Meeting Write-up.

As a group, we all seemed pretty happy with the idea of intervening in the value capitalism encourages us to assign to objects and places  (based on Jody's initial idea of the invisible - i.e. the hours a worker pours in to designing + physically constructing an object, or the things that have happened in any given space, being wiped from it in its publicly presented form)

I won't rehearse the various thinkers that enrich our idea, and the various angles from which we can approach the topic, as the rationale for our intervention and the impact we hope it to have has more or less been covered by the posts below, and certainly, in terms of our essays, we should have no trouble constructing a theoretical framework within which our idea is based.

Simply put, what i have gathered from our discussions is that we wish to bring back nuance, to challenge minimalist and utilitarian spaces and objects on which capitalism seems to rely (indeed, spaces and objects wiped of  all character, individuality and history seem to further engender the alienation that makes apathy so high and the possibility of change so difficult...)

The problem now, we seem to agree, is to take this theory, and all of its potential practical applications, and settle on a definite, concrete intervention in the public realm that we hope will have a positive impact.

Questions/problems:

• Will we work individually over the holiday, and then come together for one intervention a week or so before the submission date?
• Or enact a series of 'mini-interventions' over the course of the remaining 5 or so weeks? 

• Are we to focus on one object/space and attempt to bring it back some character together, each approaching it from a different angle (i.e. writing poetry, taking pictures, an oral history etc etc)
• Or each take on one object/space that has personal appeal to us, and then bring these together to present as a group, in an exhibition somewhere? 

• Is an exhibition of, for example, our various interpretations of a particular space too 'safe'? Not surprising enough, and hence not likely to have a big impact?
• A more 'mobile exhibition' was suggested as a possible way to counteract this, we could, for example, hand out postcards, flyers that featured our thoughts on a particular space/object, as well as placing posters/small pieces of text/photographs around various areas.

Personally, I think the idea of each of us musing individually on an object or space and then finding a way to present this to the public together would actually be quite powerful, I'm imagining a sort of 'treasure trove' of various snippets of conversation overheard from a certain spot, seemingly random facts and figures of how many people sat in a particular spot, perhaps some research on how that particular product is made, photographs, poetry, all combined to assign a seemingly banal product a lot of significance (if only for a short time...). 

Our blog posts over the coming weeks could be a mixture of how we are getting on with our various meditations, perhaps some samples of what we might hope to exhibit, and also some of the theoretical reading that might be useful in our essays. This way, we would still be coming together as the deadline approaches, editing and finding the best way to present our combined meditations and each would have a unique take.

This definitely still needs some work but at least we seem happy with our concept!