Postcard #1

Hamish - How I see 'The Other'

This is just a rough sketch of an idea. The background goes as follows:

1) People identify with a number of different groups and communities, Some are deliberate memberships (e.g. our musical tastes), some 'accidental' (e.g. our sex). Some are visible others harder to discern. Some are of particular social and legal significance (e.g. race), others are less so, but may be more central to a person's sense of self (e.g. musical ability). How do I see the other in my day to day? How do I see the other in my work on the England and Wales census? Who, what lies behind each datum collected in this rigid and strict (but important) way of defining ourselves?

2) In Being and Nothinness, Jean Paul Satre discusses the notion of 'Bad faith' when a person defines themself by their occupation, social, racial or economic class etc.

Sartre states that in order to get out of bad faith, we must realize that our existence is distinct from our formal projection of a self.

Satre also writes that other people (and indeed the possible presence of other people) makes us stop being the centre of our own universe and forces us to look at ourselves as an object - to see our world as it appears to the other. The other person is a 'threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world...Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control.'

How I see the other and how the other sees me forces us both into a continual existential conflict between our subjective being and the objectification of other people's definitions of us.

Nathalie - How I see 'the other'

"Guess Who? Hasn't come out as well in smaller format."

"Stream of consciousness sketch - mainly wanting to work with colours within faces. Thinking 'the other' based on classes on diversity, racism that I taught the last 2 weeks. Multicultural, multicolourful."

"Well... wishful thinking. Me in a parallel universe...."

"'how i see the other'... guitarist on stage at festival"

All produced on a Bamboo Tablet

Liam & Siobhan - Inside

Inside Siobhan - a new life

Nick - Inside

Nick's multimedia experience - inside his helmet racing his bike

Nathalie - Inside

The poem by John Clare reads:

I feel I am, I only know I am,

And plod upon the earth as dull and void;

Earth’s prison chilled my body with its dram

Of dullness, and my soaring thoughts destroyed.

I fled to solitude from passion’s dream,

But strife pursued: I only know I am.

I was a being created in the race

Of men, disdaining bounds of place and time:

A spirit that could travel o’er the space

Of earth and heaven like a thought sublime;

Tracing creation, like my Maker free,

A soul unshackled like eternity:

Spurning earth’s vain and soul-debasing thrall

—But now I only know I am, that’s all.

Terri - Inside

Trapped inside - a prisoner of materialism