It was an interesting experience discovering a location and noticing the surroundings in a very detailed way. My partner Alex and I had a discussion about the difference between the ways we notice things after seeing each other’s work. Before I took any photos or recorded any thing, I walked around the location and had a detailed look at the list. I spent some time finding everything I need so I can complete the list. When I’m sure I have everything I need I started taking photos and recording audio and videos. When I took those photos I wanted them to show what I noticed but I also wanted them to be visually impressive. So they also need to be decent photography works too. It took me some time to get the composition I want, so all the photos look good. Alex told me she did it in a very different way. She told me “I arrived at South Yarra station and I just following what I noticed, when I was there in the morning I was following my feet, looking at contrasting textures and patterns, I tried to be really passive about it. When it was dusk I was really drawn to the aesthetic of all the different lighting and movement; traffic and people and the flow of people going home from work.”

So our ways of collecting what we noticed is quite different. I tend to find everything I need first and collect them all at once. Alex tends to collect what she noticed immediately.

Taking a further look in the media I collected, I can actually find things I did not notice when I was collecting the media. Everything I wanted to show is well shown in the media, but the texture of my pieces also caught my attention. The texture of the ground changes when I was in different sections of The Lover’s walk. The color of the graffiti shows a strong contrast with the color of the paint on the wall. The glitters on the flowers are shown in the picture. In the reflection picture, there is even a drying rack on the balcony. These are things I did’t expect to see when I was collecting the photos. Now these elements are also something I will pay attention to, it is interesting to find new elements to notice.

This reminded me of a discussion we had in class, about how you can discover new things when you look at something you have seen before. People learn new knowledge every single day, and they change a little due to the new knowledge they newly learned. So if I go to The Lover’s Walk days after I collected those pieces I am sure I can notice something I didn’t notice last time. Because I have learned new ways of noticing. However in order to achieve this, it requires effort, at first I can’t just go there and look around for a few minutes. In that way I’m not processing the things in front of my eyes or improving my ability to notice. Maison mentioned this in his book “If you suddenly say to yourself ‘Tomorrow I shall notice…..’, the decision to notice in the future can at best facilitate noticing. You cannot guarantee it. Disciplined noticing is really about making the effort.” It takes time and effort to improve and get used to noticing new things.