Installation Artist Research

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic is a Serbian performance artist who takes quite a radical approach to her work, using her body as an instrument to get across her message. Through her work she explores the relationships betweent the artist and the audience and the limitations of body and mind.
In her work she often risks harm to herself.

In one such performance called Rhythm 5 also known as the firestar, Abramovic almost lost her life when she became so immersed in the piece, she ended up losing consciousness and had to be rescued by members of the audience. The idea of the piece was by burning the five pointed communist star, she was representing a mental and physical purification and addressing political issues of her past.

A piece I thought was really disturbing was a piece called Rhythm 0 in 1974. Abramovic placed on a table 72 objects to be used on her as she stood passively in the middle of the room. Some of the objects were items like honey, a feather, olive oil and a rose, and there were also items such as scissors, a scalpel, and a gun and a single bullet. By the end of the piece, her clothes had been cut, she'd had rose thorns dug into her skin and people had aimed the gun at her head.
Abramovic noted that at the start of the performance people were much more reserved and over time they became more aggressive.

Rest Energy

One of my favourite pieces of hers is an exhibition performance called 'The Artist is Present', where Abramovic sat on a chair in silence and members of the public came and sat opposite her for a few  minutes in silence, whilst maintaining eye contact. The piece attracted many different people, even some celebrities heard about it and came to take part. I think I like this piece the because we so rarely look at someone in the eye for more than a second without talking. There must be a very raw connection between two people who look one another in the eye with no conversation filling the silence.

Maps and Networks -  Everything Marina Abramovic does is about connection with the audience through her performance, and to me that links strongly with our theme, with connections and networks associating with each other.


Chris Milk

Chris Milk is an artist who experiments in many different mediums, beginning his career in music video and photography, and expanding out into more experimental territory. He investigates the possibilities available from using interactive technologies and arts and is CEO and Founder of several different virtual reality companies such as

Evaluation and Final Piece

Technology rules? from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

I found this unit really engaging as the topic was an idea I came up with, so I found it an enjoyable topic to investigate. I find the idea that corporations and the government have access to all of our online data not only possible but likely. I suppose in a way I have a bit of the heart of a conspiracy theorist in that way, although I don't worry enough about it to stop using social media and various other technological methods of communication.
I think my group ended up working really well together, as we all were very interested in the topic and came up with really 'out there' ideas about what sort of things our data might be being used for and ways to interpret this. We did struggle with the fact that all three of us are very unorganised characters, which meant that sometimes we really had to take a step back and think 'hang on, this is important and we need to get it done by this time' because otherwise we would never have completed anything. Once we had done that we were able to get on with the project and complete our paperwork and everything else we needed to do.
We had a few hiccups along the way where we lost footage, due to misplacing hard drives which ended up being really annoying as we then had to re-shoot a lot of the footage. I think that if we had used that footage we would have ended up with a very different film although whether that would be for the better or not is hard to say.
As it is I actually rather liked our final outcome although there were perhaps a few things in the edit that could have been neatened up. I really enjoyed doing the sound for this project, and after just completing our sound projects I was now more familiar with Audition and so I could create a soundscape with more ease than I would have otherwise.
All in all, I think our project went better than I hoped it would, although if I did it again, I would probably edit it slightly differently.

Sound

I found this film on vimeo that I thought the sounds were really interesting for. The whole soundtrack is done using sounds recorded from analogue cameras, and made into music.

Digital Analogue from NORTH OF X on Vimeo.

For our experimental film my group decided we didn't want to have music in our piece, so I looked into lots of different sounds I could use to make a soundscape.
We were thinking we could find loads of technological sounds to incorporate into the track, such as phones ringing, printers, cars etc. We also thought having voices on the radio and static would make a really interesting addition to it, and would represent phone calls and people communicating over long distances.

I began initially by searching for various sound effects on free websites such as 'Sound fx' to use, and adding them all to a folder in Audition.
I then began to sifting through the sounds and picking the ones I thought would work well together and adding them to my mixed track session.

At first I found it difficult to find a pace for the track that accurately matched what I wanted the audience to hear, I wanted them to get a sense of the pace of the film and sort of the rhythm of the clips. To do this I watched the edit several times and began to build a pattern of where there were lulls in activity and tried to adapt the soundscape to that.

I had some sounds as base layers that were mostly just meant as background noise, although instead of just having one or two background layers through the whole thing I cut up a lot of them and spaced them through it. I then began adding in the other layers and clips. It took a long time to get right just because of the length and the amount of layers, and to stop it from becoming repetitive I also had to make sure that I had large resources of sounds to draw from.

