Your Hand in Pollution began when Zitni, Sarah and I became a group and combined our initial ideas for our solo projects in Assessment 2. Throughout Assessment 3 we developed our ideas of what entanglement was, and how plastic, water and the human hand could be related. We found the answer was quite obvious: water pollution. This issue is increasingly more urgent and we wanted to spread word about how easily water can get polluted. There are many different forms of pollution, e.g. domestic, industrial, agricultural, etc. (Rai R.K et al 2012). The toxicity levels of water are dependent upon different chemicals and elements within the water. Different chemicals can be released by different substances being dropped into it (for example copper or lead) which increases the LD50 (Lethal Dose) test results (the dose limit is set on a scale high enough that it 50% of animals within the test would be killed. (Nesaratnam, S. 2014). For this showcase, we wanted to demonstrate the effects a small drop of ink (representing pollution) can have on the water supply.
Our main idea of what it means to be entangled is how something might affect and relate the another. In our case, this is how the human hand leaves plastic (in the form of rubbish) behind, and it gets into the water stream. Building on Ingold’s theory of “no inside or outside, and no boundary separating the two domains. Rather there is a trail of movement or growth” a person can unknowingly contribute to pollution by forgetting to pick up their plastic the park, and hence that plastic gets into the water streams. We combined sound, text, video and images in assessment 3 to portray our concept. These mediums worked well together to tell the story of the dangers of pollution and how we can help stop it. The text provided the information while the videos and images provided the evidence. In assessment 4 we wanted to take it one step further and show the audience how easy pollution is, and how the smallest ‘drops’ can build up and make a difference. Thinking carefully and practically about how exactly we could engage the audience directly, we settled on our final piece. The tangibility of dripping ink into the bowl allows the audience to physically see for themselves the damage pollution causes through the changing in the water colouring. Utilising the screens, we live-streamed the water bowl onto the wall, highlighting the key element of our showcase and surround the audience with the effects of pollution. Once the audience has completed the first stage of the showcase (dripping ink into the water), we have utilised Instagram as a medium for two-way communication and the combination of text and images to further tell a story. The images we have uploaded are of a painted number, which audience clicks on and is given a riddle about water or pollution. Once solved, the person is rewarded with a prize, either a painting or a poem about water. The images of paintings provide an aesthetic element to the Instagram page, but do not tell enough information, hence the text. These two components work really well together, especially on Instagram, as that’s what it is designed to do: combine images with text. We entangled these platforms together to engage the audience as much as we could. The tangible media (the water, bowl and ink) works closely with the videos, the audience is not only doing, but they are watching the water. The second stage of our concept, Instagram, integrates both text and image itself. The image provides the aesthetic, while the text provides the information. The final outcome of our piece is to inform people about pollution through integrated media, and encourage them to change.
What were the questions that arose for your group and that you might like to explore in future work?
“What is entanglement?” Was the first question that arose. While we did discuss this throughout assessment 3, we now had the added element of physical space to incorporate. We mulled over the idea of utilising sound and space and looked at ways that we could get sound to “exhibit the same power of illumination as light” (Cusak, 2013). The Eavesdropping exhibition assisted with a few of our initial ideas. Originally, we were going to place speakers in a line so as the audience followed the sound along our piece. Employing the idea Cusak discussed in 2013: “the interpretation of sound certainly benefits from a knowledge of context in the same way that captions and titles enhance photographs”, the sound would be the main feature while the undecided images and text would provide the context. While we swapped the main focus around, instead deciding we wanted the audience much more involved, I would like to explore the idea of sonic journalism further. I think sound can be very powerful, and is a relatively underrated and under-utilised sense in the art world.
However, as I have stated, our final piece morphed into a more audience-driven concept. Which sparked our next main question: what do we want the audience to take away from our showcase? To answer that, we looked at what our main idea was: the under-valued damage of water pollution. How could we communicate this so that people would listen? We didn’t want to lecture people in an obvious way like so many environmentalists do, so we turned to a more-subtle option. The water in the glass bowl, which turned murky as the audience added ink to it themselves. This was actually quite successful. As our piece involved each participant uploading a video to their personal Instagram, I was concerned as to how many people would be interested in partaking. However, everyone seemed quite excited about how interactive it was. The hands-on element is something that I would love to develop further in the future. I think the Instagram posts and messaging back and forth became too complicated and the message was lost in the process, but getting people to create and add to something themselves brings a personalisation and satisfaction that can’t be achieved through visuals alone. I would love to have a more varied and relevant background sound. I think a microphone attached to the bowl so you could hear the ink hitting the water would increase how submerged the audience became in that one action. Not only surrounded by the imagery, but by the sound too each participant would be entangled further into our showcase.
How did you consider the way someone might engage with your work in an exhibition space after seeing the exhibition in class (or another of your own choosing)?
The Eavesdropping exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum was my initial introduction into how we could present our final piece. We had previously toyed with the idea of playing more with sound and space, and seeing the different ways sound can be presented and displayed sprouted different ideas for ways to manipulate our final display.
