Centre: Posters in building 80 shortly before being told  of the strict regulations.
Left & right: Posters in building 9, home among the plethora of other Media studio material.

Meeting with Gianna and Marissa early Tuesday morning, we quickly divided a number of SIGNAL posters between the three of us. Intending to post them in the most densely populated and circulated areas in RMIT’s city campus such as Building 9, Building 8, Building 80, and the library. However, we faced a number of issues as we each went to our designated areas.

These specifically included: strict university regulations regarding the posting of advertising material. Being told by a university staff member in building 80 that no material was allowed was quite a shock as this was the building Marissa and I had decided to advertise the most on, due to its popular usage.
However, we quickly liaised and realised more problems were on the horizon as Gianna was told similarly that the library did not allow any posters. Further yet, the only space that would in Building 8 was the RMIT Connect space, which was already (to put it lightly) saturated with posters from other groups.

Regrouping with Marissa, we decided to head off to building 9 and post the flyers where appropriate and allowed (such as the level 2 atelier, level 3 printing space, and at each staircase per level). Additionally, we later went to RMIT Connect to stick the remainder posters where there was room, deciding it was better to oversaturate one space than waste multiple printed posters.

The entire debacle was quite a rigorous way to start the morning, but was significantly enriching in retrospect. For instance, in the space of a 2 hours, Gianna, Marissa and myself were faced with problems individually which we then had to re-communicate to each other online, before again meeting in person to disseminate roles and brainstorm solutions.

The entire process involves a lot of trust and openness to flexible plans, as clearly our original goals were thwarted. Additionally, as Rose was not able to make it, we had to make decisions without her input and thus, were in a situation in which we could have very easily miscommunicated or been unbalanced with our solution (such as giving all the work to a missing group member, or discounting any alternatives due to immediate laziness). Despite this, the three of us were able to maintain communication and achieve our ultimate group goals to distribute posters, and we were even able to do Rose’s allotted posters, as this seemed both effective, pragmatic, and sensible, given the regulations surrounding the process and time bound nature of advertising a temporary exhibition.

In conclusion, I was proud of the way we were able to adjust to the limitations we were faced with, and in the future I know now to read up on or RMIT’s authorities in regards to advertising regulations, as this was a factor none of us had tried.

Having accidentally arrived on-site at Signal at 8:30am on a Wednesday morning, today’s class time was spent viewing and listening to everyone’s projects for the Signal exhibition.

Being able to view my 4 x 8 second films on a larger screen than the basement suites / my laptop was quite an interesting experience. Originally, I was worried about the colourgrading appearing washed out or even potentially oversaturated once projected on a larger screen with more technologically sophisticated equipment.

However, somewhat to my surprise the title sequence (with the text ‘EVEN’) and following three segments retained my original aesthetic intentions without eroding any legibility of text or visibility.

Additionally, listening to MANTRA on the speakers was helpful as I was able to determine that the quality of my exported wav file was of standard. This contrasts with the audio of my Project 2: FLUX film, as the audio had sounded high quality during the editing period, but suffered through the exporting process and subsequently sounded static and low-fi.

https://vimeo.com/142122627

https://soundcloud.com/elaine-leong-94583999/mantra

Working mostly in the editing suites in class today provided several opportunities to recalibrate individual ideas, exchange feedback with peers, and organise / delegate tasks for our upcoming final exhibition at Signal and RMIT.

Working in the Building 9 basement, the majority of the tutorial was spent individually honing our short films and discussing Exhibition roles and tasks for the week ahead. As a group member responsible for the PR, I have spent much of this week creating and maintaining our Facebook event page for the Signal exhibition. Discussing further details with Rose and Siobhan, I was also delegated the task of writing copy for our Signal Exhibition website in order to explain our overarching conceptual approaches.

Collaborating in this way has been quite an interesting process, as the majority of the group work is done individually online, with class time being more about editing and delegating work. This contradicts some preconceptions of “uni group work” as there is a significant amount of autonomy in performing the tasks online, which I think is quite reflective of current professional practices in the arts community.

