Is this what I'm doing?

This is from a conversation i had via msn with a friend. about my work. I have edited out the scarce replies ( I think maybe he regretted asking me, haha ) And tidied up the spelling. i might amend it to make it a little more coherent.

I am really interested in how a lot of people are living 2nd or 3rd hand, through the things they read in magazines, on the Internet, in books, or see in films or on TV. i think that too many people are experiencing life second hand rather than actually living it fully aware.

i count myself as one of those people

and parallel to this i have found myself in the middle of an identity crisis

and these things are definitely linked

it could have been that living this way cause the crisis

i think there are more degrees to this not living life first hand thing too, that i don't count myself in...

like computer games and being slaves to advertising and that

so, whilst in the thick of this, i have realised that a lot of the things that i like and dislike are beginning to define me

the things that i collected as the starting point for this unit we references to a variety of different things that were pulling my interest all over the place. film, literature,philosophy etc

and whilst these aren't tangible things that are defining me, they are still second hand reference

anyway. i started to brainstorm a final outcome idea that would serve all the references i wanted to pull together, but also satisfying the need to meld all of these different things together to make a representative thing from

-i definitely think that i have been trying to crush all these different aspects together to find conclusions and to make larger entities from them, as maybe an extension of myself - as in, having an identity crisis means not feeling as though i have a definite outline

so i was going to make a big quilt and sew separate patches together - on each patch, a different quote or theory or part of a film would be stitched to another, in an effort to draw all of this together using the language of patching up

but the entire quilt would be referencing the Existential Blanket Theory from the film I Heart Huckabees -where everything is connected

but at the same time (and this goes back to my previous work on making pods for humans) the quilt can be used to wrap one individual up and cocoon one person in a separate compartment from everyone else.

and that would be the significance of making a quilt

however i became unhappy with the progress of this and have really given in to my want to make t-shirts

which is quite a flaky thing to do

but i feel that my work can go in this direction for a reason

in reference to my idea of a 2nd or 3rd hand set of information or morals or ideas

i was thinking about what the visual aspect of my work could be

and i became interested in the idea of an Encyclopedia aesthetic

where encyclopedias often have images from all over the place -some are photographs some are illustrations but they're normally never matching as if they're old images where the copyright was either really easy to obtain or had run out

i want to put the images I'm creating onto t-shirts

mainly because i want to learn the skill of silk screen printing

but also

because i think that t-shirts are a fascinating platform for art

and they would be the new concrete poetry for our generation

well, the images are going to be these different ideas crushed together in image form

jack said 'why can't these people be expressing you' -instead of themselves

which means it will be a 7th hand image by the time it's slapped on a t-shirt

but also, it will be a second hand expression

because i made the shirt

okay...like

if i find a photo of a statue in a book

I'm looking at this book which is a mass produced item

which came from an original compiled book

where the photo was sourced from somewhere -maybe taken specifically for the book, or maybe found when the copyright was out or what ever

the photo is a photo of a statue

and the statue was probably made from a drawing

and the drawing was of, say a woman wearing some roman woman attire

and the drawing would have had to be posed for

which would be a re-creation of and event or idea

that's just a fun one because it's a statue

but say it was a drawing of a flower

in a book

it's very removed from a real thing

and that's the justification for the imagery I'm using

Basically

i want to get the idea of melding a film and some philosophical theories across BUT! they don't have anything tangible

so I'm using images that are far removed in a way

if you think of an encyclopedia

it has all these different things compiled

but it's mainly text and diagrams etc.

but then if you think of one of those tacky souvenir tea towel for, say Scotland, and they put everything that's to do with Scotland -typically, all together on one tea towel

i want the feeling of the encyclopedia

but with the crushing together of the whiskey bottle and the bag pipes and the yappy dogs wearing tartan hats

at the moment the thing i want to put on, has little meaning :)

and yes i have regressed a little

the t-shirts make a lot less sense than the quilt

however, i think the quilt needs to be an accumulated piece

and i just don't have the time to make it before the quilt

and with the t-shirts, i have the space to learn a skill and make a visually engaging(on aesthetic level) and functional thing