Shared

For this practice I discussed it with my colaboration partner Julliet and we decided to make a interaction with strangers that relate to the current situation. We tried to not use social media platforms. And I thought drawing comic would be a good idea so I drew this 4-frame comic. I know most people are really done and bored with this lockdown life so I want to know what have they done during lockdown have made them felt better. It is also using public space as my interaction platform.

I put a few copies in the public area as well as Instagram for strangers to fill.

Unfortunately we didn't get any responses from the public so we turned to our friends and here are some ideas from my friends.

The one below is from my friend Laura.

The one above is from my friend George.

Analysis of the failure
Why did we fail?

This is the first time in my life trying to make a interaction with strangers in a public area. And unfortunately it failed. I wonder what would be the reason that no one responsed to it. First it was really hard to find a place to stick papers. It seems like no place is allowed to do so. After searching for half hour I finally found 2 places which I still wasn't sure if it's ok. I did provide pencils and put them in obvious places. One of them was next to an ATM machine. The other one was on an electricity box at a cross and it's opposite to a cafe. Maybe because it is black and white so it doesn't stand out? Or maybe people just think it's too much work to draw something. Or they just didn't see it at all.

I guess the only way to make it work is to ask strangers on the street. The possibility of getting answers would be much higher. However I'm not really good at starting a conversation with strangers. It's too anxious to do for me.
So in the end I turned to my friends. Actually asking them to draw something was not easy as well. At the beginning they said they're too bad at drawing then they said they don't have any good ideas. It actually made me realized that probably this is also a reason that I didn't get responses from strangers. Drawing seems too hard for them or they don't feel confident about it.

Explanation of our idea

Following our work on the previous exercises - myself and my partner Phoebe decided to publish a 4 panel comic strip asking members of the public to fill in one blank box.

The comic strip shows someone at home, bored, during lockdown. It asks people to fill in one blank square showing how they have been filling their time since lockdown or methods they have found to cope.

After sticking up the comic in our local neighbourhoods for a period of a few days we received only a few responses. We therefore opened it up to the people we have around us such as friends and roommates. We have gathered here the images we collected from this.

After having only a small number of results, the ideas was to actively document what we can see people doing during lockdown. This involves photographing things such as artwork, street drawings and physical interactions. These images have been collected into a moving picture to fill in the comic and show the variety of things people have been doing to keep lives moving during this time. I have also included the still images that have been used.

I grouped with Maya for the resit period. After all these months of isolation it was refreshing to work together again.
Since the lockdown was basically over for her, while I was already back in Armenia in a full quarantine, we couldn’t relate the COVID isolation of April anymore. First, we had the idea of doing a projection mapping and sharing thoughts of people on buildings, so basically having the contrast of small bits of personal thoughts on big, uncomfortable spaces. This took us to a conversation about our current situations, and we realized that, in a way, we have similarities in our background: some current political heat, the socialist past, a lot of abandoned spaces.
We thought it’s more relevant and more open (educational, why not) to combine our current situations, common historical past and connect our project to it.

Also, we noticed how the quarantine detached people from the world, as everyone was literally interacting with their own close, small environment (room, laptop screen), so we wanted to create a space where people could just share simple images from their lives and see, learn what life is like in other parts of the world.

We thought of making collages with all these scenes/buildings and distribute it as posters around with short texts about human survival/class struggle/social conditions, however, not in a very sophisticated way.
For collecting images and sharing with people, we thought opening an Instagram and taking people’s submissions of places they live in, or just images from their city that mean something to them. This could be an Instagram page for instance. That would also allow to create a network and share personal images of scenery, to make these collective images (collages) and talk about really simple, human actions and encourage humans to share their visual environments with each other and think about questions, especially after/during a pandemic that has made us question a lot.

Our audience is every citizen, every person who evern walks around or just wonders how people further than they are living.