Semester 2

This semester we are looking at ‘Disrupting the Everyday’ through creating 8-12 photographs and a website that portray this concept in a group.

My own findings:
To start this term we have been looking at readings to introduce. The reading “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” by Erving Goffman, analyses human interactions on a socio-analytical level to help understand how individuals portray themselves to others and the world and how they see themselves/want to see themselves in society. He uses the theatre as a way to analyse individual’s actions, and uses terms like setting, front, appearance, manner. People perform their every day lives through which gives meaning and importance in how we see ourselves and how people understand us. Setting changes how we portray our performance, for example more stressful settings and the stressful situations amongst them will test our performance and we may not be true to performing our abilities to the best they could be, thus not showing a true performance of themselves – maybe? Our appearance and manner are also important, “‘Appearance’ may be taken to refer to those stimuli which function at the time to tell us the performer’s social status” page 114, a person’s social status whether it be temporary (work clothes, gym clothes) or permanent, is important in helping portray an individual especially communicating one’s gender, finance, age, occupational/social status. “‘Manner’ may be taken to refer to those stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the interaction role the performer will expect to play in the oncoming situation” page 114 – helping the audience see how one will act. Appearance and manner are thought to be consistent however that may not happen all the time.

A “front is a expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance”, – therefore the image and the impression portrayed.

This reading helped me look at people in a much more analytical way of understanding portrayals and reactions of individuals, thus helps me construct ideas of representing a person. The idea of inconsistency and coherence links in with the module project ‘disrupting the everyday’. Appearance and manner as contradicting each other – “when a performer who appears to be of higher estate than his audience acts in a manner that is unexpectedly equalitarian… or when a performer dressed in the garments of a high position presents himself to an individual of even higher status” can relate to the disruption of a real performance.