Going into this project I had a good idea that I tried to do. I was going to try to film my roommates having a fake bad fight. When trying to film them, the fighting was good but only lasted a minute. After several attempts, I realized it was not going to work as well as I had hoped. I learned that citizen journalism is difficult to fake, but has to be taken in the moment. The importance and impact of the videos are not usually realized until later.

I had trouble thinking of an idea for this project, and started several different drafts. When my last attempt failed miserably, I was sitting in my room with Kirby thinking what I could do when I saw an empty wine bottle. I then got the idea to create an audio recording with different sounds I could make with wine bottles.

For my performance photographs, I decided that I wanted to do something that captured the reactions of my friends in a situation. For my project, I decided that I wanted to make them feel uncomfortable. I would ask the person if I could take a portrait of them for my art class, and once I had them all set, I would say, “oh, you look kind of fat right now”. The photographs came from their reactions to what I had just said. I got a range of reactions, most of them being shocked or laughing. When choosing subjects, I chose my friends who knew my sense of humor and knew that I didn’t actually mean what I had said, but were still shocked by it. After I took the photographs, I would tell my friend what my project was, and they loved the idea and wanted to see what their pictures looked like.

I decided to upload the images to twitter, using the repeating caption of “Right before this I told them that they looked fat #part_”. I had 9 subjects over all, so I decided that I was going to break it up into 3 separate tweets. The first two tweets had four subject’s pictures, and the last tweet had four pictures of the same subject, but was taken in succession to each other.  After a few hours after posting to twitter, my friends had favorited the tweets.

The part about the project that I liked the most was the range of reactions my friends had. I also liked this because it is difficult to guess the context of the photo if you didn’t know it.