Zoom Session 24

Photograph Analysis & Research – Christabel Harley

I’m actually filling in this zoom session retrospectively as this is the first opportunity for the last 3 weeks that I’ve been able to blog. This is one of our busiest times of year at work. Prepping all of the students for their art exams although, very enjoyable and rewarding, is also very stressful and time consuming. Therefore it’s nice to be able to sit down and finally catch up on events.

Christabel’s talk was excellent! I wasn’t sure if I was approaching my research paper properly. However, when she explained about putting everything into a metaphorical ‘paper bag’, tucked safely away for further use, things started to make sense. This is pretty much how I’ve been approaching the project up to now, so this validated my methodology.

During our session we looked at a particular piece of research. It was called ‘The Art of Semi Living’ by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. Looking at this paper was actually really helpful on two counts. Firstly, we were tasked with reading only the first sentence of each paragraph to get a ‘feel’ for the paper. This isn’t something that I had tried before, so I found that it sped up my reading immeasurably! It is certainly a technique that I plan to take forward when reading research papers. Secondly the piece itself was not only interesting as a research paper, it was also highly relevant to my own thinking. Over the last couple of weeks I have been wrestling with ideas for my research paper and this helped me cement in my mind exactly what I wanted research.

I also picked up some other useful tips. Christabel suggested just spending time looking at one piece of work. In fact, she felt that spending lots of time just looking at one piece of work might prove very useful.

I decided to try this. I knew which piece interested me and I sat with the image of the piece and gave it some thought. The piece that I chose was ‘Can’t Help Myself’ by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. This piece was originally commissioned for The Guggenheim Museum.

I need to conduct further research into this piece and its creators. However, at this stage, although very important, I was less interested in what the creators had said. My interest was what an audience member had written about the piece on the Facebook social media platform. Below are screen shots of the social media post. What I found intriguing about this post, was the way the author openly proclaims how emotionally affected they were by the piece.

I could feel that the topic of my research paper was slowly starting to emerge! I could see a relationship starting to build between human empathy and the machine. How could this be so? How could an inanimate object create such a deep response in an audience member? I felt that this piece coupled with the work of Catt’s and Zurr could become an interesting avenue to explore.

A few other notable tips from this session included looking at the CREDO database through a link to Libsearch: www.libsearch.arts.ac.uk, otter.ai and discussions around ‘N-Vivo’. Apparently otter.ai is good for transcribing interviews and ‘N-Vivo’ is good for qualitative research.

A Spectator’s View of ‘Can’t Help Myself’ by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu

Conclusion

At the end of this session I felt that my ideas were slowly starting to crystallise. I am still ‘finding my feet’ with regards to the research paper but I am finding these sessions very useful.