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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

 

Research Critique IV: Jon Cates ‘Bold3RRR’

It takes me a while to understand Jon Cates’ work, though from my own understanding of it, I see it as a theatrical piece of sort: specifically a monologue theatre. I am drawn to his dialogue, even if the screenshots is at first hard to understand. His spoken word is deliberately paced, and almost poetic at times “I want to reflect, I want to reflect, I want to reflect…” His inclusion of the noise and feedback sounds also contribute to the idea of this piece being a reflection of real-time: it represents the whole idea of “lagging” and how apparent it is in real-time video conferencing. I think it’s interesting he has chosen to embrace this technological error and include this in this piece because we inevitably go through such errors when engaging in these forms of communication. For example, we get that a lot in our Adobe Connect meetings in this class – such glitches are all part of what this is all about.

Another thing I’ve noted from the work is the idea of anonymity – similar to what Adriene Jenik mentions in her essay: “in virtual space, spatial and temporal bodies are masked and shrouded from view; it was fascinating to discover that shrouding ourselves instigated an emergence of people from behind their shadow online selves.” The image of Jon Cates is ambiguous and blurred, and even though we can see his screenshots and his actions on the computer, it does not offer the full picture. The images are monochromatic and so highly contrasted that they are whited out. Despite being denied of the physical identity, what is crucial is still being able to see his actions on the virtual space.

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.

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