For the Comms trip we first went to the Design Museum. We were reminded of the practitioner we had to be choosing for our essay, and encouraged to look out for practitioners that might be on display that we would like to write about, as being able to experience their work in person instead of through the internet or books would make our perception of it and our ability to assess it much more powerful. A physical piece of work on the site that it’s displayed has an entirely different baggage and evidences a number of different relations we can analyse as opposed to looking up digitalized versions of the work on the internet or in third party publications.
While looking through the Design Museum I also had my different thoughts for work I might accomplish for the project in mind, and analysed the displays in there partly thinking about how they might relate and inspire my own work. Here are some of the pictures I took:
After the Design Museum we went to an exhibit in 180 The Strand called Other Spaces. It was basically different dark rooms with interactive light and sound installations. I thought they were all very cool, my favourite room was probably the one with field recordings of different biomes from around the world. There were beanbags on the ground where you could lay down, and the names of different animals would appear as their sounds could be heard through the recording. Very simple yet very immersive, I feel like I could lay there listening forever.
I didn’t take too many pictures of this one, but here are the ones I did take:
Needless to say, they don’t do the exhibition justice. 😛
Since this exhibit was quite short and we still had some time in the afternoon, we went to another one in the same building called Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder. Unfortunately I was out of battery on my phone by this time but this one was my favourite of the day. It was a much bigger exhibition displaying works from a range of different contemporary artists. I thought it was very well curated and each room built upon the concepts of wonder, otherworldly experiences and hallucinations in entirely different ways.
The entrance to the exhibit was also quite interesting: It was basically in a parking lot with a little white cube with a door at the end. Upon entering it, though, the rooms were surprisingly large and intricately produced, each evoking different and unique imaginary places, with heavy use of mirrors, colours, and peculiar textures. It’s all very surreal, and I was completely enthralled.
One of my favourite pieces (or at least one of the pieces that I remember more vividly) was a written recounting on the walls of an experience the artist went through of taking acid and watching Planet Earth with her guy friends, which, because of the guys’ comments during a scene of animals mating, ends up spiralling into a very eery, very uncomfortable feminist stream of consciousness in which she compares human and animal bodies, goes into complex notions of consent, and goes on to use cows as metaphors for women, among other things. It’s impossible to convey it through here but I thought it was some very powerful, very uneasy stuff, and it definitely had me thinking about the kinds of insensible comments which I might make casually that when closely inspected are reflexes of a sick, very established patriarchal society that often times has its scary implications go unnoticed.
I ended up spending a bit too long in there, by the end I found out the group had been waiting for me for a while (oops). I got some free posters from my room though!
Terrible poster placement but I’ll basically paste anything on to the walls of my room, if anyone has any posters laying around send them my way. 😀
Caio's Graduate Diploma 