As part of the theoretical research I have undertaken in this module, I have led a workshop explaining and attempting to find practical methodologies and analogies for the ideas and philosophies influencing my work. In doing this I formulated a small series of tasks to put to the participants of the workshop, involving drawing simple block shapes, there were three tasks in all.
After a short introduction to the direction my practical and theoretical work has taken me over the past year or so I spoke to people about how the particular process by which I am going about creating the raw material for my audio visual performance pieces. Whereby I am rerecording visual and audible media many times until the build up of recording degradation and the room ambience effects the audio, and contrast variations take the represented visual pieces and turn them slowly into simple outlines and silhouette’s of their original depictions.
I then took the time to tell everyone present about some suitable analogies between this process and ideas or works that have influenced the theory behind it, from artists such as Cezanne, and from thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty. After outlining my theoretical perspectives and ideas I assembled 20 simple wooden block objects on a table between everyone, seven of these objects were blue, and the remaining thirteen were either green, yellow and red. For the first task I asked people to pick one object and draw it for me on a piece of paper in a three minute time limit. Some of the examples of this are shown below,
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I then asked people to explain to me their process for completing the given task, in order to gauge what it was people had noticed about the objects they had chosen to draw. Most people stated that the first thing they had noticed about the object was it’s form, the simple geometric structure from which the shape was made. They then went on to pick and fill in further details such as the the light variances on each side of the object, and the shadow that object was creating on the table. While people were telling this to me I had compiled a check list of things I thought people would consider when completing the tasks which included the objects relationship with others on the table, It’s geometric form, shadow/light, the drawer’s perspective or viewpoint, the objects colour, the environment it was in, on the lines which were parallel or not with other shapes, since some shapes had intentionally been roughly lined up when arranged and some had been placed at random. When completing the first task most people mentioned that they had considered the objects form , shadow and light and how that objects form had related to their perspective or view point.
The second task I asked everyone to complete was to draw all the objects on the table in the same three minute time limit. Again some examples are shown below,
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This time when i asked people to describe their process for completing the task, people while still concerned with the objects geometric form though in a much more simplified manner due to the time limit, paid much more attention to that objects relationship to the those others immediately around it positioning one object in their compositions dependent on those surrounding it. Detail was ignored or glossed over in order to gather a overall view of the composition, as can be seen.
For the third an final task I asked people to draw all the blue objects on the table but after drawing each one to move ninety degrees around the table and draw the next. In asking people to consider a composition from multiple perspectives, I was hoping to get people to consider a three dimensional space on a two dimensional medium. Though most people mentioned the colour to be of most significance to their composition, some thing which i did not intend merely just sought to signify the seven objects I required them to draw. While most people also said during the previous exercise that they had focused their consideration of one object to the next whilst creating their composition on the table, when moving their perspective around in a three dimensional space they look to considering the object they were about to draw to the others by looking at their page rather than those objects on the table. Examples are provided for the last task below,
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Through doing this work shop I believe that i have gained a brief insight into how we as observers can perceive a given piece of visual aesthetic, while I can not hope to understand all there is to relating to the how and why of how we see a given piece. When presented with a complex arrangement of shapes we will tend to gloss over a certain amount of the detail, omit certain parts of the piece in order to gain a overview of the entire whole. As can be seen we also find much detail when encouraged to examine a singe object within that complex whole. When moving around a piece we will tend to relate the object, not so much with each other as they appear from a single viewpoint but how we may have considered those objects from varying perspectives within our minds eye. Though during this workshop the varying colours of the objects were not really considered by the people drawing, outside of the task where they were required to concentrate on one colour to draw, this may very well be due to the fact that colour pencils were not provided by me and this may have a large impact on the outcome of peoples considerations of the objects presented. Since people did not seem to feel the need to represent the different colours through shading a further workshop could be carried out to help to understand the effect this may have on the given tasks.
A video of the workshop is provided below
