Initially to begin this module, we were scheduled multiple workshops in order to develop our practise but also personal tutorials with tutors whom set tasks in order to challenge our concepts and ideas of making artwork. I really enjoyed these first few weeks of experimentation and challenging what constituted art and artistic concept.
Finding it hard to locate a starting point, I began by looking at the dyes I had done in the previous project and making edits using Photoshop. I layered the dyes and almost created a cloud-like explosion on the page, but I felt restricted by the fact they couldn't move, which is how I knew I had to explore film further. Rather in an amateurish fashion, I made a series of short clips using the fabric by scanning it in, using the threshold effect and changing the opacity of the picture. This had a really nice effect of blending and black fading to white. The transition was really nice, but this wasn't professional approach I'd wanted. After speaking to a technician, it would be virtually impossible to turn these exact sheets into a film or animation, but he did encourage to explore stop motion in order to begin an experimentation into film.
Being inspired by the ineffable, a sensory experience or the spiritual, I did find it extremely difficult to come up with visuals, because I felt like I didn't want to be too literal. But I decided to use this kind of ineffability I was attempting to describe by using words that could suggest something 'else' or the 'other'. I selected a few words like 'the', 'here', 'that', 'what', which I felt kind struggled at attempting to describe an experience, something otherly. I made monoprints using handwriting and also stencils to create backwards, layered or faded text, which was quite effective, but I felt like this could lead to connotations of semiotics or language, which wasn't really the direction I wanted to go in. Despite this, I explored sculptural methods of exploring the words by cutting out the letters and attaching them using string. This kind of hanging of the text I felt was interesting and was interested int he way the message could be lost or misinterpreted because of the way the text fell. This was symbolic of the way an experience can be described, the ineffable quality of describing something like life, experiences or 'zen-ness'. I explored this further by cutting the text out of felt, using cursive text and capital letters. The cursive worked better because I felt that it flowed more.When the text falls, it completely loses it's meaning and can no longer be understood. I did really like this idea and visually I felt it was effective, but it didn't quite say what I wanted it to say. I felt compelled to continue with film, in hope that this could more of an experience than simply a visual.
In order to push the use of words, I decided to make a wooden sculpture of the word 'the' which i had planned to screw together and then unscrew into different positions. Using piece of wood 20cm long each I pieced it together. Because of the way I had drilled the screws into the wood, it meant that the sculpture actually could move in certain directions without me having to dismantle to entire thing. Though I didn't intend this, it actually benefited my plans for the piece. I painted it black and photographed it in different positions, moving sections of the piece in order to distort the word its self. I liked my results as they were aesthetically interesting and I enjoyed interacting with the piece. I also liked how the piece was actually rather autobiographical about the way I'd experienced the topic of otherness and the spiritual because there have been many times where I felt confused about how to describe this otherness that is apparent in the world. However, I didn't feel like it completely encapsulated exactly what I was trying to say as it's quite architectural and looks as though it is relating only to communication/words in art.
Going back into digital methods, I explored sound. I experimented with recording the sound of water, cars, the public, walking, the sound of silence. I felt that sound was a key element to creating an experience, being a sensory thing. After exploring with recorded sounds, I felt like I wanted to create some of my own instrumental or constructed sounds, because I felt like the recordings had a lot of background noise which I could not really avoid. Using Garageband, I experimented with the multiple piano effects to create my own continuous and ominous sounding noises. Being a fan of sleeping noises myself, for example the sound of rain, 'pink noise' and 'white noise', both sounds that apparently are proven to help people sleep or relax, I aimed to kind of recreate this same kind of sensory experience. However, not being familiar with music, I found it hard to compose a kind of tune and decided that it would be to compose from visuals. This is what led me back to film.
Having researched into time based media, I researched the work of Andy Warhol and a young artist Benjamin Bennett. Warhol was well known for his 'Sleep' film where he records his lover sleeping for 6 hours. There are multiple shots but essentially this is a video where nothing happens and there is a sense of watching from the outside as a separate individual and almost another dimension is created. Benjamin Bennett creates film which has been seen by many on YouTube of him sitting and smiling directly at the screen for 4 hours. For many, this is disturbing and strange and Bennett has received many questions on the purposes for this video, which he says are kind of irrelevant: he says it's something he felt was needed to be done and it's more about the viewer more than anything. My interpretation of these videos was the idea of mans ability to be able to sit in a room with ones own thoughts and many of us can't do this and can't even think of why we would consider to do it. It's meditative and could be really therapeutic. I also really like both of the artists ideas of creating a film, which more or less could have been a picture, because nothing happens. Bennett calls his work a performance piece and he gets more from the experience of doing it himself than the actual video would give anyone else. This is why I decided to try something similar.
