Even though the home is considered more of a natural environment, I find that experimenting and manipulating material helped me to further understand and explore the actual purpose of the prompt. The home environment and the use of senses is very complicated and I didn’t want to explore just the raw, natural parts, but also how it can be perceived in different ways. I thought for each phrase that it would be more interesting to be in different rooms, isolating them but also mapping out the whole environment.
Opening with Ways of Seeing, I used video and audio from my backyard as it is the most natural part of the home. To challenge expectations I switched the audio and video, put the video off centre, and changed the image ratio. In regards to the photos, I wanted to further explore the idea of mirroring and try to illustrate how images can be viewed in various ways. Originally one of the images was just of the sky and some clouds, but I wanted to make it more than that, presenting it in a way that makes people think about how they view things.
During Visibility I used a lot of distortion, illusion and colour to show how complicated and complex your environment is visually. The changing eye colour effect was included to present how your inner perception alters depending on how you see things. I decided with the photos that I would mainly focus on how unclear the home is. Blurring and cutting out fragments of the images illustrated how we only ever see portions of what is around us.
During Time/Tempo I wanted to focus on the routine and rhythm that we follow, using the kitchen as the setting and making the audio a lot more dominant. By using flickering, as well as a time-lapse, it demonstrated the passing of time and how patterns are consistent, yet can be disrupted and incomplete. The use of collage and positioning similar yet subtly altered versions of an image together I found to be a simple and effective way of showing how time passes. For example, the three images of the moon, taken from my backyard, are the same photo but positioned differently to show movement and differences in perception.
I wanted to end on Isolation. I used the audio of opening, closing and locking a door to make it obvious how separate and closed off the bedroom is compared to other rooms. I stuck to black, white and grey to make it stand out from the rest of the video which mainly used colour. Silence and quiet audio were implemented to illustrate a disconnection from the rest of the world. Concluding on the glitching image on the television, announcing there is no connection I thought was effective in presenting how much things can change around the home environment, considering if you look back at the beginning of the video and compare the tone. The one least straightforward Isolation image I’d say is of the four faces facing each other. The purpose of the effect was to illustrate how closed of a person can be physically and mentally, in their own world, the home being that world.
RELATED POSTS
https://www.mediafactory.org.au/nicole-tsolakkis/2018/03/20/there-are-other-ways-to-see/
https://www.mediafactory.org.au/nicole-tsolakkis/2018/03/20/the-power-of-isolation/
https://www.mediafactory.org.au/nicole-tsolakkis/2018/03/24/lightroom-and-photoshop/
https://www.mediafactory.org.au/nicole-tsolakkis/2018/03/26/at-home-in-the-world-sacred-place/