Category Archives: Art

99% invisible

It’s been a while.

Since I have visited this place…or listened to Radiolab…

Discovered a very interesting podcast in the latest episode on Radiolab: 99% Invisible

At first, I thought it was something to do with Dark Matter, something invisible and undetectable to us which scientists say makes up something like 94% of the universe!

Then, I thought maybe it was a metaphor for how much we can’t see: as visible light only makes up a few percentage of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

This is what I soon discovered: “99% Invisible is a tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.”

Although this podcast mainly focuses on design, architecture and cities, the concept of its name still sparked ideas for me.

As I am working on a project with a friend to understand the different influences on climate change, and why it is still so easily denied, I think the concept of 99% invisible is a suitable metaphor to describe not only the easily forgotten yet significant impact we have on our planet as a species, but also our blindness to the true insignificance of our selves, race, gender, countries, species, planet and even our solar system on a cosmic scale.

The phrase highlights the wonderful duality of human perspective: that we ought to be humble of our place in the universe, yet never underestimate the impacts we can have in our environment.

Reviewing the Act of Filming

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.

– Stan Brakhage.

Throughout the first half of this semester I have been constantly trying to project my own living experiences onto screen (or more accurately in this case, recreate it through the act of filming). I saw the camera as only a lifeless tool that assisted my intentions (to communicate a sense of oneness with nature and a less human centered worldview through relationships with nonhuman characters). But it wasn’t until coming across Stan Brakhage’s idea of defining the camera as a non-human perspective that I realised what we often take for granted. The camera sees things that we are too limited by our human subjectivity to see. Though not an entirely an omniscient perspective (the very word implies the contrary), as reminded by an earlier inspiration John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) which sparked my initial investigation, the camera has its own unique perspective. Brakhage’s film Window Water Baby Moving (1959) presented the events of a birth from a neutral perspective yet portraying a realistically fragmented reality that is truer to our experiences in life than the conventional device of filmic continuity.

Since then, I have performed several experiments exploring the act of film by ways of seeing, filming and moving as well as investigating the relationships between them. Reflecting on my experimentations and observations, my research have diverged from the original research I proposed to conduct in week 8. Rather than developing a set of auteurist codes and personal filmic devices, I discovered tools that can be used to creatively navigate or engage the world around me. The act of filming when conducted aimlessly as a form of meditation, is an effective way to implement experimentation into the creative process.

I have also observed several classmates on their research projects as well as other productions outside of class. During these events, I observe and compare their methodologies to my own developing ways of working. This led to a further curiosity of whether or not they also contemplate about the meaning of the act of filming and the relationship between observing as a personal experience and the decision to frame or film something with the eye of the camera. With this in mind I conducted some recorded conversations with the people I have been working with to generate discourse surrounding this topic. The process of having conversations is an organic and dynamic one that I have discovered as part of my methodology, which I will continue to use throughout my creative endeavours. Through these conversations, not only did I get to know a bit about what others are thinking and how they perceive the act of filming. As well as generating a much needed local discourse surrounding film culture within the student community, it also brought upon insights on aesthetics, cinema, experience, identity, philosophy, culture and even politics. This became one of the significant revelations during this process: that cinema and filmmaking should be explored constantly in connection to the world around us, particularly in contemporary society.

Another epiphany led to the decision that a compilation video of my journey exploring the different perspectives on the act of filming, would be a more suitable documentation rather than creating a conventional scene or simply writing a reflection. The experimental footage and recorded conversations formed the basis for this visual summary:

As a result, accompanying this written statement is a film essay recapturing the journey of exploration and a concluding conceptual performance piece that summarises the relationship I have with the camera.

