For this collaborative project Melanie, Chris, and I decided to bounce off of prompt ideas in the STLAJ. After flipping through the journal we got the idea of doing something involving a silhouette and asking unwitting participants to fill them in with adjectives, or phrases. Body image and stereotyping issues are being more and more heavily discussed today; so, we thought we could use this as an opportunity to shed some light on the ways in which our societal standards make it hard for people to subjectively describe the feeling they got from a nameless, faceless silhouette because of their preconceived notion that a body should look this way and not that way.
Each one of the group members randomly chose a silhouette, printed it out, and asked random participants to blurt out the first descriptive thing they could about these silhouettes. Some of the answers were surprising, and yet some were expected. Personally, I was collecting adjectives from the purple silhouette. I work most of the time, so most of my answers came from people who were willing to answer the question as I was making their coffee. Most of my collaborators were from this area, and had a range of all ages. I believe that the answers I was given reflects that. This is a project that could have endless possibilities. Our next step for this would be to upload it to a Twitter page with the hashtag #BodyImage and invite people for their own adjectives, and to discuss previous participants' answers. In doing this, peoples' feelings on this issue would be brought to light and it could be a potentially cleansing experience for those who may, or may not, identify with this project.
The images and description of the project can be seen here: