Week 8

In week 8 I take a step back from development, to gather feedback from an industry specialist and the panel review. By establishing where I'm at, I'm able to see several gaps in my project that will need to be filled.

Resource reflections

By the Throat


Fig. 1: Borenstein and Weiss 2021. By The Throat Trailer

I was recommended By the Throat by Ben – a film about our spoken language, and how it identifies us as people, belonging to various groups in society.

It was interesting to observe how slight differences in pronunciation can sometimes speak of conflict between two groups in a society, and thus divide people into “familiar” and “others”. For example, in the film, a man explains how when crossing the Jordan river, guards will ask crossers to pronounce a specific word, and use the pronunciation of the S in that word to determine wether or not the crossers are Hebrew (and thus allowed to cross) (Amir Borenstein and Effi Weiss, 2021). This made me view the world as closed, rather than open, and also very much in favour of the “lucky” ones.

A quote from the film, “Owning nothing but the body. Becoming nothing but a body” (Amir Borenstein and Effi Weiss, 2021), made an impression on me. From this I read that without a home-nation, we loose an important aspect of our identities. If this is the case, my project is not really heading towards a successful solution. Instead, a language for all makes everyone equal, and therefore removes people’s identity. This is good if the goal is to unite, but bad if the goal is to accept our differences.

Forward I think it will be important to emphasise that my language should act as a symbol, rather than a communication tool. The aim should not be communicate across nations or to replace one’s mother tongue, but rather to make viewers reflect upon our immigration policies, and what it would be like to live in an open world.

The New York Times: Lawrence Weiner

Fig. 2: Weiner 2001. GOLD SILVER PER SE EMERALDS STEEL SALT PER SE DIAMONDS MOVED CARRIED PER SE PLACED. [etching]

Reading an article in The New York Times on Lawrence Weiner, I was interested in his quote: “(…) the interaction between the work and the viewers, who assumed considerable responsibility in taking it in, pondering it and assimilating it into their own experience, or trying to.” (Kennedy, 2021).

Since deciding to develop a constructed visual language, I’ve been struggling with the fact that people will not really be able to understand it. Of course, the whole idea is to make readers interpret it visually, but even so, the project was starting to feel a bit irrelevant to me. Weiner’s quote did however make me reflect on the relationship between reader and language further, and consider wether it might be okay for them not to understand the work as long as they take something from it. After all, the language’s intention is to be felt, rather than read, and in order to achieve this I think it will be important for people not to understand the project’s outcomes right away.

Industry specialist: Presentation & gathering of feedback

This week I finally managed to see an industry specialist, who provided relevant research in time for the panel review. Please visit next week’s blog post for further details.

Formative assessment outputs

Most of my time this week was spent refining my project plan, writing my literature review and preparing for the industry panel presentation.

Refined project plan

I had come a long way in terms of project direction since writing my project plan, and therefore most of the document had to be changed. In addition to having shifted direction, I had also received relevant feedback from Celine, which I wanted to consider.

Feedback points:

  • Like my industry specialist, Celine suggested to develop a more specific research question.
  • In terms of objective, she explained how the current one wasn’t clear. Since the plan my objective had become clearer and I had moved towards taking the role as a designer, rather than a more journalist approach as I had considered in the beginning.
  • The audience research was (and still is) not very comprehensive. At this stage I have determined who to target, and it would therefore be beneficial to work on this in the following weeks.
  • In terms of methods, Celine suggested to specify how I will be documenting / gathering data of the place I’m investigating.

Please click here to see my refined document. Moving forward I will also attempt to establish a clear week by week plan, focusing on insight gathering, observation methods and final development stages. This should be clearly linked to feedback from my industry specialist, as well as from the panelist review session.

Literature review

I then went on to write my ongoing literature review, which can be found here. I decided to establish three keywords for my literature as I figured this would let me see the gaps in my research. This was very successful because it made me realise that I still need to do quite a bit of research – particularly in relation to Equality and Borders & Immigration.

Weekly wrap up

This week has been very important because of the amount of feedback I have received through industry specialist and panel review discussions. Due to limited time I haven’t actually been able to do written reflections on the feedback yet, and doing so will therefore be the first focus point of next week.

Speaking to others about my project, I have realised that I’ve moved into design experiments too quickly and that my project currently lacks insight. Establishing a list of literature key words has therefore been important, because it has helped me see the gaps in my research.

Although we are expected to be designing at this stage, I think I will try to spend the majority of phase 3 collecting insight through interviews and literature. Particularly due to having chosen a political project where specific groups of people are the “topic”, I think it will be important to speak to those groups, making sure I’m not just trying to fix something that doesn’t need to be fixed.

REFERENCES:
Amir Borenstein and Effi Weiss (2021) By the Throat.

Kennedy, R. (2021) ‘Lawrence Weiner, Artist Whose Medium Was Language, Dies at 79’, The New York Times, 5 December. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/arts/lawrence-weiner-dead.html (Accessed: 12 March 2022).

LIST OF FIGURES:
Figure 1: Amir BORENSTEIN and Effi WEISS. 2021. By The Throat Trailer [film trailer]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wU2ir7qd_4 [accessed 19 March 2022].

Figure 2. Lawrence WEINER. 2001. GOLD SILVER PER SE EMERALDS STEEL SALT PER SE DIAMONDS MOVED CARRIED PER SE PLACED. Art Review [online]. Available at: https://artreview.com/how-lawrence-weiner-1942-2021-reimagined-what-art-could-be/