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Event documentation

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Compilation of research + concept elaboration

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Adult Colouring In - Final Game Concept

This game was inspired by adult colouring in books. We have here 3 colouring in sheets and the winner is the team that has the largest area shaded within the lines and we will appoint Sarah to be the judge of that.

The concept behind this game is the exploration of stress and work culture especially in large corporate institutions. We have here adult colouring which is an icon of stress-relief and relaxation and you’re turning that around by placing a time constraint on it and we have Sarah to act as the employer/supervise it to judge the works based on essentially the productive output which relates to the topic of collaboration and community as you are building a community focussed only on material output and the relational model between time and productivity instead of genuine effort towards a task, that occurs in a lot of companies placing emphasis on material results and superficial figures and numbers to define achievement.

Furthermore, drawing is typically a very solitude task that is usually enjoyed in the comfort and privacy of one’s home. We contrast this by forcing a group approach and collaborative effort towards it. What results is you have multiple hands and multiple personalities all trying to come in and finish the task creating an interference to the natural process and system of drawing which is more organised and careful and involves planning of the particular colours that will be used in each section. This relates to the week of glitches and interference as it can be viewed that time is acting as the stressor or disruptor of the task creating an interference that is also graphically represented on the paper with irregular and wayward lines that leave the confines of the black outline and it is the idea of these imperfections that are the glitches of the work.

These imperfections also reflect the imperfections of real life business management as you have large companies sieving through hundreds and hundreds of applicants to find the perfect potential employee but will still face hr issues and lacking group synergies.

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Notes from our brainstorm.

RESEARCH

CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION/Brainstorm:

Time + Stress

Corporate + Stress

Adulthood + Childhood -> Stress vs. wonder

Exploring how the limits of deadlines affect us.

Passage of time - One Year vs. One Month vs.  the closely observable One Minute.

Exploring stress culture and moderation

Relationship between adult stresses and childhood wonder

Subverting games and icons of stress relief under a time limitation to induce stress.

Stress can be a force for positive motivation, however is corrupt?

Multicultural lens or inter-cultural exploration of stress.

Japan - good work ethic, asleep at work/overworked.

Australia - hates stress, fights for laid back, flexible hours, ‘slackers’.

Singapore - hot climate, social expectation to wear business attire, uphold professional image, stressful, leads to dehydration and decreased productivity. Casual clothing days.

Art/University student pressure - Will we ever make it? Success stories “I dropped out of Harvard and now I’m RICH” What about those who failed? Or about those who finished their degrees and did nothing with them?

IF you love it, do it! But once your passion becomes your job ___ It’s work. And work is hard.

http://artpulsemagazine.com/institutional-stress-when-bureaucracy-replaces-art

http://contemporaryartmagazine.net/the-link-between-stress-relief-and-art-in-the-workplace/

TO RESEARCH: Contemporary works involving party games, teamwork or food incentives. Play.

FOUND: corporate parties, youth camps, children’s parties > complementary to our concept, but not explicitly artistically engaged.

E.g. Enterprises like http://mindgallery.com.au/ -> An Australian group that facilitates team building activities through collaborative art making with people who are not typically regular ‘artists’ or trained artistic practitioners to foster unity in the workplace.

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The colouring in sheets/outlines were also made in preparation for the 3rd game.

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Further concepts were fleshed out including concepts for each game.

Everything was also compiled into one google doc.

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Conceptual rework of the project:

After Wendy’s discussion with Sarah Rodigari, we decided to refine our concept, focussing on some points raised about potential areas of improvement in our design, this including the need of an end product created through the work and a clearer goal, that there should be something learnt at the end of the experience and something that can be discussed about. As the act of team participation in games was something that did not have a physical output or leave a tangible end product, we tried to include games that produced material output. We decided to achieve this through documentation and reworking the M&M game by making the goal to sort them by colour into cups, so in the end a reorganised M&M pile is created.

