Some reflections and general notes as we go into Reading The Signs
- [ ] Otherness or nan?
- [ ] Idea of building a portrait links to the boxes of personality they used to have in the dementia care home. Little frames full of images that summed up a person’s life, except they rarely had photographs of themselves because not a lot of them existed. It’d be images like places they had work or fashion they had grow up with or tv characters from their time. Bits of the culture they lived in but mostly the ones they chose to participate in because those are the ones that could represent them best. We are all products of our environment so grabbing bits of an environment is almost enough to sum up a person.
- [ ] Otherness seems like kind of an obvious one to go with purely on the basis of who I am as a person. Has the opportunity to explore the idea of being othered in a community of others and how uniquely isolating that can feel. Something about layers? Idk but just the word makes my brain go on this whole tangent - the idea of fitting into “normal” society the same way a puppy or something would. So you fall through to the next level and that’s like the “cool outcasts” or whatever but they really don’t like you so you fall through to the last layer and it’s just darkness and you sit there for a really long time thinking you must be the only person in the whole world down on that layer. Maybe you can see the glow of the other outcasts above you almost like a ceiling, but you can’t reach it. This could work as an animation or something idk. Eventually you see a flicker down on your level and at first you ignore it but ultimately you build up the courage to run to it before it dies out. And that’s how you find your people. And then everything feels lit up. Like your eyes have adjusted to the darkness.
- [ ] Asking Cabal to write about their experience of “otherness” could be a pretty interesting way of collecting research for this topic this week. I’m thinking a google form asking them to write about it, and maybe a place to insert a small drawing expressing how they feel about it. I’m expecting MS paint more than Mona Lisa but it could be an interesting source of visual research.
- [ ] However there’s also really interesting potential to the whole idea of building a portrait of someone without using their face. Like these are all people I know really well and have spent hours talking to. We know each other inside out but I don’t know their faces, they don’t know mine and most of us don’t even use our real names. Seems like an obvious link to the idea of portraits without faces because that’s kind of the point. Maybe I could do dedicated sketchbook pages (like max one side of a4 per person or something) creating a mini “portrait” of prominent members or something. For some reason the person who comes to mind first is ginger and his bloody clock.
- [ ] I’ve gathered some visual research from Pinterest and tumblr. Tumblrs and interesting one because the image search is absolute dogshit, but you can search for pretty much anything and there’s gonna be someone who’s reposted a relevant sadcore quote or poem about the topic you’re thinking of. I’m thinking of using these similarly to how we used the song lyrics in the Sound and Vision topic. The visual research from Pinterest is varied, but one common occurrence is this odd photography with what I presume to be a fish-eye lens. It exaggerates and alters the proportions of the figures. I think it’s just an interesting way of visually representing the idea of otherness. Beyond just dressing strange or having a weird silhouette or something, the whole structure of the body is altered. Could be an idea to play around with photography as a medium I don’t usually experiment with. Also feeds into the fact I really need to get better at including “meaning” in my work and not just having things exist to look pretty. This works because of the idea of the visual oddities leads the viewer to question why else the figure may be an “other”. Idk I’m writing this at 3am.
