Joanne's Journal

Brief In groups of 3 or 4, create a video essay or experimental documentary. Based on the theme of ‘Collection’. This should be between three and five minutes and should include visuals and voiceover (that you produce). A team of 4 consisting of me, Lucy, Blanca and Yang, we brainstormed on some ideas of what topic we should focus on. At first, we were a little dumbfounded when we were given the project. We were given such a short period of time to come up with a topic and was quite worried about whether we could meet the criteria at first. Creating a visual essay from scratch was a little intimidating because we have never done it before but I was excited. I personally enjoy watching visual essays on Youtube. Brainstorming   Figure 1. Mind map Figure 2. From Yang's iPad, our team brainstorming ideas We started drawing a mind map of stuff that we have collected previously from our Collection Project. Just jotting down random topics that could possibly come to mind ...

On Tuesday (5th Nov), we went on a field trip to the Insititute of Contemporary Arts and 180 Strand. The first place that we visited was the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The exhibit is called "Omnibus" which was curated by the Honey-Suckle Company, an art collective based in Berlin. We visited the ICA to get inspiration for our visual essay assignment, however, to be frankly honest, I did not quite understand the installations that were shown there. It was a little bit too abstract for me and I did not really enjoy them. Description of the exhibition. Image by author. However, there was an installation that intrigued me.   Ohn End , 2005 by Honey-Suckle Company Description This is a contemporary music composition and sound installation built by the Honey-Suckle Company in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger. The room houses blankets and metal rods draped over one another while Konrad's music composition is played in the background. After doing much res...

Warburg Institute Visit On Tuesday (15th Oct), we went on a field trip to the Warburg Institute and Wellcome Collection. It was an eye-opening field trip as we got to view a library collection that was only open to post-graduate students. We were first introduced to the photo catalogue that they have in the building. Sadly, I did not manage to take any photos as I was listening to the librarian explaining the history of the Warburg Institute. He talked about the founder, Aby Warburg, who was crazy about collecting books about magic, science, philosophy, mythical gods, basically any subject that we would not have imagined. He explained to us that Warburg was so obsessed with collecting books to the point he created his own research library which was funded by his family. What intrigued me the most during that introduction session about the Warburg Institute was how the collections were catalogued. They were not catalogued according to alphabetical order but according to the dif...