Furthermore, regarding the concept we decided to explore the issues of stress culture in work and uni, relating to the theme of collaboration and community. We had the idea of exploring the relation between time as a limiting factor and stress as a resulting factor. We wanted to emphasise how having time limits doesn’t necessarily cause stress and that games like the ones we’ve prepared with a time pressure can be in fact enjoyable, and further highlighting how stress can sometimes be needed to motivate someone.

This concept was expanded through research about Alan Kaprow and ‘The Happening.’

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Assessment 3 - Group Project: Event

Our group scheduled a meet up on Wednesday and did a brainstorm of potential ideas for the event that we could follow through with. This included ideas of community and collaboration through a collaborative class art-making session, or bring objects from home and speaking about them. Furthermore, ideas of building a blanket fort and climbing under to share stories of your childhood also were relevant to topics of community and collaboration through the process of building something together and sharing memories. Ideas following the week about glitches were also brought up, such as bringing your pets to class as an idea of interference, also what I felt related to the idea of glitch was ‘Night at the Museum’ as an idea of a glitch, being an interruption to the time continuum as historic figures come to life in an anachronistic setting and where the modern realm and historic realm are consequently intermingled. The ideas of bringing pets to class, building a fort also seemed to break the learning atmosphere of the classroom as a form of a ‘glitch’. We finally settled on the idea of a game show inspired by ‘Minute to Win it’ which both related to the idea of collaboration and community and also glitches and body politics with each game exploring a theme.

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Final Work submission

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Concept Statement - Task 2

2. Can creative acts be rebellious when rebellion has become canonised in art, design and media histories? What would a contemporary creative rebellion look like?

In my second assessment task, I explored the issue of social media activism and its effect on rebellion and political movements in our technology driven society. I wanted to convey the usage of social media to show support for social and political issues as a passive form of response to revolt as the root of the issue. It is this posturing and display of support or perceived activism that seeks more for the recognition from others of its supposed advocacy rather than for the genuine concern and care for a cause that proliferates the issue of a society that heeds more on the veneer and placard of social/political involvement and not on the importance of real and actual impact for a plight. This has been backed up by research which tracked behaviours of over a million people on Facebook who liked a page, finding that of the million, less than 3000 donated.

This suggests that the overabundance of ways to publicise one's stand for a political issue are all perhaps a puffery and overcompensation for a lack of real political action, which can extend to political art as a canon in art, due to this over conducting of posturing that has led to the failure to carry out real perceivable gestures with realised consequences, which my work to aims encourage and provoke the reconsideration of these ways and to break the passivity of consumers of art.

This is presented in the style of a gif with the hands of fists as the quintessential symbols of social revolt that have become almost sensationalised for social media attention when people broadcast such issues over social media in a visage of activism through the silhouette of the hand and phone, trivialising the gravity of such causes. This is reinforced by the fists that become likes, with some holding beverages that highlight the ironic similarity of an upward fist that represents the strong will of rebellion that can easily become a more passive gesture of a 'like' on social media.

The beverages such as Coca-Cola also represent buying into the ideals and constructs imposed by society as Coca-Cola is known for its curved shaped bottle emanating the desirable shape of the female body, a reinforcement of the ideals of society, and as such, the irony of the fist that can easily transform to one holding a bottle of Coca-Cola that espouses consumeristic notions and of mainstream societal ideologies like the gender expectations of women and what should be the norm for their bodily curvature (which I explored in body politics and affect week), that changes such an empowering image to one of a passive following and conforming to the mainstream, which hampers the individualistic spirit that drives true rebellion. This develops on a theme in my first task, that like works of art that are made with profit in mind or for mass reproduction can become redundant and lose the integrity of its power to inspire rebellion as they are often filtered to fit to the standards and tastes of the masses, thus actions like holding the soft drink and buying into corporate brands like Coca-Cola that mass produces products with an image connoted to constructs and ideals imposed by society could suggest a deprivation of that power to go against the tide.

