This week’s session was apparently supposed to be for us all to present slides related to what we have going on with our project at the moment (which, (somewhat thankfully) I was not the only one who didn’t get the memo for), as it is our last week before spring where we are expected to come back with a first draft for the project, so it makes sense and will be helpful to find out where people are up to to develop my own work accordingly. As I am stuck in this limbo right now of not having much going on at all with my project, I had to just be honest and explain that I haven’t got very much of anything done. I explained some ideas that I had with my friends, as well as some more ideas to do with tattooing and performance, which did help, but I don’t think I am where I should be at at this point and over the spring will ideally be able to get things worked out enough to have something to present when we come back.
As for last week’s jam session, it didn’t happen; I booked the room out, and on the day everyone either cancelled or didn’t respond, but wanted to do it at another time. I have a feeling that this isn’t going to really work for a Uni project since everyone is pretty unreliable, not that this wasn’t expected, everyone has shown up hours late every time we’ve actually done it, meaning it’s hard to get everyone in one room. During the Spring, though, we could play some music, just not related to this project, I don’t think.
The rest of the class was focused on preparations for Crit sessions and methods of giving peers feedback in the best way possible, a lot of it was quite good advice too, and felt related to what is happening with the method of the group listening sessions Adam Stanovich puts on, where after the first listen the group is to talk amongst themselves as if the artist is not in the room, and the second listen through is to engage in the Q&A. This method gives the artist a view of how the work engages an audience without their own input attached, giving the response more purity with the peers acting as if they are not even there, really.
For myself, though, if the work with my friends continues to fall through, I think the best bet is to man up and contact an artist I don’t personally know with a proposal rather than waiting for friends.