This
week has been fairly productive, creating daily work for 30/30 alongside
watching a bunch of films and playing various video games. Unfortunately, I
still haven’t got around to even starting my essay, but I’m hoping that in the
next week I’ll actually get it done so that when the new term starts on the 18th
I’ll be able to solely concentrate on work and the offsite shows, rather than
having many things to juggle around.
Most
of the work that I’ve created this week for 30/30 has been, in my opinion,
fairly good. There have been days where I’ve simply had an idea, or remembered something
that I’ve wanted to do for a while, and just done it, without actually thinking
about what the various connotations were, or even if the meaning was fully fleshed
out; I’ve not been entirely happy with these particular works, ‘style over
substance’ would be the best way to describe them. Whenever this occurs though,
I just remember that tomorrow is a new day, another chance to make a new piece
of work. Other than that they’ve mostly been good.
So,
on Monday the brief was experiment with
documenting your work through another medium. This was one of my more ‘aesthetically
orientated’ days, where I simply threw a bunch of video clips together from
previous works overlaid with various text. It was kind of dull and I was
slightly disappointed in myself at the end of the day.
Tuesdays
brief, translate your work into another
medium, was a good one, inspiring me to create a new piece of work using
one of my old sculptures from my foundation course. I decided to film the
burning of a particular sculpture, using three different IPhones to document
the process which enabled me to create a – sort of – three channel video work. The
different videos are all moving at different speeds, you see the same journey occurring
from different angles and different clips, progressing as one separated into
three. It definitely encapsulates the feelings that I have for my foundation
work, which I’m happy about. It’s interesting, as the work that I destroyed was
centred on capturing emotions, so in creating this new work I have, in a way,
made a work about my emotions towards my past emotions. This is being
highlighted by the aforementioned differentiated clip speeds. I enjoy this very
small meta idea.
Wednesday
was another bad one; use wiki how to
learn something new and make a work with it. After creating and submitting
the work I realised that I could have made something a lot more interesting if
I had simply thought about what it was that I wanted to do for at least ten
minutes, rather than simply jumping into a thing that sounded like it would be
good. I ended up creating a gif that featured a bunch of internet memes that I
had created, slowly filling the television screen within a family home. It was
a shame, but as I say, another day, another new piece.
Day
7’s brief was make a fake, of your own
work. On this day I happened to be crawling through my old files as I had
to reset my computer to its factory settings, and discovered a video piece that
I’d created a few months ago to go alongside my film Utopian Realism. At the time I’d spent a day or so working on it
but had decided against using it for one reason or another. This time I chose to
use it, tweaking it slightly, ‘bob-ifying’ it, over-utilising certain video
effects. This worked out well, but it did feel a bit dull still. Less like fun
and more like work, albeit not a lot of work.
On
Friday, make a work in five minutes,
I decided to re-appropriate an idea that I’ve seen duplicated many times, the
speeding up of a film; allowing the viewer to watch a whole film in a mere ten
minutes or so. This is reminiscent of many pieces, in particular Douglas Gordon’s
24 Hour Psycho where he slowed down Hitchcock’s
Psycho to two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. For my piece I chose
to speed up Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
Many hated the film at the time of its release, mainly because it didn’t
actually answer any of the questions posed by the TV show. I feel that many
people at the time probably wanted to see it, without actually ‘seeing it’, so
I felt that it was the perfect film to re-appropriate for my original simple
idea. I enjoy the idea of speeding up a film, and hope to use it for a more
suitable piece in the future, thinking the connotations through a lot more as
well as making it into a bigger thing, maybe cutting together multiple films by
the same director? Turning someone’s prized collection into bitesize chunks of
data to only be enjoyed on a visual level, with the plot not being cared about.
This would work for films like Avatar
or the majority of Michael Bay’s ‘cinematic escapades’, style over substance,
aesthetic over concept. Diluting Bay’s entire film library into a five-minute visual
orgy would be interesting. An idea for a later date.
Yesterday
was a good day; with the brief being get
someone else to make you work. I chose to take this brief on a journey
through many layers of thinking. I began by having the simple idea of
purchasing a piece of ‘art’ from eBay and the order details being the work. I
slowly expanded on that by using a piece of work by Hito Steyerl Is the Internet úäCì@?ù.1HcpiÙîfê¿Dead,
a digital piece where Steyerl intentionally corrupted a found image of a
woodcut print by Utamaro, embedding one of her written texts into the image’s
source code. This glitches and degrades the original image. In the video piece
that I created, I have positioned Steyerl’s piece next to the screengrab of the
order details from a painting of an elephant that I purchased via eBay. During
the video piece, using the online app ‘Image Glitch Tool’, I attempt to
recreate the general aesthetic of Steyerl’s piece, taking away the meaning of
the work and simply focusing on how it looks, playing on how ‘glitch art’ is
primarily centred on the first layer of a given work; the aesthetics. Whilst I
was attempting to recreate Steyerl’s image, I utilised my webcam to film myself,
which I then blurred out, giving myself a segment of anonymity whilst being embedded
within the work. I’m still trying to work out why I put myself in the piece,
maybe to make the process more evident, maybe to create a classic ‘rule of
thirds’ composition or maybe to make it less evident that it’s me creating the
thing, and that it could be anyone. I think I like this third option the most,
as it furthers the point that anyone could be doing this, that there’s no real
skill in what I’m doing. The slowed down keyboard tapping accompanies the
manipulation, serving as a soundscape at times, perfectly fitting with the continuous
distortion of the screengrab. I like how it turned out and feel that it fitted
into the brief quite well, using someone else’s work, an online application that
does your work for you and an image of someone else’s painting, all coming under
the banner of get someone else to make
your work.
