After reading the chapter for last week and analysing it and what I think it means; this week were presented with two tasks involving group work to achieve the outcome. The whole point of these tasks in my opinion were to get us thinking about open works and what we class as a finished design and how we determine what is the finishing point. For each of the tasks we were given a set of instructions which seemed really straight forward in the first instance but I soon gathered that they were quite vague and as a group you would need to agree on some more rules and instructions. From the outset I was one of the first people to say in the group that these tasks are all based on opinion and open for interpretation and therefore an open work like we had been introduced to in the previous week. This thought process of the "open work" was key to these tasks as the instructions were open for interpretation and could be conveyed in your own way which was evident as in the end all groups outcomes were all different.
Our group chose to do the perfect circle task first; for this task you were instructed to draw the perfect circle and you would take it in turns to go round the circle until it was the perfect circle. You had to go round clockwise when taking your turn; the first person started with a dot and it gradually got bigger as people added a border around the initial dot. Each turn was allocated 30 seconds to draw the perfect circle; to finish this task you had decide what the perfect circle was and then you could stop. Each member of the group had a different colour so that you could easily see who had drawn which section; we stopped when we all agreed that it was the perfect circle. I must admit that we would have probably stopped earlier if I was better at drawing circles. Due to the lack of substance in the instructions we decided as a group to fill in the areas around the borders that we drew as the instruction only told us to draw around the previous one which if we would have done that the circle would continue to be deformed. This is why we chose to alter the shape of the previous circle by filling in and adding parts. As shown in the image that was our groups idea of the perfect circle.
The second task was called the beach which required you draw dots on the blank page which was meant to represent the beach until you thought the beach was too full. Each person had a different colour pen to draw the dots with, again this was to see whose dots were from. The instructions stated that you should do a circle in the biggest space of the page; but as a group we decided that by doing small dots we get a more even spread as someone may decide to draw bigger circles than others which happened in some other groups. After we drew the dots we took it a step further and interpreted that all the dots of the same colour could in fact be the path that an individual has taken across the beach. In the end this made the beach look full but not overcrowded as the shapes in my opinion made the beach look balanced. This variation from other groups shows how different people can interpret the same instructions in a completely different way.
Overall I feel that this task made me more aware of the meaning of an 'open work' as it is one thing to read and digest the information but when you put this in to practice you can get a full understanding of the meaning. So after attending this seminar I think that an 'open work' relates to the fact that you could all be told to do the same thing but everybody interprets the instruction in their own way due to experience and their own thought process. This can relate well to my own practice and inform my studio work as i'm looking a lyrics; lyrics can mean one thing to one person but can completely offend another, it's all about how the person interprets the words. It also relates to looking at emoji's, you have some common ones where everyone can relate to whereas some emoji's can mean different things due to their experiences of using them and some will gain a metal meaning between friends which could be completely different to another group of friends.
