In our Wednesday morning studio, we conducted a gallery-type exhibition of our projects and looked at the different ways in which everyone went about exploring their homes. As an individual piece, I felt that my end product was generally underdeveloped and lacking in production quality. When viewing my media in combination with others’, however, I found it to be much more powerful as a collaborative body of work. I found that this was because integrating everyone’s images, films and sound turned the project into not just an exploration of one space, but a discussion regarding the notions of what home is. I feel that there are universal ideas regarding ‘home’ that are intrinsic to all living beings. The nooks we instinctually carve out for ourselves are an extension of us, as we live through (via) them. This may be why we feel so strongly connected to the spaces that we occupy – we make them a character in our story, and through this bring them to life. This also makes me think of ideas now being explored in the course concerning ‘places’ vs. ‘non-places’, the non-places being the transition space between the places that we connect with. These ideas could also, however, just be my completely unfounded philosophical ramblings and I should probably do the readings.

We also looked at pieces from artists such as Liu Bolin, Jochen Gerz and Adam Magyar which I particularly enjoyed. The way in which they used performance art or media artefacts to disrupt and explore public and private spaces was mesmerising. Specifically, I found Magyar’s ‘Stainless, 42 Street’ so interesting, as the train station is such an archetypal transitional ‘non-place’ that humans so often find themselves in. Train stations almost epitomise the mundanity of every day life in the Western world. The contrast of expressions on the faces of commuters was a great juxtaposition to the mundanity of this space and the routine actions that occur within it.