Response 11 - People/Writing
Thanks for this task, Alan. I started carrying out the instructions as you advised; by making an audio recording where I spoke about the people that surround me. I quickly had an idea how to use this recording but in the spirit of the task I interrupted myself, rethought the idea and then ended up combining ideas into a third outcome. It felt true to the task to allow myself to change my mind and rethink points halfway through. The essence for me in this response was the idea to:
- Make an audio recording where I talk in a completely intuitive way about people that surround me in my physical life and online.
- Respond to this audio track through movement. The gestures or movement pattern should change for every new person mentioned.
- Respond to the audio track through mark making. The colour should change for every new person mentioned.
I decided to document stage 2 and 3 (movement and drawing) through a time lapse video - mainly for my own amusement and to have a record of it. When I looked back over the footage, the 15 min session of moving/drawing while listening to the audio track had been reduced to 12 seconds! I put them in my video editing program and stretched them out to 2 min 20 sec and layered them with the initial audio track and an additional audio track that I made when I scribbled on the drawing. I was curious about the layers that this created: the stretched video footage on top of an audio track that jumps back and forth in time and places between people and events. Finally I recorded myself talking for a few minutes about the process of responding to the task. Below you can find the transcription of this recording.
Transcription of audio reflections for Task 11
Something about experiencing the embodiment of the task. Gestures from hands came in and then the drawing, this was my first idea. Doodling. A method to transcribe the audio track. This feeling of being incoherent. Jumping from one thought to the order. Every time a new person was mentioned in my audio recording I had to change the colour on my drawing. And not think about what I was doing. The colour became representative of the person and the way I was talking about the person, the tone of voice I was using and how I was talking about them would be manifested though my use of the colour. I was interested to see that in the beginning everything happened very central on the paper but the people in the beginning of my audio recording were very peripheral in my life. Some I hadn’t seen for years. And they were all in the middle, bold colours and marks. As I went on and the paper filled out and I started making these blue circles which came as I was talking about time and the idea of linear time and how this doesn’t exist and Lisa in relation to time and how she feels ‘untimely’ for me. The ‘circles idea’ ended up tracing around the paper and suddenly the focus shifted from the central bold marks from the beginning and they became a sort of backdrop to the blue circles. The time connections pulled all of the other marks together; what seemed important and essential slipped into the background to actually highlight something else. Looking at the finished piece I actually see the connections throughout the drawing. The repetition. The colours and shapes of the circles stand out.