If I appraise the outcomes of Project 2 purely from within the framing of the learning outcomes, then it has been, undoubtably a failure. I have not been able to locate ‘human’ collaborators from within the student body and to date and have not been able to find anyone outside of it. I have not been able to submerge myself in the differing dimensions of collaboration in respect to the requirements of the course, so I have nothing to reflect upon about the process of collaborative working at this stage. I accept – to a degree – that my fears and resistance to the Unit requirements could be manifesting this lack of connection, but as I have discussed in my response to Exercise 3, the material is also contributing – but I won’t repeat my complaints here.
Looking at Project 2 from outside an inflexible application of the learning requirements, there are opportunities being presented that I can explore further and potentially use as vehicles to draw in collaborators. Exploring the phenomenology of being human dovetails with the ethnographic approach I began developing in the last unit – it offers me scope to investigate questions around others experiences, others ‘being-in-the-world’: this obviously demands that other people are involved.
But as a foundation for a larger collaborative project, the tool and technique I have developed can only be considered a very small component of something much larger: there is not enough narrative substance to the creative output as it stands. I am not actually sure what I am trying to say, to question or prove – it’s very much an exploration of a standalone process, which provides little phenomenological evidence and has limited creative value at present.
Looking to the immediate future (Project 3) to progress I feel I have no choice but to play very loosely with the requirements. Their prescriptive nature (“you must work with another student; you need to share a co-written brief”) is limiting. With the lack of interest from students within OCA, and to address my fears and resistance, forward progress for me will only be possible if I really step over my ‘edges’ and make myself truly vulnerable. To do this I intend to reach out to the local creative community in my hometown. But I cannot do that speculatively, I need a more concrete purpose (even if that ‘concrete hasn’t set yet’), so I am going to develop a brief that I can use to engage potential collaborators (P2 seemed to want us to focus on collaborating for collaboration’s sake with no thought for the purpose, question or intent that underpins the collaboration). I am imagining this brief to be a living document, one that will continue to be shaped by all the collaborators during the timeline of the project. I want this brief to address my interests – I want it to be grounded in exploring the phenomenon of being human, possibly in exploring what it is to be human in my home town (I don’t know) – but I want it to allow space and scope for others to push my boundaries through exploration of their interests, whilst I push their boundaries. I want to attract people who are more experienced than me, who are better. I want it to encourage healthy creative friction. And I want to conjure up and attempt something ambitious with processes and materials I currently have little to no experience of.
I can see the possibilities, and there is a frisson of excitement about those (I have been exposed to several live examples of collaborative projects recently) – I just need to ‘get out of my own way’.
Returning to this project to end this limited reflection, I have constantly questioned throughout the practice, if what I have been doing can be justified as ‘collaboration’. Is my loose application of Heidegger, more inspiration and a set of principles to guide me? Can I reasonably say that I have been collaborating with my body or with the landscape? Is there a collaboration approach possible without people being hinted at in the work I have done? There are inferences of these types of possibilities within the unit material, but there is limited exploration of them to offer us foundations for pursuing these types of directions. I need critiquing and guidance from an external source to help me understand if there is validity in this currently slight approach I have taken.
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