moving img + layers

Lately I keep thinking about how the installation will come together. Working a bit on each aspect of my project, I realised that they shouldn’t exist as separate outcomes. I wanted to see how I could fuse both digital and print together. I also hope I can set up my work early so that I can work in situ. I really want to put things up as I go and rearrange them.

I played around with the projector in the VC lab and layered some animated collage against my process book.

Photo 14-3-16, 2 07 37 PM Photo 14-3-16, 2 07 40 PM

What I wanted to do was to make the animated collage a part of the giant map that I am doing and see how I can do away with viewing the ‘live data’ part of my work on the computer and incorporate with the big map and the blog archive.

moving collage 2

moving collage

Some gifs I made in attempt to capture the moving images against paper. I really love it, it makes the work come alive in such an exciting way. I want people to be able to immediately immerse themselves in this installation space of mine and my hybrid processes of making my work. Like I was saying in my previous post, I really wanted to see how I can go for a tactile approach to digital media. Which brings me to the next part of this post…

Photo 15-3-16, 9 51 14 PMPhoto 15-3-16, 9 51 20 PMPhoto 15-3-16, 9 51 23 PM

I made a prototype to show how I am putting together my big map, connecting all the concepts existing in my work. The elements of the map is set against my blog archive:

  • collages that I put together to reflect virtual nostalgia.
  • collages are connected using pink “branches” to the entries that are colour coded.
  • coloured entries are part of the database that I’ve been building and collecting on Google Sheets

Hopefully I am able to project the animated gifs on the wall space. Alternatively, I am considering installing iphones or ipads on the wall to display the animated work.

Lots of ideas going on this week… hope to share all on Friday.

tactile approaches to net art and aesthetics

One of the key things I want to explore through my visuals is to find the sweet spot between tactile art making and digital art. I’ve saved a collection of images to my Pinterest.

KEYWORDS

Throughout 2015, I was a little obsessed about finding a balance between making words and pictures. I feel that they have always been very separate processes. In the last few months, I think I’ve started to find a way to fuse them together. These are some of my thoughts and reasonings behind my visual output. I am paying close attention to how these areas are linked.

These are some works I found online by a Melbourne-based artist Rashee:

2_2_670 1_670 1_670-1 3_670-1 2_670 2_670-1 3_670 1_1_670

Rashee uses graffiti, painting and drawing to create artworks. His imagery is borrowed from system errors. What I like about his work that he takes a little inspiration from his borrowed imagery and let it expand into an abstract piece of shapes and beautiful mark-making. As a standalone piece, it is beautiful. It allows you to see the patterns that exist in these errors as marks made by the computer in an automatism fashion.

Final Project Update 2: Methods/Setup

Previously I was working on collecting screen recordings and thinking about how I can make use of the inbuilt screen recording function on Quicktime to capture my working process. I was quite comfortable with the approach, until I started using Periscope more after the micro-project we did on it a few weeks ago. I enjoy using Periscope quite a lot, because the function of Periscope addresses the “live broadcast” aspect of the project.

As discussed with Randall, I will be incorporating both Periscope and the screen recordings as part of my project. My work process is active both online and offline, so I think it will be necessary to include both aspects of it, rather than limiting myself to one channel. The next phase of my project will look at how I can incorporate both Periscope and screen recordings. So I might use a split screen function for this or something that allows me to screen two types of broadcast. Periscope videos can be viewed online, so there won’t be an issue for me to screen my live broadcast together with my on-screen process.

I would call my project a work in progress of a work in progress. The process of making my work is important and I enjoy opening up my process to others. I don’t think the nature of my work is very obscure, that the concept would be difficult for others to grasp, but I sometimes struggle with explaining my work because I think of my work as a big mind map: there are separate ideas that are linked with each other. For example: writing > illustrating > collecting > remixing. By broadcasting my process, I am highlighting each little concept as I work on it by actually showing (instead of explaining) my work.

As mentioned in my last project update, I find it useful to incorporate the use of Periscope because of the interactive elements of the app. I like the ongoing, immediate response from my audience although I haven’t figure out how to reply to comments live. It’s a bit tricky anyway since I’m drawing. I told Randall about this and he suggested that I can communicate with them via paper: I’ll just write my response down on paper so they can see it. I think I might do that as part of the work.

