Noticing Tasks – The Reflection

Through your experiments in noticing what did you learn about making media through noticing? How are you going to develop these experiments into a larger project for Task Four?

Through not only developing and making media, I have established a stronger bond towards attentive noticing and how sensitive and minute the world really is. Through this process of noticing, reflecting and refining my works, I have been able to focus on specific areas of media making and fine-tune those skills. It has allowed me to reflect on why I am making the media or choosing to take the photograph, rather than out of habit or just for aesthetics. Actively participating in this project has allowed me to break through my usual process of media making and allow myself to focus and take the time on perfecting a certain medium and to think about it in a different way. For example, I used subjects to focus on the influence of environment how that influences people’s art in “Drawing“. This allowed me to develop my ideas about the influence of art and artworks through description – the original drawing, done by me, was similar, yet the final result of the ‘drawing chain’ was different due to the way that the individuals participating chose to describe each artwork. This allowed me to understand the process of similarity and how every individual can interpret something differently. This can be further developed in the reading, A Poetic Approach to Documentary: the discomfort of form, rhetorical stages, and aesthetic experience (Bettina Frankham, UTS 2013), specifically through the quote making reference to Nicolas Bourriaud (2002): “The idea of a relational aesthetic takes into consideration the spaces that a work creates or allows for the spectator. An awareness of the aesthetic of relation or exchange created through a particular formal approach brings the space of connection between spectator and creative work into focus”. To unpack this quote, it resonates with what I was trying to do with my experiments in media making: this idea of ‘rational aesthetic’ and a ‘gap’ to allow the individuals viewing the media is poignant and allows them to develop, describe and think about their own ideas. Furthermore, I also developed this idea of media and description amongst my other experiments, which I thought was an effective way to connect my learning through noticing to making media. Furthermore, Bourriaud cements this idea with the ideology that individuals should make their own decision about what the work is expressing, not the artist using non-narrative and un-connecting forms: “certain documentary projects as the non-narrative form as a way to prompt a dialogue between the spectator and the work. In the way that this leads to a reconceiving of “the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt”. Thus, every element and design of the media form are different – thus – from what I have gathered in my experiments over the last couple of weeks, I have acknowledged that individuals capture and retain certain aspects in media due to the environment and people that they are exposed to.

Through this idea of ‘decisions’, I want to develop this idea further in my larger project for Seeing the Unseen. Some questions that have arisen for me for this development process is the ideas of the environment and how that impacts an individuals perspective of media –  What aspects of different media do people perceive from an image – why do they view this certain aspect and not others? From this, I am wanting to focus on a photography series of wide angle shots to avoid subjectivity that certain close-up angles can bring to an image.  I have a strong interest in developing this idea about discussion, thought and the process of other individuals and the media that is presented to them and is something that I am considering, as shown through my weekly process of recipes and self-reflection through this task.