S.O.D Final Pieces

The deadline submission for the pieces was yesterday, these are to be sent off to Jonathan over in New York who is planning to curate the exhibition for the second year in a row.

We began to test our idea by printing these off as stickers and putting them into context in certain places. We figured although these pieces are for the exhibition, they could potentially be expanded out into the real world and dotted around cities.

S.O.D Exhibition piece

After discussing our idea more we came up with some content for the notifications as shown in the sketches and from those, created a few digital mockups of how we thought the ideas could look.






The plan with these was rather than to have these maybe on a full scale poster within the exhibition, these are something that would be 1:1 size of a regular notification (about 7cm wide) and would be stuck around the exhibition. The format of these would be recognisable since we see notifications everyday and so when noticed from a distance these would hopefully draw in people's attention, for them to really take in the message of the notification.

Reply Letter from Craig!

He replied!

Obviously I could tell from the letter header that he wasn't in Manchester like he typically would be, instead down in Falmouth lecturing and so it wasn't a definite that I'd be able to interview him face to face. But at the very least I'd be able to interview him over email. He also sent a cool business card in which his very personal and realistic tone of voice shines through.

To follow up the letter I sent an email, thanking him for the letter but also to ask whether or not it would be possible to interview him in person or over email and so hopefully we can sort something out.

S.O.D Upcoming Exhibition

Talks of this years exhibition for S.O.D have been in the works for about 6/7 months so far, up until recently we decided on a theme for the exhibition which is to be turning annoying things into nice, essentially negative things into positive. For the exhibition everyone involved in the collective has the chance to create a piece of work that fits in with the theme.

Both me and Jon decided this was something we could work on together to create something that turned everyday negative things into something more uplifting and positive.

Initially our ideas began to focus more around technology more specifically our mobile phones, because although these are useful and help us everyday, they are also something that can be harmful to us, psychologically. Using our phones too much can make us anti-social, as although we think that social media is connecting us in more ways than one in the virtual world, realistically it can be doing quite the opposite in the real world. We talked about how phones can be a distraction during the day, especially during uni/work etc. as constant notifications can take our focus away from whatever we're working on. 

The reason why we decided to focus on phones more specifically social media is because this is something that affects the majority of people but more so because it's something that we both felt affects us on a regular basis. The constant need to keep up to date with social media profiles, worrying about how people will think of you when you post pictures on Instagram for example, stressing out because you haven't messaged someone back in the past 10 minutes.

We started to put more of a focus on notifications in particular, it seems that these can be considered a negative thing in day to day life. Often they're unnecessary and excessive, not just visually but audibly as well, hearing the *ding* or vibration every 5/10 minutes can become extremely distracting and also annoying.

An idea I had was to take the format of a notification (the annoying thing) and switch out the content for an uplifting/satirical (positive) message that could hopefully brighten up someones day. E.g. an Snapchat notification that might say 'Missed something? Don't worry it still happened', something that might make be humorous but at the same time makes a comment on our obsessions over our phones and social media.

Rough initial sketches