So, when I started this assignment, I spent a number of hours trying to come up with various words and concepts that describe myself. Which in and of itself I found hard to do. Then the next few days I tried to link those concepts and attributes to images and abstract ideas like we had been briefed to do, but i really struggled to do so. I continually came up empty. After a while I began to get frustrated with the assignment, and that just led to less and less creativity.
I literally couldn’t come up with any reasonable ideas that were usable for this assessment. What I finally settled upon after days of trying to come up with something, was that I was terrible at abstract thinking, and that I was finding the assessment difficult. So I thought I’d try and represent that in an abstract way. At least something would be better than nothing.
The collection of images, sounds and videos I have brought together on the most basic level represent my struggles with thinking about the abstract. For example the video of lines being drawn on an empty space represents my inability to think creatively when given a blank slate. Or the picture of a hammer on abstract art symbolises my initial approach of trying to just brute force the answer and how I tried to use the wrong tools cognitively to create these pieces of media.
However I realised after I had compiled the various images and sounds that they also reveal aspects of myself. Many of them come from outside, showing that I’m an active person who enjoys the outdoors, they show that I am logical, analytical and somewhat rigid in the way that I think (very much like the image of the piece of wood, deliberately measured, carved and sanded with a single, specific purpose in mind).
As for whether I think it works or doesn’t work, I think on some levels it does and others it doesn’t. The audio components could have been better. I liked the idea of the sound of flowing water represented what I needed to do in order to finish this assignment (go with the flow), but the other two weren’t home runs. In terms of how I’d approach it different next time, I would definitely try and be more free with the assignment. It took me literally days to figure out that I needed to stop trying to come up with the perfect idea and just come up with as many ideas as possible. Some of them were bound to work, even though many didn’t. I’d also definitely try to bounce the ideas I had off of more people, I involved my housemates but I think involving more of my classmates as well would have been worthwhile.
