WORD BRIEF: TETE A TETE

Ok, so this was my first proper brief i have done whilst at Bucks New university. I was given the word "tete a tete" which is a french word literally meaning "head to head", referring to a private conversation or argument. The main aim of this was to see how far i could push the word to get it away from the original meaning. It was all about how i interpreted the word, regardless of whether it makes sense to other people. All planning was done on wallpaper, so it was easier to write and write and write without having to use lots of different pieces of paper to lose.One of my ideas was to make a piece of music. The word "tete" has a beat to it, making it very steady. As i play guitar i wrote a piece of music incorporating this beat, combining the strings and the hitting the base like a drum -but iv got no idea how to upload it to Blogger!

I looked at animal greetings and how they differ from human greetings. What really stuck out to me, is how they use there sense of smell so sniff each others bottom to pick up information. If a human was to walk around smelling someones bottom it would probably get reported to the police and you would be reported for GBH!

Next i moved onto different ways of saying the word. Depending on how you pronounce the word "tete" it comes out like "teat", and as i have "tete a tete" (2x tete) i automatically thought of a double uddered-cow. Going on to think about: what would happen if the body was then split into two (as they have 4 stomachs anyway, that would be 8), and two sides of things (good/evil. Black/white. Up/down), twins, triplets, doubles, mythical beasts etc.
Now we have the introduction on mobile phones we dont talk head to head, its "head to phone", but with the introduction of texting we no longer even speak to people. it is as though we have taken our own voice away from ourselfs -a form or self-dehumanisation. This reminded me of world war2 where Hitler singled out the Jews with the yellow star of David, and gay people with a pink triangle, taking away there rights and gradually there lives. I came up with my own symbol for people with mobile phones, a red O on a badge to pin on yourself. I chose the shape "O" because it symbolised the persons mouth being taken away from them, and the colour red connotes lots of things: danger, anger, stop.
This final idea is a spin-off of the previous idea (mobile phones). The idea that we communicate with our hands now we have mobile phones. I drew up lots of different ways of showing this, including the alphabet on each section of a finger, "smiley's"/"emotions" on each finger, send/receive buttons on your thumb. I finally came to the conclusion of: by texting with both hands we feel comfortable, so taking away one of our hands we don't feel right, but texting is something that isnt natural and isnt initially comfortable. My final outcome was a single hand with half a smiley face on it to show how we are unable to communicate properly. I played with fake blood to show the physical damage we are doing to ourselves.