Month: October 2017

Exhibition spaces that I’ve been lucky enough to be working in at the Biennial have been reminding me of the poetics of space, harmony, colour and noticing.

Each of these images represents conflict of sorts – breaking up spaces –
The face coming out of the wall reminds me of the increased awareness of noticing – extricating oneself from the white noise to a place of seeing and being.
It was an exhibition piece at the Russian pavilion regarding social media and the way in which we become consumed by it.
Media tends to cloud our minds with the pollution of others. We forget or perhaps we just unlearn the innate and learn to march to the tunes of others. Perhaps this is all just abstract thought with no real purpose but it’s what was going through my head at the time I saw it.

Exhibition spaces that I’ve been lucky enough to be working in at the Biennial have been reminding me of the poetics of space, harmony, colour and noticing.

Each of these images represents conflict of sorts – breaking up spaces –
The face coming out of the wall reminds me of the increased awareness of noticing – extricating oneself from the white noise to a place of seeing and being.
It was an exhibition piece at the Russian pavilion regarding social media and the way in which we become consumed by it.
Media tends to cloud our minds with the pollution of others. We forget or perhaps we just unlearn the innate and learn to march to the tunes of others. Perhaps this is all just abstract thought with no real purpose but it’s what was going through my head at the time I saw it.

New York

Unfortunately that I didn’t get to take any footage in London because I was too busy but New York was bustling.
I went to Times Square and took some footage of all the lights as an obvious contrast to that of the previous footage I took in Melbourne in Avondale Heights.

• Audio of people talking
• Audio of commute
• Video of lights
• Video of people walking
• Video of taxi from below

Venice:

• Sounds of rain dripping
• People chattering in piazza
• walks to and from hostel
• footage of people walking
• footage of kids playing soccer in the street
• footage of shadows

So far the footage has been limited but the layers are coming together.

Developing my skills for mindful noticing was a difficult task when I began thinking about it too much.
I’ve found that knowing how I notice already meant that I just took out my camera, iPhone of DSLR and I allowed myself to capture whatever my senses directed me to.
Pulling focus to things that I was forcing myself to notice muddied the waters too much, so allowing my organic perception of space was a better way for me to gather my media.
Of course, knowing the base of my interests also helped me in accumulating the information that I was looking for but ultimately, I enjoyed the nature through which my media was collected.

Is noticing negative?
Noticing in a creative capacity isn’t negative but it does beg the question, as discussed in class, whether or not the things we were noticing for the projects would be things we would have taken note of, had we not have been actively engaging with our environments more so than usual. Did I pick up on paint strips, puddles of water, reflections and lines in the sky more than I would usually? Yes, of course but it’s not a negative thing, it’s just that depending on the sort of noticing you’re wishing to explore and evolve, it may not be as organic as an endeavour as you may have imagined it to be.
Being aware of our environments is a survival instinct, it’s innate, so we’re not venturing too far from our biological imperative.

As a result of these internal drivers, I did feel that because of my understanding of self, having already been an observer of particular things – (the reason I wanted to take this studio in the first place), I did have the ability to ‘deatch’ so to speak, and to notice things without a sense of urgency or need. I do feel we notice things because of something inside of us that is drawn to something in particular and I did find the early explorations of noticing in a group partner’s environment to be interesting in a comparative sense.

My final work drew heavily on this comparative element.
When I was in the country, I was always finding elements of the city.
When I was in the city, I was finding the country and then sometimes I didn’t and I embraced the discordance.
The jarring effects were interesting to create in the editing process, audibly speaking. Sometimes, the poetics I had been actively looking for weren’t there and so the space between the imbalance was interesting to explore.

I began noticing the way the trees would move, sometimes swaying in the breeze. I distinctly remember looking at a bush of yellow flowers against fence posts in a field, with Melbourne in the background, thinking that the posts reminded me of the buildings and that the audio I had recently collected in in Italy of women squabbling in the streets could be a great overlay to the aggressively moving flowers in the wind – it was already coming together in my mind.

The challenges of creating a non-fiction and non-linear piece of work was a difficult task.
Movies, stories and life in general are built on the foundations on a beginning, middle and an end and through my editing process, I grappled with whether I was ‘doing it right’ or not.
I still think to myself whether I feel I have done it well enough but having worked on it and played it back to myself a lot, I just had this feeling that it fit – it works for me.

I like the harmonious interludes that are conflicted by the city noises, the hums of engines, the bike bells, trams and people.
The country overlaid with city noises creates an interesting perspective of these spaces and opened up a new layer of noticing for me once I tapped into the idea of contrast vs poetics, from my original prompt.

Above all, I feel that working on this studio enhanced the way that I see things that were already in my peripheries.
The way I view my surroundings has increased and my sense of awareness has heightened too.
My appreciation for the simple things, especially the audio aspects to the work; wind through the grass, people’s chatter, hums of the atmosphere, have increased and its been nice (and a little anxiety inducing) to have those mental reminders to notice over the course of the semester.

