Working from a Manifesto

Will People Interact?

The first thing I did today was create a manifesto but by writing automatically rather than having a set topic in mind. The first thing o started writing about was stereotyping and presumption, and how people will look at person and dictate what they are like whether it be for how they dress, their skin, or their ethnicity. From this I started thinking about how I could make a manifesto piece using the piece of writing as a base. 

I started on this piece by first getting my head together, as there was a person I am particularly interested in that I wanted to somehow incorporate into my work, and had to think about whether or not it was possible in the first place. 

Because I couldn't think about it, I decided to make another piece of automatic writing to get things out of my head, which I would then cut up and make a piece of typomontage just as David Bowie had once experimented with. 

I eventually cleared my head and came up with a piece of writing that I was happy with and that explained, to the best of my ability, what I was hoping to get out of my manifesto. After I had photographed it, I cut it up.

After cutting it up, I dropped the pieces onto a large piece of paper, originally I wanted to use black paper, but had to use a different colour, so I chose pink for no particular reason. Where ever the cut out words had landed, in order of height, being closest to the top of the page, I glued them down without trying to decide where to place them. In most cases I didn't look at the word until it came to placing it. The end result was complete nonsense, which I decided to use as a base for my work, and I felt that the pink paper I had chosen to use for no chosen reason worked really well against the white paper the words had been written on.

Once I had cleared my head, I was able to think properly about how I could possibly turn the manifesto I had written into a sculptural piece that was interactive. The first thing I could think about when I looked at the word prejudice was the opinions people had today in our society, which over recent years had become extremely over-sensitive. I decided to ask around and see what people would say were common opinions.

• Donald Trump
• Stereotypes against foreigners
• Femenazi's
• #Freethenipple
• Inequality
• UKIP are racist
• Islamaphobia
• Black/White culture
• Gender Orientation
• Religion against Homosexuality
• Culture inappropriation
• Make-up
• Asian culture
• Menstruation

I decided that I wanted to create a barrier somehow, that people would attempt to break through, which would reflect getting past the close-mindedness. The space I chose was the space between two metal beams in the 2D studio. 

To make the barrier, I wanted to use something that would take some effort to break through, and not something that was especially easy, like paper, so I decided on clingfilm. After thinking about it, however, I realized that the space was much too large and the material too little, so I started thinking about an alternative. I also wanted to prompt the viewer and provoke them, so started to think about ways to do it.

I thought about the main causes for opinions to form, which would be the media, in most cases, and decided that newspapers would be a good thing to use to convey the idea of opinions. Because the space I had chosen was much too large, I decided to scale it down, and thought about how I could create a similar piece.

Following on from last weeks experiment, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to create an enclosed space that the viewer could enter and either exit the way they came, or break through the front, in which I was going to use the clingfilm to create a window. I settled on using a table.

The first thing I did before starting was to test how strong the clingfilm was, so I wrapped it around one side of the table twice and pushed onto it. The table moved before the clingfilm even became slack.

With this, I started to wrap the entire table with the clingfilm in two layers at a time. Once I had done this, I started taping sheets of newspaper to the table top, and bringing them down slightly and taping the ends to the clingfilm. I did this all the way around until the edges were covered.

The side I wanted the window on was the first side I put the newspaper so that I had a reference for later.

I eventually wrapped the entire table in newspaper, which made it into a box. I also taped newspeper inside to hide the clingfilm, with the intention that later, I would be taping more newspaper with sensetive subjects and offensive opinions on the inside.

The offensive opinions were based off of the list of things I had collected from asking around earlier, and I decided to paint them in varying sizes and formats in black paint onto newspaper.

I had intended to put them into the inside of the space, however I had done too many and not many of them were dry enough in time, since we only had that day to come up with and create a piece.

Because they didn't all fit inside, I decided to stick them on the floor with the writing facing the window, so that when you looked out of the space, you could see the writing as well as everything else.

Overall, I hadn't expected the space inside the table to be so cramped. The clingfilm and newspaper combined created a very stifling and dark environment, which I liked because I felt that it went well with my concept of being close-minded. The window allowed enough of a view so that you could see a lot of what was happening around, but wasn't a clear view unless you were to break it.