24th November, My Thoughts

Today was a very productive day despite a few difficulties. Sharon has left the group for her own reasons and Fay was absent due to illness. So today there was only Jess, Louiza and me, meaning it became difficult to make important decisions. Despite this, we produced a mind map filled with our thoughts on the project so far, and things that needed to be done. I filmed the process of us making the mindmap in the hope to capture the audio while we discussed it, but the audio was very quiet and hard to distinguish.

I have uploaded pictures of the mindmap, but intend to upload the video of us producing it along with a transcript of important ideas we discussed. We have decided to keep the mindmap and work on it more next week when Fay will be able to give her input, and we hope to create a very busy collection of our ideas.

Today we discussed further ideas of the actual piece and Louiza came up with an idea that the artwork put into the slots should be on blank puzzle pieces. This sparked the idea of after having collected the pieces, putting the puzzle together and creating a separate piece of work which might be permanent. I liked the idea, but I had a few problems with it and raised a few points. I felt that creating a second piece of work would remove the focus from our original idea, I felt that it should be one or the other, not both. The original idea is much more interactive and fun and I felt that if the public were to walk into the museum and see the masses of puzzle pieces collected in the cylinder in the foyer they would be able to imagine the pieces being put together which would make the work successful, I felt that we didn't actually need to do this in order to put the idea in people's heads. When presented with the choice of one or the other, I felt that the original idea was stronger, especially when thinking about Jess' ideas of producing artwork and exhibiting it in a matter of minutes, the original idea related more to the museum experience whereas the creating of a puzzle reminded me more about a school project which might not be considered contemporary art. We had to compromise quite a lot in order to come up with an agreement and I don't feel that we have managed that completely yet, and we hope that with Fay's input we will be able to bring more opinions to the table and work out what we are going to put forward our proposal for.

We spent a lot of time working on our actual idea and kept forgetting that we wouldn't actually be making it. We spent a bit of time thinking about the proposal and other pieces of documentation we could produce. We came up with the idea of producing leaflets and posters in the shape of puzzle pieces with a limited amount of information to get people into the museum through curiosity. We all agreed that we would be interested and curious by a very vague leaflet. We also decided we would write a newspaper ad and the transcript for a radio advertisement as these things would be required in order to publicise the event. We thought about planning workshops with people, perhaps at schools, care homes and open at the museum for the general public to encompass a wide range of people and generations.

We discussed with James and Adam the idea of a touring piece which would end up different in every location it visited. This was considered to be a very strong point of our idea and we were told that we should definitely exaggerate this point in our proposal and rationale.

Over the next week it is my job to come up with a newspaper advert and transcript for a radio advert. Other job roles within our group:

Louiza: Start working on a proposal and opening letter

Jess: Create leaflets/poster designs, work on producing a small maquette