Today’s
brief was use a readymade/existing object
as todays work, put your own concept on it, does it still work? In response
to this I decided to create an assemblage of sorts, taking quick screengrabs of
the various windows that are constantly open on my computer whilst I’m working.
The central clip consisted of all the Google Image results that come up when
you type in ‘readymade art’, accompanied by the Google Search bar, a segment of
the final episode of House of Cards from
season 4, a slice of scrolling through my own Facebook feed and a square from writing
this blog post. Looking at myself as the readymade, or the
screen/applications/media that I interact with every day. It also takes ideas
from earlier projects of mine, surveillance and the overconsumption of various
screen-based forms. The sound experience that goes along with it is a mixture
of different House of Cards
recordings, the typing on a keyboard and Blank Banshee’s Teen Pregnancy. All part of my daily routine with various connotations
embedded within each of them.
The
rest of my time this week has been taken up by consuming the screen, using my ‘free’
time to indulge in incredibly rich video games and certain films that I haven’t
got around to watching until now.
Playing
Oxenfree was definitely an intriguing
experience, a supernatural 2.5D adventure game that follows a group of teenagers
who open a rift to an alternate dimension whilst exploring a deserted island. Throughout
the game you play as Alex, attempting to discover what’s going on whilst interacting
with the different members of your group to form unique bonds that impact the
games narrative. In Oxenfree I began
to feel connected to these characters, due in part to the well-written dialogue
that actually felt like you were having a conversation with a teenager, rather
than in Life Is Strange, for example, where all your interactions with fellow
students felt like a 45-year-old man’s perspective on how young people speak in
today’s society. This connectivity made the ‘choice and consequence’ mechanic
all the more pertinent, getting you to choose between saving Clarissa or Ren,
for example, becomes a lot harder when you’re actually invested in them as individuals.
Although this mechanic is used a lot in video games, in any of Telltale’s games
or throughout the Fallout series for
example, I feel like it actually worked well here and to the games advantage,
rather than simply embedding it for replay value alone. The art style is also
quite beautiful and unique, especially when the screen glitches when time is
being manipulated and distorted within the narrative.
Pony Island
was another video game that I consumed this week, coming under the ever-growing
banner of ‘games about games’ it describes itself as ‘a metafictional game that
has the player interact with what appears to be an old arcade cabinet game
called “Pony Island”’. As you progress through the game you are tasked with
deleting the very game that you’re playing, as it’s apparently the manifestation
of the devil itself. Like The Stanley
Parable the game seems to be having a dialogue with the participant, in a
literal way in terms of the message boxes that pop up throughout the two-hour
experience as well as in a not-so-literal sense when it’s teaching you how to
play the game within the game. To give you a sense of how the game attempts to
fuck with you, as I was playing the video game on my laptop, messages kept
popping up from Steam, enquiring whether or not my game had been ’hacked’. This
turned out to be an incredibly inventive tactic used to make me look away from
the screen, stopping me from concentrating on a certain puzzle and failing that
part of the video game. This was genius. There was another point where the game
was briefly minimised because a virus on my computer had opened a pop up ad.
There was a brief, five second or so period, where I wondered whether or not
the game was simulating this virus, or if it was just my computer having a
normal virus. Even if that’s not even possible to do, making me think that it’s
possible is an incredible feat to have accomplished. I would definitely recommend
investing two hours of your time having your mind fucked with for a mere £3.99.
I
also played a little game called Unravel
where you step into the shoes of ‘Yarny’, a small, wine glass sized anthropomorphic
creature made of yarn. The central mechanic that sees you navigating through
various environments involves the unravelling of your own body. This incredibly
dark aspect of the game, having to loose parts of yourself to continue your journey,
is never really commented on. Similar to the character of Kirby and how he ‘sucks
up’ creatures in order to gain their different abilities. This happens a lot in
video games, particularly ones designed for children, where a key gameplay
mechanic is actually devil-esque in its nature, I feel that there are definite parallels
between this and old kids tv shows where the majority of what’s being said is centralised
around sexual innuendos. It was a lovely game; but nothing more than that, with
the main mechanic becoming quite dull a little too quickly.
