Below are exhibitions I visited during semester one...

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Liza Sylvestre - asweetsea (John Hansard Gallery)

asweetsea explores what communication is for a person who is deaf, has deaf parents, and is an artist in today's world. It asks the question - what does hearing mean? What does deafness mean? What does disability mean? Where do these things begin and end? asweetsea's main piece features a cartoon film from the artist's own childhood, reworked through the eyes of her hearing child. Here, we see how hearing can alter the view of a film and how it can change a childhood experience entirely. Throughout the piece, we see Liza communicating with her child, asking her what she can hear and what it means to her, and then creating images based on this description. The two final films are entirely separate from each other. To accompany this piece, Sylvestre created resin sculptures of cochlear implants and the inner ear. I visited this exhibition before I landed on the idea of researching language and communication, and I think this is what may have piqued my interest. Seeing how communication works between the HoH and hearing really interested me, as did the ways in which sound can completely change someone's perception of something - even as children.

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Sarah Filmer - Knit the Walls (God's House Tower)
Over the last 6 years, knit the walls has involved countless Southampton residents in the co-production of a knitted version of the city wall. The long-standing exhibition aims to reconnect people with stories and histories that have been lost over time; unrecorded in books and archives. What if somehow the everyday lives and conversations of Southampton's past residents can be held within the city walls? I was lucky enough to speak with the artist and take a piece of the exhibition home with me. The aim of this was to allow extra communication between Southampton's residents in regard to its past and how we can preserve this. By this point, I had begun to explore language and those we have lost, so I really love the way Filmer attempts to save and record stories and memories here without using words.

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All Together Now (WSA Gallery)

The below exhibition was created by fellow WSA creators and aims to bring different cohorts and artists together. I fell in love with a performance art piece that was taking place that day named 'something out of nothing' by a friend Olivia Crawley, as well as various pieces of text around the space. I think after researching communication, my love for words and language has taken to a new height and I've found a new respect for it as an art form. Something out of nothing takes simple wordplay and turns it into physical action, whilst keeping things fun. The pieces of text around the space were created by an artist with dyslexia who was attempting to show how hard the art world can be to navigate as a person with a learning disability - whilst also making fun of it. Its design for the screenprint has to be written and printed backward, adding an added layer of difficulty.

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Room to Breathe (Outernet London’s NOW Trending building)

Room to Breathe is a light and sensory sound experience in the heart of London, that aims to give those who experience it a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday London life. The exhibition features 360 screens displaying film art from various artists and attempts to slow London down to a standstill for a brief moment of time - to stop and talk or simply enjoy the space in silence. It hopes to connect those from all walks of life and encourage communication between them. Admittedly, I simply stumbled upon this after an interview in central and had absolutely no idea what it was until after. But, I did have meaningful conversations with others and it helped chill me out, so it definitely did its job. After doing more research at home afterward, I loved the way in which it encouraged communication within busy London life - even people who don't 'enjoy' art stopped to watch and have a conversation. It was refreshing to see everyone simply appreciating something together in such a disconnected world.

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Tate Modern

The Tate Modern has 100s of exhibits, but I was predominately focused on language. There was A LOT. The two pieces that really caught my eye were a series of images and words by Martha Rosler (below to the left), and Babel by Cildo Meireles (below to the right). Rosler's piece explores the psychology of flying and the general aesthetics of airports, as well as the role of passengers and the strategies adopted by airline companies. The sentences draw attention to the ways in which airport advertising and signage promise to take visitors elsewhere mentally. The ways in which companies use advertisements to send subtle messages to our subconscious didn't surprise me, but it did really interest me. How can we use signage in games to influence players in ways they don't realise?

The second piece, Babel, is based on the old Bible myth set in Babylon that aims to explain why people speak different languages. According to the myth of ‘The Tower of Babel’, a group of travellers bands together after the Great Flood to build a tower that escapes the rising water and reaches God in Heaven. Insulted by the idea of people wanting to escape the flood to confront him, and thereby death, God scrambles their words so that they can no longer understand each other and no longer build. He then scatters them globally where they spread their new languages amongst other civilians. This has also been used to explain why there’s so much conflict in the world today - language was built from God's anger. The installation itself takes the form of a circular tower made from hundreds of second-hand analogue radios. The radios are each tuned to different stations and are adjusted to the minimum volume at which they can still be heard. Despite this, no radio station can be heard over another - the cacophony of voices becomes incomprehensible to the viewer. I attended this exhibition just before starting phase 4, and it has inspired me GREATLY. I had no idea the piece was called Babel, and that the main body was actually made of radios, until after we had decided on a name and theme for our game. I sort of drifted through the room, as it was something I had seen before. After researching, the loud, overlapping voices in a large tower at the centre of space are now something we are going to try to implement into our final game - as is the use of radios throughout the environment.