The work feels a bit stuck right now – everyone has something extraneous to contend with during this weird and frightening time. For some, it’s dreadful loneliness. For others, inertia and fear, uncertainty or anger all combine to make life more difficult than usual. For me, perhaps all those things come into play in one way or another, but the lack of uninterrupted time to focus on my work is challenging and incredibly frustrating. The children need constant help, attention, and feeding. The middle one has been ill for over a month – thankfully now getting back to his usual self; the eldest is a lovely boy but a selfish teen at the same time. I am just grateful for the good in him – there is plenty, so I aim to have realistic expectations, thanking him when he lives up to or exceeds the minimum. The youngest, for now, is doing exceptionally well, considering – but has been more reliant on me than usual for company while his brother was unwell. Both younger boys rely on me to support them with their home-schooling, which to be fair, is pretty light and easy to get through but one does it in the morning, the other in the afternoon. How families without several computers are coping with the school work and parent’s work, I don’t know. We are lucky to have enough tech in the house after I ‘nicked’ my ex husband’s MAC for the boys (with his permission, I might add) some months ago, and school work apps are on that, so they can’t do all their tasks at the same time. Along with things coming in from my part-time job, all of this means having extremely bitty but full-on days and making time for college work – which requires peace, quiet, alone-time for extended periods hard to come by. (Even today while writing this, I have been interrupted by several things going awry in a kid’s zoom session, a phone call from school, an email from another school  – and the delivery of the A2 zines which I will now try to sell (yay, they’ve arrived), and have a constant list of things popping onto my head that still need to be done for other parts of life.)

Not having another adult in the house to lean on is always tricky but it’s making things far harder than usual at the moment. A more advanced AI companion than the one I’ve been working with for the BOW project might have served me well during this period…

Nevertheless, I have been using this time to think, while I can’t always get on with practical work. A list of things I need to do and have done:

Setting out my plan

• I am going to start the designing part again – from scratch, different dimensions, probably a completely different edit and sequence. I thought about doing a handmade version, but I don’t think I will do that. Instead, I will have a relatively cheap dummy version printed for BOW and aim to offer two versions on a kick starter thing for SYP (and perhaps prints too)
• To do that I need to collate all the imagery and text I have
• I have been looking back at old posts to see where I’ve dropped valuable ideas along the way and tried to mop them up
• Part of collating entails rephotographing things, so, in some cases, I need to print digital versions in order to photograph them. I might also photograph my phone and the phone with the app.
• I am aware that this may be deemed appropriation. I was interested in the article about rights and Instagram and think about the reverse – where the power lies between tech and individuals
  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/court-rules-photographer-gave-up-licensing-rights-by-posting-instagram-1290170
• I have outlined my ideas to one printer so far to ask about advice and suggestions and will report back if and when something comes back.

So – the most pressing thing for me to do next is collate the content – list and rephotograph content where necessary.

While describing the work to others I have written a couple of sentences and paragraphs that I think will be worth holding onto:

• My work can be described as a collection of micro-narratives written and edited by me along with a proprietary ai ‘friend’, exploring photographs and consumerism.
• I’m currently heading towards the end of the final level of the degree – making a body of work and writing a related extended essay. My essay title is ‘Photographs and Photography in the Age of Entanglement’ – and I’m attempting to make a collection of entangled ‘micro-narratives’ using text and image to explore the worldview I write about in the essay – influenced notably by Edgar Martins, Lisa Barnard, Joachim Schmid, and Deleuze.