Explanation of the work
Pick up 100 hairs of my cat Ipa, paste them on three sheets of paper, and write “I AM A CAT AS YET I HAVE NO NAME NO I AM IPA”. This is a remix of Ipa's hair and a Japanese novel I am a cat by Soseki Natsume. The novel starts with a phrase 我輩は猫である。名前はまだない。(I am a cat. As yet I have no name.) which is very popular and well known phrase in Japan. I used exactly 100 of Ipa's hairs.
My process/thought
As usual, I started with my brainstorming. I did it two times; the first time was before the 2nd class and reading/watching 2nd week assignments about remix, and the second time was after that. My memo is on aaaa.
Here is the process/thoughts I want to share the most from this work. I finished my work yesterday night (9/13, Fri) and, to be honest, I am still confused with how I can assess the quality of my work. As of now, I am not satisfied what I have done for this assignment. It is very difficult for me yet to wright my thoughts down as I said I am confused, but here is what I feel like now:
- Isn't my work too straightforward? I used 100 of my cat's hair, but all I did was basically write letters. Isn't this idea too simple? I feel it's not 100 different ideas, but just 1 idea showed in 100 different ways.
- I feel I was luck of “what did I want to tell via this work”. Maybe I was too obsessed with the idea of remix and forgot to think about that? What is good for other people to see my work? Isn't my cat too personal for me and too unrelated for others so that it is boring for them?
- Watching Ipa's hair carefully and arranging them to write a letter was actually fun. No hair is the same, and no letter written by the hair is the same. Most of the time, putting/pasting on the paper was uncontrollable and there was a room for accident/by chance.
I need to time to digest this feelings/thoughts so that I utilize this experience for my future work. I'm going to add notes how my mind changes after some time.