Pratical Peer Review 2

The work hasn't really reached a new focus since the last peer review, and many of the plans for development have yet to be implemented. However a newer focus on commuting, more specifically queues of cars has emerged. The research leading up to my essay writing discovered a quote by Henri Lefebvre, saying that waiting or commuting is, 'an inevitable product of the bureaucratic appropriation of the everyday'. I discovered that commuting is highly representational of the everyday, the daily rush hour being explicit evidence of society's focus on capital showing itself in the everyday. 

Feedback suggestions:

- Create zine focussing on different locations and observations
- Use combination of looser, faster drawings and more detailed, refined, giving more information about place
- Images as singular or sequential, which is more effective? Think about context audience receives work
- Draw same place over and over, showing passing of time, creating a narrative 
- Consider whether images are relatable/connect to an audience
- What is the conclusion of work?
- How is visual research going to be processed?

Plans for development:

- Continue focussing imagery down, just waiting and queues, for example - reread essay so that imagery can successfully explore ideas written about
- Start to combine drawings into wider images which explore the everyday as a whole, create compositions that sum up discoveries
- Create zines of themes/locations for example a zine of commuting cars, a zine of people queuing 
- Process visual research through collating, selecting, developing, redrawing, collecting, combining
- MAKE MORE WORK

Project Updates, Cars

• Really fun way to work, looser and full of movement and energy. Drawing static objects/slow moving as if they are 'alive'. 
• The structures of the different everyday lives are documented, brought together by the daily commute. The volume of vehicles shows the routines and waiting that modern western society dictates on the everyday and the individuals within it. ‘…the only life that people have, which is neither completely determined nor completely free’ (P.Sztompka, 2008)

• Using COP as an opportunity to push my visual language, I found this way of making images really enjoyable and fruitful, especially in a reportage context. The immediacy of the drawings is important, as the moments captured are commonly fleeting. The ability to document the necessary forms and aspects of an image in a short space of time is an exciting challenge.

Practical Peer Review 1

Positive, encouraging feedback from peers. Work is at broad stage, documenting people in both Leeds and Manchester city centres who are ‘waiting’ or going about their daily business. Not yet explicitly focussed, a good method for starting out, being broad and seeing how it focusses ‘organically’. Review suggests that text and image results are most effective - I will try and incorporate both in my final images, letting the text give the images context and a deeper exploration of the everyday. Reduced and gestural line work was well received, saying it ‘captures passing of time as it is responding to’.

Suggestions for development - 

• delve in more, speak to people

• include individual daily routines

• zone in on favourite parts, develop

• make publication

• screen print layering line drawings up

• incorporate more text

Plans for development - 

• focus on main concepts and areas, waiting/commuting and impacts of technology on the everyday

• think about collating images into publication, collections of topics, themes, subject matters to build up a series of the everyday through different categories

• think about ways of incorporating text, talking to people? overheard conversations? interviews? own observations might make an interesting context?

• continue pushing visual language of work, develop loose mark making and quick representations of forms and subject matters

• ensure practical work links to and explores content of essay

The work could definitely be more explorative and experimental in its documentation methods and visual presentation. I am going to try and combine more research methods into single images to create a ‘map’ of sorts that builds up a picture which represents the everyday in a more detailed and broad way, taking into consideration the complexities and multiple factors of the everyday. 

Project Updates

• Research on Henri Lefebvre's ideas on 'waiting' as being an inevitable part of the everyday. Started documenting people waiting, queuing and going to work.
• Commute observed as a very common, repeated structure of daily life, experienced by the majority.

• Immediacy and gestural nature of the cars queuing became an essential part of the project. Capturing the aspects of the everyday in a more abstract, looser way reflects its intangible definition. The drawings simultaneously have structure and routine yet are also ever-changing, just like the everyday. 

• Henri Lefebvre's 'vacuum' is well documented in these drawings from Manchester City Centre. A lot of the people I observed were on their phones, and by capturing them en masse it highlights technologies presence in the everyday.
• The anonymity of the individuals documented speaks to the universality of the everyday, where even individuals with differing routines, structures and definitions of the everyday are still a part of the social whole, of society, and of a web of human connections.