On Friday, we had a writing workshop which was geared towards one of the ADAS writing objectives for the Artifact project: 300 words of preparatory research for a short video we were to make talking about an object.
For the purposes of the Friday exercise, we were told to bring in a real object and a picture of an object, and I chose to bring in my linocut stamp of my elephant Dacre Beast.
Then, we did a series of exercises to widen our ability to talk about the object.
The first was about the found object, and writing about it objectively for 5 minutes. I found this a bit easier to write because I had created the object myself, so I knew a bit about its origins and purpose.
Then, where the second line is on the middle picture below, we had to do a similar writing activity, but this time, we were posed with the task of writing thoughts and feelings about the object. This was significantly more fun.
After we looked at these objects, we were tasked to dig into our memories and think of an object from our childhood, or something that was very much not present in the room, and immediately the object that came to mind was a little, rubber Ariel figurine that I had as a kid when I was about 7 or 8.
This was the exercise that got me the most emotionally involved. It was a bit like going back to a dream and being in you 7 year old body where all of the stakes were exactly the same, and then sort of re-entering your current body and realizing that none of it mattered and that you have no idea where that object is in the world. It was strange though that the object itself offered such direct access to these memories and stakes, because perhaps what was more interesting than the object itself was our personal relation to it or reason for remembering it. Objects are tied to people. That is what makes them most interesting to me. Caio was my partner for this project and he had a similar experience, but he was more transfixed by the lost nature of his remembered object, which also happened to be a toy, than his memories with it.
Lastly, things got very silly, and we gave voices to new objects and created dialogues between these objects in those voices.
Caio and I worked with two objects which we affectionately called Glove and Whale. The impression that we got was that they were two dudes that lived in a basement flat together and smoked a lot of weed in their spare time. Glove was a bit of a prick, and whale was just a really cool, easy going dude, but they would never question the dynamics of their friendship. Whale had a low, slow surfer bro voice, and Glove was a bit more annoying. Together, we created a dialogue between the two about public transit.
Overall the exercises were very helpful in reimagining ways that we could talk about objects, and it helped to prepare for writing about the object in preparation for the video.
RCA Graduate Diploma 