as part of the basho we completed the Make Gold workshop where we thought about what gold could mean to us individually, then collecting these thoughts to create a recipe. we all had quite differing and abstract ideas so it seemed like an impossible task at the beginning but we decided to vote for one person’s ideas to focus on and make a recipe for. A good environment was our choice as it was planted in the abstract and real. we wrote all the ingredients down to ensure everyone knew what was meant by all of them and what had to be included to achieve the end goal. going through them, we decided on an order that would enable other things/steps to thrive like focusing on air/sun/ocean/clouds as an initial phase, then adding the living things to populate said environment. the most difficult aspect of this activity was working out the scale of the recipe and whether we should make it as literal as possible or to keep it within the abstract. we tried to keep it realistic as is shown in the order of the steps, going by priorities and what each step would require from the last and what would help the next step work. finding the right actions for each step was difficult like adding/mixing etc. the ones we went for feel like they are in a sort of middle but could have been considered more as a group to condense the recipe into something more possible.
we then looked at another group’s work (which was quite similar in context with ours) to examine what others thought of the task and how they executed it. like ours, they had a similar issue with scale and quantity, perhaps leaving it abstract as to not decide anything affirmative about a huge subject matter. they had more of a range of actions to benefit their recipe to ours which probably would make it much easier to follow.
it was fun to do this task and explore limits of abstract and literal thinking. it was very challenging to come up with a concept we could all participate in and understand, especially when everyone had differing ideas of ‘gold’. once we got something on the page it started to make sense by itself and we could concentrate on the steps. beginning the steps took a lot of consideration of what to be first and how. placing literal language onto something so unambiguous felt impossible. we went with collecting air as that was what made sense to everyone in the group and seemed plausible.