How will I apply this to my work as I continue?
I genuinely feel that the fundamentals of this studio have been really important overall.
While they were difficult to grasp in the beginning, my understanding of what it meant to really ‘see’ began to take shape the more I got out into the environment and engaged with it.
Talking about it was a little too abstract for me but seeing the footage in front of me, setting up the shots, walking the streets knowing I was recording it all, led me to understand the greater purpose of it all – especially on playback.

I’ll be taking a lot of the base of the works, longer shots, remembering to pause and take in the surrounds, more of a European approach to filmmaking (Tarkovsky) will be woven into my future projects.
Reminding myself to continue to make will be the first hurdle to overcome but I’m sure I’ll begin to notice the changes from there on in.

Ingredients:

• two different locations; rural + urban
• Canon 5D3
• Recorder (HR Zoom)
• iPhone 5S
• tripod
• Mixer Apps

Method:

• Taking long (10 minute) and short (3-5 minute) videos and sound bytes of environments

Outcome and Reflection:

I found I was focusing on people moving throughout a space instead of focusing on things in general.
I moved on to what captured my attention throughout the use of sound and found that the bigger pictures were interesting to hone in on as they made up the spaces for the smaller fragments.
The longer I waited, I found the more impatient I grew, especially because I was continuing to notice things outside of the frame of view and I grappled with the idea of what type of recordings I should do (video) -do I pan, do I hold fast and keep still.

Pitch:

For my final task 4 assignment, I aim to create a layered piece of work that opens up the channels of what comprises a city and the country.
I have an unusual set-up in that I will be overseas working throughout the final duration of this studio and my locations are somewhat limited to urban environments and time to collect media is also quite limited.
However, I would like to use these constraints to work for me somehow, in that I would like to use what limited media I am able to collect and find the narratives embedded within those collections.
Not interested in restricting myself too much, or wanting to over-analyse the footage I’ll be collecting, I’m interested in finding motifs in my environments, both urban and suburban.
Audio will play a large role in my sensing of the space, to take myself out of my comfort zone and test myself on noticing and seeing through hearing.
I’d like sounds to guide me through a space and would like to fuse both the visual and audio together for a final piece. While not wanting to write anything in stone just yet, I am seeing a larger picture coming to form in my mind of the layered themes I’d like to create.

I think overlapping of both the environments in my research will work well together, hopefully forming a narrative of sorts once paired.
I’m interested to see where this leads.

Task 2 

As I faced certain challenges with time and place, I decided to focus on audio predominantly, with little bursts of video to help furnish the space in which the audio hinted at.
Walking through the streets of urban environments was all I had access to in Italy and so I collected sounds of the streets; people chattering, yelling, calling, singing, instruments and buskers playing music, the sounds of people’s shoes tapping on hard surfaces, the eclectic nature of the urban environment was consuming and the streets were alive.

Experiment 1:
For this experiment, I decided to use my iPhone and record the sounds of the streets of Venice on my way to and from work.
I wanted to create long pieces to work with so that I could use chunks of media or fragments when it came time to editing the final piece.

Experiment 2:
For my second experiment, I introduced video to challenge myself a little more. It was difficult using the DSLR and I was conflicted by the quality of footage, so I swapped between iPhone camera and canon 5D mark iii, taking short lengths of footage.

Experiment 3:
For my third experiment, I decided to mix the two (audio & video) and tried to meld the two and find patterns in the country environments and explore those further through stillness.

In the week 9 Thursday workshop we did a lot of planning for task 4.
Meeting with Hannah and discussing ideas with the other students in the class really helped me develop my ideas further with the certain constraints that I had to work in personally.

Timeline:

September 22nd -29th

• Notice movement in urban environments
• (Venice) bridges, alleyways, nature, anomaly’s

September 30th-October 6th

• Finalise the locations in which I’ll focus on
• Use various mediums ie: phone, camera, recorder
• Use different apps to record my choice of footage
• Narrow down the footage in projects
• Narrow down elements in footage that correlate with one another

October 7th-13th

• Begin to overlap and layer footage with
• Decide on length of footage and screen time

October 14th-20th

• Begin editing
• Reflect
• Submit

What matters to project four?

• Layering and overlapping of footage
• Emphasis on similarities
• Narrative
• Duration/length
• Patterns
• Evocations
• Environments chosen (urban/suburban)
• Editing – or no editing

Biggest, Big, Littlest

Biggest: Evolving and showing what the similarities and differences there are in the environments as one is escaped from (city) in favour of the other (country) and yet there are elements of each place in both if we look close enough.

Big: The media collected (sound & video) are pivotal to helping us understand these similarities and differences as our senses are crucial to our perceptions of environments, yet personal to each of us.

Littlest: The means in which I captured the footage, focus of equipment and myself, clashing of footage (audio & video), environmental accessibility.

Challenges/Risks:

• Organisation
• Over analysing
• Locations
• Time frame and restrictions
• Being overseas and foreign places, not having access to locations
• Editing process
• Planning
• time time time