Project 02: Dictionary – Film : Our Images

Last week, I had the idea of utilizing and integrating film into the dictionary without any direction in terms of topics. This week, I’ve finally settled down on the topics that I’ll be really interested in for my upcoming FYP. I want my work to be existential, to be about human’s capabilities for creation and destruction and how new media, in its rawest form, can be both detrimental or beneficial for our idea of what existence is about.

My transition from annex 1 to annex 2 sees a change in direction where initially, I had a bunch of categories and keywords revolving around the medium of film at face value. The meanings of the films itself eclipsed the entire idea and intention of even creating the dictionary itself. Why would I need to create a dictionary referencing films to a specific word and idea? Not the kind of intent I’m looking for. Probably been done to death already.

Throughout the week, I constantly sought inspiration from different sources and what captivated me the most was the idea of Synecdoche in linguistics. The way the word “sails” refers to the entire boat and so on. Then I was thinking, is there a way to create a synecdoche of humanity without becoming minimalistic in a way that the meanings , feelings and auras are lost.

I somehow stumbled upon the information about Voyagers 1 and 2, the Pioneer exploration ship and how Carl Sagan was involved in the creation of very specific artifacts to represent humanity as a whole.

This below is from the images on the Pioneer Plaque on board of the 1972 Pioneer 10and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.

The symbols on the top left are hydrogen atoms and the size of humans in relation to the spacecraft are explained.

Sounds on the Voyager’s Golden Records. I think the current year’s graduation show promotional materials are inspired by this.

The pictures that were put on the voyager spacecraft. If the human race manages to kill itself, this is the only thing other life in the universe will know about us. This would be the imprint we leave on the entire universe.

Voyager Media

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After going through all of these, I felt like the logical thing for me to do is to use films to represent us. Majority of films are our worlds replicated in an idealistic way (or the other way round) and allow us to dive deep into that sort of fantasy for escapism . However, there are many truths in relation to real life that are inescapable. Our destructive and creative capabilities are what make us human and through film footages, I hope to create an experimental video collage of films addressing those ideas. In a way, it will be a visual dictionary of human existence.

Current ideas about deliverables,

1)Experimental Film Collage,

2)A booklet for dissecting the video

Will keep brainstorming to float the idea better.

The Library of Babel : A library of every possible combination of words and alphabets

This is simply amazing

You can go ahead and try entering your name into it and it’ll be in a specific section, chamber, wall and volume of a book that’s not generated. That means if you come back and check on the same page again, your name will still be there. It’s the universe in this library.

figuratively

The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence – in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ books.

Project 02 – Dictionary direction – Film Dictionary

For this project, I’m looking to dive deep into films to create a visual dictionary. With the list of specific words that I have chosen, I seek to find movies that are associated with the words and bring out new meanings through dialogues or objects. So far I’m still looking for methods that are further than appropriation and looking to draw out various elements in films that are not face-value and details that are usually overlooked.

The examples below are some that I’m interested in. They have successfully compiled a series of recipes that are unique to the individual films that they are representing. Food and drinks are some of the things that we tend to overlook in films in this case. However, they can easily encapsulate the aura or spirit of the film. In this case, we often associate Martini Dry with James Bond and White Russian to the laid back attitudes of The Dude in The Big Lebowski.

http://cocktailsofthemovies.com/