Category: Research

“STOLEN!”…

Tom Baines / / Concealed Illusions, Development, Research

Shock, horror and bewilderment! The Brayford Painting, which our performance was to be based on was stolen!  Maybe not stolen, but in the room in question where it used to hang is now home to a pencil on paper drawing of the ‘Venus de Milo’.

The ‘Venus de Milo’ is a sculpture statue of the Ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite. Already we are starting to use this as an idea to incorporate into our piece. We are turning the negativity of the painting bring removed and replaced into a positive. The statue itself is a copy/interpretation of a supernatural being so its physical form could be anything. This is the artist’s copy of her. The drawings in the Usher Gallery of her are also copies. Or rather copies of a copy.

My role in the performance is to draw pencil on paper, similar to the ‘Venus de Milo’, the beauty of the girls in my group putting on and taking off their makeup. And therefore creating my own copies of the live art in front of me.

Can a ‘Non-Place’ Exist?

Shane Humberstone / / Possessed Time, Research, Space

‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé 1995, p. 77), if a building possesses ‘non-place’ characteristics then it is there to only serve a purpose rather then add something to a community or an area.

In an ever growing fast paced world, the essence of character and legacy can be seen as depleting and being replaced by service based infrastructure that holds no personality, such as airports and shopping malls. These places are blamed for setting people up on the mundane conveyor belt of life. These places have no character and they do not create experiences or provoke emotion such as churches or battle grounds. It is worth mentioning that a ‘place’ or a ‘non-place’ does not necessarily have to be a building but any area of space, like a motorway for example.

Creepy road

Although I agree that when the essence of the past is present in a building, or a room or even a road, it does create a different atmosphere and a sense of identity. We all know of that back road to that certain place that has the really scary trees and the old broken wooden fence running alongside it, which fills us with memories and atmosphere every time we drive down it, and often we give it an identity by naming it. In turn it is evident that modern places still have their own stories and are filled with people who have their own experiences. An airport can be perceived as ‘Everyday spaces of Late-Capitalist cities’ (Coyne), can be seen as a vacuous filtering system of people, or you could look at the individuals. Each passenger has their own story of why they are there and their own influence on the space. People develop memories and experiences at airports all of which add to the identity and character of the place. Furthermore, the members of staff that work there every day become part of the building and bring a whole new type of character to the building. The beautiful thing about these large places, filled with forever changing people, is that they can be filled with so much more experience and character than any historical site, and on top of that they have the ability to change their identity so significantly and so often, which makes them more of a ‘place’ than a lot of the places Augé would perceive as a ‘place’.

When first looking into Gallery 3 at the Usher gallery you see all these pieces of art and watches with an abundance of history and fascinating stories, which simply epitomises the idea of a ‘place’. Despite this, if you think about it closer, Gallery three is just another gallery conforming to what can only be perceived as a normal museum gallery. It is dark, small and has little writing explain the stories which would indeed truly make it a ‘Place’, compared to the Collection, it can be perceived as somewhat flaccid and thus has another product of what museums should be.

‘Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed…’ (Augé 1995, p. 79), this not only insists that there is hope for our airports to one day been seen as a ‘place’, but also our fully cultured, fully historical churches once started off as a ‘non-place’ and still contains ‘non-place’ characteristics. Moreover, this shows that a building will never reach its full identity, its context and essence can only ever grow. I believe that the speed in which a ‘non-place’ can become a ‘place’ is heavily down to the acceptance of the build in the community, alongside with its actual aesthetic beauty. Take a motorway for example. A town may totally hate it because it has left a ‘scar’ on the landscape and has no positive externalities for that town, whereas it could actually be seen as a compliment to that town and become a big part of it, not only bringing ease of access to that town but also, in time, it can build a new history more fulfilled history and new experiences made with journeys taken on it.

 

Passengers walk through the newly opened Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal in Atlanta, Georgia

Airports can be seen as a plain large glass blister on the earth just ferrying people in and out, but these people give them more character than any type of brick or mystical stories. I disagree with those who think that airports or shopping malls are ‘non-places’ because they do not ‘identify a loss of personal identity’, or a, ‘decline in meaningful relations amongst the users of spaces’ (Coyne). Despite this it can easily be argued that each member of staff sees each customer as just another number. In turn each customer can see the staff as just mere faces of the company they may be dealing with, ‘The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society’ (Augé 1995, p. 111-112). Although I still believe, and have experienced, that people in these places genuinely want to help you and create an experience for you which may not be received from a ‘place’ steeped in cultural history, because of the vast size of these spaces, and the volume in which people are dealing with, going to these ‘non-places’ can be seen as a process as opposed to an experience.

Essentially i do not think ‘non-places’ really ever exist, no matter how young the space is, people are forever having influence on everywhere they go and these ‘places’ never have a chance to be a ‘non-place’. Our task is to see if we can re-insert life back into Gallery 3 and give it an extra story to tell.

Written by: Shane Humberstone

Works Cited:

Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, London and New York: Verso.