There was one part of the exhibition where the audience could sit in the middle of a darkened room and watch a screen while the sound played around them. It felt as though you were surrounded by the piece when you entered the room. And the screen (either at the front or the two sides depending on which piece was playing) helped centre and direct attention. It was the balance between engulfing and focussing, making some kind of sense of the entanglement between the sounds that were coming from every angle. We took the idea of the big screens for our final piece and utilised the projectors in the showcase room. Our initial idea sparked off the cuff of the idea of letting the sound be the main feature, and the screens simply there as a guide. However, after some workshopping, we realised that as our piece is not secluded, the sound might be difficult to concentrate on, and become fully immersed in, as one was in the inspiration exhibit. We decided on a more integrated use of the screens rather than just directional. I think this change of direction worked really well because it brought to life the simple bowl and highlighted the change in water. In the future, I think we could have improved on the lighting. We battled a little bit between wanting the projector to stand out in the dark, and needing to light what was being projected. This problem could have been solved with a lamp of some kind lighting the bowl without taking away from the projectors.
A few years ago, the Melbourne Museum put on an exhibit for the Titanic, and it remains one of my favourite exhibitions I have been to. The ticket to enter the exhibit was a designed as a ticket aboard the ship itself, and the name on the ticket was of real life passenger of the Titanic. Throughout the exhibit, you followed the prompts and clues on your ticket to unravel a little bit more about your designated person, and the things they would have done (e.g. entrance to the ballroom for the VIP guests). At the end of the exhibit there was a wall with all of the names of those on the ship, and you could look up the name you had been given and find out if they survived or not. The personalisation of the ticket is what made the exhibit to interesting. In our final piece, we got people to upload a boomerang of them pouring ink into water on their Instagram and tag our Instagram page. We then sent them a riddle, and then replied once they had solved it. After that they were given a number to choose, correlating to the numbers uploaded onto our Instagram page, and won a small prize. Throughout the day, we had many people do this, I think it worked really well because it got them personally involved, as opposed to simply walking past and viewing out showcase.
How have your ideas about entanglement and making ‘entangled media’ changed over the semester?
Entanglement is a strange concept to me because it’s so obvious yet so complicated at the same time. When I first thought about the idea that everything is entangled somehow, the initial response is “well, duh”. But then, the more you consider it, the more entangled everything becomes, until it hurts your head to think about. It’s the way everything in the entire world is intertwined. It’s the definition of the lesson in every time-travelling movie ever “Don’t touch anything!” because the smallest change can make the biggest difference. It’s “a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines; not a network, but a meshwork”. The world is entangled in such a way that it is ever-evolving and ever changing with everything anything does. Essentially, people are not only living in this world, they are inhabiting it and therefore are “threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to its ever-evolving weave”. (Ingold, 2013). The world is not a straight line where something effected by something, which then affects the next thing, and then the next like a connect-the-dots. The world is a scribble made on paint where each section between the scribbles is coloured in a different colour, somehow all matching and yet not matching, all meeting up and yet all separate and but all somehow one work of art.
At the beginning of the semester I had no idea what ‘entangled media’ meant. I could venture a guess and say it was the use of different forms of media (e.g. video and sound) to create one piece. I thought it was referring to the way different mediums worked together. The way the image of a movie worked with the sound to make sense, or the way you could press a button and it would make a noise to indicate the fact you’d just pressed it, for example, doing everything on your iPhone while it’s on loud. Entangled media is all those things, but it’s also so much more. It’s intertwining media in traditional and non-traditional formats. Over the semester, I have explored the different ways in which media can work with media to tell a story. Throughout each assessment, this has become more and more clear. Assessment 3 demonstrated this, where we utilised text, images, video and sound to tell the story of water pollution, none would have made sense without the other. The text was there to explain the images, the images were there as evidence for the text, the videos provided overall context while the sound added an extra atmosphere to the piece, a kind of third dimensional element.
Assessment 4, however, has combined entanglement with media. It has allowed us to entangle the four-dimensional world with the interconnected web that is social media. It demonstrated the ways in which we entangle ourselves every day. Filming our surroundings is a very common thing now, it was therefore interesting watching a physical act become a platform of media (video), which then lead to two more platforms (image and text), with the idea of entanglement consciously in mind. For the first time, I was conscious of how closely related everything is and everything is becoming as technology increases (i.e. we now have better cameras on our phones than actual cameras so accessing those modes of media (video and image) are painstakingly easier than it was, even 10 years ago.
If we had the chance to do this again, I would reconsider the logistics of filling the bowl of water. It didn’t fit under the taps, so we had to run back and forth with drink bottles. This slowed down the process a lot in between each re-fill and the water was left murky for longer than it should have been due to the difficulty of refilling it. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of people eager to participate and post on their Instagram accounts. I think the overall showcase went quite well, and demonstrated how not only entangled media is with other media, but how entangled it is with real world is as well.
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