open-ended is exciting but scary

Every since I've been threading on this open-ended path on my project, it has been changing immensely. I'm not sure if it's good or bad but every time I go back to previous pages on my sketchbook, they start to make less and less sense, so I guess it's good.

I have been looking at one of the exhibits at 'Touch me' specifically Touch me I and II, Yoko Ono's April 2008 exhibition in New York.

Below are the instructions taken from Yoko Ono - Touch me (Charta, 2008)

touch me I

Take a photo of your body part reaching out from the openings.
Make a choice:
1.keep the photo
2.discard the photo
3.pin the photo up on touch me II
4.put a message underneath your photo
5.ask a friend to put a message underneath your photo.

y.o. '08

touch me II

touch me I

touch me II

touch me I

I like how something so simple triggered such a response and such a interesting result on touch me II.

In my last post I said I wanted to show some videos to people and see their response regarding the video. What I didn't like about this idea is that it was centred too much around the video, and less around the people. Today I was thinking about putting the focus more on the people and their stories. Should their stories to connected or separate from the video/visuals? Separating them from the video makes the whole project even more randomised than it already is, connecting them obviously provides a clearer link to whoever is watching, which could be nice - but misses the point of the whole project.

So now I'm left with two things to do.

1. Find these individuals and start collecting stories.

2. Think about what the content of the videos / visuals is going to be.

My idea at the moment is to just get abstract shots through video & connect with the visualisations, but perhaps to include some shots of people searching for meaning / doing meaningless things in everyday life . Anyway, whatever I do - I need to start testing these things out next week.

I think now I'll go make myself some coffee.

-------------------

(10 minutes later)

Slightly more ambitious (because I'm bad at programming) I've been thinking about this idea but avoiding it, but here goes: what I really want to do is to have the project online so that more people can include their stories via a database which then updates the stories to include the new ones. I will try to find someone who understands these applications and see if this is at all feasible.