Today marks the first tute since completing our first assignment, and I was super excited about where we’d be going. As mentioned previously in my last blog, I felt I was starting to get the hang of the observation process having labored with the idea of what the purpose of annotating multiple times was.

We started out similarly to how we left off last week, with those who hadn’t been afforded the opportunity to present placed in small groups with others who had in order to gain feedback on some of the ideas we were thinking of. These were to form the basis of our in class activity, where we’d create four words and attempt to capture photos of them and send to Robbie for a brief presentation in class of our findings.

I presented my findings alongside Isobel, and the words “silence”, “calmness”, “traces” and “repetition” were words we as a group decided were the most potent from our presentations.

“Silence”

While at first we assumed the process of gathering photos for these prompts would be easy, it was soon pretty obvious that it would be a more stern task than we realized. We managed to capture the photos within the 20 minutes Robbie had given us, with some prompts making for more prolific media creation than others.

“Repetition”

In viewing the presentation of the photos we had, I began to wonder whether I had approached the task in the same way as the first in class task we ever had, and after a while it became obvious that I had – taking the prompts too literally when trying to compose the photos. This was something Robbie highlighted in bringing up Clare Rae, a multimedia artist whose experimental work challenged us to, again, think more laterally through her extensive explorations in whatever prompt she tackled. The class ended with Robbie asking us to stand on chairs as well as to lie on the floor, much to the confusion of the passing by students and staff.

“Traces”

“Calmness”

I think what today’s class really demonstrated to me is that to simply go with my initial idea or gut feeling for a task is not necessarily going be sufficient – I really have to try and work on breaking down why the task has been set and what is really there to be discovered. That is, to lie on the floor or stand on a chair and see things from a different angle and confuse everyone around me as to what is happening.