Similarly, an online presence reduces individual identity as it provides a platform of anonymity where differences such social class, race, age and gender can be masked that diminishes individual responsibility leading to a de-escalated motivation to rebel.

Furthermore, the Pepsi can is also a reference to the controversial Pepsi ad that showed celebrity Kendall Jenner hand a Pepsi can to a police officer who drank the beverage and resulted in celebration that seemed to suggest the drink was able to resolve serious social issues like police brutality that have been a very grave point of debate and reprimand especially in American society. In such a way, the commercial itself being an ad and campaign to promote a drink for profit is in ways trivialising very serious matters and highlights a need to treat social movements like police brutality with greater consciousness, that often an interplay with social media can suggest otherwise.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

A. Boros, Creative Rebellion for the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Public and Interactive Art to Political Life in America, Palgrave Macmillan US, US, 2012

K. Lewis, K. Gray, J Meierhenrich, 'The Structure of Online Activism'. Sociological Science, vol. 1, February 2014, pp. 1-9.

R. Tostevin, 'Online activism: it's easy to click, but just as easy to disengage', The Guardian. 14 March 2014, viewed on 19 September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/mar/14/online-activism-social-media-engage

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Experimentation: Delving into rebellion further, I felt that the raised fist is the quintessential image to represent rebellion and I wanted to combine that with Coca Cola which represents the mainstream. However it was very difficult to combine the two in a fluid way. Furthermore, I find it interesting how the orientation of the fist is very important, when it is upward, it is far more positive and empowering, however if it were downward it could suggest aggression, defeat, oppression.

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Experimentation: I wanted to also explore themes of consumerism like the initial research on Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soups and so I took to two of the most popular soft drink companies and tried to create some irony to their slogans and messages. Coca-Cola is famous for its classic curved bottle which is supposed to emanate a feminine figure, so are we buying into ideals of the female body and other societal ideals? I think this also closely relates to the week of affect and body politics, as there are micro politics even with the beverage we choose to consume. Similarly with Pepsi they had a controversy with an ad they put out with Kendall Jenner that had her give a Pepsi to a police officer which then supposedly resolved the whole protest. Pepsi tried to portray its drink as something that brings people together yet it did the opposite, thus I also tried to contradict its stance with a gun that is often an instigator of violence. I would like to expand on this idea further

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Experimentation: - I experimented with gif format of an egg yolk - Relating to the topic of affect and body politics which I delved in, I wanted to explore the affect that is evoked when images of a raw egg is seen - inspired by the very popular ‘satisfying’ videos of slime over social media, there must be some sort of underlying emotional response or satisfaction that is being evoked when exposed to such stimulus, and thus I tried to recreate my own version with a raw egg - the gif format also helps with a sense of movement and the feeling of the egg such as its viscosity, texture etc to amplify the senses and affect

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Experimentation: Similarly, I tried similar techniques with an egg

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Experimentation:

I also found a mandarin that was less smooth and did not have as round of a shape, and compared it to one that was more smooth and round as a parody of plastic surgery before and after shots

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Experimentation: I also tried to cover the ‘imperfections’ of the mandarin and compared it to one that was bare to perhaps question which one was ‘better’ and are we supposed/expected to cover up our natural selves?

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Experimentation: I attempted to make an orange ‘beautiful’ - I wanted to also explore ideas of the expected beauty standards of society - I used various methods such as placing lashes, adding blush and even attempting cosmetic surgery - there is the contrast of the organic specimen, which as I chose a fruit is quite contrasting to the man made equipment/tools which I used, representing the artificial and constructed society and its standards imposed by man, which in this case imposing such standards looks quite misplaced which I want to highlight to show there shouldn’t be such strict standards - furthermore it is difficult to determine what would make an orange ‘beautiful’ likewise with humans as it is oftentimes an arbitrary standard