When Robbie first explained to us the idea of this first assignment, I was initially quite excited on the possibilities of what to annotate. After our first taste of annotating observations (in this blog post), I had initially chosen to focus on my room (a place I spend most of my time), an intimate setting and my front porch, which is in the open but is still quite quiet. However I quickly found began to find the experience of trying to annotate my surroundings at home to be challenging.

This was because it is such a familiar environment to me that I wasn’t able to put my biases aside and try to focus on more abstract sounds. What made this worse was that I found I had nothing really exciting to expand on my ideas with, so instead of further annotation, I found myself stripping the observational detail to its most minimal and filling in the annotation sections with what I had written in the first place. I also found annotating my room to be very frustrating, especially at the time I did it in (no one was in the house). There wasn’t much sound at all and the only distinguishable feature was the hum of the air-conditioning slightly outside my room.

This changed significantly for me on last Tuesday’s class (which I touched on briefly in my last blog here). A conversation I had with Robbie inside the reading room helped me understand the nature of what the essence of the task was by helping me expand upon idea of history through of pieces of eraser debris lying around on the desk I was at. This helped me think more laterally and shifted it into thinking about how specific elements observable fit into the entire space rather than annotating the observation based solely on what it consists of. As a result I reworked my initial homework task, and was asking more questions of my observations.

I didn’t get to present in Thursday’s class, but I have some ideas from my observations that I was pretty excited to share. In my visual observations after Tuesday’s class (conducted in the study of my home) I was fascinated by the idea of whole histories existing within one place, and from my initial observation of eraser debris on my father’s desk, I began to wonder whether it is possible to view them as physical mementos of history being written or erased at a particular time.

My ‘annotated visual observations’ presentation

As mentioned previously, I went back to my home to rework my auditory observations and in looking over my front porch, I began to wonder whether the silence I experienced for a second or so was something that could be expanded upon. I began to ask myself questions as to why silence in context by oneself is much more tolerable than if surrounded with others; whether it is possible to experience stillness in silence while surrounded by others.

My ‘annotated auditory observations’ presentation

These ideas I’m quite excited about could be the genesis of future projects, and the amount of renewed belief I have after overcoming the initial stumbles of the assignment has made me excited as to what’s in store for the rest of the semester.