The Process

For this project I wanted to do something that involved the participation of volunteers as well as some sort of interpretation on their part. My idea was to give them two words, preferrably words that are opposites of eachother in meaning, and have them interpret each one so that I could combine the two by-products and create some sort of visual lie. I did this for two reasons: first, I was very interested in seeing the interpretational differences between my male volunteers and my female volunteers, and secondly, I thought it would be intriguing to see two clashing forces in one image combined together to form a visual contradiction. What is special about this is that one can only appreciate the irony of the image if one knows what specific words the two elements represent.

 

Elements: 1. a body position 2. a color

Words: 1. LOVE 2. HATE

Data from volunteers.

 

Process:

1. Find thirteen volunteers.

2. Ask them to get in a body position that they believe represents the word "LOVE".

3. Ask them to name a color that they believe represents the word "HATE".

4. Crop out the shape of the bodies in each picture.

5. Place the cropped shape of each volunteer on a background of their respective color and apply a mask of the same color on top also.

6. Match all picture sizes.

7. Compare.

While doing this project I realized that variation does easily introduce itself from repetition. I think that in my case this was partly due to the choice in source material, or in other words, the different personalities and ideas of my subjects. For example one of my volunteers interpreted the word "love" as being best represented by a sleeping position, while another volunteer chose to represent the word "love" by getting on his knees, putting his arms out, and screaming towards the sky. More frequently, however, I saw that repetition emerged from variation. Almost 25% of the volunteers did practically the same body position: they stood there, smiled, and put up their hands or arms in the shape of a heart. I couldn't figure out if this was because they felt too silly to truly express themsleves, or if it was because they truly believed that that specific position represented the word "love" the best. In any case it showed that this process, although seemingly open-ended and very capapble of producing a visual variety, did enclose some constraints. The words were very iconic and powerful, and thus their meanings set certain preconceived rules that, in a few of my volunteers' opinions, ought to be strictly followed (love=heart, hate=black). In this way many of the final images came out looking rather repetitive. However, there were a few times when I was pleased by the responses produced by my volunteers. I noticed that in general, or at least according to my data, males tended to be a little more daring or out of the norm.