Zer8. The process for me.

School of Art & Design Collaborative Project Blog

I would only want to add some words about the process that we had as a group to reach this idea. After the talk with Kevin Love about the identity and all that philosophical reflection and then after you gave us the snowball, we started talking about the human necessity of remembering things or obtaining experiences, the idea of being permanent and that souvenirs had that functionality and of course they have also commercial objectives.

One of the first ideas was to make a puppet and it would be a medium sized structure and under its clothes you’ll see the photos we would took because the identity —as Kevin said- is more than “what is my name, where do I come from, etc.” and the idea of putting all Nottingham photos below the puppet clothes would be a hypothesis of how the identity could be configured and then I came up with the idea of fractality and how it fits with identity and how the puppet would represent that. So under the clothes would be also another puppet and under its clothes would be the same photos and another copy of the puppet with the same photos inside and with other puppet and that ad libitum but we thought it would be really hard to construct that thing because of the time and the materials so we decided to start the mapping of the city. And that’s when Mr Blackpool appeared and we decided that the souvenir became a tourist and that just, as we are students, his perspective has to fit with a student perspective.

Despite the fact that it is a collaborative project we can see the individuality or at least is clear for me. For example Amanda was our tour guide as she lives here, and we go to the places that from her perspective would be the most relevant for the work. When Nick took the photos in which we saw the city as the souvenir it was completely his idea and how he assimilated the proposal of Mr. Blackpool.

Anna made the white animations and Clémence the drawing draft. Radhika with the writing, it was Radhika’s Mr. Blackpool point of view, Riko, Tina and Niki made the installation and helped with the scouting and me, it was my own experience/perspective with/of Mr. Blackpool through the short film.