GROUP MODULE

Module 4 - Group Work. Despite hopes of pairs being allowed to be a group followed by hopes that we would be put into groups, everyone in the studio made friend groups.. leaving generally my friend group and 2 almost strangers to fend for ourselves.

ME, JOHN, CHARLEY, JEFF, JOE, TANK, DAN

The first few days were spent making brainstorms and doing little bonding sessions which were to no avail as the 2 members who needed to be bonded had to leave.. so our given space (same space i had last module) was a tip with bits of last module and stuff that wasn't our groups. we had a task to research artists and to bring in pieces of our previous work. i also had an adam green poster.. i put that up :)

returning from a critical studies lesson, i found that John, Charley and Tank had been brainstorming and had come up with the great idea of all working properly together (rather than all doing our own work on a theme) and possibly making an installation in our space, as it seemed easy to close off from the studio. then joined by me and joe, we brainstormed more until this conversation happened:

Charley: im tired..

John: we should build a bed for you to sleep in

And then we all rushed off ahead with this whole bedroom idea. It figured perfect, make a room similar to our own bedroom that was art AND we could make art in it or do performances or videos or.. the possibilities were "endless." our first group task was to bring in 3 images of our own bedrooms for our group crit and also to analyse and give us inspiration.

we decided we wanted to eradicate everything that was "the studio" we needed to paint walls, change the floor and get a roof to totally box us off. we would document this as we went with videos/photos. we started by hanging a grey curtain over our space entrance which instantly made it feel like a separate space. we sent tank off(because she can drive) to B+Q or generally a house-paint place to get paint. we decided on 2 walls magnolia and 2 walls the colour of jeffs room (a greeny colour) for equal representaion, and because magnolia is pretty much white.

whilst looking for a carpet shop we saw this handy removal van in the town centre.. and as its cargo: 2 boxes of carpet tiles. we waited around for a bit and found the van owner and he gave them us free.

we went skip hunting and found wooden table(which we graffiti'd in true student style)/chairs to contrast the plastic/metal uni ones and pallets+old dirty mattress to possibly make a bed with. We found some other bits and bobs like a super-cool coat stand, a tv-stand looking thing and...some kind of box lol. in this picture you can see the rubbish grey curtains lol

we had a fixin'-up day in which we did the basic transformations of the room: painted walls, laid carpet and fitted the bed roughly.

so, as you can see the bedroom was shaping up. the basic structure was there. our documenting going well and group morale was good. we went out and bought bedding that you can see below in our in-progress room.

Dan was generally in charge of making these flash-style videos to document things. me, him and joe made some little ones like the one below.

we decided the room needed pictures or posters..or something decorative. so i made these photoshopped images of us as if we'd been on a group bonding session to world monuments and charley and john went and bought frames to display them in. The display generally echoed joe's identity project final piece.
we outlined weekly to-do lists to keep work happening and to help visualise the final bedroom.

we did a dispersed dyes workshop, which was largely unhelpful to our project. i think we spent most of the session making random cartoons. and the image transfers unfortunately didnt work properly.

i was working in my video elective, which coincided with the video workshop, so videos were started to be being made. this is my first elective video "HOW TO" (FOR THE YOUTUBE VIDEOS RIGHT CLICK AND 'WATCH ON YOUTUBE', BECAUSE THE BLOG CUTS OFF THE SIDE OF THE VIDEO)

i also made this video of the room. a rather arty-farty compositional STEVE MCQUEEN GIARDINI style video of the empty room, when we werent there.

we also had to do a 100 word presentation about our bedroom. a group PRESENTATION. we thought of 100 different bedroom-y things that you do within your bedroom. this gave us inspiration for our final installation of the room. we could stage all of these things within the room and video them, present them within the room so the viewer was seeing everything happen where it happened and could see "props" and consequences of everything that had happened.

heres our 100 word video: unfortunately it uploaded to youtube badly so the audio is out of sync... but it went down very well with the studio. it had a totally different tone to everyone else in the studio (who all did really serious monotonous look at our idea kind of things) and ours had a much more jolly and friendly aesthetic.

we set about trying to put some sort of roof up, because the room looked like a room but as soon as you looked up.. there was the studio... the studio light and brightness. a roof would make the room have a different lighting and also make you feel more contained. at first i tried to make a roof from the rubbish grey curtains (that we had replaced with some kitsch fabric) but then that failed and we hired fabric from the fashion department which worked really well

more charity shop spreeing gave us little bits to make the room a room.. a clock, bedside table, etc. we also got some posters (a key part of any students bedroom)



we managed to get a tv from kelly and john brought in ipod speakers and a playstation 2. i think the games console was a bit part of making the room a room.. having the wires and game cases everywhere really helped the room looked lived in and used.




we staged lots of things and hired video cameras for the final week. one night we decided to stay in the room and hung out in there til about 7-8 oclock. we got lots of filming done and got some great shots of the room as it got darker. it was really our space now and i think the footage we got shows that. we were all friends messing about and having fun in there, like our own place where we lived, almost.








we edited the footage and will display it at the group crit on Monday 22nd March. we had over an hours worth of footage and had to edit it down to something watchable. heres a small taster of the "dancing" element of the film.