February 4 Critique

For my group critique this quarter, I invited 3 Mostlandian citizens, Violet "Winter" Lakeland, Michael Reinsch, and Mike Merrill, to come speak to my classmates about how they perceive Mostlandia. I gave a short presentation about who the MOST is, how we discovered the map of Mostlandia on our friend Matthew's floor, and about the various instances, such as the Mostlandian Embassies and the Yake Spot Portal where we have offered citizenship to Citizens of Other Places.


I thought that instead of people looking at my website or some pictures and talking about them for an hour, I would instead invite the citizens. This is not because I see them as my art project necessarily, but because I am really interested to learn more about why the have continued to participate in our projects past the time when they became citizens. It seems important to me to include their first hand experiences of Mostlandia in my description of what I do because it seems like their participation completes/expands my activity as an artist. It also seemed to me that like hearing from citizens first hand would be more interesting than me telling the class about it.

I asked the following questions:
- Please give your name, and what you do in your daily life.
- What do you want to tell us about Mostlandia?
- How do you describe Mostlandia to other people?
- Describe what happened when you first encountered Mostlandia.
- How do you participate in Mostlandia?
- What causes you to continue participating?

The feedback I received was interesting to me, however, I'm not sure whether the class knew how to interact with our visitors. I think that this was an interesting experiment, and would like to get more feedback from citizens, but perhaps without an audience.

Another element of this discussion was that at some point Harrell told us that Mostlandia contains, for him, three of the things he hates most in the world: patriotism, paperwork and bureaucracy.

Harrell's other critique revolved around an example Khris gave where someone visited one of our embassies and asked him if he could help them get official paperwork to get their daughter a visa. Khris told the person that he could give them paperwork, but that the Australian government might not recognize it. Harrell's main point was that at that time, Khris should have left his post at our Embassy and helped the visitor go navigate the Australian bureaucracy. Khris's main response was that he couldn't really contingency plan for such an event. My response was that Khris was honest and that it wouldn't have really made sense to leave our show and take on this other project - we needed him at our office. Harrell maintained that we should have contingency plans for everything, anything, but I don't know that I agree with that.

I wrote an email to The MOST describing the feedback we got as such:
Cyrus wanted it to be more fun, and said he didn't like how the audience didn't talk more. He said he wanted to say a lot of things but wasn't sure how to interject or talk about stuff.

Eric thought it shouldn't be fun because it was in the school setting. he also thought that we should all watch the extended version of lord of the rings all three movies together in one sitting. because, "you have the whole light vs dark, and in the end even the golum is involved in destroying the ring, and someone who you didn't expect - samwise gange (sp) - was the hero to the end. and this struggle is really about the end of the world, and you have the fellowship who comes together to save it"

Avalon presented me with a mathematical equation showing how Mostlandia is real based on variables such as imaginary(I), real(R), mostlandia(M)... if he posts it on his blog like he said he was going to, I'll send you all the link.

Amy steel said that she really enjoyed just watching Violet talk.

Eric and Michael both appreciated how Mike Merrill was able to articulate his thoughts in an interesting way.

Varinthorn said she really wanted Rudy to talk more because she enjoyed listening to him.

The visiting artist, Kate Procrass, thanked us for presenting, and said she thought that our work was really interesting. She said she enjoyed the way we talked about history and place as subjective things.

Violet said she had never thought about art in the way we talked about it in the critique. She wasn't sure how to think or talk about it.