Neopets Retrospective

 

I normally talk about movies and cartoons from the previous decade but I feel it’s time that’s time to discuss something that’s more  exclusive to the 2000s, and that’s the popularization of the internet. I know it’s been around since the 90s, but back then it’s mainly used for pornography and black market goods. I know that’s still the main use to many but as the 2000s decade was progressing, all these new websites were coming along, many of which was for social networking that wasn’t something most kids were going into, so what kids really had then was this wonderful browser-based animal RPG called Neopets. It’s where I went onto the internet when I was young. Neopets was probably riding off the super popularity/success that was Pokemon. Neopets was a site where we could have virtual pets, and there was a large world there that we could do quite a bit in… it was just a quirky early internet site made for college students…

A transcript from the video which I found earlier today about Neopets, and I want to write a bit about it as I think it’s a good starting point/back story to the virtual part of my project.

I think Neopets.com is the virtual equivalent of a physical childhood play thing for some people my age. If you asked them what is their earliest internet memory, perhaps it will be Neopets. Like Pokemon, Neopets is made up of fictional world that is richly inhabited with creatures, items and many more. I didn’t own a GameBoy when I was a child, but once in a while when I meet my cousins, I would borrow their GameBoy and play Pokemon on it. We would take turns playing it and while it was quite fun, I never fully experience the fun of being a Pokemon trainer. But I had a computer at home and my cousin got me onto Neopets. I became so obsessed with it, and I was absolutely enchanted by this rich world. That was in 2004 when I was ten years old.

Anyway I could go on about why I loved Neopets so much, but it is quite embarrassing and I remembered being called a ‘Neopets freak’ in primary school, and it’s not the main idea of this entry… But what I eventually took away from my Neopets-crazed days was learning how to code stuff. There was a page on the website that taught users basic CSS and HTML (things couldn’t get that complicated on a web browser then anyway), which they could apply on their user profiles to beautify it. Looking back, I thought this was a very interesting way to get users to personalize their profiles. I’m not sure what was the reason behind encouraging players to use coding to change their colours of the text and add web links. As a young girl, I was drawn to making my user profile pretty and stuff, so I had to learn these basic tips and I think that really got me interested with web pages and web design. I didn’t have a topic that I was interested in, so I dedicated most of the web pages I made to my dog. I took pictures of my dog and put them on the web page, and accompanied the photos with stories about her. neopetshtml

Anyway, I got really carried away making all these web pages. But it was all in good fun, and I eventually quit playing Neopets, moving on to making more of these webpages for good.

I wish I had screenshots for all these stuff. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to embark on the virtual part of my project. The Internet is brilliant, and with it, we are able to keep track of data. I quoted Deyan Sudjic previously about the immortality of data on the virtual reality, but I sometimes feel that paradoxically, all of these data is quite ephemeral, as objects of memory. They are more fleeting than physical things: a piece of Post-It someone left for you, or a piece of jewellery your aunt gave you. The concept of time and relevance on the Internet is perceived differently than in reality. Once something is updated, and new things come along, you can’t really find an old version anymore. Things get old quickly on the Internet. Servers and domain spaces have a time limit. My old websites can never be retrieved again because the free web hosts I were using were either gone, or were developed into something else. I tried to keep backups of my artworks on the Internet on a thumb drive, but I lost it ages ago. Amongst various attempts of rebooting my virus-infected computer also leads to the loss of data over the years. What I have now is my blog, my Internet journal. Even the media I upload have a shaky, unpredictable life span. Old pictures from 2005 cannot be retrieved, because the servers have died. I thought my blog would be the most appropriate thing I can use to talk about this ephemeral nature of Internet memory, because I have been using my blog for a long time, and given it’s time and space on the virtual realm, it is quite a relic. The rest of my Internet ventures have been very short-lived, relevant for the time that it was popular.

