Bed Spread

Both myself and my boyfriend are artists and I have recently initiated him into the world of knitting. I have a stash of allsorted wool lots of it impractical for making anything of substance. So we are en-devouring to knit squares, sow them together and make a blanket for our bed. It will take time and is a kind of indication of commitment to each other. Its one of those projects set off on with no real idea of what will be discovered.

Update February 2014 - We made about 5 squares and sewed them together. Or more specifically I made 4 squares and Simon made 1. They are now residing in a bag somewhere. I still knit, Simon is not knitting. We are still together. 

Field of view

The idea that you can only see what is in your field of view at any given time and in any given place. The rest is Gestalt effect, filling in using our imagination. Was musing on this after seeing a work by David Theobald called Trill at Cube's Open Art Exhibition. The work showed a Budgies Cage from a birds eye view. The bird looked out onto a modern kitchen with no life in it. As you watched you saw the light come up from the window to the left and bathe the room. We think of a caged animal as restricted in its vision but as you sat there in the space you looked beyond the bars into the room, not in longing but in inquisitiveness.

This led us on to talking about people who have been in captivity and specifically Terry Wait. I seem to recall Terry Wait saying that when he was locked up in his cell with nothing to look at he realised that his vision was only really as limited as his imagination.

We can only be in one time and one place at any given moment but our minds can propel us beyond our vision to all sorts of places. This can be done in romantic ways such as day dreaming about another place or in practical terms like when we give directions. It is for the sake of our sanity that we presume that the world outside our vision did not change since we last visited it. The Streets beyond the view from the window is still the same and the bookshelf still stands against the wall behind us. I Am interested in exploring this idea of limited physical vision informed by imagination and memory in some kind of art piece.

Shop dropping

Items which I think the shop should sell but which they don't are placed in the shop. The dropping off of the items and events which culminate from this are documented when a person takes the item to the till.

Shelf stacking

To take place in a local supermarket some time soon. Actor 1 takes cereal from the middle shelf and then decides not to have it and places it on the lower shelf. Actor 2 takes cereal from the bottom shelf and then decides not to have it and places it in the space on the middle shelf. This happens as surreptitiously as possible. Eventually the whole landscape of this section of shelving is changed. Photo documentation before and after with an account of the experiment in between.

Interesting article of product placement.


Shelf Staking part 2
Went to Tescos the other day and set about the task of shelf staking with my son and boyfriend. We moved one stack of spaghetti to the space of another. I'm going to present all this in one pice with a text about the process. I'll post it here when its all sorted but for now here are a few pics of before and after.

Draft explaination

Shelf Staking Intervention

Venue: Tescos, Chester

Date: Saturday 19^th February

Aim: To highlight the ideas behind product placement within supermarkets and question the effects that this may have on our shopping behaviours.

Objectives: To move the value spaghetti up onto the eye line level shelf.

To move the Heinz Spaghetti down onto the lower shelf

Script:

Actor 1 takes spaghetti from the middle shelf and then decides not to have it and places it on the lower shelf. Actor 2 takes spaghetti from the bottom shelf and then decides not to have it and places it in the space on the middle shelf. This happens as surreptitiously as possible. Eventually the whole landscape of this section of shelving is changed. Photo documentation before and after with an account of the experiment in between.

Documentation:

The actors were Beth Barlow, George Evans and Simon Kennedy. The intervention took around half an hour to complete. It was initially anticipated that cereal would be used but the variable sizes and the way that it was shelved made this impossible.

Findings:

There is less need than we thought to be surreptitious as there are very few people watching the behaviour of others in a supermarket. Only security guards watching from afar for shop lifting behaviours or for a fraction of a minute those whom we get in the way of. By the end of the intervention Beth had started to rearrange the products more like a shelf stacker than a shopper, rotating the cans to face out and changing the price tags around to correspond wit the new placement.

To look objectively at a shop with no intent to buy is at once difficult and interesting.

After changing the products a mother and child came up and rapidly chose from the eye level shelf, this now contained the value product.

The products remained in their new place at least until the following day at which point we stopped watching them.

George began to act. He placed bread in his basket and developed ideas about his characters tea intentions.