Conversations: Azim

A conversation with Azim

 

– Memory in fragments, thinking back to our past

– Voyeurism, memory of eavesdropping

– simultaneous individual experiences, our ability to relate two individual experiences or events. (consider Soviet Montage)

– I am the camera, its my pair of eyes

– knowing what is beyond the frame vs. letting yourself be the camera through the screen

– presenting reality. Reality TV ‘more representative’ of America than movies are

– Ways of Seeing – John Berger, picture worth a thousand words

– Image or words are just different and equal mediums that can be suitable for delivering certain concepts depending on what it is

– The Nature of the Physical World – Arthur Eddington in David Lynch Swerves by Martha P. Nochimson

– imagery, visual aesthetics limiting concepts or imagination or experience down to a 3 dimensional visual experience that is then flattened onto a 2 dimensional plane

– act of filming being related to the expectation to present it to others. Filming for others

– Obsession with coherence in watching a film. A film as one story, has to make sense. rather than every bit of seemingly unrelated experiences or events being a part of one film (LIFE).

– Life is boring, spontaneous, random

– Film is a part of reality, films or film culture makes up part of our reality

– “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” – Stan Brakhage.

– The camera changed the world not just historically, but in a more recent context, globalisation would be a slower process. Moving images and images in the social network, or information world.

– Without TV I wouldn’t be able to articulate my thoughts. (We should have mentioned how language affect our thinking process)

– It’s more realistic to think of media depictions of culture as “what American like to celebrate or value” or “what Japanese culture like to celebrate or value”

– Australian identity? Australian cinema?

– conversation gets into hippy territory…

 

Research: Movement

Following the first scene I posted that initiated this research, here are some of the self conducted investigations of movement:

  1. Dancing Pedestrians – This exercise was originally aimed to film the movement of the escalator.  It was one of the most uninteresting footage I shot when I first reviewed it on my phone. However, when transferred to the computer, the file was registered upside down. It suddenly became an amazing study of our physical movement from an unfamiliar perspective. We are so used to watching each step fall downward toward the earth below that watching this in any other direction seem almost like floating or defying gravity.
  2. Streetlights – an attempt to capture the movement and pacing of a car through its relation to its surroundings. The frequency of the streetlights provide a rhythmic indication of the car’s speed. The effects are also seen in the unstable handheld gestures of the camera as it is subjected to the physical vibrations of the cars movement.
  3. Sun Dance 1 & Sun Dance 2 – after 5 minutes of wandering around with a camera in my room to some music, I found something to focus on. The music, my movement, and the visual that was captured in the camera merged into one performance that felt like it had a purpose. The result was mesmerizing and meditative. One of the videos is played backwards. It surprised me how the music sounded just as melodic and emotional when played backwards and also provided another level of interpretation to the piece.
  4. Cat project scene – Over the week I also assisted on a project outside of class. The project was a story from a cat’s perspective. Although I was volunteering to act and provide location, I also participated behind scenes in working out how the ‘cat’ was suppose to move around. It was a unique exercise in trying to understand, mimic and capture its liveliness without showing any part of the cat itself. I chose to include this shot because it also captured an unexpected technique I may use in the future. When the camera is inside the box, it captured the pin hole image of the exterior world inside as I moved around. This was a unique way of capturing movement that we accidentally discovered.

As I am investigating movement in these exercises, some of the videos have been muted so that the viewer can focus on the visual movements in frame.

These exercises may be inspiring and creative endeavors, however, they are no more useful than poetry. I hope that in my next lot of investigations, more methodological process will be discovered.

Collage on Readings

Here are some ideas from the week 8 readings:week 8 reading collage1

“MY PART IN THIS STORY BEGAN, AS MANY STORIES DO, MORE OR less by accident, in a small town in upstate New York called Ithaca. And a place named after the mythical home of Odysseus is, I suppose, as good a place to begin a story as any. Back then, however, the only Odysseus I knew was a small cricket, who along with his brothers Prometheus and Hercules was part of an experiment I was running as a graduate student at Cornell University with my adviser, Steven Strogatz. Steve is a mathematician, but pretty early on in his career he started to become much more interested in the applications of mathematics to problems in biology, physics, and even sociology than in the math itself.”

In one of his paragraphs, Duncan J Watts demonstrated, with subtlety, an example of social networks. The end of his previous sentences is directly connected to the start of the next, hinting at the six degrees of connection. He also describes his involvement in the story as an ‘accident’. Knowing now that there is no such thing as random network or accidents, Watts choice of words plays cleverly on the very nature of networks.

