[I have been very busy in the past two weeks, working on filming for a BBC Pilot, and other such work, so my updates to this blog have been few and far between.]
Personally I feel the presentation responses to the work related to us are a bit of a waste of time, in total we would have taken out at least five Tuesday’s worth of work and spent that time working on the response presentations. One of those Tuesdays is wasted entirely on planning the response presentations which could instead be spent working on our actual personal projects – which personally I think would be a much better use of time. Due to this well-known thought that I know is not just my own, we, as a group decided to make the presentation as simple as possible because we did not want to waste too much time and effort on it when we could be working on our own work and projects.
So we tried to come up with a simple response to the work we were given in the previous weeks, consisting of responses to the work given to us in previous weeks. Gathering together it was suggested that perhaps we do something interesting with masks; because masks are something we can wear to hide identity, and distort people’s perspectives and interpretation of people and things. We came up with the concept of wearing blank masks, and having people draw faces on them as a way of distorting body and also as a way of representing portrait, as essentially people are creating a portrait of the masks on our faces. We decided to develop this further by wearing black clothing to try and make ourselves look more like a blank canvas, to try and blank out some further parts of our character and to try to encourage people to make our character. Additionally we all tried to wear tights on our head to cover up our hair, to blank ourselves even more, so we had no hair distracting people in trying to make us appear as a different character. As well as having people draw on our white masks to create expressions, we also thought to bring in various items of clothing, props and accessories to allow people to further create a character while using our bodies essentially as a canvas.
On the day I brought a collection of wigs, an orange, brown, and white one as it seemed like hair is a good way to show character, and would be interesting to see how people played with the wigs, if they decided to style them, how they placed them on the head or not. I also bought a trilby hat, a blue scarf, a pair of large headphones and two sets of glasses for people to put on us and play with. I thought the collection would be enough for people to have a go at creating different characters and see quite where they decided to go with the portraits they were creating. We put all the items in two boxes in front of ourselves, with a collection of paint and pens next to a sign that said ‘Create your own character’. Once we had all the masks and tights on we all posed in a circle in various heights and positions on the circular bench outside the library and waited to see what happened.
While we were setting up, there were lots of other BA students on the campus in the area watching us prepare, they were laughing and watching curiously, but none of them dared move over to see or ask as to what we were doing. We had one gentleman come over and read the sign, but he did not start to join in, which was a shame, as it would have been interesting to see if people not involved in the MA course would have a go and get involved with the presentation. Finally when the group all gathered, people instantly seemed to gather as to what they needed to do. We had to stand still unless people moved us so I could not see what other people were dressing most people like. It was funny though as I think I was one of the last people that people decided to start work on, so I watched the rest of the group getting dressed up first. I had a raincoat pulled on top of me first of all, which was funny as I was asked to put my arms through the arm holes and guided to put it on properly. I thought it was interesting that the first thing people did was put the clothes on us all first, as a group, I believe it was expected that people would draw our faces first, and then dress us accordingly to how we had our masks painted. Instead it was the other way around, which I felt was an interesting observation. I also found it funny how people would eventually go around and swap which character they were working on. So I had someone place a wig on me, then another person would appear and replace it with a different wig. Similarly, someone put a hat on my head, then someone else would return and said “I don’t like that hat” and replaced it with a different one. I thought everyone was very funny, it was interesting to see people responding as to what other people had done to each person. I would have lots of people coming to me and going “Oh gosh that’s scary” but of course I couldn’t see what people had drawn so I have no idea quite how ‘scary’ I looked or not.
I thought it was interesting to see how people played with the items we had brought as well, I know one of the wigs placed on my head was put on backwards, while for a brief time another was put in the hood of the raincoat, and someone tied a long scarf around my hand, and eventually had the end going down my top. Strangely enough, no one really changed my position at all, in fact it would get to the point where people would move my arms to try and put on an item, and then position me back to how I was originally. We had discussed in our meeting the week before that we should allow the group to move us into any positions they wanted, but as a far as I gathered from the little vision I had through the mask, it seemed like few people chose to do this.
It was mentioned in the response that it seemed we had a circle of at least two types of spectators. We had the interactive spectators of the MA students getting involved, creating their characters and portraits and so on, while similarly, they themselves were being observed by the rest of the BA students in the area on campus. We had some members of the MA students while also getting involved, would also be taking photographs and videos of the presentation , so there in essence would be a third group of spectators who would watch the presentation as a third party viewer.
Generally I feel it was a fairly effective presentation in response to the work we had been given, that was fun for all involved, yet also – thankfully – required little effort on our part. As technically, the original spectators – the MA students were part of the artwork as they were almost more involved than we were, we were just the canvas for their work.
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