A little while ago I started the side exercise of creating posters that summarise the moods & communications of the rooms and their content into a smaller, two dimensional medium. ie, if objects and their arrangements are a language, how can that language be translated to another format?
Here's one of the finished posters, followed by a short explanation.



framing purdy

Everything in purdy’s space has a purpose and a position. Delicately and lovingly, even the smallest of objects has been positioned with thought and given its own respectful part in the display. She is an expert at “framing” an object - metaphorically and literally. Nostalgia is strong, revealing a sentimental and thoughtful soul.

On Friday I found this book Arranging Things which mirrors an incredible amount of my essay (but probably articulating ideas a lot better than me). If only I'd found this earlier. It's still great to clarify and validate a lot of what I've been thinking. Some excerpts below (I've bolded the parts which especially connect with my theories and "room-snoop" experiment):

Arranging things has two aspects: (1) the selection of objects - things - and (2) the manner in which the objects are arranged. Arranging things in both the commerical and non-commercial realms have this in common: arrangements always communicate something.* An arrangement of things is not just an aesthetic expression; it is a communicational act.

In many cases arrangement is language-like... Though the domain of arranging things is not nearly systematic enough to qualify as a bona-fide language, it is systematic enough to a degree. Communication systems, like natural languages, grow and develop through perpetual use and experimentation.

Rhetoric, as Aristotle wrote, is "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." All communication is rhetorical, to some degree. If you're not attempting to get someone to see, feel, think or act in a particular manner, why bother communicating at all? Anyone who communicates today is profoundly influenced by rhetoric. As communicators we incessantly make choices regarding which words, phrases, images and/or sounds to use based on rhetorical considerations - albeit not always consciously.

*The author notes that "communicating something" means transmitting meaning - any kind of meaning - to the arrangement's viewers, or, in a self-reflective way, back to the arranger her/himself. In my experiment I also considered that the manner of our possession-keeping might simply be a self-validating message addressing our self-identity.

Photos from the first room swap: in which Sally invades Purdy's room. Fascinating to compare answers from each of them about Purdy's bits and pieces.

After some feedback yesterday about documenting this process I'm much clearer on the direction I should take. I'm going to guide it two separate ways:
1. The "raw" documentation from the experiment (in a thoughtful format of course, most likely a book).
2. A fairly freeform collection of visual responses I create myself (eg. object mapping, gathering commonalities, reconstructing ideas visually).

I'm still collecting some ideas on documenting this experiment.

1: Perhaps I could "map" the bedrooms in a similar manner to this plant species labelling.

2: I had the thought of physically using bits and pieces found in peoples' bedrooms to illustrate their possessions. ie: the paper-steam in the top left picture - imagine an old phone bill from someone's drawer cut up and used in my image-making.

3: This picture is so great that I just don't know what to say.

Thanks Penrose Annual 1965.

August +

This is the part where I take all my bits and pieces, ideas thoughts and inspiration and squeeze it out (gradually) into something wonderful and intriguing.
A large part of my essay involved avoiding the idea of "collecting" being restricted to the association of a hobby. Instead, I consider collecting to be the general human tendency to gather and acquire - the fact that we keep "things" and the manner in which we keep them. What do such things communicate, if anything at all? From here I travelled in all different directions, but stopped for a long time at the idea of collection as personal expression. That we acquire pieces in order to communicate who we are - whether to others or as some sort of confirmation of our sense of self-identity.

I'm testing this theory as well as my organisational skills in a loose and creative social experiment. Taking a large group of my friends, I'll divide them into pairs of people who don't know each other. Not having met one another and knowing nothing about the other, both members of the pair will visit the other's home or bedroom with me, have a long and investigative look around, and come to all sorts of conclusions about the sort of person they are. Answering a questionnaire I develop, they might have to guess at anything from physical appearance to dream holiday destination or favourite flavour of dip.
After all this, I'll document it. I don't know how but I know this is the crucial part. I don't want to forget what drew me to this topic in the first place - that I'm very attracted to the eclectic potential of multiplicity. Collecting as a theme lends itself to quirky and unexpected representation. At this point I'm open to the forms it could take (anything from a publication to a series of large posters to a mini exhibition/installation type thingy) and I'm absorbing lots of interesting ways to communicate multiplicity in general.

Artist David Capra interviewed in Blanket Magazine's collection issue:

"A lot of my work is a result of collecting... I prefer to work this way as I can put down various unrelated things together on the one page and watch them create a dialogue between one another... Since an early age I have collected various things, like a strange coping mechanism, it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I look at what I have gathered together and life then feels more manageable."