Topic: GRAFFITI
Why do people do graffiti outdoors?
So people can see it
Why do we want people to see graffiti?
Because we like showing off and we love attention
Why do we love attention?
Because were narcissists
Why are we narcissists but don’t like narcissists?
Because we don’t like seeing our reflection on others?
what about your reflection in the water?
Because water is trippy
Why is it trippy?
It just is.
We initially decided to do our “Why” question as a pair to generate more ideas and move more into lateral thinking. Working on our own resulted in a more vertical way of thinking and we wanted to stay away from that. We did several iterations of the “Why” questions with different topics, but we only chose one at the end.
For our topic, we chose graffiti because it is something that we have been seeing around on a daily basis. From there, we somehow branched into narcissism, reflections, and water. We started with one idea, but we ended up combining several of the topics that were mentioned in the questions.
We brainstormed the projects we could make with the topic of narcissism, and what’s more narcissistic than portraying ourselves. We went around the city to find reflective surfaces such as windows and fountains to portray our narcissism. Then, we ended up with three different surfaces and reflections, one in the fountain, one in a window, and one in a building.
When discussing the “reflection” part, we explored different reflective surfaces, and water got our attention since we even mentioned it while doing the questions. We then realized that this should be the central image since it goes back to narcissism as the origin. Since this world comes from the story of Narcissus that drowned while admiring his reflection. Good news is, we did not drown (because we are not actual narcissists).
Our initial fountain was not as reflective as we expected it to be, therefore, we walked around the city, beside the Brandenburg Gate and Friedrichstrasse to explore other fountains and options. At the end of the day, we went back to our initial fountain to where our idea was inspired (the sun was at a better angle then so it was more reflective).
Photos only reflect one part of our narcissism, and we decided to take this matter into our hands. What’s more narcissistic than photos of ourselves? Photos of ourselves merged together and “edited” to show our best self. We then went back to the concept of graffiti and decided to draw over our pictures and around in order to better represent our project.
