A person can see countless things in a day. Different people’s faces, birds on the street, cars on the road, the list goes on and on. However we are also not seeing so many things in our daily life, or in other words unintentionally missed them. John Maison once said “We notice many things in a course of a day, though we will mark relatively few of them and probably record virtually none until we set about this practice intentionally, and of course there are far more incidents and objects which we fail to notice at all.” I think what he said in the book really made sense. We tend to ignore some details when we have a purpose in mind. If I am looking to catch a train then I will probably miss that there is a empty water bottle on the ground when I am on my way to the train station. So my partner Alex and I came up with a list of things we need to collect in the location each other chose mainly based on surroundings. It is very detailed, I think it can really help us to exercise how to notice small things or things we tend to ignore because we though it was too normal.
The list contains:
3 five-second long videos of things in front of us
1 photo of something above us
1 photo of noticing nature
1 photo of shadow/reflection
3 photos of things on the ground
1 sound recording of the location
The location I chose was Chapel Street/Toorak road in South Yarra and Alex chose The Lover’s Walk. I think if we pay attention to details and go to a location with a purpose of noticing things we will notice so many more things than we do usually and some of them can be surprisingly interesting.
From what I know about The Lover’s Walk, I think there will definitely have many cigarette butts and pieces of glass on the ground. Because What I heard about the location is people like to go there at night when they are drunk.(Kind of a negative rumor) There are not so many people there so there will be some garbage left on the ground and some graffiti on the wall. The place is right beside a train station so I should be able to see and hear some trains passing by. There are many trees and flowers there, which makes it very easy to notice nature. What I don’t know is what can I find above me other than trees’ brunches. Am I going to be able to find any reflections? Because I don’t know if there is any windows or glasses there.
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