Neopets’ rich fantastical world also retains the nostalgic and innocent quality of childhood playthings, albeit on a digital space. When it became really popular back then with children, it was labeled as a website with ‘sticky content’ that got children to spent hours and hours per week on it (children like me). Comparatively speaking, the effects of Neopets on young people is nothing compared to websites like Tumblr and applications like Instagram, both of which are used widely by many young people. Tumblr is also a rich world full of content pertaining to real-life and popular culture. It is a mass Internet media of unfiltered content, which can be a good and bad thing. For example, pornography .gifs are a popular thing on Tumblr. Skinny inspiration is also popular on the website.  I mean, I’m no prude or anything, but I find it quite worrying that such content are so easily accessible to anybody. Along with the few other popular social websites, it generates and feeds a culture that thrives on these images for envy and jealousy. Tumblr’s (in)famous endless scrolling function means that you’re constantly, forever, addicted to this stream of content.

 

dictionary mindmap

KEYWORDS

 

Here’s all my keywords arranged in the main ideas that I want to explore in my dictionary project and my FYP. I’ve given a title to summarise this whole mind-map and concept which I call “The Double”.

the double

The ‘double’ refers to writing and illustrating, two halves that make up my main practice as an artist. Writing and illustrating have always existed as separate processes for me and not processes that complement each other. I would like to combine both processes in my body of work for FYP and the dictionary project as I’ve never done it before.

This idea of the double also refers to duality and opposites, which is the sub-concept in my project. The process of writing and illustrating yields different ideas. In the mindmap above, I’ve categorised the keywords that come to mind when describing my illustrations and my writing. As you can see, they are very different. My illustrations are all part of a world that I create, often fantastical in nature. They are colourful and elaborate and I would like my illustrations to be appreciated for their aesthetics and techniques.

As an illustrator, I’m keen on exploring femininity. Most of my works are female-centric, they focus on the female figure and the emotional aspect of what it is like being a girl. There is a lot to explore about the female figure. She is an embodiment of a concept, a persona, and she is a form to be studied and admired. They are also colourful, full of patterns, and they are generally more fun.

I like to think that my words exist in black and white: topics and issues that I talk about in my writing come through more literally. I write constantly, and about the things that I think about and my responses to situations around me. Hence, these things aren’t made up, they are all real and much unlike my drawings. My writing is all part of an endless personal narrative that documents my experiences and an examination to how all of these contributes to my being, both as a person and as an artist.

outcome

‘Outcome’ is the list of keywords I would associate with the final outcome of my work, be it for the dictionary project or the FYP. It encompass all that is between “everything” and “nothing”. In my earlier entries on this OSS site, I’ve referenced a quote Paul Arden quite a few times:

The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. To replenish, to give away, the more you give away, the more comes back to you.”

Most, if not all, of the content that makes up this body of work is from my personal archive of words and pictures, from when I was a child, through my adolescent years, and finally now. The outputs from this archive is a form of purging for me. To challenge myself to let go of old ideals, and recreate again.

The keywords in this column are the expected goals I want to achieve with the outcomes of this entire project.

alternatives

This column is a pairing of keywords which are not necessarily opposite in nature, but describes my own alternative responses to some of the issues that are apparent in my work.

absence > presence
resolve > repress
longing > certainty
excess > reduction
resentment > reconcile
belief > non-belief
embrace > eradicate

macro > micro

The events listed in the micro column would make up the events listed in the macro column, and in turn will form the ideas listed in the methods column.

on pixels

ttttremix1 ttttremix2 ttttremix3 ttttremix4 ttttremix5 ttttremix6 ttttremix7 ttttremix8An ongoing series of collage made for the dictionary project.

My work revolves around picking up the trash and debris that is feelings, and rework them into something that’s worthwhile. A presentable melancholy, an accessible darkness.  It’s time to pick them apart and give them a new lease of life. Melancholia and it’s friends are like glitches. Remixes, edits and filters rework these glitches and help assimilate them into normality.

glitches.remixes.edits.filters

As a large part of my work derives from my participation in the virtual, digital space, I’m also looking at glitch art, and digital manipulation as ways of presenting my content. A glitch is defined as a “a short-lived fault in a system and often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot.”. I’m treating this definition in a metaphorical manner in relation to the process of blogging and writing in journals. These accounts are my way of dealing with negativity and issues, and eventually they exist as evidence that indeed, “this too shall past”.

To quote Franz Kakfa “One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.”

