1) Curiosities and Obsessions Brief - Shawn Sobers - 25 & 27/9/17

Shawn started off our 'Curiosities and Obsessions' brief on Monday, and you can see my annotations from this below. Following on from this, on Wednesday he went on to talk about the creation of ideas and where they come from. My notes from the Wednesday session are also scanned in below.

We started to look at different videos from various individuals that touched on the origin and production of ideas, starting with David Lynch's video "Where Great Ideas Come From", from which I took away some interesting key points.

- No idea is original, you catch them like fish.

- Ideas are produced from where you put your energy.

I thought these were both actually quite straightforward and obvious statements, but something that I often forget when thinking about ideas. It also made me realise if I put energy into the things around me that I enjoy and interest me, great ideas will come from them and I can involve these things in my work - instead of just trying to pluck ideas out of nowhere. The 'idea' part at the start of the brief is usually what scares me most about the project, and Shawn's questions "How much do you listen to your idea?" and "Are you prepared to let your ideas take you in different directions?" made me realise that I shouldn't be worried about having one unchanging idea and continuing it throughout the whole brief, but letting it develop and take different shapes.

One thing I was struggling to interpret from this brief is the way we need to get multiple outputs from a single idea, so Shawn showed us an example of Melanie Manchot's work 'Security' to illustrate this.

She created work in two mediums - photographs and moving image to capture security guards. The two different mediums show very different sides to the individuals, with the photos of them looking quite reserved and tough whereas the video of them undressing showed a more vulnerable side. They can lose and gain power from the way they are presented to the viewer. I think this idea is quite interesting, and really highlights the way different mediums can best show different forms of ideas. This led me to think of the question, what creative approaches work best for my idea? Which is something I need to start thinking about as my idea develops more.

I really found this lecture helpful, not only because we went through the brief of the Curiosities and Obsessions project, but also because it has made me think about ideas in a new and less scary way. I shouldn't be afraid to have weird ideas, but instead embrace it, and I need to allow my idea to take different forms and developments along the way for it to reach its full potential. Different mediums of photography is another point I need to be thinking about, and which ones can best portray my idea to the viewer.

#obsessions