Final Outcome.

Began looking at the word “Scatter” and took it literally so I documented glass being scattered against a wall. My initial reaction was to recreate the impact of the glass by the momentarily hit against the wall. Though I didn’t feel that much inspired by just breaking glass however the feeling of breaking the glass was somewhat liberating. I came across Plate smashing in Ancient Greek Culture in which they use to commemorate the dead. By smashing the plate this would be an act of distraction from mourning loved-ones. In modern Greece plate smashing is somewhat of a tourist attraction and is not practiced as much as it use to be. Though a ban was introduced in 1970s as it was seen as dangerous.

In today’s society plate smashing holds many implications such with the current credit crunch Japanese business men pay to smash a plate this wave has also hit San Diego. The research that I’ve collected contained no personal matter and I didn’t feel any connection. I began thinking of what plate smashing meant to me. For me smashing a plate it acted as a emotional release. The plate carrying my emotion and then smashed and scattered into pieces. I didn’t feel that compelled and didn’t know how to progress this into a final idea. I then thought of my childhood and how my mother use to smash plates with anger, usually it was the result of that time of the month or nobody helping her out in the kitchen. I began to evaluate her actions in the past and realized it was a cry for help. She was frustrated living with a man and she was never compatible with a man living under the same roof as her. So the occasional nights there was a lot of quarrels between my mum and my dad. Usually the stupidest things would spark an argument.

This is where I began looking at different ways of conveying this notion. I did a lot of development with videos and reflections. Also deviously recorded an argument between my sister and my mother. Collected sound bites from Hollywood movies of love fight scenes. I developed these by mixing up the sounds and having a male and female on separate sides of the speakers but recorded on one track. So Left speaker is female and the right speaker is male and they would argue together. I felt it was too obvious and didn’t contain the right consistency to be carried off as a complete art work. So I wanted it to be in reference to my chose word for the brief I didn’t want to go of course. So I thought of distorting the sound of the argument by stretching out the words to sound like a digital broken wav.file.  If you look at a visualization of a stretched wav sound it scatters into dots. So I’m stretching it and stretching it until it breaks into pieces. This is the result of the distortion of the argument emitted from the speakers. Also the audio replays again and again. Its like a broken recorded replaying the same argument and its going nowhere equals to a broken relationship hence the damaged speakers that once connected the two in harmony.