Yesterday(Monday 26th March)- My latest deadline- Collaborative Project.
Our brief was to create a piece of work in a partnership,we were given around 6 weeks to create the work and after pulling names out of a hat my partner and I began our work.
A day trip to the coast with a mountain of equipment (cameras,tripods,a mirror and a packed lunch etc) was planned.
The equipment was piled into the back of my retired london taxi and off we went.
Upon arrival it became clear that the weather wasn’t too favourable,but we ploughed on through the grim and grey day, slowly having all our energy and enthusiasm blown out of us by the biting wind,it was so miserable. Our equipment just seemed to enjoy nothing more than making us more miserable.
one broken and abandoned mirror later, we had ran out of steam.
our camera film was all but used up and not feeling particularly creative,we trudged back to the taxi where we were relieved to be out of the wind and on our way home.
as a last minute idea we set up our digital compact camera on a tripod and pointed it out the front of the cab to ‘capture’ some of our journey home.
Next day:
We reviewed our reconnaissance material and weren’t too impressed,some of the pictures were just about ok but it was the film footage on the digital camera that caused a spark of an idea- as we watched this tiny screen we were noticing the reflections in the partition of the taxi,they were really interesting.This could not be ignored!
after thinking about possibilities of expanding this ‘footage’ we had the idea of going for a drive and recording what we saw using 2 perspectives:
i) the drivers fixed concentrated view out the front and limited to small glimpses from the side window,
ii) the passengers view or ability to view almost 360 degrees and freely,
aswell video we used sound recorders to capture ambient sounds ie cars going past,the squeeking of the taxi on it’s journey,aswell as that we recorded a commentary of some of the things we saw and thought about as we travelled around in the taxi.
The approach we adopted was that of a psychogeographer, we met at a designated point that each of us knew how to get to, after that it was a case of following ones nose when it came to direction of travel,with cameras and video recording of course.
we had pre-determined a time limit for the drive of 15 minutes and that was our only stipulation.
Whilst reviewing the footage we realised that the visual element of what was recorded didn’t enhance our idea and we decided to explore the possibiltiy of using the sound alone.As this isn’t a medium that myself or my partner had ever really thought about using we had to research other artists using sound instead of visual work.
a couple of days passed and the deadline was looming ever closer…
Late one night a eureka moment struck and next day I passed the idea on which was eagerly accepted by my partner.
We began to organise our ‘piece’
the plan was to use the original vessel in which we recorded the sound
The Taxi :)
one thing became immediately evident when listening to the piece in the taxi, was that it would be almost impossible to really feel immersed in the sound as outside distractions such as people peering in through the windows.We wanted to allow people to experience what we had experienced on our journey and came up with a simple but effective solution- why not black out the windows.
We sought permission (from Croydon council,through one of our lecturers contacts) to park the taxi on the green space outside our college ready for presenting our final piece.
needless to say that we presented our final idea and although there are things we would want to change (for next time?) it became quite a talking point and we had some positive feedback from our peers.
(although I haven’t gone into too much detail about the work created I wanted to share some of the process we went through in our collaborative project.if anyone is interested what we did in more detail then feel to contact me and I am more than happy to go through the finer details.)
I will add pictures and possibly a video soon.
