Meghan Kelly's Automatist Excercise

In the first square, when shapes were drawn, they are quite representational. There is an image that resembles a clock, a keyboards, a bowling pin, and the others are more abstract, perhaps a wave in water, what resembles fireworks or a beard, and a square/diamond which because of the location to another image reminds me of a kite.

The second square when the first memory of pain is very short but descriptive. It simply says “Doctor’s Office, Needle, Arm, Pain.” Which everyone has experienced.

The third square with the drawings of medicine was very similar to the things I drew. There is a spoon with liquid, and a few bottles.

The fourth square is writing things that came to us when images were drawn. The words are: horse shoe, torch, cord, target, and flower.

Because the second square is on top of the list of words, it seems as if those two squares go together. The same goes for the second and third square, because it talks about doctor’s office and there is medicine in the other square. It can also be the other way around, with the first two squares and last two squares going along with each other. Possibly the images were describing what the person tried to think about while in the doctor’s office to avoid thinking about the pain. With the last two squares maybe the flavor or shape of the medicine made someone think about those words.

Because we all did this was done in squares, I feel as if it is like a comic, a very abstract comic, but a comic nonetheless. Even though some things are drawn and other things are written, it still fits together. It seems like a very abstract story of someone’s life. All four can relate to each other, and because of this it is quite interesting. Even though they are in different handwritings, some in pencil, some in pen, they fit together.

I think that there is an influence of consumerism on the responses gathered. The first square has drawings that very much represent material things, third has images that we all connect with medicine, and the fourth are things that are also material goods. The second square is more abstract with its connection to consumerism, or influence of it, but it is still there, because whatever was in that needle was advertised to cure or prevent illness. Because all of the responses can be linked to consumerism, it makes me wonder if it is at all possible to associate things with connecting them to our consumer habits. There was a word said that made someone draw a bowling pin, how was that connection made? There was a shape drawn that made someone think of a cord and a horse shoe, but why? I think because we have things coming at us from all directions of life that influence us to consume, we have images in our minds connected to things that may not make logical sense. Advertising leads us to subconsciously connect things that we would not necessarily associate with something.

But the thing that is interesting to me about this exercise was that aside form the medicine square, my responses were quite different. The fact that someone thought of associating certain pictures and words to things that I would have never thought of made me think. I notice that certain items are advertised more to certain people, possibly the other people grew up in an area far from where I lived. Everyone experiences different things in life, even though we also experience the same advertisements. Maybe certain associations are drawn out of experiences a person has had rather than what has been advertised to them.