a written response...

I need to write about the project space last Friday and also today's triad tutorial... I'm going to start with the latter...


So this was the first official triad of the semester, though, due to participating in the workshop at the start of the year I was familiar with the process. The other two participants were Kyle and Ellyse, (both first years), and Catrina, (photography tutor), was present to facilitate... The order of running was Kyle - speaker, me - listener, Ellyse - observer. Rotating, me speaking next with Ellyse listening, then Ellyse speaking last. All three of us seemed comfortable monologuing for the required 10 minutes and I hope that my feedback on Kyle's presentation was useful. In my crit I did my best to give an over view of my working practices and methodologies as well as talking about the collaborative work that was presented in Friday's project space. Given that I only had 10 minutes, (and I was freewheeling), I couldn't in any way explain every aspect of my practice. Ellyse's feedback seemed to reflect this. At one point both E & K heard me say temple work when in fact I had said temporal work, I can only imagine the confusion this must have caused before i felt compelled to correct them. It only goes to prove that one should annunciate... or that people should listen carefully, I'm not sure, but I'll take the blame this time... The feedback I received was well put but nothing that I hadn't already considered. This, again, I feel can be attributed to the time constraint and to my inability to say it simple. This is something I will continue to work on but I also think that I might consider being more specific in the next triad. In my role as observer I decided to take a more traditional tack, as the other two had made more subjective observations about the conversations and offered feedback in a similar way to the listeners role. This was fine but I decided to take notes of just the body language rather than comment on the content of the presentations. I was, however, criticized because it was impossible to know how the two things married up... hey, you win some you lose some. I agree that if I had noted what was being said as well as what they were doing it may have been more useful but as I pointed out, that is a skill I have yet to develop...


And so to the project space...


It went well... there were a few pre-show problems, namely Kim's photos kept falling down. We had hung them first with white tack, which we quickly decided was not good. Then we hung the whole show with double sided tape, which seemed to work wonderfully, until the next morning when we found half of them on the floor. So we finally settled on velcro, which meant we had to take down the remaining photos too and rehang them all, so they all stood off the wall the same. The other thing that should be noted, only for notation's sake really, is that after we opened the show we had a retraction of consent regarding one of the photos. The subject, a friends daughter, was upset by seeing herself blown up to almost life size and therefore her mother asked that it be removed. It took about 30 seconds to realize that the only thing to do was to take the image out of the show, and in hindsight I feel slightly guilty about the fact it took so long. At no point was upsetting anybody an aim of this project, and so the solution was obvious. This did leave us with a gap in the hang which in itself didn't bother me, if anything the 4 squares of velcro acted as a record of the photograph in a similar way to how the rest of the show recorded the ESW event. My only concern, given that this happened 1 hour before the crit, was that the conversation in the crit would become one about ethics and consents. This is not an uninteresting issue but we had operated according to the colleges ethical requirements and felt that to go down that road would have been going off point... I had suffered in my last project space from a lecture on ethics in the morning which meant a lot of my participants ended rebelling for the sake of it... still, in the end it didn't happen so all was well... In the crit there was a good amount of conversation, all around the ideas Kim, Yaya and I had talked about. It was acknowledged that we had collaborated successfully and all in all was well received. Due to the fact that I've been mulling over the idea of the transformation of performative work though documentation for quite a while now, none of the crit conversation was particularly surprising to me. I took this in two ways... firstly, I was pleased that our plan had come off. The work we had presented raised the questions we had intended it too. Secondly, I was a little disappointed, I always hope that someone will drop a bomb in these things and that there will be huge revelations which open up new and exciting paths... this didn't happen so much. But there was something niggling at me with regard the project that I couldn't put my finger on. Kim W pointed it out to me straight away today. The performative work I make, (at least the better work), has an element of instability... not just literally. There is something provocative and engaging about the live work that wasn't really present in this project space. Thanks Kim for pointing this out as it's given me the thing I need to chew on... mull over... you know what I mean. If the work transfers from one form to another how do you transfer/document/communicate those aspects, the things that seemed key to the performance but may not come across in a poster... One thought is the idea of model making that Andrew and I discussed. Because the ESW felt so sculptural maybe it is appropriate to document it sculpturally... Maybe the posters weren't the most appropriate method of presenting the voxpops... who knows? This gives me plenty to think about though... If you bothered to read all this, thank you... you nutter.