Prompt given 2/10/2020, completed in 6/10/2020 This project has been very difficult for me from the very beginning. I didn’t understand well the brief and I didn’t have any ideas I thought were decent. Also my team was formed fairly late which meant that we were pretty much behind. I wasn’t too passionate. Everything seemed like it wasn’t going to go well and I didn’t share artistic vision with any member of the group which just made it harder. At first I was inspired by Richard Dawson’s music video of “Dead dog in a n alleyway”:
I think the video is insanely creative and I loved the color pallet, but my group wasn’t too fond of it. We started thinking about doing an animation, a physical model of the map etc. but the brief was very restrictive on this and decided to stray away from our original idea. I sadly don’t have any drafts of this since we quickly realized that it wasn’t possible. We thought hard about what everyone shared at uni, being in a pandemic or not, and we saw that a good night out united us all. It wasn’t a serious or emotional idea, it was a light hearted concept of just having fun. We decided to use neon colors and a linear map to show the progression of a night with friends. This was our first draft.
This wasn’t satisfying at all, at least to me, and we were in a creative block. I was very unhappy and it didn’t help that I was going through some personal stuff that made me not put as much effort and heart as I could. Reading week was not going as well as it could. I had some ideas on how to fit the illustrations on the first draft but they were hollow and ugly:
At least we had the color pallet clear and sorted (Complementary and neon) but the form was just ugly. I was feeling very bad about all this and my group seemed to think that this was good enough and for me it was clearly not. Two night before the deadline I decided to meditate for a while and clear my head, so at 1:00 a.m. I had a vision of what the project could be. A literal map of Kingston in isometric perspective that showed the progression of a night out (at leas it was better than the other ideas). I worked two hours in a manic state because I finally found something that might work. We still kept the color pallet but now it was more of a map than what we had done before, although incorporating elements of the previous one (Illustrations). These were the early stages
As you can see I used google maps as blueprint and only drew the buildings in the route, which I basically improvised. The next challenge was to incorporate in some way the illustrations that Sarah made. The group decided the itinerary and time stamps so it was my job to make it all work: here were the results.
We added different routes (red, green, blue and yellow) and the illustrations were accompanied with simple distorted typography to explain a but better, indications of time and of place. It now looked like a GTA map, unintentionally, and I was pretty happy about it. Now it was the turn for my group to come up with the title, which they did as a neon sign. This is the final outcome of the project
I am satisfied with this specially taking into account that we have made it in a very short period of time. It’s not my best work but it’s quite fun, so I won’t complain that much.
Now, with the manifesto. Since I invested most of my time in the map I have barely had time to produce a good manifesto, but at least with it I knew how to say. I have barely any actual drafts of the manifesto since it just bursted out of me. It might not be very aesthetically linked to the map (I hate neon and used gold and silver instead) but spiritually it does. It support the idea of not taking yourself or your work too seriously and the fact that sometimes it’s okay to make light-hearted work. I also was very influenced by Kandinsky’s “Concerning the spiritual in Art” where he explores the meaning and impact of intention and heart into art. That’s where “guide yourself with intuition” comes from. This is the final outcome:
I am very satisfied with the message but not as much with the form, which is due to time management issues. I may go back to this in the future
With this project I have learnt three main things: don’t to projects with people you don’t know and don’t share artistic vision, intention and criteria; read the brief multiple times and maybe work with less people (obviously depending on the brief). Ah and maybe don’t do an important piece of work in the middle of a lockdown, which adds a lot of stress to the mind and makes working, creative thinking and new perspectives much harder to do effectively. This projects, with all its hardships and not-as-good-as-it-could outcome has been a big lesson for me and overall a very enriching and even positive experience, I hope to be able to implement everything I’ve learnt in the future and make better work. It’s all for the best. Thank you for reading.
NAMENOTFOUND// 