My experience attending our successful exhibition was almost like completing a big performance in-font of a massive audience. Int felt amazing to see such amazing work from my fellow classmates but most of my own. My completed work was finally able to see the light of day after much circles of development and hard thought. My short film was displayed on a flat screen tv in the “bedroom” along with two other classmates work mine was on the main TV, this was a decision made by my fellow peer, tutor and I. We figured it makes sense to have my film which was a childhood tv show remake to be displayed on the main TV for the room because it was most similar to what a home in our childhoods looked like (except for the flat screen tv part!!) It engaged with my audience in this way because it was the first thing they saw which in turn set the tone for our room/exhibit. While standing next to my exhibit throughout the night many audience members said it made them feel “uncomfortable yet comfortable” which was the exact words I used in my artist statement when describing how I want the audience to consume my product. This made me feel accomplished after they told me that because it was a giant tick in the box of desired outcome. Apart from this quote many audience members who were fellow media practitioners made notice of the quality of my work. “How did you get the grainy-ness of it? It looks like something out of play school, so accurate, I love it!” After my experience learning from my mistakes when completing my first few experiments I was able to have a gage in the desired editing skills and more specifically where I edited my product on. For this major project I decided to make the big girl decision and go to an editing suite even though it was quite difficult to transfer my product toward the end which was a key concern for this studio-the editing. Since our studio focused on editing quite a bit to obtain the desired “weird” effects it was a key concern to worry about exporting videos and the minor details- in class we experimented with glitches and changing JPEG’s to TXT and disrupting the coding inside to acquire a glitched image- this class activity taught me a lot about editing and the “out of the box” techniques I could possibly use in my final work.
One feeling provoked and focused on through digital media in this studio has been nostalgia and the uncanny. In my final work I combined both of them which I did through media practises such as colour grading my clips to look bright, youthful and playful to highlight the kid aspect of it. I used shows like play school as reference which as always a colourful show with simple shots. The eyes are the first thing that my project grabbed so I knew I wanted to include a dominant colour grading. The uncanny I reached through the use of AI, I incorporated the AI voice to narrate the film which the puppet shows had like sesame street- except they used real humans, I used AI to combine what we learnt in this studio with the nostalgia. The use of AI was a careful touch as the feeling of imitation and “fake-ness” was translated into the “uncomfortable/uncanny” feeling. What I learnt about these feelings throughout the semester is that there are so many ways in which minor details like a dolls position or major details like colour grading can make an desired affect.
‘“They reveal latent forms of abstraction underlying the digital image.” What Cameron says here in this reading is when a digital glitch appears it becomes almost abstract and not real anymore, for the time being in which it glitches, it struggles to exist. But it also reveals whats backing it up, almost like the curtain being pulled to reveal the wizard of oz but if the wizard was not a human but instead a big black hole of nothing’ The same reading I visited for the glitch experiment is one I carried through the assessment because it held such relevance in uniqueness to the ideas I was developing.
One of my unsuccessful iterations was the glitch experiment, I couldn’t get the glitch right because the technical software was unable to cooperate- in this situation I was limited and taught me that I had to use my editing skills in other ways to imitate the glitch effect. A moment I didn’t know how to feel was the first studio session which was almost like a therapy session because we were naming things that we find uncanny with digital media and basically everything surrounding social media was brought up and it resulted in us talking about perception and missing the past/nostalgia/. It took me by surprise because I wasn’t expecting myself to be so interested in academically discussing a subject. These feelings removes through the development of my project and now reflecting on my project. “ the self-consciousness of styling that accompanies online postings…” This quote Gronlund, M used in the Dialogue experiment week reading was a stand out for me as it made me immediately guilty for having an online presence. The words used were so kind and factual that it didn’t feel like an insult but rather a cleverly ravelled up ball of predicted feeling. This inspired me to think of the minor details in script writing for my film.
If ni were to keep working on my artefact I would want to create the entire episode and maybe introduce more characters. It was so fun and healing to make as I used my own childhood doll in the film. I really wish I could’ve had more time to create an entire episode it was something I was regretting in the moment for not trying hard enough and pushing for more time. In created an entire episode what I would do different is I would include a lovely backdrop and make a theme song, to make it more personal. Even though Fisher explains in his writing that we should appreciate the eerie, weird and free I would also find ways in which I can make it less uncanny because I would like to create something in my own hands that isn’t uncanny but instead really comforting and modern yet nostalgic.
REFERENCES:
Cameron, A. (2017). 19. Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image. In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (pp. 334-352). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474407137-022
Gronlund, M. (2014). From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art after the Internet. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 37, 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1086/679372
Brehmer, M. (2023). Visualizing the weird and the eerie. Ithaca: Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/visualizing-weird-eerie/docview/2861509848/se-2