Additional developments regarding my own films included colour grading and applying the films to Jordan’s template for Signal. Resizing the footage and editing the aesthetics of it is arguably one of the most enjoyable parts of the editing process for me, as it is often the time in which my ideas are most viscerally realised through manipulating the aesthetic properties of the artwork. For example, despite having originally been quite pulled towards a darker, Bill Henson / chiaroscuro sensibility, my footage and recognition of Signal’s projections (which occur at night) led me to take on a more white washed, bright / clinical aesthetic. Having accounted for these Site specific limitations during filming (which was done in a bright room against a marble tile backdrop), the colour grading process was quite easy, though more focused on qualities like: brightness, RGB curves, and Tri-colour editing.

As I’ve been editing my raw footage outside of class, several problems have become quite apparent, all of which tie heavily into the idea of responding to site.

Firstly, there is the significant time constraint of 8 seconds, as outlined from our Project brief criteria. Originally, my idea had been to emphasise the grotesque qualities of a hand crushing fruit through editing techniques like slow-motion and extreme zoom. However, given the limited amount of time our projections will appear, every second needs to be information rich in order to be appealing as well as visually cogent / succinct.

During editing, I realised that slow-motion in the traditional sense was not going to be an effective tool to visually transmit my concepts across. It would take far longer than 8 seconds, and the footage itself was not optimal for extreme slow frame projecting.

Secondly, I noticed a sort of Brechtian alienation / awkward meta-awareness that was arising as a result of my editing. For example, keeping the original temporal qualities of the raw footage resulted in a strange composition involving a disembodied hand struggling to crush a fruit. The pacing of this “stylistic naturalism” was quite bizarre and watching it, one was struck with a general feeling of embarrassment and awkwardness, as if the footage was playing back poorly.

As a result of both these constraints, Robbie and I agreed that speeding it up / using editing techniques like intercutting and glitching would help to both communicate my idea more efficiently, as well as reduce the strange audience paradigm that was arising from the raw footage.

Furthermore, despite not being able to use slow-motion in the originally conceived sense, I was able to intercut slowed-down footage with faster intercuts to balance the pace of my films.

Overall, this process has been quite important in my idea refinement, as I am realising more and more the importance of taking into account the audience, the projection site, and the context / impetus for visually communicating ideas. Chiefly, there needs to be a recognition and collaborative dialogue between the artist-in-process and their intended exhibition site in order to ensure a congruent experience of abstract concepts.

   Despite being quite ill and having been absent for our Wednesday morning studio, on Thursday afternoon I managed to make my way to Signal for our individually run group tutorial.

In this meeting, Jordan took us through a live tutorial on how to navigate the Signal projection template on Adobe Premier Pro. Demonstrating the necessary skills of multi-screen resizing, timelapse staggering / synchronised playback, and other useful editing techniques, this tutorial was helpful in reiterating the necessary technical considerations that Signal’s exhibition properties present.

For example, being both on site and speaking with Jordan, our class discovered that Signal’s physical beams / framing will limit (or perhaps creatively challenge) the way we compose our frame. Being placed in the centre of each of the four screens, our projections will consequently have to be quite mindful in how they deliver visual information, as a large chunk of the centre will be essentially ‘dead space’.

    
Bringing into focus some ideas for Project 4

As we near the end of Semester 2, the final project brief looms overhead, ever pressing and yet not quite delineated.

Today’s studio class was spent brainstorming and throwing around our individual fixations with the goal of uniting disparate ideas under some common theme – both conceptually or aesthetically.

As everyone went around the table explaining their concepts, a few common threads of thought emerged. These included: the human body, time passing, seasonal transitions, colours, lines, and trains. Hearing everyone’s varied responses to both Signal and its projection properties was quite insightful, as I noticed my own tendencies to be drawn towards organic subject matter (textures of hair, macros of the body) in comparison to more structured narratives.

Additionally, over the course of this semester I’ve found myself increasingly (if not, to borrow Robbie’s term ‘obsessively’) returning to the idea of the human body as an allegory for landscapes (vice versa), and the notion of evocative installations. In particular, the ability of an artwork (through audio and visual stimulation) to provoke incongruous feelings in audiences: disgust at the common, repulsion at intimacy, comfort in the grotesque, and so forth.

