After Dan's arrival

Before our meeting in the Rocks I'd been doing a bit of thinking about the project (those long car trips from Canberra do have some upsides...)

I don't think our problem is going to be getting stuck for ideas, I think we are more likely to have too many ideas. So I tried categorising some of the ideas we've all had and seeing how they fit into an overall pattern - and the picture I came up with has the word DISTORTION in bold in the middle of the page. Around this, are three other main ideas that all relate to distortion, and all relate to one another (imagine lots of double-headed arrows). They are:

INTERVENTIONS
* Blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is fake in the environment

FABRICATIONS
* Blurring boundaries between what is real and fake in the history of the place and its surrounds

PERSPECTIVES
* Questioning what is real? Whose view is real/fake?
* Exploring the impact of seeing something at different times/from different angles/in different contexts

The line between each of these categories is blurry:
- Some people will see certain interventions, and this might alter their perspective
- All history is to some extent a fabrication - it depends on your perspective

Of course this a simplistic summary of some really major ideas that we have talked about. But I thought it might help us decide on which aspects of these ideas we'd most like to explore.

After talking about the project with her Mum, Dan has become a bit wary about the 'Histories' angle. Thoroughly researching and understanding the multiple histories of Bundanon and its surrounds would definitely take a lot of time and resources. If we did decide to go down this path we would need to really narrow the scope to something very specific so that we don't end up looking stupid, or perpetuating the tradition of overlooked and forgotten stories...

Which brings me to my final point. None of us want to end up producing something which is amateurish or undergraduate-ish. But we are (at least I think we are) proposing to explore a medium which is new to all of us - site-specific artwork. I would hope that we all have enough skill in our individual disciplines, and have developed enough artistic judgement that we would be able to recognise if what we were producing was naive or unprofessional. But I think we really need to therefore decide on what we are aiming to achieve in our two weeks (with contingency plans). If we don't agree on an expected outcome before we go away, methinks this may be a recipe for disaster... What do you all think?

Creative Brainstorming

Two weeks ago now (time goes so quickly), Dan and Jules and I met up for lunch in The Rocks.

Since it was a Monday our brains hadn't quite kicked into gear, so while we were waiting for Dan, Jules and I did a few creative brainstorming exercises...

We picked 5 random words from the book Julian was reading and separately listed various aspects of that word. We then picked a few of these to talk about in more depth, discussing how it might relate to our project.

An example: WIND

Some of the aspects of wind are: it lowers the temperature, it makes you feel unsettle, it can make music, it can be used to generate power, it is spelt the same way as wind (wind it up). Ideas that flowed from this included ways in which you could try and make an audience feel unsettled - mist machines, lighting, music, viewing a work by flashlight...


Another example: HOUSEHOLD

Aspects: Big brother/Reality TV, fights, chores, division of labour, one person's dominance (hold), morning coffee, sharing.
Relates to the artwork: Different people have different roles in determining aspects of the artwork, we assign the audience to various groups depending on assumptions we make about their appearance (for example, one group might be given a tour of Bundanon from the owner's perspective, another group might hear stories from the cook's perspective etc).

Even if none of this is used, it was definitely a useful method for getting some creative juices flowing...