To start, I’ll look back to the end of the last term of Y1, which is really more the moment before a pause than an end, before the hot summer. Looking back then I was handing out fliers as an invitation to participate in making images whilst watching the short film Dolphin Close by Ed Webb-Ingall. The images were to be made by taking photos of the film on screen through a viewfinder, a series of small holes punched into the fliers.
I hoped to shift viewer’s attention whilst watching the film (available freely https://vimeo.com/1092103009) through the potential of obscured vision, kaleidoscopic visuals and tight focus areas on screen, a kind of live re-edit process. That the resulting viewing experience could be playful, a little confusing but also mirror some of the film making techniques used in Dolphin Close. That viewers might sense their attention changing, that they’d be drawn into paying attention to the storytelling tools and processes as they digested the short film.
My invitation to participate yielded no results and it’s a good reminder that asking for something requires the either provision (time and guidance) or affective coercion. Neither of which I successfully provided.
I distributed the fliers amongst two different groups, my fellow cohort on MAGCD and the staff and volunteers at the community farm I work at. In both groups the initial reaction to the viewfinder was of interest, of using it to view the immediate surroundings. However it failed to get people to take the next step, despite the instructions I’d offered. The flier also lacked a clear reason or incentive to participate which may have helped get people over the hurdle of carving out space and time for watching the film.
I had already made this assessment by the time I took part in the dialogues which I’ll document in another post and you’ll see how the flavour of that failure has steered some of the conversation and how the dialogues offer ways to reshape and refocus my enquiry.
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