Not staring at the camera smiling, but I decided that I could take a video of myself doing nothing, and also a video meditating. I liked the idea of something going on behind the scenes of two actions that look very similar. In the video doing nothing and letting my thoughts wander, I led on my bed and for the meditation video, I was in a cross-legged pose which made it more obvious what was going on to the viewer. I took a video on a camera and also a time lapse using my phone. I experimented with speeding up the time and slowing it down; interested in the fact for that the majority of time, nothing really changed. I would look for the slight movements in my own hand, my breathing was more noticeable and it became really intimate. It was less about the actual video and more my experience of actually doing it. I felt uncomfortable to let other people see the video and share my experience of meditation, being that it's something I would only do alone or in a yoga class. Being in the private setting of my bedroom, it did have an uncomfortable voyeuristic feel to it and it did feel almost the opposite to what an actual meditation would have felt like, because it was so uncomfortable to be filmed. This perspective almost harps back to the Taoist beliefs of something becoming invalid or not as worthy when it becomes labelled or identified. Sometimes things are supposed to be felt and experienced rather than documented. By putting something into words or documenting it every second, it dilutes the actual meaning of the action. Although I hate to watch the videos, the concepts and themes which arose were really interesting and it's something I feel I will come back to at a later stage in my practise.
Having had this idea to create sounds from visuals to create a sensory experience/installation, I thought about things I could record to work from. One of the things I looked into was slow motion video, which I found really interesting; particularly the work of Douglas Gordan who created the film '24 Hour Psycho' which was literally that. In an interview Gordan talks about the way the tension is removed from the film and it creates a new kind of dialogue and removes the original meaning. I really wanted to play around with this idea in my work because I really identified with the removal of tension. I had this idea of recording every day life and reducing the film to slow motion using Premier Pro. I really liked this idea of slowing down daily life and almost creating a dystopian world. I would overlay sounds in order to enhance the experience of a different, slower world. Sometimes the reason people are stressed is that everything seems to be happening too quickly, so to reverse this might be quite effective. However, I found that filming and slowing down things wasn't as simple as I'd anticipated because I didn't manage enough frames to slow it down completely without it becoming jittery and almost just like shots instead of actual film. I am going to look into what I can do to improve the transition to slow motion and also overall quality.
In the workshops, I experimented with film photography, welding, mental casting, illustration, Premier Pro and paper making. While these methods were really useful in developing my knowledge and practise, I felt like some were more relevant to me personally than others. At this point I knew I really wanted to develop my use of making films, so Premier Pro was really useful for me.
During the personal tutorials, the tutor set various tasks in order to challenge how we made work and what work meant. I really enjoyed being forced out of my comfort zone by having to make work in short periods of time. A particular task I enjoyed was re-purposing a material. I chose to re-purpose charcoal, a drawing utensil, into a material I could use for sculpture. Lucy and I sat outside on a bench and performed this stacking of charcoal sticks almost like jenga. I felt like it was important to do this outside where people could see; it was almost like performance art and I felt this was really interesting. This was the first bit of film I produced in response to the short brief and I felt naturally there was this element of ritual and interaction with an audience which struck a chord with me.
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| Performance piece - stacking charcoal - ritualistic - methodical |
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| Experimentation with opacity using scans of dyed fabric - creating movement and a shift from light to dark. |
I recorded a stop motion of me drawing circles using a pencil; the circle grew larger and larger and then grew smaller again. This simple hypnotic kind of effect i achieved I really liked and there was something otherworldly about it; something abstract. I then developed this into digital stop motion using firstly just black and white circles. I used Photoshop to created a simple animation/GIF of a circle moving out and back inwards, creating kind of hypnotic and strange visual. I experimented with oval shapes, empty linear circles, full circles and also used different colours. The method of actually creating the films was very time consuming and I felt the actual videos weren't overly exciting, but I hoped that on a larger scale, they could have an impact.
