Content:
In this ‘production diary’ I will outlined my contribution towards the festival. It should be noted however, that detaching my individual contribution from that of the group is an impossible task. The group staged this festival and I believe the group should be given the same feedback. However, I understand the restrictions of the learning outcomes and I understand I will be assessed as an individual. Therefore find an attempt to notate my individual contribution.
I will also use this production dairy as a reflection as I feel this will be most useful for my artistic research and my artistic practice.
Please see attached the festival folder which we used as a group throughout the production process.
Individual contributions:
Attended meeting on work ethics. As a group we all noted down some rules or some wishes on the way we would work as a group
Theme: Helped suggest the theme of taste. Matter was added after with the theme agreed;
It’s a matter of taste.
I suggested that this sounded like a good tag line but maybe not the title.
Name: suggested the name Papilla, later changing it to Papillae to have an onomatopoetic flavour to the name. I started by researching taste, leading me to the tongue, leading me to taste buds, leading me to Papillae.
As a group we decided that a name should be fun, it should be closer to a sound rather than a word, have an onomatopoeic quality, it should be a title that people didn’t know immediately what it meant so that we could make it our own thing, have some kind of connection to taste and/or matter. Papillae, it was agreed upon, served all these functions.
Visual Identity:
Place myself into the visual identity group with Ermis and Fay.
Contributed to the Papillae pinterest board with Fay.
Agreed mouth should play a role in the logo.
Lots of images of grainy 80’s/90’s cartoons were referenced maybe connection between the grains and taste buds.
Drafted versions of the logo.
Thought maybe, to connect with cartoons, it needed to be illustrated so drew mouth combined with the letter P. Thought it was alright.
Slept.
Woke up.
Thought it was terrible.
Decided to go down a more graphic route. Fay selected the Typeface Gazpacho so used this for Papillae. Added a basic cartoon-like mouth with papillae coming out of it in pink to reference a tongue.
Played around.
The more bold, the more simple the better it looked.
Sent go Ermis/Fay.
Both approved.
Ermis added A Matter of Taste with knockout lettering.
contributed to this Powerpoint
Ermis designed a website.
He used a bright yellow and a bright blue circle as a background for the logo.
This looked cool so I used it for a background for the festival poster.
Couldn’t get the poster looking right so sent the individual elements to Ermis who re-arranged them and made everything pop.
Steef haggled some free printing so re-arranged the visual identity we created and formatted them into: 2 types of stickers (one with just logo and one with dates), A1 poster x 5, a roll up banner.
Wrote a copy for the festival in the form of an invitation.
Sent this via email to every student in ArtEZ.
Clarified a design template to use so others in the group could send outward emails from the festival and it be consistent with our branding.
This involved deciding on a title typeface, size and colour
And body typeface, size and colour.
Where to use the logo and usage of the background colours.
In the week of the festival I printed 40 A3 posters and pinned them around the ArtEZ building.
Went on a sticker frenzy around the building.
With Ermis, we designed a power point presentation with the complete programme using our unified visual identity.
It was daz’s suggestion that we play this on a TV screen that appeared in our HoPP space.
It was an area that every student who used the theatrium had to walk past.
Walked around every student in the canteen on Friday lunchtime to promote the Bingo event.
Re-lensing research:
Re-lensed my research by creating the event ‘Table Top Cabaret’.
In this event, I was interested in re-lensing my research through taste.
Bad taste in particular.
I’m interested I what people find distasteful.
I bought the cheapest white wine I could from Lidl as part of my research tasting.
The research tasting was an invitation from Danielle to think about our artistic research through one specific beverage that audiences would taste before being exposed to the work.
Coincidently (because I was told we were unable to serve audience food we cooked ourselves). I asked the canteen of ArtEZ to provide catering for the table top cabaret.
This also became a literal source of bad taste.
After writing my Lexicon, I discovered that clowning, camp, joy and ordinary were terms that resonated with my research and terms that I should further explore.
Inspired my friend Tom Marshman’s DIY drag persona Annette Curtain, I decided to develop my own DIY drag persona.
XPAT was born.
With a thick northern English accent and a strange patriotic pride of being an expat. She became the perfect vehicle to explore performative ambivalence through the lens of taste and incorporating the themes of clowning, camp, joy and ordinariness.
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Images: E. Christodoulou
Considering we were a group of 10 people with strong personalities, I think the festival ca be deemed a success.
I feel I worked well within the broader team.
I think the amount of time we had to deliver the festival was actually too long. Toward December I felt the group were over complicating basic tasks because we had the time to do so.
I think the fusing of the first year module and this module doesn’t really work.
Technicians and student were stretched by delivering two assessments at the same time and it meant that 1st and 2nd years were not as readily available to support each other, even as audience, during these assessments.
I think it was a mistake to make the festival about our own artistic researches.
One of the joys of a festival is the bringing together of different people for a fleeting moment.
The decision to make the festival about our own artistic research meant that we didn’t have outside performers coming in. This made me feel like the vent was inward looking rather than outward looking.
I expressed concerns about this with the group and I now regret not pushing tis decision further.
This decision also meant that we were very occupied with performing, presenting or workshopping rather than festival hosting.
The talk on What is Artistic Research was perhaps the most successful event of the festival but could still of happened with outside performers.
Audience numbers were very low.
As part of the visual identity and communication team I think we have to take a little accountability for that fact.
However, it was decide to focus on the audiences of ArtEZ as an audience group and it really did seem like ArtEZ students were busy in these three days.
Speaking with students of graphic, design and fine art, there was a consensus of “yes I heard about that festival” But “didn’t have time to catch anything from it” or I also heard “Yes I heard there was a festival but didn’t really know what it was about”
We could have done a better job to push that artistic research would be presented in the form of workshops, performances and talks.
However, I felt we did a good job on ‘branding’ the festival.
Maybe our programme was a little too full which meant not only were we unable to be audiences for each others’ work but also audience were faced with a plethora of info over three days and felt confused/overwhelmed by the content of individual events.