I blogged on April the 29th that I was going to take part in a friend’s art project called Take it & run. It was an interesting journey that, as is typically the case with me, started off at a glacial crawl and became a mammoth sprint in the last two weeks. Here is the sketch that I decided to take:
maths says that 95% of everything is always normal and 5% of everything is always not. so why are we surprised?
It was an interesting challenge to do something with this. At first I wanted to take a large number of photos, attempting to find sets of twenty items where one item was abnormal. Like a deformed or extra perfect pigeon or something, nestling it amongst other sets of human faces or similar. I talked this over with people but never quite got round to shooting anything.
In the event I realised that I actually wanted to make a video, initially artistic - in the vein of Rosie Cooper’s short but beautiful snow. However, in the end I settled on doing a short documentary because this idea of normality is fascinating and I wanted to explore it further. It is under five minutes and combines an interview with Richard (who drew the sketch) and an attempt to find ‘normal’ people in a deliberately naive way. It went down well at the showcase exhibition on Saturday and I am highly proud to have been counted amongst the artists that ran. Thanks must go to Mat Ray for helping shoot the interview and talk through the concepts and special thanks must go to Ashley Burroughs for chasing people around Trafalgar square with a ruler.
There are many interview clips I really wanted to squeeze into this documentary that didn’t end up fitting: how Jesus hung out with the edges of society and how the sketch started from a discussion around transgender and intersex - but I’m pleased with the result and the revelation of the importance of the edges of society.
Reflecting on the event as a whole, it was clear that the event pushed people to new levels of excellence and, simply, got people to create stuff. One of my favourite sketches is entitled paint or die - and for me the event was the opportunity to paint.
paint or die
THIS IS AMAZING - i’m so chuffed that you took part and put so much into the project
http://takeitandrun.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/normal/
[...] See what Simon has to say about the project over here. [...]
I love this project. Very amusing and thought provoking. It certainly does a good job of exploring the potential positives of being on the extremes, although it probably needs a ‘health warning’ that on many spectrums (spectra?) is may not be good to be an ‘extremist’.
The mathematical origin of the normal distribution curve is a statement of what has been observed to be ‘normal’ in a population and like all statistics, it is not inherently a judgement of what is right or wrong or good or bad.
95% (approx 2 standard deviations) is commonly used for the “middle ground” of interest, but again there is nothing inherently special about this region. For a given problem we can set the boundary wherever appropriate, 80% or 99.999%.
I love statistics for the potential scientific/mathematical discipline they can bring, but I hate the way they can be abused by the naive, ignorant and plain deceptive! As this video shows they so often obscure the rich diversity of life and stigmatise vital variation.
[...] is normal (the same one Simon Hildrew used for my Take It & Run [...]