Category Archives: Professional Practice
A Conversation – Vintage conversation
On thinking about conversations I thought about the mundane aspects of conversation, such as telephone conversations, emails and texting. As nowadays these are first nature when starting a conversation. It made me think about communication in the past and how people used to communicate back then compared to how we communicate now. My grandma keeps a lot of old memorabilia in her home and I discovered many interesting vintage forms of communication. These included postcards, old war identification pamphlets, but my favorite pieces of memorabilia are the letters I found, which included letters from my grandad to my grandma in the 1950’s. It made me consider the lack of communication methods in those times and how times have changed from writing long letters to something as simple as a text message.
A Conversation – Initial Mindmap
Here as part of my conversation brief I have constructed an initial mindmap to discover the different ways in which a conversation can be translated, I considered the mundane effects of speech as well as different forms of communication such as literature and art, digital media and different interpretation like music and dance, which are often used to convey a message. This mind map will help me construct research methods to develop my project further and describe different methods that can strike or form a conversation.
A Conversation – Micro Brief; Recording a conversation about a magazine article
For our first task for our brief ‘A Conversation’ we were instructed to buy a newspaper which was current to the date and record a 3minute 30 conversation between 1-3 people talking about a chosen article. I chose an article entitled ‘Asbo broken in just 24hrs’, which appeared in the Daily Mirror on the 24th September 2014. I completed this task with my peer Ruth Willis, and we used my iphone to record our voices. Here is a transcription of the conversation:
A Conversation
Date: 24th September 2014
Title of Article: Asbo Broken in just 24 Hours – Daily Mirror
People taking part: Lauren Winstanley and Ruth Willis
Lauren: “Let me just like, put some mayo on my plate…it’s started recording! Okay…a woman, who was given an asbo for making 160 time-wasting 999 calls did it again 24 hours later…why…”
Lauren: “Erm…because she’s really lonely?”
Me: *Laughs*
Ruth: “So she could just be like ‘I really like a man in uniform can you send someone over to my house? …Right now?’”
Lauren: “It would be like a strip-o-gram! That’s stupid, like why would you waste your time doing that? Like-”
Ruth: “Strip-o-gram”
Lauren: “Yeah strip-o-gram *laughs*”
Ruth: “Seriously you’ve got a police officer coming to your door like ‘knock knock knock’ and ‘you rang?’”
Lauren: “Why don’t you just call a strip-o-gram then?”
Ruth: “Erm…because they might not have the proper uniform? Like if you want a police man then you want the full on hard stuff…like full on handcuffs and tazer gun, it could work”
Lauren: “It could work, yeah!”
Ruth: “Have you ever talked yourself out of a speeding ticket?”
Lauren: “No”
Ruth: “Me neither but it sounds like something I want to do”
Lauren. “I’ve been at a party, like, the police showed up and I looked really high because I had really red eyes when in theory my contact lenses were just really dry *laughs*”
Ruth: “Awh I hate that”
Lauren: “Yeah…and I looked really high so I was trying to hide myself from the police incase they thought I was on drugs and I was not…to the recording I WAS NOT”
Ruth: “Over the summer holidays I got pulled by the police for ‘reckless driving’…I’d just finished a night shift, and it was like, 5am in the morning, I was like 5 minutes away from home like I could see my house and the police pulled me over, it took them 45 minutes before they breathalized me because apparantly I had an ‘attitude problem’”
Lauren: “Really?”
Ruth: “And I was like: “I’m 5 minutes away from home, i’ve just finished a 16 hour shift, I wanna just, like go to bed and they were like: “Oh I don’t like your attitude blah blah blah blah blah”. It’s just like, really?…REALLY?…I just couldn’t handle it”
Lauren: *Reading article* “Oh wait hang on, she claimed to be ill to get morphine…oh!”
Ruth: “Oh that one I can understand”
Lauren: “What…oh, because you’re on drugs *laughs”
Ruth: “No, morphine withdrawl is absolutely horrible, you spend like 90% of your time puking your guts up, and the rest of it just craving it so much”
Lauren: “I hope this was from hospital?”
Ruth: “Yeah it was! *laughs*
Lauren: “You were just like in the street somewhere…you know…having a-”
Ruth: “Yeah totes! I’m like, such a badass-”
Lauren: “Getting your morphine on”
Ruth: “Such a badass you know, my parents are vicars and I’m just there like…the total opposite”
Lauren: *Reading article* “A magistrate in south Wales said that each blue light call cost 1000 pounds”
Ruth: “Whoa whoa whoa, it would happen in South Wales”
Lauren: *laughs*
Ruth: “News stories like this only ever happen in Wales, on the grounds of the fact that they’re Welsh. On the plus side at least it’s not a news story on sheep”
Lauren: “Yeah I suppose…that’s a bit racist of the Welsh!”
Ruth: “I’m half welsh, i’m allowed to say this”
Lauren: “I didn’t know you were half Welsh”
Ruth: “Yeah, mums Welsh”
Lauren: “Oh…*Laughs*
Ruth: “But seriously right, at least she hasn’t broken her asbo by calling to say that her sheep needs morphine…”
Lauren: *Reading article* “She’s been given a six week sentence after admitting breaching her asbo…I didn’t know you could-”
Ruth” :” I wonder how old she was”
Lauren: “43…but I didn’t know you could get an asbo at 43, I thought that was just like teenager stuff”
Ruth: “I can undertand it though, becase we’ve never really had asbo’s for old people”
Lauren:”No…sorry i’m nicking all your chips”
Ruth: “Stop stealing my chips!”
Lauren: “We are not in Rhubarb doing this now *Laughs*”
Ruth: “On the plus side i’ve got a pint to go with it. Have you ever dunked chips in guinness?”
Lauren: “No! *Laughs*”
Ruth: “It’s beautiful, you know like in McDonalds you’re meant to dunk your chips in your milkshake-”
Lauren: “I love how we’re talking about asbo’s broken in just 24 hours and it’s gone on to you dunking your chips in your Guinness *laughs*”
Ruth: “Seriously try it! I’m being serious…try it”
Lauren: “Okay okay…”
Ruth: “Go on, go on just dunk it! …Now eat it…go on, what do you think?”
Lauren: “Disgusting!”
Ruth: “Aww it’s beautiful!”
Lauren: “Aww no…”
Ruth: “Don’t be daft, it’s absolutely beautiful”
Lauren: “…stop…stop…stop…STOP! 3 minutes 30 is up!”
I think that the purpose of this task was to understand different peoples reactions to a situation and how it can form a conversation, as well as how the conversation develops as the different topics extend. It describes how conversations consist of tangents stemmed by each topics, and a conversation can tell a lot about a relationship between groups of people.
Tuesday 30th September: A Conversation- Introduction to the brief
In this mornings lecture we were introduced to our first brief of the 2nd year entitled: ‘A Conversation’. Our general synopsis is to explore the different ways in which conversations take place, by understanding the importance of conversing between people, technology, politics and movement. As well as the physical aspect of a conversation we must also research the ways in which conversations can be transcribed visually, through books, social media, campaign posters, photography, script and projection, as well as media such as film and animation. In order to successfully complete the brief, we must complete detailed research techniques exploring different factors in a creative and original way, before developing our skills through a range of media to produce a high level outcome, consisting of solid technical expertise.
We must consider different factors that make up conversations; who is having the conversation? Where does it take place? Is it in a different language or is it transferred in a dialogue other than speech? We must explore this in both the conceptual and aesthetic languages and combine this to discover the form of a conversation.
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