Collaborative Practice Questionaire

Birmingham Institute of Art and Design
BA(Hons) Fine Art / BA(Hons) Visual Communication


Module - Collaborative Practice

Summative Statement

This statement is to be presented a part of the assessable body of work and is a group evaluation of the collaborative process, development and final outcome. It accounts for 10% of the final mark.

You should consider this collectively taking into consideration peer group responses and feedback.
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Brief description of the final presentation and how you arrived at it.

The final presentation will be a visual representation of how we interact as a group. How we express ourselves during meetings has become our main focus. There is an unspoken hierarchy. We will deal with the lack of some group members input/appearance by using their none existence within the final presentation of work in the form of monitors with white noise/silence/none movement.
The form of the piece will be circular representing the collaborative aspect of the group. The placement of televisions within the circular form however will be imperfect, a visual metaphor of our group dynamic.
The visual content on the television screens will focus on our body movements. We found our body movements to be revealing of group dynamic. Expressive personalities seem to move more than others. The audio content further explores this; our clash of personalities makes for interesting viewing.
Displaying the piece in a place that is relevant to the group history will mean using the upstairs corridor, as this corridor saw a pivotal turning point in the direction of the groups practice.


Description of the process. How did you operate as a group in defining roles and responsibilities?

Initially we didn’t really define roles; there was a natural group hierarchy where people really listened to everyone. However this really didn’t get us anywhere, as there was always a clash of opinion, which hampered our productivity. Meeting without all group members meant that decisions would be made then the next week missing group members from the previous week wouldn’t like the ideas; the process would repeat itself… It wasn’t until about the 7th week we actually realised things weren’t working out, so we called an emergency meeting with Mona. Punctuality or lack of, of various members of the group has encouraged a selection of us to work harder to outweigh the difficulties of missing members and to embrace this problem by redirecting and focusing our work on the subject of collaboration and what it stands for.


What skills did you employ?

Debate; forced ideas & dramatic change
Photography & film; as use to record and document anything and everything
Cooking; relating to the collaboration and team building exercise we conducted
Socialising; which has ideally helped build the group
Analysis of group dynamic; which stems from all meetings
Performance; from the impulse activity of giving out flowers.


What problems did you encounter and how did you solve them?

If we could change our group name to ‘Problems’ then we would. It’s been one thing after another. If anything would go wrong then it has.

The irony laced through the name of our group has been our downfall. In the attempt to make people happy we’ve all ended up infuriated. Lack of communication and punctuality from members of the group has left us wondering why should we be concerned if other people cannot even be bothered to show up. Its now been a case of cutting out loses and moving on regardless.

Calling emergency meetings works in the short term and moral is high for a couple of days but motivation is soon lost and frustration makes for stale progess.


References in relation to a context for your collaborative practice. Which artists/designer/practices etc, were of interest or influence to the group.

(From the ‘happiness’ part)
Sophie Calle – Stalking people.

PostSecret – Postcards made anonymously by public. Flavia Muller Medeiros – handing ‘you are beautiful’ postcards to members of the public
Flashmobs
Improv Everywhere – public interventions (high five escalator)

(Group relationships and video stuff)

Rikrit Tiravanija – making meals and distributing them for free
Surrealists
Candice Breitz
Dara Birnbaum

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