cliff

I’ve not time to finish my account of our working processes - this will have to be caught up with later.  But where we’d got up to was, after sharing all our different ideas for mini-interventions, we would swap them - each taking an idea that was not our own and developing it.  My starting point was a simple idea from Stephen: books on benches.  Put a book on a bench and see how people react.

This instantly reminded me of bookcrossing, and I joined the bookcrossing website to see if their was a thriving bookcrossing scene near the site of our intervention, or in Southend full stop. Alas not, the nearest site was in Benfleet some way away. I had thought in terms of creating some kind of book exchange box, but by this I would be simply creating a new bookcrossing site.

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One of my two learning objectives in my Self-Directly Learning Contract was to change the way I work with others, to make collaboration an integral to my practice rather than a tool or a strategy.

What spurred me to include this?  Certainly there’s the influence of the Critical Practice group at Chelsea College (one of the places I work for) - they operate on open-organisation guidelines, and aim to consider their governance critically and explicitly.  I attended their Publicamp in the summer, and I’m sure this will have some small effect on my thoughts on the project brief. Creating the Free Media tool would have placed my mind in this direction.  Have I also been feeling some kind of malaise about previous group work?  I very much felt the need with the Free Media tool to work on my own.  I’m not sure what to make of this.

What is clear though, is that I’ve spent not inconsiderable energy on this objective, and I think it’s important I make a record of this, else I’ll fail to critically examine how I’ve been working.

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This is a pretty simple little free media tool, but I was pretty happy with how it worked.  It’s a device to provide an easy, portable stand for presenting work in a variety of mediums.

What I had in mind was producing a simple presentation system suitable for flash mob exhibitions.  Flash mobs, if you’re not familiar, are large groups of people who suddenly come together for a small amount of time, usually to do something unusual.  And so a flash mob exhibition is a sudden group exhibition which comes out of nowhere, and then after a short amount of time is disbanded.

The normal convention used in these affairs appears to be the clothesline (or whatever the line is that you use to put up your photos when developing), see for instance:

Here

and here

This has a pretty nice DIY aesthetic and is eminently suitable for photography - but I think there’s definitely room for alternatives - the ‘clothesline’ has low visibility and arguably isn’t suitable for media in larger formats.  So here’s what I came up with:

Clothes Airer Flash-mob Exhibitor (CAFE)

What you need:

A clothes airer like the following:

A fold up clothes airer with little plastic joiners

It’s far better to get one where the plastic joiners are separate rather than doubling up as caps for the tops and bottoms

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Okay - so our task was to intervene in a media ecology using the basic functions of the telephone.  This time I was in a group with Anita, Em, Manali, Stephen and Chen.  After some discussion, we decided that we’d intervene in the media ecology of a bus, and do this by changing the function of mobile phones from devices to communicate with people far away to devices to communicate with people in your immediate surroundings.  Buses are a space in which people don’t often communicate with each other, so we’d set ourselves quite a challenge.

Of course, mobiles are often used in this way - the choice of model and ringtone can be used to “make a statement”, we can play with them to signal that we are preoccupied, etc etc.  But how we tried to work in this instance was to introduce a code by which people could send signals using the functions on their phones.  The following flyer was mocked up:

Five codes by which people could send messages

This was to be put on the back of seats where people would see it (but hopefully the bus driver wouldn’t.)

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Does such juxtaposition as above also suggest a narrative, and with it purposeful activity? Possibly!

No matter.  A painting of a vase full of flowers isn’t aspiring to be a vase full of flowers, so a teleological account of aimlessness isn’t necessarily problematic or unhelpful.  But its worth bearing the above in mind.  That this narrative mode comes so easily and naturally to us might explain why quite a few people on the course had trouble with the notion of anyone ever acting aimlessly at all.

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