I felt inspired by Anthony McCall after I visited his exhibition Solid Light Works, and I wanted to explore installation. In the darkness of the space, you almost felt very aware of yourself and wary of others. The dust in the room was memorising and yet the whole concept was very minimalist. I wanted to create something of a similar experience, though I knew that with the facilities I would be restricted by light and space, which was frustrating. However, I projected the film into the project space to see what it would appear to be like on a larger scale, but in order to move away from film and into an installation, I felt like I could be restricted by the rectangular screen of the projection and the room was smaller than what would have been ideal. By using a black background, I could lose the feeling that this was a film/animation and it would become more of an abstract circular thing in the room. It was consuming and strange, but it wasn't the kind of spiritual and otherworldly experience that I'd wanted to create, inspired by McCall. In my group critique I was told that my work almost resembled the installations of Japanese artist Ryoji Ikdea, with the bright lights and flashing shapes and lines. This made me reconsider what type of experience I wanted to create in film/installation.
I felt inspired by Anthony McCall after I visited his exhibition Solid Light Works, and I wanted to explore installation. In the darkness of the space, you almost felt very aware of yourself and wary of others. The dust in the room was memorising and yet the whole concept was very minimalist. I wanted to create something of a similar experience, though I knew that with the facilities I would be restricted by light and space, which was frustrating. However, I projected the film into the project space to see what it would appear to be like on a larger scale, but in order to move away from film and into an installation, I felt like I could be restricted by the rectangular screen of the projection and the room was smaller than what would have been ideal. By using a black background, I could lose the feeling that this was a film/animation and it would become more of an abstract circular thing in the room. It was consuming and strange, but it wasn't the kind of spiritual and otherworldly experience that I'd wanted to create, inspired by McCall. In my group critique I was told that my work almost resembled the installations of Japanese artist Ryoji Ikdea, with the bright lights and flashing shapes and lines. This made me reconsider what type of experience I wanted to create in film/installation.
I also experimented with projecting light through a stencil, which being less digital, I felt might give a more subtle and less harsh effect. it did work, but actually photographing the light became really difficult and there wasn't much scope for developing the piece. Using the symbol of a circle came almost natural to me because of it's connotations with the spiritual, wholeness and completeness in the context of Zen belief, which I'd previously been inspired by. However, I was beginning to actually feel restricted by using the symbol, and felt like it might be time to move onto a different symbol/ visual.
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| Felt piece - cut out 'the' repeatedly - loss of meaning - definition |
In order to push the use of words, I decided to make a wooden sculpture of the word 'the' which i had planned to screw together and then unscrew into different positions. Using piece of wood 20cm long each I pieced it together. Because of the way I had drilled the screws into the wood, it meant that the sculpture actually could move in certain directions without me having to dismantle to entire thing. Though I didn't intend this, it actually benefited my plans for the piece. I painted it black and photographed it in different positions, moving sections of the piece in order to distort the word its self. I liked my results as they were aesthetically interesting and I enjoyed interacting with the piece. I also liked how the piece was actually rather autobiographical about the way I'd experienced the topic of otherness and the spiritual because there have been many times where I felt confused about how to describe this otherness that is apparent in the world. However, I didn't feel like it completely encapsulated exactly what I was trying to say as it's quite architectural and looks as though it is relating only to communication/words in art.
Going back into digital methods, I explored sound. I experimented with recording the sound of water, cars, the public, walking, the sound of silence. I felt that sound was a key element to creating an experience, being a sensory thing. After exploring with recorded sounds, I felt like I wanted to create some of my own instrumental or constructed sounds, because I felt like the recordings had a lot of background noise which I could not really avoid. Using Garageband, I experimented with the multiple piano effects to create my own continuous and ominous sounding noises. Being a fan of sleeping noises myself, for example the sound of rain, 'pink noise' and 'white noise', both sounds that apparently are proven to help people sleep or relax, I aimed to kind of recreate this same kind of sensory experience. However, not being familiar with music, I found it hard to compose a kind of tune and decided that it would be to compose from visuals. This is what led me back to film.
