Methods of Investigating

Laundry room

My chosen site for this brief was the laundry room. I was influenced firstly by Agnès Varda, The Gleaners and I, 2000 and the concept of gleaning into mundane, everyday things. I was interested in her way of looking at the world and the everyday. So I chose the laundry room as it is a space most of us go to, but it is seemingly mundane and taken for granted. 

I took notes while sitting in my laundry room, interviewed a fellow student, and recorded sounds and video. All while looking closely, trying to see the room from a different perspective, I stumbled upon this idea of Foley with the sounds and replacing them with videos from other sources to create sounds for them. The videos I took also can be reimagined as pieces of a sci-fi film or something set in outer space. 

The other piece of work that influenced me was Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space, 1997, where the film consisted of video clips of different spaces, taking in a documentary style, by capturing it as a frame and letting things happen inside it. I derived the idea of the video linked below from his work. I like the idea of being in a space as an observer and watching things unfold as they happen, not influencing any of it, just watching. So I combined the footage I had with the images and sounds to create this visual, in a way to capture the essence of a space.

External links :

1. Laundry Room Archives – A collection of all the data from the laundry room
2. Capturing Space – Video Experiment to capture the essence of a place