week 1: positions through contextualising

a.k.a. ‘ways of saying’ by John burger.

attending a tutorial having slept 2 hours the night before means sometimes you mispronounce respected critic and author John Berger’s last name as burger. but we move on.

having concluded positions through iterating, I felt like I sat in a clear space with where to take my research this week. 

but often things don’t go to plan. I had a lot of academic and text based references, but no visuals, so I decided to start there.

the line of enquiry I ended at last week was this:

during the de-brief, Matthew suggested that it lends itself a solution, and I need to step back from trying to answer my question in a question. I’m not writing a brief, I’m undergoing open-ended enquiry. also, I’m focussing on too many concepts at once, so I need to narrow down and choose one.

this felt difficult because they are intertwined in my mind. but I thought the research would provide clarity so I decided to start there.

I decided to map links between pieces of my research on a miro board to see the common themes.

the themes I identified were:

I came to the tutorial utterly confused.

the feedback I received from zarna was to focus on objects alone.

this led to…

feedback:

• Artefacts /injected experiences back to the narrative/ what makes up the gaze/ identity, culture, and everyday life/ maps/ map feelings/ Ornamentation objects. 
• Some people might have a different opinion on the ornamentation of objects  
• As a collector —- implicit meanings of them: extracting, ask people to evaluate them? 
• What makes them neutral or not 
• Be conscious of the decisions you made. 
• Designed objects isolated from their context- does that make them less neutral  
• How does graphic design put it further in this process of making them neutral 
• It might be worthwhile for you to regard these objects within the museum context (maybe the negative side?) 
• Try not to think about answering all of your topics but see object as what connects all your topics together. 
• What happens when these objects are put in different contexts or environments, and what questions of enquiry come through? —place/ object’s relationship with people? 
• Maybe start with the concept of neutrality? 
• Futuristic POV?  
• Place your objects in different environments and take a photo of them. 
• Noor to Noor; rewatch Bell hooks doc