Describe your group’s primary sources. Record brief statements about the primary sources from looking closely at them. What details jump out at you?
Try not to interpret them. Pretend you are describing these items to a friend.
Consider your initial impressions. What assumptions might you be bringing to your observations?
Creepy. Dark. He looks like a Cowboy Magician. At first appears very tied up or in distress. Very dark lighting with some over the shoulder photos. Depressing decorations, It looks like it is falling apart. Dystopian quality to it, appears like the part of an action movie before the aliens attack. Neato Inflato structure is like the alien. The auditorium full of empty chairs. Very eerie absence of human life. All of the photos share a similar dark quality.Difference in theme or style of the speakers, the first is a man in a suit behind a podium, the second is in a fringe jacket sitting in a backwards chair, and the third is a student looking casual.
Think about the context of what you’re looking at:
— immediate context : How does each item relate to the other items in your group’s set of primary sources? If one item, how do text and graphics work together?
— the social/cultural/political aspects from the period in which the materials were produced
What information would help you to understand and interpret these primary sources?
-Where all of the people? Why is the lighting so bad? The point of the decoration does not make much sense, the point of the Neato Inflato is unclear and the strong essence of synthetic and fake materials feels distant and detached from the theme and idea of “Earth”.
Create a minimum of 5 questions about your group’s set of primary sources. They can be very general or very specific.
Your group may answer with your own hypotheses, but it’s also fine to leave the questions open-ended.
1. Where are all of the people? Maybe they took the photos before it started.
2. Why is the lighting so bad? Maybe the lights were turned off for preservation.
3. What is the significance of all of the plastic? Did they know that is going against Earth Day?
4. What was the point of the Neato Inflato Structure? People were climbing inside of it, was it an art installment? Just there for fun?
5. What did the speakers talk about?
