Process Piece: Dishes

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_tINWW5oT3heUhUNkRGVUdqajg/view?usp=sharing

Doing the dishes by hand is a very familiar chore for me. For almost my whole life I have lived in places which did not have working dishwashers. As I child it was my most loathed chore, especially because doing the dishes meant washing stacks and stacks of dishes, silverware, and large pots and pans for nine people who cooked and ate a great deal. Now I have come to terms with this chore as a necessary part of adulthood.

I chose to document the act of washing the dishes in an edited sound recording. I chose this medium because I felt like the task of washing dishes had a lot of interesting sounds which meld together to make a whole. In the finished product the rushing water, the scrubbing, and the clinking of the dishes layer on top of each other, and are hardly individually identifiable. However, as a whole the sound recording documents the very universal task of doing the dishes. The process of creating this piece was much more interesting to me than the product. The sound file that I ended up with is not very interesting. Listening to it I don't think that you would even realize that these noises were carefully selected and edited down from an eight minute recording. But for me each sound I included has a special significance, since liked it enough to keep it in the final edit.

In a class room I think that this would be a great tool for teaching students to get familiar with video or sound editing programs if you were going to expect students to use them to tell other stories in the future. It is also a great introduction to documentary type thinking, if you want your students to start a project where they collect and document the stories of others.