Hence, in considering these emotional tensions I am pulled towards creating short video works of hands engaging in destruction or decay.

Rotting fruits, dirt, insects, pomegranate pulp being caught under fingernails. These are vignettes which keep surfacing in my mind. I’m also drawn to the chiaroscuro aesthetics of contemporary video / photographic artists like Bill Viola, Chris Cunningham, and Bill Henson. While I feel my ideas are quite simplistic currently, I have a strong pull towards particular themes of publicising the grotesque, and projecting uncomfortable sequences involving the human body, and the usage and manipulation of body language to bring about disconnect and miscommunication.

   A view from within Signal, the city as glazed over from a faulty iGlass window.

Backlit on a Thursday afternoon, our Specific to Site class met at Signal to discuss and brainstorm ideas and potential approaches for our final project brief.

Seated upstairs around a (fittingly) art making workshop table, we broke into small groups to generate concepts and flesh out creative responses to the site. What struck me first about Signal (as I was absent for the first meeting there) was the transparent quality, and resulting aesthetic experience of the space. For instance, the way sound and light pervade the area so thoroughly brings to mind the tensions of the interior vs the exterior.

It is nearly impossible to ignore the world around Signal. Auditorially, there is the percussive, throbbing pulsation of the trains passing through, and the guttural croons of gulls swooping low and heavy. Visually, there is on one side the towering metropolis of Melbourne CBD skyscrapers; and on the other: the gentrified natural landscape of a polluted Yarra river and the calculated flourishings of the Botanical garden.

Surround the space is this idea of opposing bodies, interacting and informing each other’s qualities. This idea is furthered by Signal itself, as it was once a communications towers directing trains in and out of Flinders St. Now serving as an accessible, government funded art space for youths, it calls for a new reading of what it means to communicate, to send a signal, to direct bodies of people.

Our class discussion brought up several notable points including the need for an overarching theme to unite all our works, the possibility of utilising the corner as a wider canvas for projecting our works, and the idea of voyeurism and the grotesque as a way to challenge and subvert the paradigm of public art exhibitions catering to align with social milieus.

Rose and I also discussed our collective interest in exploring the idea of human bodies. This interest stems largely from the consideration of Signal’s style of video exhibition, which occurs at night, overlooking the Yarra, towering above Southbank passerbys and commuters. It is a very publicly visible canvas, and thus, a deliberate consideration of the audiences we want to (or by incidence of site) engage, and the manner in which we do is a significant point. Having said this, I plan to continue brainstorming further conceptual approaches which make use of Signal’s specific temporal / spatial  exhibition qualities, as well as my own creative interests in aesthetically abstracting the human body and embodying ephemera. 

Early on Wednesday morning, the entire Specific to Site media class gathered to screen documentaries and receive feedback from Joseph Norster and Robbie.

For my project, titled HANNAH COURTIN WILSON with Amalina and Jac, Joseph and Robbie’s critiques suggested longer intertitles for easier reading, as well as a looser, perhaps more experimental approach to footage (achieved by getting in contact with Joseph for Testing Grounds’ archives) and finally, the inclusion of more dynamic imagery to liven the controlled, neat, but slightly cold talking heads structure documentary style we adopted.

But alas, something was rotten at the beginning of this Denmark, as exporting failures had previously thwarted me yesterday, only to (at the thirteenth hour on a Wednesday) suddenly export successfully in time for a comfortable viewing situation in class. Robbie mentioned the necessary disruptive quality of deadlines and last minute technology problems, and the subsequent gradual acclimatising that will have to occur on our (collective) part. This was an important insight and observation, as I do anticipate using adobe premier pro in the future, and despite my experience and comfort with the software already, I may potentially come across this issue again and thus must learn alternative means to ‘making the deadline’ without making excuses or fuss.

https://vimeo.com/140037251

WORD COUNT: 782

H A N N A H  C O U R T I N  W I L S O N // A Short Documentary

HANNAH COURTIN WILSON is a short talking heads documentary interview exploring the intersection where bodies of humans meet bodies of lands.

