas was the perfect person to
sit in on our Tuesday tutorials Robin and Eleanor. But all did not go to plan. For
starters, the only people that turned up were myself and Lizzie from the
installation sub-group and Millie from the film sub-group. Not a great turn out!
We were asked to pitch our idea so far and the tutors took a positive interest
in what we had to say about the installation.They were particularly interested
in Lizzie’s knit samples because of how tactile they were. However, as Millie was the only one present
from the film group, I don’t think she was quite able to do justice to their
ideas on her own and since we had not been involved in that process, neither
could we. This led Anne to question our decision to work separately and she
stressed that we were completely missing the point of the collaborative unit.
At this point I must admit, the whole sub-group scenario was a bit of an easy
way out of having to manage such a large group!
For the remainder of the meeting, Anne talked to us about
the ways in which we could combine the film and installation as a sort of performance
piece where we could invite the audience to experience the installation as a
sort of guided tour and film the reaction. Whilst her ideas were all very
exciting, we left the tutorial feeling a little dazed and confused.
Things only got worse when the news hit Facebook. I would
post a screenshot of the conversation but it’s a little messy! The problem was
that Millie posted a panicked message about how we were being asked to change
our ideas. Somewhere along the line this got heavily misconstrued and things
got pretty heated as people were not happy about though of dropping ideas.
Needless to say, I was pretty nervous when we called for an
emergency group meeting. Thankfully, we had all cooled down a bit and were able to talk about how we could intergrate the film and installation. At first we talked about the knit being part of the set design
to go with the film. But as we went on
to brainstorm scene ideas I was a little concerned that the story line had
nothing to do with our plans for the installation at all. I think it was a
little difficult for the group to visualise how it would fit in as we haven’t yet
gotten around to sampling anything on a larger scale and as a consequence couldn't really show them what we had in mind.
As the narrative the film-people had in mind was based
around irrational fears, I suggested that the knit could be a figurative representation
of this that is present throughout the footage. The fact that it would be more
in the background for some of the scenes might add to the sinister connotations
as fear can be portrayed as something that is ever present.
I think after all that fuss, we might actually be in agreement. All we need to do now is to get cracking on some large scale
knit samples!
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