A word vomit about my thoughts so far on PB4:
So at this stage, I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do. From the last project brief, the biggest takeaway I had was about authenticity, and the genuine and organic relationships that existed in The Dancing Dog from face to face communication – a sense of physical connection and local community that I rarely see in my generation. I was fascinated by this as opposed to the almost entirely digital world that I live in, where so much of the communication I have with my friends is through social media, and even a lot of real life interaction is documented digitally. There’s constantly smartphones with photos and Snapchat stories, which is so different to the atmosphere that I saw in the bar where everyone was completely absorbed in the present moment. We’ve become so reliant on technology – even with things like going to a bar, it’s such a different mentality of just stepping into a place because it’s in the neighbourhood vs. with millennials, where it’s common practice to check an app like Yelp to determine the best place according to the atmosphere desired. I’m interested in exploring this significant shift into virtual worlds, whether this type of spontaneity and raw interaction is lost in the digital age. On a broader scale, I’m really interested in the concepts of culture and society, and the effect that technologies/digitisation has on the relationships, habits and trends of different generations.
Associated ideas that came up in my brainstorm were tangibility, the real life/physical interactions as opposed to things behind a screen. Regarding everyday life and habits, I was really interested in the TED talk about boredom, and how there’s never such thing as boredom these days with a smartphone in our hand. Our lives are so fast paced and we’ve become so used to constant stimulation not only in the form of our technology, but by ads, sounds etc. in the environment. Our attention spans become shorter and shorter and we never really make an effort to sit down and reflect, which is the importance of boredom. It might be really cool to investigate the notion of boredom, and do experiments asking people to live without their phones or see how much people mindlessly check their phones. A big thing of boredom to me is time – our minds are so fast paced that we get bored when something takes more time then we’re used to. This links to patience – so maybe I could document a craft that takes a lot of time, intricacy and patience or is very simple. I also thought about linking old and new media practices and explorations into analog vs. digital by comparing two people that do the same craft, where one is using the traditional technique and the other is using a digital technique, looking at the differences in their process and outlook.
As for format/media, I really enjoyed the process of going out, discovering and reaching out to various people and learning about their craft/expert area. I know that I definitely want to do something that’s non-fiction, documentary style and not a short film/creative type thing. Talking to Dan in yesterday’s class, he suggested doing research about the topic and then producing a short 5-10 minute documentary that includes interviews with experts, people in the different generations and maybe doing kind of social experiments where I randomly go up to people and start conversations.
Hopefully by the time I do some more research I’ll have a more concrete idea about the type of final product I’d like to create.
