Week 6. Half way. Wheels seem to have fallen off the wagon and right now I’m not certain how to get any of them back on!

We discussed the next key assessment task (A list of 100 concerns). I outlined what was meant by ‘matters of concern’ and also ways to think what a constraint is, how they are used, why, and their implications and consequences.

We looked at several examples of ‘constrained’ works by Johnathan Harris: We Feel Fine (which seemed to be showing its age as it didn’t run very well at all), The Whale Hunt, 10 x 10, Cowbird, and I Love Your Work.

While we tried to think about these in terms of what they did (what they do), and then why, the conversation was about pattern making. Here, an architecture to allow patterns to form is created first, and then the content is made that then ‘fills’ this architecture. This is different to how we have been taught to work. Each is basically a list work, and each allows for complex forms of patterns (visually and temporally) to form, not because of the content but because of the architecture and constraints that are put in place first.

Why does this matter? Because it frees up making and creativity. Once you have the architecture you make, in agile lightweight (or even slow, careful, it doesn’t much matter) ways and the constrained architecture does the building for you.

For the next task we are going to try to do something similar. The aim is to define a constraint that we are able to make to simply and easily. The topic or theme of what the constraint addresses is open (you can define it), but there will be a lot of work done on how a constrained list making then happens around this topic or idea.

To Be Done for Friday

• Have at least three topics, ideas, things, that you would like to make a work about.
• Have a rationale (reason) for why this topic (idea, thing) matters to you in a positive way.
• have already set up an account on Flickr on another service that will let you display a gallery of the brief videos you will be making (flickr comes with 1TB free so you aren’t going to run out of space)