Gob Squad

“In Saving The World, Gob Squad squeeze the world into a handful of videotapes. Produced in 24 hours, a seven camera panoramic film portrays one place of a city as a microcosm of the entire world. The mission is nothing less than to save the planet and preserve it for an unknown future. Starting with ‘saving’ sunrise, Gob Squad soon move on to ‘saving’ the essentials of life on earth such as money, freedom, ice cream and love.” http://www.gobsquad.com/projects/saving-the-world

The theatre/performance group Gob Squad was recommended to me during my pop-up exhibition. I found this particular piece interesting because it’s the other end of my idea’s stick. I’m approaching the exploration of what will survive from today from the perspective of people in the future, whereas Gob Squad have made an artefact which tries to preserve today’s world for the future. They’ve done so by closely documenting and interacting with a fragment of the larger world, it’s interesting to think about how this might be interpreted if it survives and how people might gain understanding from it. Things like Turkish culture being friendliness and the public library as a place that contains all knowledge are really cool nuggets of primary source information, which people could take as fact or interpret in all sorts of different ways. Perhaps if I try to reverse engineer the meaning of my artefacts by taking their current use and abstracting it, or when I don’t know what they are by imagining what they could be, I could come up with some similar nugget-type pieces of information that are used to paint a larger picture of the world.