This week we were told that we needed to spilt up and see what different outcomes each team could get from the same idea. Before we did this, we sat down to work out our concept from fresh to find what we really wanted to do. We had a long discussion before Sam came up with an idea, we could set up two projectors, one with an exploration on the treatment of refugees and one with an exploration of what can happen when refugees assimilate. The treatment video would be attached to the ceiling, whilst the assimilation video would be playing from down below and when the audience entered the space, they would interrupt the video, blocking it. Whilst this video wouldn’t be visible, the treatment video or ‘the past’ would continue to play as we cannot change the past. We decided we could make these videos by remixing existing content. To try and spilt up whilst still helping our overall goal, we broke up into teams – the treatment or ‘dystopian’ video, the assimilation or ‘utopian’ video and an audio track that would play over the two.
We all began working separately on each section. I was working on the ‘Utopian’ section, but after starting work, I realised that utopia isn’t really what we were trying to convey and we stripped it down a bit to just being more about acceptance, so I started looking at clips based on that. I found a lot of clips that I thought Sam could use for the audio, but was having trouble actually finding clips that could portray what we were trying say. We spoke to Jo and Nathan half way through and they were concerned that the projection idea might not be as effective as we thought so we decided, as we were running out of time, that we would go back into the gallery while we worked on the videos to see what we could come up with.
We pulled everything down from last week and started again. Jo had been suggesting that we cover furniture with the sheets to imply that it was a home that had to be evacuated, but were hoping to return. We started doing this and felt that with this new theme the presentation was finally complimenting the concept. We then used televisions to play the treatment videos, as well as static, but we put them under a sheet too. The effect created was quite interesting. We placed the chair and table with the typewriter/television on top in front of the work.
We decided that moving forward, we needed to use more actual furniture rather that the plinths in the room. The feedback we received was that potentially the videos could also include information about the family that lived there and that there should be longer pauses between the clips, so the televisions were flicking on and off. We agreed with this and would like to build on it next week.
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