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Beginning with the theme of Memory I thought about things that people wish they didn’t remember such as bad memories or unhelpful advice and through that came to the idea of “Unlearning’. The process of combating pockets of information in your brain is something I was curious about and wondered how someone would do that.

The resolved piece takes a person through that practice and also presents other people’s stories. It challenges your previous behaviour and beliefs and forces you to review how those actions affected yourself and others. Each sheet starts with a belief to unlearn and goes on to acknowledge why it is unproductive and possibly harmful advice- it requires you to apologise and then plan how you will act against the advice in the future. An essential part of the piece is the feeling you get whilst filling out the sheet- it took me back to feeling in trouble in school. I felt ashamed for what I had done and not getting away with it but at the same time it was a demanding challenge to complete as most of the time I didn’t feel my actions warranted a punishment. This seems to present an unwillingness to change, it emphasises the difficulty of unlearning bad habits. I plan to have extra sheets for the viewer to fill out to experience the process as well in order to fully immerse themselves in the feeling of change- and actively reject their negatively ruling thoughts.

I initially wasn’t sure how to present the work as an A4 piece of printer paper didn’t feel like art and could easily be ignored. However, I do feel that it brings the same sense of discipline you would feel in school because of the coloured paper and the structure of the exercise. Lee Lozano’s work played a big part in attempting written prctice as art and also thinking about how it could be presented. Perhaps in a setting with them pinned on the wall and a pile of sheets to take from would emphasise the idea that it’s an interactive art piece. The next step would be to involve others to see how it would be carried out and to further the idea of unlearning past myself.

Working in writing has benefitted how fast I work as it doesn’t take as much physical effort, However, the idea of conceptual work scared me a bit so I was avoidant of creating for the start of the project. Because of this it likely lacks development and I feel lots more work could be done to polish or possibly expand the piece. I also feel that maybe it isn’t that easily accessible because it might need quite a lot of explaining, so next I would aim to discover how an audience would view it and then edit it in a way that anyone could relate.

i began by looking back at my mind map for the previous project about memory to draw ideas that i hadn’t yet explored and came up with a few routes to be explored:
– Documentation of memories? how reliable can they be? can two people remember something differently but both be true?
– A memory being twisted over time
-Nervous habits- subconscious muscle memory
-Unlearning unhelpful information/habits

I decided to explore the process of unlearning to see if it’s something that’s possible to do by yourself. Throughout our lives , specifically our childhood, we are fed bits of information and advice that we don’t ask for. It is repeated so much the it becomes ingrained into our memories and often we start to live by it. Often these chunks of wisdom are posed as a positive thing so we buy into it easily, however, on many occasions they are just a means of control. I decided to compile a list of these sayings to explore:

The way they are written reminds me of being in school and trying to learn new information. Perhaps applying the same methods of learning to instead begin a process of unlearning could work the same way. To do this I would need to flip the sayings round to mean the opposite, so to unlearn “ignorance is bliss” I would have to write “ignorance is NOT bliss”. Repetition is a common technique for learning so I brought this in to the process.

This reminds me of the lines you would have to write as a punishment, apologising for your mistake. I tried this with the rest of the statements, however, a lot of the meaning got lost in them and it ended up just sounding cynical. I feel like they won’t be easily that recognisable or make sense unless explained.

The nod back to schools methods of learning also reminded me of “punishment exercises”, a worksheet given to pupils when they misbehaved to redeem themselves and apologise. I want to consider placing these statements in this setting to acknowledge their effect and work on changing how we view them.

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This is a rough plan for how it might look- I took inspiration from Lee Lozano’s “general strike piece” with the idea of a simple structured page of writing that lacks visual excitement but however makes up for it with the discussion within the format.

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This is the work that i felt was strongest- it challenges your previous behaviour and beliefs and forces you to review how those actions affected yourself and others. Each sheet starts with a belief to unlearn and goes on to acknowledge why it is unproductive and possibly harmful advice- it requires you to apologise and then plan how you will act against the advice in the future. An essential part of the piece is the feeling you get whilst filling out the sheet- it took me back to feeling in trouble in school, i felt ashamed for what i had done and not getting away with it but at the same time it was a big challenge to complete. This seems to present an unwillingness to change, it emphasises the difficulty of unlearning bad habits. I plan to have extra sheets for the viewer to fill out to experience the process as well in order to fully immerse themselves in the feeling of change- and actively reject their negatively ruling thoughts.