Bal du Moulin de la Galette

After the presentation of our final installation I am personally extremely happy with the way it turned out and the response we got from the veiwers. When we deconstructed the painting we found that we were coming up with lots of ideas to portray this theme of social gathering and social change. We went ahead with our main idea - the video - and we found it to be very successful. We found that we were trying to incorperate too many ideas into our final installation and in the end we stipped it back so that the main focus was just onthe video because of how successful it was.

The feedback we got from the crit was pleasing as people generally got the idea of the peice with it being about social gathering and past and present. The only thing we probably needed to improve on was making the peice more inviting for public to interact with as we wanted them to be able to walk across the floor, leaving footprints, and veiwing the video from the stool and many people said they did not feel like they were supposed to do that.

At the start of this project i never would of thought, as a group we would of ended up with a video installation. The end result however in my opinion was the best outcome we could of hoped for. We deconstructed the painting to the exstent of allowing peoples thoughts and emotions to run free withought getting caught on the fact that the original idea/piece came from one of Reniors most famous paintings.

Video installation is something that i had no experience in and i am glad that i have had the oppertunity to create this peice, because now i can move forward with confidence knowing that i can explore a new area of Contemporay art.

When the video had been projected onto the wall, I was really impressed by the quality, it had kept our grungy look and was very clear. The only thing I would change about the production of the video would be that I didn’t like the motion. We should have got a tripod or placed the camera on a static object. If we were to do it again there would be a few contextual elements I would change. It would be interesting to see the chair within its environment. I would have also like to have set up a viewing area, with many different pub stools. This would also encourage people to walk into our installation to sit and view the video without feeling under pressure. I think our piece turned out well in all as most people understood why we shot the video and the connection between the chair and the floor.

Thanks.

Beth

Here are some things that were said about our piece during our group critique-

• It freaks me out
• The chair is the main point
• Very busy, crowd of people
• People want to avoid the chair
• No one dares sit on it
• They all have their backs to it
• Humor to it
• People want to ignore it
• Curious but don’t want to seem to keen
• Fear what you don’t understand
• Hidden camera - you can study people
• Spying
• Abstract
• Lots of elements to it
• Public are unwilling to help
• Set out like a cinema
• spooky, ghost town feel
• Footsteps in same direction
• Silence + echo
• Sounds backwards, background noise
• Past, memory
• Stool reminds people of pubs/socialising
• Solitary stool
• Breaks social norms to sit on a stool in a street
• Performance
• People avoid putting themselves on stage
• memory of just one person
• one persons memory of what happened
• nothing remains except one thing
• Footprints of who was once there
• Le pipe, we say its a chair, we show a chair, there is a chair
• People do not want to interact