Filming & Editing

For our experimental film we used a large variety of different cameras as we wanted to our film to have different layers and tones to it that combining material from multiple lenses could give us. It also gave us more freedom as to where and when we were able to film. For example, some of the footage was filmed on my phone, as it is something I carry around everywhere with me and meant that I could film where ever I was. Other parts were filmed on DSLR as Dan and Ivan both have their own cameras and they were able to film sections whenever we needed it, or if we wanted to add something to the footage we already had. Ivan also hired out a fish eye lens which we used to get a more unique perspective on various aspects of what we were filming.

We spent a lot of time on our edit, as our film is mostly montage so the sequence of the clips was very important. We cut between clips in a way that showed each bit was connected to the following part of the film, and we parts of the narrative we had filmed we interspersed throughout the length of the film.

We wanted to get quite a lot of variance in our colours, and the fish eye lens that we used for some of the footage captured some really vibrant tones and shades that really made the films more aesthetically pleasing. For example the blue of the late evening sky in this clip I really liked, and it's one of my favourite frames.

Experimental Film Idea Development

My initial thoughts on this project were about entangling someone in a literal web, to represent the way technology pulls at our lives. What I was thinking of doing was using the studios to film a figure silhouetted in a room with all the strings coming off of him and attaching to computer monitors with code on them. We were thinking of cutting sequences of montage into it, and the sections with the figure itself would have a bit of a Bill Viola feel to them.

We soon realised that our ideas for the studio sequence wouldn't portray quite what we wanted it to, and decided to try something else.

We started thinking about online personas, and our digital representations on the web such as our facebook profiles, twitter accounts, emails, the data thats recorded on websites that we visit that's sold on to third parties and then similar product are advertised to us.

This is a browser attachment that allows you to view the amount of websites that are viewing your information from the page that you're on at that particular moment.

We also decided to keep data diaries to see how much we used our phones in a day.

 

We decided that the medium we wanted to use would primarily be montage, but we knew that we'd need some sort of - not quite narrative but something like that - to string together the main body of the films so that it made sense. To do this we decided we would film someone waking up and the first thing they do is check their phone. So many people these days (myself included) use their phone as an alarm clock. This means that its on all night, and is the first thing you check when you wake up.

Experimental Film Research

For my research I browsed lots of experimental and mainstream films on vimeo, I found a couple that helped give me inspiration for some of our shots such as this one called 'Streets'

STREETS - NEW YORK CITY from Tim Sessler on Vimeo.

This film helped give me ideas for possible shots we could use in our film, as I really liked the angles used, and the lighting is really visually nice. I thought the night time shots used colour in a really interesting way, and I loved the deep blues of the night sky.
I also thought the use of slo-mo was really well done, as it enabled you to observe the movements of the birds and the water etc. with increased detail.
The focus is amazing, the amount of detail captured in every part of the frame is stunning and it really imbues the viewer with a feeling of wonder when observing the film. I'd like to try some of these techniques out for our own film, such as the shots at night time with the blue sky or maybe the slo-mo.

ART & SPACE: Portrait of an Art Journey from Duncan Ward on Vimeo.

This film I thought was interesting as I really liked the choppy clips of road at the start, and I thought the transitions into following shots worked really well with the fade out, although I'm not normally a fan of fade outs. I think it works in this piece because of the style of the film, but if I tried to incorporate it into our one it would probably seem very out of place in relation to our theme and the rest of the film.
I get that with this film it's intentionally black and white and really fuzzy, which I think works well for it (it makes me think of cloudy rainy weather) but it's not something I am intending on incorporating into our own experimental film as I don't think it's suitable for what we are thinking of doing. I suppose it could be quite an interesting idea to make parts of my film black and white but it's not really what we want to go for I don't think. But it works well for this piece.

Soundscape and Evaluation

Overall I am relatively happy with how my soundscape turned out. I think if I did it again I would make it longer, and there would be more of an arc within the piece. I designed this particular work so that it could be seen as what the character is hearing, but also what I imagined it would feel like. I was drawing on the idea of being trapped and tormented, and unable to get away from suffering. Initially I was unsure on what I should use as my focus in the piece, but the scratching of nails I really liked. I was unsure as to how it would fit in with the rest of the piece but I think it worked pretty well in the end.
I do however think I could have found something better to use for the idea of chains, as the items I used I didn't sound as great as I wanted them to in comparison with real chains.
I really enjoyed learning how to use Audition on this project as it is something I've never used before, and I while at first I found it tricky to get the hang of, after I had mastered the basic controls it became a lot easier to figure things out and experiment with what I could do.
Also I found recording my own sounds a very engaging process. I loved getting more hands on in the project, and found the task of looking for items that could make sounds to suit what I wanted challenging and yet also rewarding when I found the right item.
If I did it again I would spend loads more time testing out different objects and seeing what kinds of sounds they made, this would have given me more variety and I would have been able to try out more ideas when I was putting my soundscape together.