In my final year of my Masters I went in a different
direction from the social media concept of art collaboration. I decided to
organize workshops with groups of 2 to 8 people. These workshops lasted for
about 2 hours where I provided food and drink and instructions on how to make
paper beads.
In these paper beads I asked my participants to write
something they thought was meaningful. It could be anything they wanted, maybe
even a drawing. Sometimes they took this request and wrote sarcastic or shallow
remarks and others took it more seriously and wrote secrets or deep questions.
I did 8 workshops in the United States, Scotland, England and Lebanon using dictaphones to audio record the conversations with the participants'
permission.
With the audio that I collected, I sat through and
listened to everything. In all of the discussions, I realized a few things:
that the bigger the group, the more shallow and light-hearted the conversations
became while the smaller and more intimate the groups, the more serious and
personal the conversations were. I found 6 different broad subject matters that
I felt best encompassed the feel of all of the workshops, and the mini cultures
that developed during those workshops.
The subjects that I found were culture/location, music/personal,
art, me, politics, and romance/relationships. I edited all of the audio and
mixed all of the conversations together. I then put them on 6 individual MP3
players connected to headphones. For my installation in my MFA show, I placed
all the beads that were made in previous workshops on a dining room table with
the headsets placed at each chair, along with instructions on how to make paper
beads. Viewers coming to the show could either listen to the conversations,
and/or make more paper beads.
Culture, Location
Music, Personal
Art
Me
Politics
Romance, Relationships
The response that I received from both participants in workshops and viewers at the show were not only positive but met with excitement. I found that creativity, human interaction and conversation are essential for people to feel color and life into their existence. For a fully rounded person one must have art as apart of their life.
