Tutorial with Steve Bulcock and New Ideas

So yesterday I signed up for a tutorial with Steve Bulcock as I was feeling very helpless in regards to progressing any further with this project. Luckily, the tutorial really helped. He told me that the outcome didn't need to be high-tech or gadget based (the wording and examples in the brief made me think otherwise in the beginning) and that I should start with smaller more simple ideas. He also said it could evoke a memory more than experience, and then that in turn would be an experience in itself. He said imagine I've told you that you can do absolutely anything you want with no boundaries, and then reign those ideas in to fit the brief. I must admit it was a great comfort to hear these helpful ideas and I now feel a lot more comfortable about this project.

I really liked the idea of basing my project around objects/ideas that could evoke memories and that the project would be more about me and my  own experiences, rather than the outside world and experiences I have never encountered. Any work I have ever made has never been especially personal or specific to my life, so this could be an interesting learning curve but I believe it could ultimately make my work more meaningful.

On my way home I started listing some objects/ ideas that cropped up when I thought about my childhood.

• Favourite childhood books.
• Family holiday video tapes and photographs.
• Memories of Infant and Junior School, old friends.
• Divorce of parents, choosing to not see my Mother.
• Music that reminds me of my childhood.
• Clothes with childhood memories attached.
• Big events in my childhood.
• Certain objects that trigger memories.
• Teenage memories, senior school, friends, etc.

My house has changed a lot since I was a child. Rooms have been redecorated, things have been broken and toys have been thrown out. So I really do have to look hard to find things that link with memories from my childhood.

Some more specific objects/ideas that came to mind.

1. I still have a mint green bathroom stool with little chubby elephants on it that was bought for me when I was a toddler. I couldn't say 'stool' when I first began to talk so resorted to calling it a 'scoob'. This  then turned into an inside joke in my household. It's stayed in the bathroom ever since and stood the test of time. Until recently when my Dad stood on it and broke one of the legs. I repaired it and now keep it out of harms way in my room.
2. My Dad always filmed our family holidays. One year when I was 6 or 7 whilst we were on holiday I discovered if I looked through the prongs of a fork at someone it would look like they were in jail. It also worked particularly well if I held the fork right up to my Dad's camera lens, then anyone who watched the video tape afterwards, including me, would feel like they were in jail too. This entertained me to no end and just the mere sight of fork that summer would have me in fits of laughter. What can I say? I was a strange child. We still have this video tape, and it's one of my favourite childhood memories.
3. When I was about 4 or 5, I loved the taste of Calpol which is liquid paracetamol for children. I vaguely remember even pretending I have headaches just so I could have a spoonful now and then. It became a bit of a problem and one day I managed to get past the child lock on the medicine cabinet and drink about 1/2 of a bottle of the stuff because one of my parents hadn't screwed the top on properly.  I was rushed to hospital but luckily I hadn't drank enough to give me kidney or liver failure and therefore didn't need my stomach pumped. Calpol bottles have been around me ever since then and always remind me of that little accident, but fortunately I have more sense now to not chuck down the contents of the bottle.
4. When my Mother was in hospital having my little sister, my Dad would drive me to and from the hospital to visit them. I had a Spice Girls cassette in the car and would listen to it non-stop. The sight of this distinctive cassette case would always remind me of those journeys.

These are just the initial memories that always come back to me when I think about my childhood. I think it would be a good idea to watch some of the holiday, Christmas and birthday videos from my childhood to help refresh my memory of things that happened to me. Then I might come up with more interesting objects/ideas to include in my project.

EDIT: I had a great idea for how I could present these ideas if I wanted to approach it quite simply. I could produce a series of sculpture/paintings/drawings of the objects/memories, but distort or blur some parts to show how sometimes we don't see all the details of the memory clearly. I believe this would be more interesting that just presenting the object in complete, and more closely represents the experience of remembering something from the past.

Absence of Sense

Whilst looking into Anosmia (the inability to smell)  from my brainstorm, I found some more interesting conditions and their names to do with senses.

• Anosmia is the complete loss of ones ability to smell
• Hyposmia is a partial loss of ones ability to smell
• Ageusia is the complete loss of ones ability to taste
• Hypogeusia is the partial loss of ones ability to taste
• Parosmia is a condition were ones sense of smell is distorted or where one smells certain odours that are not present, i.e. Phantom odours
• Dusgeusia is a condition were ones tastes abnormal phantom tastes.

I also discovered something called Synesthesia where the brain confuses stimuli taken in through sense and triggers a reaction another sense. For example you might listen to a piece of music and get a certain taste in your mouth or see colours that your brain relates to the music. Some people also perceive letters, numbers or words to have specific colours.

I think any of these would be interesting to try and recreate for everyone to experience. But again maybe I am being to ambitious.

Brainstorm

I was feeling a little stuck so I decided to group all the ideas buzzing around in my head into a brainstorm in order to organise myself a little bit and gain some clarity.

Getting my ideas down on paper, or blog in this case, has really helped me off load the mass of ideas that were stuck in my head and I think I will be able to progress with my project much more quickly and efficiently from now on.

Simulant Robots

Also mentioned in the brief was the idea of extremely realistic robot humans. Some examples in the film being West World (1973), Stepford Wives (1975 & 2004) and A.I.  Artificial Intelligence (2001).

 While looking into the idea of simulation humans I came across an interesting theory. It's called 'The Uncanny Valley'. It was theorised by a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori in 1970. (Translated article here) The theory states that the more realistically human a robot or simulation appears to be the more familiarity we have for it. However, there is a certain point where if the humanistic qualities become too ambiguous, we develop a distrust or disgust for the robot instead. This idea is represented nicely in the graph below, and is also where the name 'Uncanny Valley' comes from, because of the extremely steep valley in the graph denoting the drop off point in our emotional relation to the humanoid being.

This idea really interests me, but it might be a little ambitious to theoretically make some sort of human simulation that would cause someone to experience the Uncanny Valley phenomenon because of limited time, materials and skills. But perhaps I could come up with something on a smaller scale that would still relate to this idea instead. I plan to watch the films I have listed at the start of my blog post and perhaps try and find more to draw inspiration from.

Casualties Union

One of the ideas mentioned in the project launch was to do with the Casualties Union (website here) This is an organisation that train people in how to recreate realistic injuries with make up and how to act accordingly to portray certain conditions, for example a heart attack. These skills are then used in emergency services and military training events to make the situation feel more realistic. Some examples:

This is obviously quite an extreme form of simulation and is meant to  be shocking to provide as realistic an experience as possible for the medical personnel during the training exercises in order to prepare them for dealing with these injuries/conditions in the real world. It's also quite a morbid set of skills to have and quite an unusual organisation to be a part of, but obviously a very important one.

About 8 years ago I actually did a very brief course on Casualty Simulation with St. John Ambulance Cadets. We were taught the basics of recreating cuts, bruises and blisters. However, it was a long time ago so I don't remember it in great detail, but I do member bits and pieces. So this may be advantageous if I did decide to centre my project around the idea of casualty simulation. I will have to see what other ideas I come across in my research.