Assignment AR 5a : My Project Plan & Research Proposal
Project Plan 2
via Inspiration
This is another way of breaking down the required tasks and processes for my Research Project using Inspiration 9 software. The beauty of this is that hyperlinks and notes can all be added simply, so it builds up over time.
Project Plan
Research Proposal
My interests are wide and eclectic I would say. I am keen on history and archaeology, architecture and art, and I ingest information on all of this and more avidly. So to pin point a particular area of interest can be a problem. My practice during my BA was primarily focussed on glass, but I really want to broaden my horizons and see where my research takes me. This is both challenging and liberating, and that I feel is one of the purposes of studying at MA level.
Inspired partly by my first small item, made in the first few weeks of the course and a film by Elizabeth Price called User Group Disco, exhibited as part of the BAS7 exhibition, I am delving into the world of Family Momentos. I find myself drawn to this area, as it seems it is a rarely explored part of our notion of ‘family’
The small item I constructed was a container of ephemera, objects that have no intrinsic value, but had meanings and told a series of stories. Elizabeth Price’s film is an exploration of an imaginary museum, a freakish vision of the future and a comment on our consumerist culture. What will we leave for future generations to interpret?
Our lives are a fusion of nature and culture, but nature and culture are a contradiction. Because culture is the essence of what makes individual humans into a group, the core of social identity, its continuity is vital. (Bertaux D, 2005)
There has been a large amount of research in Psychology relating to memories, particularly in the area of false memories by Elizabeth Loftus an American psychologist. She proved in study after study, that the mind is not a videotape device that we can count on for accuracy and clarity. She has shown that memory is highly susceptible to seduction by suggestion. That what we remember is coloured by what we expect to see, what we're told we've seen, what we want to see, what we are asked to see.
I have also noted some interesting work on the subject of Autotopography. In particular, studies on ‘mementos’ and the technical challenges of utilizing digital technology to record them, by academics from the University of Sheffield and Innsbruck (Petrelli, Whittaker and Brockmeier, 2008) . The term autotopographies was coined by Jenifer Gonzales (Gonzalez, 1995) , in order to describe the importance of personal objects in the constitution of the subjective. She argues that many scholars have theorised about "things" but there is a dearth of scholarship on what "things" actually mean to people and how one's subjectivity and one's things can be mutually constitutive.
I believe that research around this general area could be utilized to allow a community to engage and integrate in an artistic practice and to become part of an installation or exhibition.
My methodologies would include, interviews, surveys, photography, video, alongside experimentation within my practice.
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. (Berger, 1972)
Bibliography
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin & BBC Books.
Bertaux, D. (2005). Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, Memories and Interviewing. Somerset, New Jersey, USA: Transaction.
Gonzales, J. (1995). “Autotopographies”: Prosthetic Territories, Politics and Hypertechnologies. Boulder, CO, USA.: Westview Press
Petrelli, D. et al. (2008). Autotopography: What do Physical Mementos Tell Us About Digital Memories? New York: Association for Computer Machinery.
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