Work In Progress

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we, as a group  have been compiling a series of experiments in which we have been trying out our ideas of how to visually represent a statistic. We were asked to present a ‘Work In Progress’ to demonstrate the research and work that we have done so far. In order to be fully prepared for this, we met up as a group to try a run of this. Please note, a full video of this particular exercise is currently uploading onto the blog (At a rather glacial pace!!!) But for the time being, here are some stills from the video. We tested this for 10 minutes. Resulting in ten balloons being blown up to show ten children in the UK being born. (In the UK) We popped 75% of them to indicate the death rate. The cups in the centre of the table represent the number of children who die from drinking contaminated water, which equates to one in every 20 seconds. This is an extension of a previous exercise in which we solely concentrated on drinking the water, whereas in the final piece we anticipate to be doing more tasks: Please see the video below.

The feedback received from our Work In Progress presentation has left us asking a number of questions, regarding whether to inform the audience of what they are viewing, ultimately telling them what all of our actions represent. Some thought it would be best to state this at the beginning of the performance, so that what we are doing has more of an impact throughout the piece. We have debated leaving envelopes on the seats of the audience, asking them to read out the statistic after a certain amount of time has elapsed. Furthermore we have also discussed the possibility of placing the statistics on the walls of our performance space (Studio 2) so that the audience perhaps can make the correlation between the statistics on the wall, and the actions we are performing.

We have also discussed leaving the revelation of the facts until the end of the piece. Yesterday within our presentation, this provided a sense of shock, as it took a moment for the audience members to comprehend what first appears as a monotonous series of events, such as a balloon being blown up, or a glass of water being drunk.

However it might be argued, that if we proclaim our facts at the very end, it would almost make the piece ‘preachy’ as though we want the audience to think about how much water they waste for example. We have decided that we do not want this. We do not want to convey an argument as such within the piece, we literally intent on concentrating on the visual representation of statistics.

This is something we need to think about in the upcoming weeks.

Finally the video has decided to load on the internet. Please see the video below: