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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

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.

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.

The discpline of noticing…

Our environments may have been vastly different by comparison; Smith st and Carlton Cemetery but the collection of videos we captured were actually quite similar.
We looked over the content and found that we both found interest in decay, movement, inertia and symmetry.
Upon closer inspection, I realised that not only had Oscar and I collected similar findings but we had also framed our work similarly – creating compositions that complimented the surroundings.
As our media was collected in high traffic zones, we collected similar atmos; vehicles, wind, people, bells, horns, birds etc..

Labelled ‘a place of rest’, the noisy backdrop intervenes with the serenity of the gravesites.
‘Slowing down’ is difficult.
I sent Oscar  to the Lygon st boundary line where large cyprus trees once shielded the street from the tombstones, creating a sound buffer.
Now, it lay open and bare, exposed to the streets opposite.
Cars went by in droves, going about their daily routines – oblivious and focused on their paths.
Residential houses occupied the spaces opposite the graves – life as usual.
Trucks created a moving backdrop to the motionless gravestones in the foreground.
Flowers were laid on graves, looking more lifeless than broken grey stone, withered and weathered.
Graves that looked to have burst open, unprooted by trees nearby over the years passed – grotesque and haunting; it was easy to see why my mother would bring me here as a child to tell em ghost stories. They practically wrote themselves!
Trees that appeared forest-like, off in the background created a Tarkovsky-esque eeriness that rang truer to the themes of a graveyard in one of Oscar’s captures.
The natural backdrop almost appeared unnatural.

In Smith St, cyclists peppered the streets in bright colours as cars drove up and the intersection of Gertrude and Peel St.
Paint was in abundance, marking all surfaces, each and every one a new canvas.
Tags and graffiti; good and bad screamed abuse at passers by in bold, bright lettering – ‘SLUT’. No one seemed to notice.
Memes and pop culture references, motivational and inspirational quotes tagged blue stone curbs, rainbow painted walkways, all going unnoticed by passers by.
Textures and materials, paper paste-ups, large-scale murals, stripped paint and cracks in the architecture grabbed my attention.
It interested me the way in which street art differs from art we see in a gallery.
We attach meanings to artworks in galleries because they’re a) in a gallery and b) because they’re framed (most anyway).
It intrigued me how colourful this part of Smith street was and just how it all goes unnoticed.

As I already spend a great deal of time in this space already, usually dining out at Bowl Bowl for dumplings, or haunting Angelucci 20th Century, I had my habits and had overlooked almost all of the things that I had collected in my videos.
I had noticed however, the large murals and various tags on the record store and kebab shop.
Reflections were heightened and water movements in puddles in the ditches were overlooked.
Usually noticing people and their movements, I was drawn to people less in this exercise, looking at things instead.
Powerlines and the tops of buildings that I had seen but not really looked at filled the frame of my camera, creating shapes where there had not previously been any.

All the while I was noticing, I also noticed others noticing me.
I paused for long periods of time, capturing things of interest.
One gentleman interrupted one of my recordings to ask me what I was doing.

‘I’m just looking.’

Links to media:
Oscar: here
Lana: here

Similarly to my last post, I discovered that I have a fixation with movement, light and architecture.
They’re broad topics of exploration but I like the idea of starting out in this capacity and then allowing myself to narrow down my area of noticing to a smaller pool over the course of the studio.

I do wonder why it is that I notice the things that I do. I wonder why I am attracted to light and certain light too. Usually light being reflected in pools of water, creaking through doors, cracks or light leaks.

The way I was collecting my media was made easier by the fact that I used alarms to prompt my noticing, rather than relying solely on myself to remember to notice – which I find difficult in the early stages of learning.
The alarms alerted me to my surrounds and it’s almost as though I kicked into gear and my process of selection and elimination took over and my instincs decided what was worth and what was not.
I would like to continue working with alarms even as I grow more accustomed to noticing as the set moments during the day, regardless of where I am will serve as an interesting element to the media project – what will I find that will catch my eye?
– I may be in class, in a sterile environment and find a sliver of light particularly interesting as my alarm goes off – who knows.

Overall, I was satisfied with my findings and I’d like to begin forming a narrative with the work through the use of video as a study to help incorporate motion into my work.

Architecture plays a pivotal role in my images, lines and form compliment and accentuate the shadows and the structures upon which they’re reflected and projected upon. It’s always prevalent in one way or another, mostly silhuouettes and replicated by way of shadows.
Angles are created and focused on, rather than curves. While I like an undulating form, I tend towards sharpe angles and contrast a lot more than anything.

Texture is also prevalent in the images, both smooth and coarse surfaces – tacitile elements are interesting to me because of their visceral nature, as is the overall vibe of the images.
Each image contains a shadow which incorporates movement.
If I were to have filmed one single spot where the light made a sharp line across a brick wall, it would have shown the slow progression of the day. The light, rising and falling, closing the chapter of that day until the next.

When sharing the images I took with the group on Thursday, no one mentioned anything to me that offered any alternate perpectives as I think the images themselves are self-explanatory – simplistic. The fact that the images are simple is what I like about them but I would like to evolve the images further by exploring the subject of simplicity and intricacy further.

This week we were asked to give feedback on ourselves; serving as a means of reflections on our perceived progression throughout the semester.

I’ve really enjoyed this course and the Media 1 classes.
While I’ve had varying work commitments that have encroached on my abilities to attend every class, I’ve been really impressed with the fundamentals that are applicable to all my other subjects.
It’s difficult to find a course that is true to its claim from the very beginning – it has been a challenge and a delight.

Learning how to use software that I never allowed myself the time to try and giving me the push that I needed to launch myself back into video.
Having always taken little snippets here and there, being the girl who has received her fair share of eye rolls when I take out the camera, it has been nice to get back into it.
Working with a lot of different people has been a challenge, mostly because of age and experience levels but it’s the same within each industry.
Where I don’t know something, another person will make up for it and vice versa.

Overall, I think that my growth has been gradual, dipping in certain areas, technologically speaking. Although, I’ve found the adobe systems to be somewhat intuitive and because I’m a lightroom and photoshop user, they’re much the same across the board.

Good times – here’s my multi-coloured graph:

After having heard from Kyla the day before, the readings that I did the evening before the workshop helped create more of a synergy, as the world of sound, strange as it may be to ‘hear’/read, I didn’t think much about it.
At least, not much before this course.
Perspective, lo-fi and hi-fi sounds were something that I had never really thought much about.
Sure, I listen to music a lot and I can’t imagine a life without it but the varying frequencies, while referenced a lot, didn’t really interest me enough to follow on with any sort of inspection.
My interest in perspective stems from the visual aspects, as sound waves are intangible, I find comfort in the haptic, enhanced and inspired by wavelengths and these frequencies that dance upon the air.

Immersion was another interesting one. I’d not ever thought of there to be an opposite to perspective but I suppose there’s an opposite to everything, right?