Today we caught up in groups again to describe our process moving forward via a brainstorming activity. The first stage was to conjure 20 words that we each drew from the process and the site, which we ultimately condensed to 10 words. We ended up with:

foster
movement
threshold
intersection
ritual
faceless
emptiness
presence
grunge
blurred

I contributed “foster” as I thought about The Tote’s role in facilitating the underground music scene, as well as the patrons feeding into and fostering the culture. We discussed approaches to incorporating different interpretations of community as we head into future investigations, and out of these discussions we developed prompts such as “blurred” and “faceless” – as these may suggest, we are hoping to capture human presence as anonymously as possible, so that the result emphasises the effect of their presence more than anything else. I also fed “intersection” into the discussion, largely having been inspired by an RMIT Interior Designs Masters research compilation that I managed to acquire by chance entitled INTERsection, which I am sure will provide fruitful inspiration and momentum to the process. I will explore this further in more blog posts, although at this stage I understand that the use of “intersection” in this context can be read as the marriage of “interior” and “section”, where the interior becomes a compilation of sectioned spaces. This resonates with my experience of accessing The Tote before hours, finding intriguing qualities in rooms and areas usually inaccessible, either due to a lack of permission or by way of being shrouded in darkness. The Tote also represents a space where different people intersect for a common ritual, the intersection of artist/audience. The venue also conveniently sits on an intersection. One of my favourite terms we discussed here was “threshold”, which Georgia introduced and described as the experience of being on the brink of danger in the moshpit, navigating the chaos and existing at the threshold of safety as a ritual and sometimes cathartic activity.

Following this, we paired these words together to create new conjunctions and possibility for creative potential. Some pairings that arose were “faceless ritual”, “emptiness presence”, “foster threshold” and “blurred movement”. This activity served as a way to imagine contexts for some of these prompts and to recognise the potential for their interplay and inevitable interconnectivity. Daniel discussed his urge to represent both “faceless ritual” and “blurred movement” in a motion blurred image of enthusiastic audience members in the moment of moshing, with faces peeling away in a warped blur.

From here we developed another 10 prompts, which although quite abstract I think provide some more interesting stimulus. They are as follows:

challenge
expose
pressure
hold
feed
sync
moment
threaten
resonance
element

With these in mind we spoke about how to represent a “moment” at The Tote, as it is experienced. I think there is a lot of potential for us to visit this idea at different times, although this may be our biggest restriction: the restricted time we will spend at The Tote.

Lastly, we defined our overall goals, which are to:

• Emphasise community
• Expand scope from Assignment 3
• Explore presence
• Deviate from Assignment 3

With this all laid out, I am confident that moving forward we will bring some more interesting material out of our experiences at The Tote. At this stage, I plan to delve into INTERsections and feed that into my process. I am still drawn to the experience of emptiness and how that might still be at play even with a full Tote – can there be moments of emptiness? Would any moment spent in the packed Tote reflect those I experienced in the empty Tote? Will my experiences in the empty Tote effect subsequent visits? Excited to move forward armed with these questions.

Finally, I should note my reluctance before today to follow on with The Tote. I felt as though I might have everything I need from there and was keen to apply these ideas to different sites. However, speaking to Daniel and Georgia along with Robbie discussing the effect of honing in on something specific to draw expansive material from it rather than finding little from an overwhelming stimulus has inspired me to persist with The Tote and see what else I can tease out of it.