Not staring at the camera smiling, but I decided that I could take a video of myself doing nothing, and also a video meditating. I liked the idea of something going on behind the scenes of two actions that look very similar. In the video doing nothing and letting my thoughts wander, I led on my bed and for the meditation video, I was in a cross-legged pose which made it more obvious what was going on to the viewer. I took a video on a camera and also a time lapse using my phone. I experimented with speeding up the time and slowing it down; interested in the fact for that the majority of time, nothing really changed. I would look for the slight movements in my own hand, my breathing was more noticeable and it became really intimate. It was less about the actual video and more my experience of actually doing it. I felt uncomfortable to let other people see the video and share my experience of meditation, being that it's something I would only do alone or in a yoga class. Being in the private setting of my bedroom, it did have an uncomfortable voyeuristic feel to it and it did feel almost the opposite to what an actual meditation would have felt like, because it was so uncomfortable to be filmed. This perspective almost harps back to the Taoist beliefs of something becoming invalid or not as worthy when it becomes labelled or identified. Sometimes things are supposed to be felt and experienced rather than documented. By putting something into words or documenting it every second, it dilutes the actual meaning of the action. Although I hate to watch the videos, the concepts and themes which arose were really interesting and it's something I feel I will come back to at a later stage in my practise.Having had this idea to create sounds from visuals to create a sensory experience/installation, I thought about things I could record to work from. One of the things I looked into was slow motion video, which I found really interesting; particularly the work of Douglas Gordan who created the film '24 Hour Psycho' which was literally that. In an interview Gordan talks about the way the tension is removed from the film and it creates a new kind of dialogue and removes the original meaning. I really wanted to play around with this idea in my work because I really identified with the removal of tension. I had this idea of recording every day life and reducing the film to slow motion using Premier Pro. I really liked this idea of slowing down daily life and almost creating a dystopian world. I would overlay sounds in order to enhance the experience of a different, slower world. Sometimes the reason people are stressed is that everything seems to be happening too quickly, so to reverse this might be quite effective. However, I found that filming and slowing down things wasn't as simple as I'd anticipated because I didn't manage enough frames to slow it down completely without it becoming jittery and almost just like shots instead of actual film. I am going to look into what I can do to improve the transition to slow motion and also overall quality.
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| Motorway scene - slowed down - mirrored image - absurdity |
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| Town centre scene |
Another experiment I did was filming and photography incense. Incense is known for being a part of many eastern traditions; for scaring away demons, for meditation or simply for celebration. There is the association with purging and burning away negativity, which is what makes it quite ritualistic and symbolic to different faiths or traditions. Not only is it quite a significant material on the topic of religion and meditation, it's also beautiful to watch I find it quite hypnotic and relaxing.
Setting up a kind of studio in my bedroom to experiment, I found it really impossible to get the pictures of the smoke. I felt that with a studio this could be easier, however fire alarms would restrict me from using the universities facilities. I did manage to get some films of the smoke which seemed to be a lot easier than photos. However, I found that I had a lot of trouble capturing the level of quality I wanted, bearing in mind I may eventually be projecting this on to a large screen. Eventually I tweaked and perfected my technique by lowering the ISO to 100 - the minimum - and using a specialist photography light from the studio. The light had to be focused on the smoke and surrounding area I controlled the light using my curtains to allow just enough.
On developing the footage, I used Premier Pro to change the composition. I learnt a lot about editing through this process. One effect I really liked and stuck with, was the mirroring effect where the film is split. I did this by using 'mirror' and repositioning the clips. This is two different films playing side by side but cropped and flipped. An even more intricate way of creating a similar effect is simply layering the two films directly on top of each other and then flipping one of them. By changing the opacity and using various effects, the films can play over one another in opposite directions. It was really beautiful to watch and I'm really proud of this particular piece. I could imagine this projected on to a huge screen on every wall of a space.
To continue the practise, I intend to develop my own sounds and to put the two together. I've developed some videos experimenting with sound on my youtube channel; follow this link to have a look at more of the digital work.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVtulEOgYNENx0WZWb3d5A?view_as=subscriber
Setting up a kind of studio in my bedroom to experiment, I found it really impossible to get the pictures of the smoke. I felt that with a studio this could be easier, however fire alarms would restrict me from using the universities facilities. I did manage to get some films of the smoke which seemed to be a lot easier than photos. However, I found that I had a lot of trouble capturing the level of quality I wanted, bearing in mind I may eventually be projecting this on to a large screen. Eventually I tweaked and perfected my technique by lowering the ISO to 100 - the minimum - and using a specialist photography light from the studio. The light had to be focused on the smoke and surrounding area I controlled the light using my curtains to allow just enough.
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| Still from the videos created using incense |
To continue the practise, I intend to develop my own sounds and to put the two together. I've developed some videos experimenting with sound on my youtube channel; follow this link to have a look at more of the digital work.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVtulEOgYNENx0WZWb3d5A?view_as=subscriber
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