11 Sep
Today is the first day of this term.
The Idea Factory is all about generating your ideas without a limit of methods you take in your work. We are told to use three words to come up with a final piece.
Our three words are 'Anarchism', 'Concrete', 'Amplify'.
Since 'anarchism' is more about politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and with a long and complicated history. We chose to begin with figuring out what anarchism exactly means and what its main point is. We planed to collect more materials about the historic information such as famous anarchists in the history, the major events which happened before. What is the initial idea of anarchism? What do they want? How is it possible to realize? What did they do to make it come true? Are there any successful examples in the past or still exist? How it keeps working and what is like inside?
For that we had no clue about the questions above so we decided to start with the simplest information and add some of our understanding into the idea development. In our conclusion, the general anarchists support 'no governments and no authority'. The world they want is more like utopia and not so realistic. Without the governing power and restriction on personal behaviors the world might be chaotic and due to it is against government, most of the anarchism events in the history are related to severe incidents.
We had two different version of thoughts. The first one is on the side of the anarchists and see concrete concrete as the symbol of the monitoring from the government. So we tried to show what it is like to break through the walls government built to blind the people to cover its sin through 'breaking the concrete'.
The second one was to take a neutral position and to take a deeper look into it. We still wanted to use concrete to stand for government while treating anarchism as something we had doubts about. We wanted to show different possibilities of the future world in our work and without a decision of conclusion since it truly has no answers yet in the real world.
12 Sep
Today is the library session.
Since our main word is anarchism, a word behind which there is a lot of information and history, searching in the library is really helpful to the this project.
We decided to figure out what kind of art piece we want to make and what materials we wanted to use.
We planned to do an installation including the general features and something indicating the developing process based on the discuss we had yesterday and those information we've collected about the history, especially about how those anarchist organizations or political parties set up, developed, expanded and the affairs caused by them, related to them, or affected by them.
Generally, we wanted to express the idea of something with ' one way in, endless ways but maybe no exit ', but we were not sure about which kind of work it should be like.
I preferred one idea that is an interactive installation. It is a room with a lot of fake doors on the wall, ground floor and ceiling. There is only one entrance and once you went in, the entrance will be closed means ' there's no way back '. The countless doors everywhere stand for different possibilities about what the anarchism world would be like. Also, the walls are made of mirrors, letting you see yourself in it to rethink the decision you've made. But the entrance is closed now, no chance to redo.
For example, there could be global chaos for that without the governing the darkness anchored deeply in humanity would be released. Also, it's based on the assumption that humans are born with evils inside.
Meanwhile, there will be music mainly about those speeches or manifestos about the anarchism, even the background music in some movies related to anarchism.
The other two in my group preferred the other idea based on a structure from one book we've searched. It's basically a structure simply made of wires twined together like a cocoon. Their plan was to separately set a beginning of 'existing government breaks down, anarchism world begins' and several endings roughly symbolizing possible situation. At the same time, other materials will be added onto the wires to show things like people suffering from wars and global conflicts.
At the end we decided to go with the second idea that could better display the details in the developing process. We decided to use a broken concrete ball for the 'current world collapsing'. At the same time all the wires will come out of the ball, twining together but you can't find the destination.
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The materials needed are wire, concrete, wax (possibly used to make little wax men that melt to symbolize the people suffering) and all other medias like newspaper that can talk and communicate.
14 Sep
After several days of brainstorming, we were told to work individually to generate more ideas and come up with rough outcomes by simple sketches or other ways you like.
I really dug into a lot of history in the last few days. I started to work on the sighs and other visual materials. I chose the symbol of FAI ---- Federación Anarquista Ibérica ( spanish), a Spanish organization of anarchist (anarcho-syndicalist and tanarcho-communist) with a huge letter and a eagle head on top. I also add other parts like twisted human body parts inspired by Picasso's work made during the Spanish Civil War. I wanted to choose wax as the main material. I would put it in a glass room with metal ground floor.
When on display, the floor will be heated up and the whole room will be so hot that the whole wax sculpture I made started to melt. I want to show that the anarchism is still not mature enough for the whole world and it can easily collapse.
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We were divided into new groups of five or six and told to come up with new ideas after lunch. In the new groups we first shared our previous ideas and got feedback from others. I was really impressed by others' works with different medias like different making materials and music. Some of them were in small scale but really striking.
My work was appreciated for its melting wax. They said it's something new but simple and clear to convey the ideas inside. The melting wax is really eye-catching.
We were told to pick a best one in the group and show them on a larger piece to the whole classroom.
The one we picked is also a moving installation. It's a ball hung up on the ceiling with multiple layers. The most inner layer is covered with LED screen. The second layer is very thin of little water in a plastic sheet. The third is a complete black shell made up with separate parts supported by sticks inside inserted in the inner layers. The last one is a fragile glass layer.
When on display, the sticks will stretch out so the black layer will be separated into pieces. Then the stretching-out sticks with black parts on top will break the glass. Meanwhile, the water will be boiled and move with the plastic sheet and the LED screen will start to play the videos or images selected about anarchism. We also use a music mixed with some from the movie <V For Vendetta> and some parts of Donald Trump's speech.
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In the show time, my favorite one is a installation plus a performance art with a theme of 'feminism'. The drums and sound box will play a fight between a couple in the soundproof glass room in a public space. So the audience ---- basically everyone ---- have no ideas of what's going on. Then some actors and actresses will start shouting and fighting in the crowd.
They want to show the idea of domestic violence. Unfortunately, others will never know what happened to the wives and couldn't help at all just like they can't hear the sound inside the glass room. When they think it has nothing to do with them, the fight outside and just around them will inform them that the domestic violence could happen to anyone and we should keep alerted and ready to help.
I think the whole Idea Factory session is such a good start of the course for it has no limits and all for your own thoughts. You are free to generate and visualize your ideas but still need to center around a serious theme. The researching, researching process are also exercised. You will learn how to express yourself, absorb others ideas and make your ideas into words and share to all.