Re-Story Initial Ideas

After receiving feedback from our previous workshop Text, Script, Sound , my group and I decided to sit down and plan out what we wanted to talk about and prepare for our presentation.

We realised that certain things for example, our use of light and different mediums really worked for us and other things, not so much. What was brought to light was how using articles only to suggest the era in which Lord of the Flies was written in but not about the actual plot ended up confusing a lot of students viewing our installation. This was a result of being unable to locate a projector that worked on the day as initially, the articles were only meant to indicate era but not to be read and only meant to serve as a background for the video therefore without the projector working, students were left with no other choice than to read the text in front of them. This incident furthermore reminded us the importance of having a back-up plan.

This incident then inspired my group and I to produce the final instalment in only one colour. We wanted to make the final instalment one colour-specifically white, as we wanted viewers to be able to interpret the instalment in their own ways. Furthermore William Golding was very clear and adamant on his views on human nature and therefore we wanted to represent his bias views by using only one colour. Another piece of artwork that greatly inspired us to use only one colour was 'Wald aus Wlad' by Takashi Kuribayashi, a Japanese artist who wanted to recreate the forest and explore the idea of natural and artificial.

We also really liked the idea of forcing our viewers to bend down and look through specific holes in order to view our instalment as it perfectly represents the mob mentality of the boys within the novel and how overtime each boy slowly looses their identity. By forcing viewers to bend down, we will be able to portray how the younger boys within the novel were forced to listen to their elders in order to avoid being punished and how the felt inferior and small against them.

Other artists' work that also inspired our final instalment are Tokujin Yoshioka's 'The Show' and Joanna Hruby's instalment as both instalments were very inviting and therefore we studied these instalments to see how they achieved such effect and how bring such feel to our instalment.

Initially we though of placing little boys footprints onto the floor to invite viewers into the instalment and also indicate a sense of presence. However, we also wanted to indicate an evil being hidden within our characters so therefore we decided to add red pig foot prints that would stand out and tweak interest and uncertainty within the viewers.

We also debated on whether or not we wanted to block off our instalment or leave it open as one of the things that us as a group picked up after completing our Text, Script, Sound workshop was how we felt that surrounding instalments were too distracting and by having other instalments' audios playing, our own audio was unclear and therefore became ineffective to our instalment. On the other hand, we also fear that by blocking of our instalment, our instalment may end up looking uninviting and therefore not stand out. In the end, we decided to leave our instalment open as we stumbled upon this instalment by J. Patrignani and all loved the strong and bold presence of it.

Furthermore, by creating something quite strong and powerful also conveys Golding's very factual and clear start to Lord of the Flies where the reader would feel overwhelmed, almost smothered by the amount of information them as readers were confronted with in the first chapter.

This was one of the initial ideas for the instalment :

We wanted to create an instalment where viewers could go under and look at our displays through a series of holes we have cut out of a paper cache/pulp sheet. We wanted our viewers to look through this hole and see a series of heads hanging with cloth draped over suggesting lost identity and with death being a constant theme within the novel, we thought that it would only be appropriate if we did this. With this in mind, we then went on to see how other artists have achieved this effect and we found two ways that we thought could work really well with our project.

These two projects were done for Halloween and included polystyrene heads being draped with either linen, cheese cloth or muesli that has been stiffened with cornstarch and PVA. We really liked the way these projects turned out as even though they were one solid colour, we were still able to make out an identity behind the layers of cloth.