@

In the most ‘creative’ way, I chose to use this symbol to represent how I felt about David Shield’s “Collage” text. The letter ‘a’ is situated within the circle, but it is also a part of the circle. Each fragment within the collage are individual identifiable parts that are also an indispensable contribution to the collage’s concept.

Usually, in our writing and reading, we communicate through making logical points, sequentially setting up our arguments, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. But in the “Collage” extract – ideas, notes, observations, arguments etc. are piled in an archival collage. Structure and logic has been temporarily abandoned by the author. In turn, the ‘visitor’ must experience each fragment individually, before assembling, in a reflective process, the logic or argument of the overall picture. This is an inspiring work and a beautiful and fascinating  experience because, like Zen meditation, thought and judgement is suspended during the experience while the participant discovers every piece of the puzzle. And it is not only about the non-linear structure it created, but there is also a duality presented in this experience: one has to focus on the individual fragments while, at the same time, acknowledging the collective body that it is a part of.

MIFF entry 2

Went to two MIFF films today: Listen Up Philip by Alex Ross Perry and an animated film Cheatin’ by Bill Plympton

Both were fantastic and absolutely hilarious!

Highly recommend if the opportunity arises!


Listen Up Philip: miserable, lonely, desperate characters so blatantly put on screen, its sad honesty is its funniest quality.


Cheatin’: Abstract emotions were brilliantly captured by bizzare scenes. Plympton’s animation was surreal, clever, and not exactly subtle. A journey that left the theater with me since. Part of me is still in that world. 

Thought I do have to say, not a big fan of the Kino theater.

Allone @ MIFF

Sepideh-Film-Poster

Just came back from a documentary at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Sepideh – Reaching for the Stars (2013) by Berit Madsen, is a documentary about a 17 year old Iranian girl, Sepideh, who has a deep passion for astronomy and aspire to become an astronaut. The film explores some of the hardships  that arise from her daring modern dream and the fight for science within a society faithfully driven by religion and traditions. 

I believe tears started pouring down my face from the first few minutes til the last shot. Being a passionate stargazer myself, I was overwhelmed that the girl on screen believed in the same things I believed in. I was very self-conscious about my crying in the cinema, it’s something that I’m usually very embarrassed about. But I soon realised that there were many others sniffling around me. Usually, I would be watching something like this in my room on my computer screen. I would get emotional by myself and probably think that I am the only one feeling this way right now, or why is everyone else too busy with their little lives on earth to care about what’s out there and so on…(A bit like me vs. the world kind of mentality). However, going to this film alone was an incredible experience. If I had gone with someone else I know, my experience of the cinema will be that I am ‘watching a film with my friend’. (Us in a crowd of ‘others’). But being there ‘alone‘, I know yet do-not-know every one of them equally. Therefore, to me, no one presence overshadows any other. I feel each and every presence in the theater equally and feel as if I was just a part of this larger, bigger witness called an audience. And we were all a part of the same emotion that is bigger than us that we are experiencing.

SIM•ulation ONE

The title of this blog is borrowed from an idea in S1m0ne (2002), a film by Andrew Niccol starring Al Pacino. The story revolves around a computer generated actress who was titled Simulation One. In similar ways, this blog is a simulation of a persona. In a recent tutorial, the notion of an ONLINE PERSONA was briefly mentioned. This inspired the title and direction of my blog. My previous works in photography were mainly concerned with identity and stereotypes and how much or how little we know another person. Following this interest, I plan to use this blog as an experiment to document the manifestation of an online persona.

In chapter 1 of one of this week’s readings Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Weinberger lists many interesting examples of peculiar situations involving uses of an online persona or username. Through these examples, exploring the effects and phenomena that stem from the fundamental questions of identity. Perhaps it is nothing different from our role playing in daily life. At work I perform a sales assistant; within the family I assume the role of daughter, sister; in a relationship I act as a girlfriend; and here, I carry out the role of a blogger.

So what happens when there is no need for resistance anymore, and we can see our virtual persona in the same light as our personas in the real world? At the moment, we are living a dual life in the midst of such a transition between this seemingly real non-virtual world and our online activities. Some are still resisting the new, some choose to be so immersed in it that they have left the past behind completely.