Hence, I’d like to think of the issues I’ve blogged about as glitches, as transcient matters.

Digital manipulation had been a constant method of my art-making. In these series of collages, I’m combining real collages scanned from my physical journals, and reworking them digitally to create more layers of symbols and images. The addition of  the planets, for example, is an allusion to early Internet art, part lo-fi, part ephemera. I’ve also distorted certain parts of the images and increased the colour information drastically, creating highly saturated areas of colours. This produces a “glitched” effect and is also symbolic of the intensity and saturated nature of my journals and blog.

The whole process of digital manipulation in these collages began first with an image scanned from one of my journal.

Image (33)Image (50)

Again, these whole idea of collaging, remixing and applying “glitches” to these images is a way to re-present melancholy, a performative way of acknowledging the temporal nature of these issues, and above all, a kind of celebration.

I will be adding text to accompany these collages.

That’s all I have for now.

#wip

 

life is a process journal

archive10 theday1 theday2 theday3 theday4 theday5 theday6

Saving pdfs of my archive, month after month, year after year. As you can see, it takes quite a few hours to do so, perhaps because I stopped many times along the way to take part in some predictable reminiscing.

While combing through my entries, I also found a handful of entries throughout the year, this is just about my all time favourite poem by david levithan (from the book ‘the realm of possibility’) it’s a well-thumbed book of mine, opened so many times to this poem, that flipping open the book takes me straight to that page. I believe I have more entries than these.

Just realised the book is also currently in my bag which I’m rereading for the millionth time, on my way to school. I never get tired of it.

why

What is the basis of my project?

The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. To replenish, to give away, the more you give away, the more comes back to you.

– Paul Arden

I’m quite a hoarder. I write, I obsess, I feel. Doing this project is a way of purging and releasing old hangups. To not become stale.

teenage grime

IMG_9515 IMG_9527 IMG_9529
a really short weekend, burned from looking through my physical journals and taking some photos. going to leaf through these books briefly and maybe sieve out some ideas for my final, or anything, really. i thought about the term “tags” and what randall packer said about “tag cloud”, perhaps that could be something. i think with this project, my material is really endless and heavy, and i could go so many ways.

+

some stuff that i wrote some time ago from my blog, that may be useful for research and this project on archiving and remembering time. thoughts about the process of memories, blogging and keeping a journal.

spent the weekend dreaming again. it was terrible. i don’t know what i am thinking man. i quickly made a few pages of a new zine last night, because the thought of you is too terrible. it is called “letters to you in Arial”. i made it because i imagined that if i had a typeface to carry the spirit of my writing, I would use Arial. i wanted to hide behind Arial because it is used on many boring letters you do not want to receive. bills and admin stuff. and handouts in school. you don’t know the writer. oh but it is ok. does not matter.

Thought about reviving my tumblr and posting art related things there. Keeping a blog is effort. Keeping a picture blog- more effort. I guess it is why, year after year, I am able to blabber incessantly on this page. It is far easier to write. But then, I also have feelings to account for. feelings often need to be expressed in words, rather than pictures. For me at least.

Realised I have been blogging for 10 years. How very long. And how very whiny. Perhaps. I am happy that there are little pictorial documentation of my teenage life, as discussed previously… I was an ugly teenager. Like damn ugly and fucking awkward. Yes a fair percentage of us all had been awkward to a certain degree, but mostly this side to them shed away after a while and suddenly they just become average people. Normal. They just breezed through this awkward phase to become this completely nondescript character. I really don’t know how I am still not pass this stage. Am I ? I really don’t know. Very sad. But anyway, I’m glad these written words are all that is left about teenage me. It would be difficult to paint a picture of me with these dark pieces of writing if you don’t know me. Thank goodness.

collecting data

today i’m compiling my archive with PrintFriendly, a really useful tool to simplify the data on my blog page. it’s going to be a tedious affair to collate the amount of data on my blog, having to manually convert each page to a pdf format, so that i can manipulate the content. i’ve tried all sorts of nerdy stuff including exploring the ‘export’ function on wordpress, but the result is an incomprehensible mass of codes.

so this is the first step in gathering material for the outcome of this project. i’m definitely considering the idea of long-form storytelling.

collectingdata2