Summer School day 3, Wednesday 30 July 2014

10.30: Make a List
Participants are issued with minimal instruction to ‘Make a List’

With only a stack of paper and no further instructions the participants are invited to work in pairs to respond to the collection. Each of the partners takes half of the list back to their original group to influence the making of Noticer/s.

10.45: Agency
Participants are introduced to Jane Bennett’s keynote lecture, Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter (New School, NYC 2011)

16’.43” Start
53’:07”-55’:22” on ‘thingness’ – a faux-naive question;
53’:23”-57’:28” on political implications of Bennett’s theory.

Bennett’s keynote lecture introduces idea ‘agency’ and ‘vibrancy’ of objects and possible artistic responses to this concept.

10.45: P-A-U-S-E
The mobile blackboard is used during and after the screening to record Noticings.

11.00: The Social World Of Objects
Artist Simon Pope draws attention to the ways in which our Noticer/s might be drawn to other objects and people to form a community, public or social world.

Pope shows examples from his recent work Primary Agents Of A Social World 2014, in which he traces the relationships between a large coal sample held at National Museum Wales’s large-object stores and the various people and things which have had a transformative relationships with it. In a short film he attempts to reveal the ‘social world’ of the object by assembling a small group of individuals who have had specific and strong engagements with the piece of coal, forming a community with the object as its catalyst, protagonist or hub.
 Additionally through The Outlier (2014) Simon introduces notions of a ‘public’ as being engaged rather than unconsciously co-opted in relation to the Noticer’s core ideas of seeing and noticing.

2.00: Transformative Relations
Simon’s working method was to seek-out material transformations of one thing by another; an exercise which he asks Summer School participants to perform for the Noticer/s.

Participants identify, imagine and collate possible material, transformative relations for the new object. They create a script with the voice of an object/material.
What are the materials?
What are the processes that have been used to transform them?
What are the qualities of the relationships at each transformation—such as of care, exploitation, etc.
Where are the object’s materials given attention? (and where/when are they overlooked, ignored, taken for granted?)
How did they get to where they are now? e.g. how were they transported, traded, stored, exchanged?
Who are the people that transform or are transformed by the materials?
What are the things‚ other than humans, that transform or are transformed?
How might we represent these relationships? Is this possible, or even desirable?

3.30: Object Autobiographies
Each participant contributes to a performance to camera.

For each person or thing that the Noticer/s have a relationship with, the participants describe the relationship from the point of view of the object.

Written, spoken and recorded for camera each participant makes a series of short autobiographies.

4.30: S-T-O-P
Noticings are recorded on the blackboard.

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