“Reflecting”

What are the differences and similarities between what you expected to notice and what you recorded? From watching your pair’s media and talking to them, how do you think their way of collecting with media differs from yours? How has making this work led you to understand key ideas about noticing in relation to readings, exhibition, discussion?

When discussing our ideas for what we were going to record, we decided to try and take away our already presumed assumptions about the place. For example, I had already idealized Hozier Lane as a predominantly tourist area – when thinking about what I was going to video and photograph for the task, I wanted to shy away from the ‘tourist ideas’ – however, ultimately I thought I was going to notice the art and graffiti in the area. When speaking to Lyreca about her ideas for capturing Brunswick, our ideas differed in what we noticed – mine was more about the movement and transience of Hozier Lane, whilst Lyreca’s were about the details in Brunswick. She said that she thought there would be more outdoor cafes and eateries, however, she did notice the influx in various cuisines such as Asian, Indian and other ethnic restaurants which she did not realise she would come across.

I think although our theme of noticing was the same (eg: ten photographs, one ten second video), this was put in to practice very differently, just to show how unique a place and someone’s own interpretation of a brief (and a place) can be. When examining the readings, I thought two particularly stood out to my approach of noticing in Hozier Lane, particularly the ideas presented in Bettina Frankham’s “A Poetic Approach to Documentary” where she discusses ideas as “spaces for engagement and openness for interpretation… infinite possibilities in combining and making connections across a network field of elements”. In regards to my media making approach, this rang true in the sense that not only was choosing each other’s places (for me, Brunswick – somewhere familiar to me and Hozier Lane, somewhere that was familiar to Lyreca) allowed us to reflect on our own noticing about a predetermined location, but allowed us to expand our view of the place that was familiar to us through someone else’s noticing. For example, I appreciate Lyreca’s view of Brunswick’s smaller details (the phone box was something that particularly stood out to me as most people carry around mobile phones, yet, there is a phone box in the urban streets of Melbourne). For my own noticing, this idea ‘infinite possibilities and combing and making connections’ was through the change in direction of my noticing – originally focusing on the graffiti, which turned into me noticing about the transience throughout Hozier Lane, how one minute there could be twenty people and the next minute, there could be no one. This level of attentive noticing is something that I would not usually engage in, so it was refreshing to almost ‘rediscover’ a place, but through video and taking away my preconceived ideas of Hozier Lane.

Furthermore, this work has also lead me to the beginning of the course, when we discussed attentive noticing – both in class discussions and through the reading “The Discipline of Noticing” by Joh Mason – although I have discussed this reading in my previous blog posts, I am going to express a different part of the reading – specifically Noticing, Marking and Recording. The opening sentence in this section is something that I think represents my attentive noticing at Hozier Lane, and this collaborative task as a whole “To notice is to make a distinction, to create foreground and background, to distinguish some ‘thing’ from its surroundings”. In our Task, this was the detail in Brunswick and the movement in Hozier Lane – everyone who would go to these particular places would notice different things, just as Lyreca and I notice different things in that places that we are familiar with – if I had not participated in this task, I would not have been exposed to the different ideas that people have about places that are both familiar and distant to them – thus, showing me that everyone’s view on a space can be interpreted and percieved differently, which has been further discussed in class and in the readings.