When thinking about the people in your life you can picture their faces and perhaps identify them by their stature or gait, but how many of your friends belly buttons can you recognize? A belly button is so personal, and unique to each individual. I chose to collect the belly buttons of the people I encounter and important people in my life.
Collections are most often precious; perfectly arranged china, priceless dolls in a dark wood cabinet, etc. These kinds of things are what comes to mind for me when I hear “collection”. For most, the reason for collecting is because of the value of the items. For this project then, I decided to go the opposite way. I wanted to make a collection of objects that interested me visually, but held no significant value on their own. I was also interested in the idea of narrative, seeing how placing a couple incongruous objects in an otherwise similar group could suggest a story.
See the presentation here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RUDevy0mhg1Qw0W7oI25E2l72Sp6YvULo9xew9pEpQc/edit?usp=sharing
Over the week, I collected knots of hair that I found around my apartment. With four long-haired occupants, these hairballs are not in short supply. Often, hair that has been removed from the body is considered ‘gross’ or’disgusting’. As someone who is interested in knotting and weaving, I find a different kind of beauty in these forms. I photographed each ball and post processed the images in order to emphasize the delicate lines that can make the clump so beautiful. Art relies heavily on context.
In this collection, I focused on collecting things that I saw outside which I could imagine that I have lost at some point in my life. In this way, it was like ‘reclaiming’ lost things for myself rather than just taking it off the street. Surprisingly, it seems like many other girls besides myself loose their hair bands.
For this collection, I chose pieces that students believed was their most precious belonging. Whether it was due to sentimental reasons or nostalgic memories, the items they chose were special to them.
The system I chose to target for 24 hours was Education. In Part 1, I determined that one of the outputs of the Education system is ‘Demonstrated Learning.’ ‘Demonstrated Learning,’ I determined, usually comes in the forms of essay papers, artistic works, or grades on exams. I selected ‘Demonstrated Learning’ as a Leverage point, and concluded that I could disrupt this system by producing nothing, showing no evidence of learning.
For 24 hours, I thought about various ways to complete this assignment and break systems of my daily life routines. In the end, I attempted no new behaviors and produced nothing more than this blog post. By making no changes to my daily routine, I did not complete the assignment for Concept III: Systems and Processes.
These drawings are the evidence of an experiment. ‘Spending Free Time’ and ‘Observing Others’ were the primary systems affected by this work.
Instead of spending my free time on Facebook, I sketched the people around me.
Instead of observing others via Facebook, I took a closer look at how people were interacting in the physical world.