Beyond: Two Souls
was another piece of interactive fiction that I dipped into this week. I’ve
enjoyed the majority of Quantic Dream’s video games, Fahrenheit being a particular favourite alongside Heavy Rain. I am still yet to fully
experience the whole story, but compared to other games in the genre of ‘interactive
drama’ I feel that, at this point, it doesn’t really stand up to some of my favourites
that I mentioned in last week’s post. The breaking of a spell that was over my
past self for a while.
The
final game that I experienced this week was a beautiful game called Rayman Legends. A game I used to play a
few years ago, one that brings up various memories of how my life used to be.
It’s interesting to consider how, due to the interactive nature of a video
game, the emotions that can be conjured up are far superior to that of a film. I
feel that muscle/procedural memory is one of the factors that contribute to
this; learning to interact with the medium allows you to be more invested in
what’s occurring as you’ve given more of yourself to this active experience, rather
than a passive medium like film or television. I’m really looking forward to
seeing what people manage to do with video games in the future, the rise in VR
and AR technology being a key factor in this.
Saying
that, I did watch a few films and finished House of Cards, which was quite
incredible. I’m really enjoying how dark it’s getting, how the layers of Frank
and Claire’s marriage are slowly peeling away to show their true selves. The
last shot of season 4 eloquently sums this up for me. I really enjoyed it and
can’t wait for season 5, whenever that’s going to come out.
I
finally got around to watching Blue Velvet, a definite gap in my ‘film bank’
that I’m happy to have filled. It was a beautifully dark tale, which needs no
real introduction. I also watched Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk with Me which was quite great. Giving no answers to the
unanswered questions of the tv show, but that’s obviously demonstrated within the
first ten seconds, where we see a television being smashed into pieces with an
axe. I found ‘the scene that everyone knows’ to be incredibly disturbing and
worked so very well due to the simply awesome acting by Sheryl Lee.
I
also watched Victoria which was breath-taking.
The ‘one shot’ aspect was awesome and is definitely the thing that draws you in
most but you do find yourself slowly becoming enthralled by the cast of
characters as you slowly learn more about them through extended ‘dialogue heavy’
scenes filled with well-acted discussion. Another simply astonishing film was Upstream Color, directed by the same
person who created Primer; the
undeniably amazing sci-fi indie film of 2004. I would highly recommend everyone
to see UC, for the majority of the
film I felt incredibly uncomfortable and generally perturbed and astounded as
to what was going on in front of my eyes. I don’t want to spoil it by actively describing
what occurs during its 1 hour and 36-minute running time. I would just go and
watch it.
Alongside
this I saw Hail Caesar! Which I found
to be quite exuberant and visually appetising. Unfortunately for me it didn’t quite
have enough substance to back up what was occurring on screen and there was no
real moment where the whole thing was turned on its head, in the classic Coen brothers
style, which was a shame. Whilst I’m saying this though, I’m very aware that I thoroughly
enjoyed it. To go along with this, I watched Beneath the Planet of the Apes, whose ending was just laughable.
The whole thing was a complete downgrade of the original, which was quite
saddening.
One
of the highlights of the week was Mr.
Nobody. A film where an elderly man reflects on his life, and all the
different paths that he could have taken. With heavy Cloud Atlas vibes, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Quite a heart-warming
tale centralised around the loss of memory and what it means to be old. Really interesting.
Another sci-fi film was The Man from
Earth, a very well researched film that involves a man admitting to his
colleagues that he is in fact 14,000 years old. The bulk of the film is made up
of the man being questioned by various professionals about where he’s come from
and who he’s ‘been’ in history. It offered a really interesting, fresh look at
what a 14,000-year-old man would be like in today’s society; just a ‘normal’
person.
I
know that I watched many more, but unfortunately I’ve completely forgotten and
lost the majority of my browser history (due to having to reset my computer
earlier in the week) which is a shame. When these things happen I always feel
like I’ve lost a slice of my life, a segment of time that will only be remembered
when someone says ‘have you seen …’ and I immediately remember an incredibly
important film that I’ve missed off this list. This reliance on other people is
never pleasant, alongside the serious overreliance on my browser history. It’s
something interesting to think about in terms of artwork, something that has
come up a lot within my work and will probably continue to in the future.
During
the week coming up I want to finally start on my essay and use up this last
week at home to its full extent, experiencing a range of films and video games
before ‘serious’ work begins again. Although I’m enjoying 30/30, I feel like it’s
slowly ruining my ability to actually create work with any substance, which is kind
of distressing. I hope that in a week or so when I embark on a new project I’ll
be able to readjust back into my ‘normal routine’, whatever that means. Anyway,
that’s my week.
Enjoi.
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