Sod's law.

College is meant to be a place where you become passionate and serious about your studies. It is your choice if you go to lessons, if your on time, if you do the work, in fact its your choice if you want to be there at all. In my eyes it should be our choice to decide how we use the Internet. If we want to go on social networking sites and waste our time and our education, then perhaps we should be allowed. As human beings we like a structure to be put in place but just how much structure should we be given at college?

I knew as soon as I started this project based on social network sites that I would face some problems. Facebook was already blocked and Tumblr was blocked a few months ago, but I figured I still had twitter, it would be fine. A week or two into my project and I go to log in, a screen pops up saying something along the lines of 'This website has been blocked'. Great. I've been logging into twitter for two of the three years I've been at this college, and as soon as I actually need it, it gets blocked. Sods law. Its strange that the college take these steps hoping it will help, they think you wont loose focus in class and you'll spend your time in college doing what you are there to do. When in fact these steps can actually hinder our work, what some people don't seem to understand is that these sites are amazing sources of information. Take Tumblr for example, there are sections linking you to pages and pages about : art, design, architecture, poetry, sports, news, politics, science, gaming, film, music and more. And twitter is a great way to possibly get in touch with people you wouldn't normally be able to. Artists for example, sure you may be able to find an email address from their website but quite often these emails will be over looked. Where as a twitter account is a personal thing, they can access it throughout the day by their phones or computers, there's no need to open hundreds of emails, they all appear in a feed, meaning you have a larger chance of them reading it. I think that this is a much more personal way to communicate and begins to bring down the boundaries surrounding 'famous people' and their fans.

With twitter now blocked in college it was the perfect time to begin my first piece. I wanted to bring live tweets into the real world. Taking a sentence that could be overlooked and bringing it to the attention of people. Whether it bored people, confused people or amused people it was still communicating to the people. I find it strange that one of these 'tweets' that can be seen be millions of people on a website could find more attention in a small environment such as my college, simply because I picked a pen up and wrote it. Is this finding the value once more in hand written text?

To me a letter is a much more personal object than say an email. Just by the fact that someone has sat down, picked up the paper you are now holding and hand wrote every word, taking time to make sure each word is correct and is in fact what they want to say. As I am typing this now I type what I think, I do this quickly and without much thought, I'll go back and read it over once I'm done. Quickly changing anything I think is wrong, without leaving a trace of what was previously there. It is this fast pace that appeals to us in this fast world we live in. If I was to have hand wrote this I'm sure it would have taken me twice as long, being the reason I use this blog as my journal. With everything being typed, designed and printed in our society, could it be that a hand written sentence could be the most eye catching thing out there?

With all of this in mind I borrowed a small white board, positioned it outside the art rooms and wrote a tweet on it from my live feed on my phone. I had to stop myself from trying to find the most entertaining tweets to write, and just to write the top one as it was the most recent. After all my concept wasn't about amusing and entertain people, but to just simply communicate to them. This piece was combining the personal quick thinking tweet with the personal handwritten action. Every now and again I would go outside and replace the tweet with a new one. As this was outside the rooms people would walk in and ask what it was about, they would start talking to each other and discussing it, every if they didn't fully understand why it was there it was still doing its job.

Once the day was over I reflected on the piece. I liked the no hassle style, the simpleness of presenting a plain white board with hand written text, making the statement the focus, much like the work of Richard Prince with his plain backgrounds and text. But to me the piece as a whole wasn't powerful enough. I placed it outside the art rooms because it was right next to the smoking area where people tended to gather. I also placed it there because I was being polite, placing it somewhere I knew that know one would have a problem with. This was wrong of me, I should have been drawing attention to it rather than hiding it away. The next day I decided to carry on with the piece, this time I took it up to the wicked cafe and placed it on the stage. I also tried to write on it every hour. This was better, it created more of an impact and a wider range of people were viewing it. However it still wasn't filling its potential.

I felt that even though this piece could have gone further it was time to stop and move onto a new idea. If I was to do this piece again I would really commit to it. Personally I would like to have stayed with the board all day, writing the tweets as they came up on the live twitter feed. This could have been photographed or filmed and sped up into a short film sequence.

I find it interesting that I could take a white board from college, leave it where I pleased and wrote whatever I wanted on it within the college, yet I'm not allowed to access a mostly harmless website on college computers. What a strange level of control.