We finally started uni again this week and, aside from the odd dull lecture regarding the structure of the course it was very interesting. On Thursday we had our first tutorial as a group and explained the Sims 3 piece and spoke about the Brighton show that got pulled during the summer. Surprisingly we managed to speak for quite a while uninterrupted, the group enjoyed the story about the show in Brighton and seemed to register the idea about the Sims work and the Performance, but we think it may have been hard to react and interpret it without a physical manifestation of the ideas. We had a sketch up version of the Sims plan, but forgot to show it, perhaps that would’ve helped.
It was suggested that we consider our method of realisation, and to be sure that there is a continuous strain of ideas running throughout our practice. This concern may have been voiced because we mentioned that the Sims work is still relatively new, and therefore slightly unresolved as an idea. We should take care not to get held back by the piece, she mentioned this because the arduous nature of creating the videos may take a while, haltering our progress in the process. We aren't not worried about this to be honest and feel that we proved last year that we have the ability to run multiple strands of work alongside each other and see no reason why this would not happen this year.
An example of this style of audience emersion can be seen in ‘Stoner’ by John Williams, it is a novel that offers such a detailed and textured portrait of a man’s life that one is almost tricked into thinking that another’s thought could speak for themselves. The subject of the book, William Stoner, was not remembered when he died, but his life was full of victories and defeat. He leads a relatively bland life; he marries the wrong woman, teaches at a university and has a daughter that, in the latter stages of her childhood, rarely makes contact with him. William’s delves into Stoner revealing the struggles and conflicts of life that go unrecorded through the passing of time, thus highlighting the importance and significance of the individual. William Stoner is all of us, and each of us is William Stoner; his surface life is dull, yet inside his life is kaleidoscopic; an ever shifting tide of mass that can sometimes be passive and other times passionate and forceful. Microscopic shifts of self-awareness and understanding briefly connect him to himself, to others and to the world.
The novel is about the universal value of human life, a type of inner life that does not need external valuations. A life that is possessed and understood only by the individual, ‘Stoner’ somehow manages to materialise these values and present them unto us in such a manner that the reader experiences a form of self-realisation that resonates with William Stoner’s discovery of his own self-awareness. ‘You Me Bum Bum Train’ and ‘Stoner’ both press complete emersion upon the viewer/reader, the audience experiences a unique displacement from an everyday exterior that has become their normality. They are reminded that an essential part of life is acceptance of their individuality, and a necessary step towards this is self-awareness, understanding and reflection.