The session began with an overview of Proboscis and some of its projects by Giles Lane to indicate some of our processes, tools and techniques that influenced the development of the Anarchaeology process. This was followed by a short group activity with the students forming 6 groups to make a selection of images (from those they had each brought to the class) which were printed on StoryCube sticker sheets.
In the second half of the session (led by Andrew Hunter and Alice Angus) the class was divided into 2 discussion groups and each group given a set of the images and 6 StoryCubes to construct. We started with the premise that images on the cubes formed a kind of ‘Accidental Museum’ and explored what would happen if you were to curate a narrative across all the disparate images. What juxtapositions could we find, what associations and connections, what might we need to introduce to to make a bridge between ideas or associations? What narratives would emerge with different associations of and arrangements of the cubes?
One group decided to find a thread in the actual images and the other worked with a process:
- The first traced a narrative of recycle and renewal – from items of recycling, to cycles of nature to cycles of life and death and ideas of regeneration and reincarnation.
- Thinking about how to isolate and refine themes across so many images, the second group used a process or rolling the cubes and randomly selecting images that they then had to collectively describe. The descriptions were written on the 12 faces of two blank cubes. They thus worked towards narrowing down 6 cubes to 2 and then the aim would be to narrow 2 cubes to one.
Finally we looked at other uses of StoryCubes and processes of researching alongside the aims of the assignment for next week.
– Giles & Alice
