Seeing the Unseen Pitch

From not only the whole of the course, but the weeks leading up to today, noticing is something that I have found to be particularly subjective – individuals can notice and discover different things about a landscape, artwork, photograph or city that you do not pick up on. From this diverse rangee of opinions through the experiments + recipes I conducted, as well as my own reflective process, I have drawn to this conclusion and intend to focus on this thought for my final project in Task Four. I will give you an overview of my three experiments and how I am going to develop these ideas further in my future media making:

Week Five ‘Drawing’ – centering around the ideas of how people describe media and how that can influence another individual. In this study, I got three test subjects to almost do ‘chinese whisperer’ scenario where each individual describes their own drawing to the best of their ability to another person, who has not seen the drawing and can only go by their description. From this experiment, I concluded that individuals not only focus on similar aspects but also describe and take away many elements which others do not notice.

Week Six ‘Describing Familiarity’ – individuals were asked to describe ideas about the three words MELBOURNE, RED + HOME and what first came to mind upon hearing these. From this idea, not only did people take different elements of the word differently but it shows how people perceive different things based on their circumstances.

Week Seven ‘Describing Suburbia’ – the outlier and experimental piece of my experiments was the final piece, where I walked around my local suburb (in this case, it’s Carlton) for around half an hour – taking photos every five minutes. This experiment was not only time constrained and individualised (I did it by myself) but then I had to describe and try and explain the photos the next day in my reflection. Although these photos were quite mundane and ‘everyday things’ (such as buildings) it honed my skills of describing and gave an individualised meaning to how I personally describe things with my own bias.

All of these ideas stem from my interest in attentive noticing, as discussed in John Mason’s reading as the individuals own driven response to notice the world around themselves. Although this reading was in the first week, it particularly stuck to me throughout my own media making process as I began to put my own biases aside to make media that the viewer could come up with their own interpretation and idea. These do not have to necessarily make “sense” such as a non-narrative structure (which was discussed in Week Five) but is something I am interested in the develop further. Furthermore, the concepts and ideas that have stemmed from my media making and developing, particularly over the last month have been interconnected, but separate – stemming from many different ideas.

Looking forward to Task Four, I have developed a number of ideas, which I would love to receive feedback on. My major idea and the one I want to develop further follows wide angle shot photography and how individuals notice different aspects, how they describe it and what they notice about the environment. This could range between a large scale project (say twenty + photos) or a selection of environments over the number of weeks – for example: nature, cityscape, travel, just to name examples. This is something that I am not only interested in, but I think will tie into my overall theme of how individuals are influenced by a piece of media and what they can take away from it as the viewer.

I guess they say that when you are looking for something, you’ll often make more of effort to try and discover the meaning the concept or idea that you are trying to find. This concept is something that has stood out to me through Seeing the Unseen and something I want to explore further in my media making throughout Task Four.