As a photographer in residence, Courtin Wilson is primarily concerned with capturing. The capturing of images, of interactions, of landscapes, of moments in time. With her lens pointed at and sometimes with an audience, her presence on site by default of its curatorial properties suggests an event, a happening, something to look out for which is worth preserving. The gravity of the act of photography is something keenly noted by media philosopher Vilém Flusser, who likens the photographer’s performance to a predator hunting a prey, camera poised to leap upon a slew of cultural objects, a hunter, a gatherer, a preserver of social and material artefacts (Flusser, 2013, pp.33). From Flussers’ view, the product of photography can hence be described as one of deliberate meditation, its very gesture rooted in the tension between what was, what is, and what might be (Flusser, 2013, pp.34).

This philosophy of holding onto the ephemeral is perhaps most prominently demonstrated by Courtin Wilson’s live projection art piece, titled Homeshow, in which she responded to the cityscape using a projector bike to exhibit real estate archive images on buildings around the Melbourne CBD.

Translocating a series of found images into the public sphere, Courtin Wilson arguably furthers Flusser’s photographic gesture, reanimating both the content and form of previously captured photographs and dated interiors through her deracinated, live curation and exhibition process. The result can be described as a simultaneous uprooting as much as it is of a tethering- the lounge room ripped from its homebound structures and screened onto the wet pavement. The bedroom hurled onto an inhospitable brick wall. Kitchens mounted onto the sludge and grunge of a city bin. Places once designated and designed for comfort are displaced onto the public sphere, a contrast which highlights the spatial properties of each, while suggesting a new dimension of unity. The juxtaposition is playful as it is provoking: perhaps the bin can be a place of food preparation, in some perverse way, no?

Such a sentiment aligns closely with Flusser’s philosophy, in which he concedes photography as a signifier of ‘[the] state of things that have been reflected onto surfaces’. The world translated through the lens becomes as abstracted from its material counterparts as daguerreotype portraits are from their evidently non-sepia toned humans (Flusser, 2013, pp.41-42). Examining Homeshow with these views in mind thus entangles the notion of curation. For example, the real estate images clearly betray a sense of aesthetic control with their wide angled shots and bright lighting. Additionally, the interiors themselves have been decorated and decided upon keen homeowners with the purpose of selling their home. And finally, we have Courtin Wilson’s selection of specific images to project onto specific buildings, a spontaneous response to the aesthetics and philosophical implications resulting from domesticity’s intersection with the public.

This brings us to two central concerns: Where is the act of photography occurring? What is the delineation between exhibition of photography and the gesture of photography?

It is with these lingering questions in mind that our film – through its deliberate segmentation – attempts to unpack Courtin Wilson’s involvement through snapshots, flashes of insight, and pondering. Collating short snippets from a 17 minute conversation, HANNAH COURTIN WILSON presents vignettes selected from a particular time and place (Saturday, Testing Grounds in Melbourne, Australia) in order to reconfigure the role of the artist in activating, if not, reimagining the utilities of the public sphere.

Held in the office space at Testing Grounds with additional footage of Courtin Wilson guiding us around the site, our film attempts to embody the multidisciplinary qualities of Courtin Wilson’s own practice. Such efforts are demonstrated by the pastiche of camera properties utilised, including still frames, handheld footage, and various intertitles, none of which can be individually called a documentary, let alone a photograph, but collated together form a whole which aligns closer to Flusser’s concept of the photographer as a hunter of culture.

Furthermore, in relegating the conversation from its organically sprawling linguistics to heavily edited fragments, our film attempts to extend the very definition of the photographic gesture. For example, film (perhaps not digital but certainly analog) is essentially a compilation of still images stitched together to create an illusion of movement and time passing, and can therefore be considered one of the more visceral examples of humankind’s attempt to preserve its cultural productions. Recognising the onscreen collision and entanglements of social landscapes (conversation) with temporal ones (time, space, and further yet- place/s), HANNAH COURTIN WILSON suggests a further dimension to the hunter: what does it mean to hunt the hunter?

References:

Flusser, V (2013), Towards a Philosophy of Photography, e-book, Reaktion Books, London, pp.33-49, viewed 12 September 2015, http://rmit.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1582288