AM

After chatting with Luke, Emily and Sophie in the studio today, one of the things that came out of that was the idea of debating societies and official debate where people are given a stance on an issue and then have to debate it, even if they don’t believe in what they are fighting for. It reminded me of the joint project we did with the third years last year where we had to take a stance on an issue [design should not be utopian] for my group, and create a convincing argument. This years joint project with the current second years also links into that as we had to convince people that we really believed in this superhero. The people who were most convincing were the ones most willing to set aside any kind of reservations and full immerse themselves in the world they’d created. Matt pointed out in my feedback that I should try and understand the debator and what makes someone good at debating; I guess from this it seems as though passion and conviction is a huge factor, or at the very least convincing people that you are passionate about what you’re fighting for.

This sort of lead me onto thinking about Barack Obama, and how he swept so many Americans, and the rest of the world, into a fever [a part of that was based on race, yes, but if you take that out of the equation and simply focus on him] He seems incredibly genuine and enthusiastic in his desire to bring about change. And of course he is very well educated and has an incredible power of rhetoric. His acceptance speech was amazing. If you compare that to his opponent, John McCain, he was simply peddling the same old issues as the Bush administration, and there was some consistently lackluster about the Republicans whole campaign as though even they didn’t really believe in what they were trying to sell. Even the addition of the always frightening and consistently psychotic Sarah Palin couldn’t hold a match to the passion Obama coaxed out of people. I want to look more extensively at Obama and the American Presidential debates, but I don’t want to restrict myself to current times, so I’m also going to try and study some other great debators.

Back to the studio discussion however, and the idea of joining the debating society at college came up. This was an idea I’d be vaguely considering so that’s definitely something I’m going to try and arrange. Except apparently we don’t have one at college, so I guess the closet might be the Political Society. The other idea was raised was something Rosario had mentioned to me about an artist who ran a workshop teaching children how to speak and act like politicians. By the end of the day, they were imitation the styles of the politicians almost to perfection. It would definitely be interesting to find out more about that.

One last point raised: I’m really struggling to vocalise my project in a coherent fashion. I try to start and then begin thinking about how little I’ve done, and how much I want to do, and my mind goes blank. Not a great start.