Coyne, Richard Orienting the Future: Design Strategies for Non-Place, Online: http://www.design21.dundee.ac.uk/PDF/NonPlace.pdf (accessed 3 April 2013)

Cafe Research Survey

Francesca Maria Izzo / / Development, People, Research

To help our group with Cafe research, I made a survey which was a similar design to the surveys the Collection Gallery asks the visitors to feel out when they visit. We thought of using surveys to find out why people come to the cafe and to see the age and type of people who use the cafe. An example of the survey is attached here in this blog: cafe research survey

As well as using the surveys for research purposes we are also going to use them in our piece. For instance, we are going to make placards which will include data retrieved from the surveys and put them on the tables where people filled them out. This will make the cafe into an exhibition which is our main aim for the part of the piece which takes part in the cafe. Other placards will also be created from verbatim; conversations and observations we have overheard and seen in the cafe. Each placard will be dated, with a quote and the name of the person who overheard it. The placard layout will be very similar to this which is an example of a placard found next to a piece of artwork in the Collection gallery:

placard text

Our group experimented with the placard idea in one of the sessions held at the Collection gallery by showing the rest of the Collection group the idea for the placards. The feedback was positive with people saying it was a good idea and the placards were easily noticed. Some suggestions were for the pieces of paper to be brightly coloured so it would make the pieces of text even more obvious however, at this stage we’ve decided to keep the placards white with back writing on so they resemble the placards you find next to pieces of art in the Collection gallery. Other suggestions also  included putting the placards on other objects in the cafe and not just the tables. For example, on the plant pots and high chairs as well as using the windows and the tables and chairs outside the cafe. This suggestion helped fuel our initial idea of connecting the outside space with the cafe and the education room but we were unsure how exactly. Therefore using the placards on the windows and the tables outside we should successfully be able to connect all three.

Cafe Research

Francesca Maria Izzo / / People, Research

To help us with our performance, we needed to know the type of people who would be in the cafe visiting the Collection Gallery and how many people would be our audience on a Saturday. Therefore one Saturday I sat in the cafe and observed and recorded quotes of peoples conversations. I sat in one of the booths at the end of the cafe as that was the only table free, from 1pm- 3pm. During this time the amount of people in the cafe was very consistent with the busiest, loudest time being between 1pm- 1.30pm. Therefore I think it would be a good time to do our performance between 1pm and 2pm as this will be the best time to have a good sized audience.

The observations from being sat in this part of the cafe made me think the type of people who sit in the booths want to be secluded from the rest of the cafe. Sitting there you can hear whats going on in the rest of the cafe but you cant quite make out the conversations from other people. For example, I could only hear parts of the conversation of an elderly man and woman who were sat behind me and the manager when she was on the phone. The type of people sat at the table behind me also in the booth demonstrated why they chose to be secluded from everyone else. The first woman who sat there was by herself, having a drink and some food. The next couple who sat there were having a small general conversation with the woman noticing the engagement ring on the tree outside the cafe. The last person was the manager who chose to sit away from everyone else so she could do her paperwork in the quieter part of the cafe as well as make business phone calls.

When I got up from my seat to order a drink and observe the rest of the cafe, I noticed a man on his laptop in the seat where my group have noticed one person is always sat there either with a book or newspaper alone. This illustrates that even on a Saturday the space is still chosen for the same thing. Meanwhile, the rest of the tables in the middle were taken up by families with small children. This is another factor which we will have to be aware of in our piece as there will be a mixed audience ranging from young children to the elderly. A couple of the children were observant with their surroundings in the area outside the cafe, playing with the plant pots and peeking into the window of where I was sat. This therefore shows that the children will be more likely to be interested in our  performance as they are easily drawn to things and may even notice things before their parents do, maybe causing the parents to notice us through them.

Attached in this blog are the recordings of my observations: Café observations

 

 

Automaton Movement

Chloe Doherty / / Development, Experimentation, Inspiration, Possessed Time, Research

Having been given feedback after showing a snippet of our durational performance to the class, it occurred to us that we may not be able to continue referring to what we are doing as falling under the sub-title of ‘miming.’

mime
/mīm/

Noun
The theatrical technique of suggesting action, character, or emotion without words, using only gesture, expression, and movement.

Verb
Use gesture and movement without words in the acting of (a play or role).

By no stretch of the imagination are we attempting to create characters, or emotion through our incorporation of choreographed mechanical gestures. Our use of costumes will suggest a time of day, opposed to that of a fictional characters wardrobe. The gestures which we have constructed consist of ordinary movements which everyone inevitably comes across throughout the duration of their day. We will include one simple action for each period and repeat it over the course of 15 minutes at a time. The gestures being the hand moving to and from the face with a clenched fist (brushing teeth), both hands with open palms moving up and down in front of the face simultaneously (face washing) and lastly a cupped hand, whilst the other moves to the mouth and back down again (eating breakfast).

Our intention is to show the effects which a structured concept comes across when exposed to the notion of time. Repeating the same action for a period of time obviously much longer than intended can turn something very ordinary into something abstract, some might even say into a piece of art, much similar to those on show in both The Usher Gallery and The Collection. Although this may seem like quite a laborious task, it’s incredibly intriguing to see how warping such a simple thing like the amount of minutes it takes to brush your teeth can have on your outlook on the gesture used, the movements incorporated or even how strenuous it may be to experiment with something so unnatural.

When choreographing the movements which we decided to use, we tried to keep in mind the soundtrack to our piece, and our chosen galleries theme; the ticking of a clock. In order for a clock to create a sound, the cogs inside of it must be working together both effectively and efficiently together. In The Usher Gallery there is a skeleton clock on show, where all of the cogs are extremely visible. We hope to achieve the same kind of structure that a clock holds by the use of our mechanical gestures.

Automatons are a self-operating machine. They adopt a series of movements, or sometimes even just the one key gesture (similar to that shown above). The mechanisms inside of each automaton are similar to that of a clock, and are even used to produce to ‘cuckoo’ in a cuckoo clock. Automatons take a gesture which we are familiar with and have the tools to distort how we view it, their fixed facial expression and lack of inhibition express no life like characteristics, yet are still created with a somewhat human appearance and the ability to mimic a human gesture.

So, rather than us disregarding the use of props in order to create a convincing mime, we are currently experimenting with the use of mechanical expression. That being said, we fully intend on exploring what it will look like to use the same task, with the ‘robotic’ movements, whilst attempting to incorporate relevant props.

Author: Chloe Doherty