This is the best group work experience I have ever had. We set to present a manifesto on abolishing the canon at the beginning, and praising art itself. This is carried out consistently. Since we decided our main concept, we have been making progress continuously. I believe that is because we share the same interests in the group, and this way of allocating students with people who have similar ideas should have always been adopted.
On first day, we communicated about each of our skills, and it came to our attention that Leah is a writer and one of her specialties is composing poems. Therefore, Leah was trusted with the writing of our manifesto, and the rest of us took the task of making the video. This process we agreed on is slightly flawed, because it is a linear process instead of a parallel that all of the group members working at the same time. Although we are collecting pieces of materials at the same time Leah writes our manifesto, it could be risky to heavily depend on one person until we get to the next stage. However, trust is the base of a successful collaboration, and it was then proved to be true because Leah completed the text of our manifesto outstandingly. It is powerful, but the audience/readers can still notice the bit sense of void in it.
Our manifesto is to be presented as a poem along with visual and audio collected from all sources. The content is designed that the end of it can link back to the beginning, implying the cycle of art: being created, consumed, destroyed, and created again. And the associative video is to be a loop as well in order to represent the cycle. The group attempted to remake some of the scenes from the videos we collected, but it unfortunately did not happen due to mainly two reasons: First, the schedule was tight towards the end of semester, there was not enough time for us to meet and produce videos. The other reason is, the group had a discussion about it, and realized that remaking scenes do not actually benefit us conveying our manifesto, there was no point for that.
There was another argument about how we define the clips we collected. Are they canonical or uncononical? Eventually it was decided to be neither. “We don’t see canon” is the answer. We are celebrating art itself, canon is no longer important. We draw our inspiration from Dada and Anarchism, we stop defining arts, but only to embrace them. Plus, since we extended our range to all art forms, we also collected videos which are not from films.
The highlight of our manifesto presentation is a cake. We want to use a cake to represent canon, by literally having letters ‘canon’ on it. We will invite people at the event to share it, and eventually leave nothing left. Figuratively represent the consumption of canon, and the destruction of it. “Food for thought”, it first came up as a joke, but a joke can become a great thought, as long as we are willing to give it a try, and that is my biggest take from the process of preparing and publishing this manifesto.
Link to Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fan_JaLvhZWBeZWgduU9xgGBdLoHBEK0