Experience is all there is.
So, do blind people really dream? As per a research done by the class we came to a unanimous decision that those who have been blind since birth can only dream through auditory signals. Whereas people who have lost the sight after a certain age can dream, but, dreams will consist of images from the years they were able to see. We also learnt that images don't grow with age. Images can only grow with visual memory. Thus even at old age a blind person who lost his eye sight many years ago will dream of images only in that time span before he became blind. We connected this to design how? We realized that there aren't many products today which are designed for the old age especially for people with physical handicaps. Today's design's purview in terms of age is only between 17 -25 years, which on a little introspection into the matter will turn about to be true. Let alone products, there aren't many spaces dedicated to these people. As the class progressed our facilitator shared an incident in his stay in Ahmedabad as a teacher. He told us about a heritage walk for blinds. During the walk the blind people were identifying places with respect to humans only. Not saying that they didn't know about places where people wouldn't go but they always had a human connection with a space. For them the experience was the only way to interact with the surroundings. The experience defined the surrounding for them. Also the people for them were a huge connection to the space.
From there we picked on a more art related topic. We started to look at the importance of performance. What is it about a performance that makes it different from art forms like painting and sketching. In my opinion a performance is like a direct dialogue. A message that is unadulterated and meant for the viewers. It makes an impression. So immediately our assignment was to perform. We had to look at a few examples and formulate a concept around which our final performance would be based.
For this performance I teamed up with Rhea and Tushar. We looked through a few pictures of performance art. They looked intense. The best part was that performance art is a personal statement.
Our entire performance was based on the concept of lies. Once we begin lying we need to tell more lies to cover up the previous lies. We reach an epitome when or conscience wants to get rid of all the lies and we start shedding them one by one. To actually show this transformation we used three people. Tushar is a person who lied. Rhea and I are his conscience while and after lying. Rhea kept on wearing more layers of clothing symbolizing the accumulating guilt in the mind. I on the other hand was the conscience that wanted to get rid of the guilt and the lies. So I had to open all my layers of clothing down to the my last layer. I was not prepared to go nude. I'm sorry....
Overall the experience was great to be surrounded by people. They constantly try their best to get you to laugh. This was also the reason that the performance didn't realy feel like performance. It felt more like a show. It felt very theatrical.
That's the lnk to a video of our first performance art.
Later again during class we looked at some eminent personalities in the world of performance. We looked at the work of Marina Abrahamovic. We also looked at the anti art Dada movement. Yoko Ono was also an important name especially for her artwork 'Cut Piece'. We also looked at some more familiar names like Lady Gaga and her dressing sense. Ultimately we arrived at the conclusion that madness is important for man to survive.
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