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

View post on imgur.com

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.

Project 01 – Calendar

As I skimmed through the databanks of Wunderground, a global online weather network, I realized how important data is to us in every aspect of gaining some form of confidence in making sense of the recurring behaviors of the world around us. There are certain aspects of the project that was interesting but there were definitely some improvements I could’ve made to it to build the layers.

I Started out wanting to build layers of data to build an intricate series of interwoven lines and solely utilize that aesthetic. But I soon realize that it was far too little and there was a lack of objectivity to it and thus I wanted to embark on a direction that’s more scientific and something that has a functional purpose.

Building on the sentiments that I’ve previously felt about the nature of time as a constantly flowing, ephemeral and intangible quality, I made use of something that’s far more material and tangible which is the volume of rainfall in Singapore. I wanted to accentuate the nature of how we always like to use pieces of information from the past to determine the future. For us to have a fairly accurate weather forecast, we need tidal data, wind data and many other conditions and recurrences. However, even in data forecast, it’s never 100% due to Chaos Theory. Thus, this project gives an overview of weather conditions in Singapore for the past years and at the same time creating a series of interweaving and dancing data that creates a form of forecast on its own.

Looking at days as data blocks

An initial idea of executing the visualized data as a one-way flow with lines at the bottom signifying each individual days. (The different coloured graphs were suppose to vary in the actual outcome)

The final outcome followed the format similar to that a runic calendar that I shared earlier on. It has a sterile quality to it which I wanted and at the same time, I felt like I could’ve worked on the craft even more.

Using logos to represent different religious and customary holidays, I placed them to draw on the curiosity of whether “divine intervention” has acted on various days. Depth wise, I felt that the project would’ve been even more substantial if I collected more data. looking back perhaps in terms of decades in order to present some outcomes about the state of our climate and showing that our future could be very bleak if we didn’t do something about it.

I felt like I’ve forgone the initial art direction to the project, which was supposed to be a subtle and cryptic piece and eventually gotten everything labeled. I would say that this is something that’s a little different from what I’ve always done and stepping out of my comfort zone. Maybe I’ll execute my upcoming projects better with my intents made better known.

Back to perusing for now.

Calendar : Creative Direction

After reading up Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, I’ve gained some additional insights to time and relativity. We often regard time, the very moment that is in play right now the absolute “now” which is illuminated by a projector. The perceived “now” expires, becomes a dormant image and is labelled the “past” and the “future” gets illuminated and becomes “now” and the cycle repeats. Thus we perceive the world to operate in a one-way temporal arrow. While we always assume that this to be true because travelling backwards has not happened yet, physics indicate that it is not impossible. A cracked egg can potentially be un-cracked and spilt milk can be unspilt.

In this diagram we can clearly see the entirety of space and time which encompasses you and I sitting in our rooms typing our blog posts on OSS, the first Pyramid getting built (cliche) and the eventual heat death of the universe.

What does all these have to do with a calendar?

All that talk about linearity and time makes us think of how spacetime can be quantified within a certain framework, given how human beings always like to manage and solve things we can’t understand. We always manage to place ourselves as a bystander, an universal observer or a keeper that gets gratification from keeping everything under our control and having some sort of pre-empt to the vast forces of the cosmos. In a way, we want to be entities that are all-seeing and all-governing, the true masters of our existence through understanding.

While scientists are able to quantify and account for space and time in an orderly manner through relativity which accounts for the speed and distances between two subjects, the layman perceives time in a more psychologically driven way. This is partly due to our differences in terms of psyche and past experiences.

Time is one of the perceptions listed in our senses which is not based on sensory organs. Neuroscientists and psychologists studies indicate that human brains do actually have a system governing the perception of time which in particular is the suprachiasmatic nucleus that is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping.

In Singapore’s context, the lack of seasons can be both a blessing and a curse. The monotony that comes with the year-round heatwaves and occasion downpours can really put a ding in our ability to indulge ourselves in the atmosphere created by events throughout the year. The average person in Singapore would only hope for the monsoon to mark the end of a year.

So I mapped out once again some key points to the significance and meanings of passing a year here in Singapore. One of the ways that the majority of the working Singaporeans would choose to pass their time and making it meaningful is through work. Every day is a cycle and that cycle goes on to form an even bigger cycle. I wanted to focus on the mental manifestations of the ways people mark a year in Singapore.

CONCEPT KEYWORDS

At this point , there are various keywords that I’ve drawn out that I feel are important and crucial to my project.

-The Wet and Dry-ness of Singapore’s climate in a year.

-The dominance of digital information in Singapore.

-The Mundaneness of work culture.

-The perception of future based on past extrapolated data.

-Our perception that with less significant events unfolding throughout the years, each of the years feel shorter as we grow older.

An initial (silly? Idk) idea with the intent of creating a simple calendar that makes you work hard to use it.

CONCEPT AND EXECUTION

I used the Runic Calendar as a reference due to its format. It has this overview that’s quite similar to the conventional commercial calendar yet has this systematic approach that lets you lay out the entire year and see recurrences, patterns and allows you to draw relations between them.

I aim to create a calendar that merges rainfall datas from previous years/(months? Unsure and looking at the viability now) into a certain visual form that is comprehensive through a generative process. The calendar will be annotated with visual icons indicating important religious and national holidays. Through the visual datas, the user of the calendar will be able to extrapolate and determine the rainfall level on each day through a series of overlapping visual patterns. At face value these datas might not even be enough to predict weather without taking humidity, sea levels etc into account. But is a way of instantly granting us the ability to account for something through a more analogous approach by looking into the past to determine the future. A rather old school approach that relies on your intuition rather than current digital technology like a fortune telling graph.

As of now, I’m hoping to incorporate a textural component that improves the interactivity and in a way making it a traditional weather teller.

MOODBOARD

Alexandra Roozen – Few

I couldn’t find any explanation for the intentions of the works yet but I am intrigued by the rows of paired squares that in a way correlate with each other to create a certain depth of the overall piece. I was wondering if there was some corresponding datas being input into creating this work. The placement of the squares seemed methodical yet random at the same time, as though there’s some relationships in play.

W- Sergi Delgado

Similar to Alexandra Roozen’s work, I am intrigued by the generative look and feel of this typographic work which also does a number on your senses as well. The parallel curves are very much graph like and I’m contemplating ways that I can make use of this aesthetic.

Reflection for Museum field trip: The Time of Others

The entire journey to the Singapore Art Museum was an extremely enlightening one. The spectrum of subject matters and potentials that could spring right out of this theme can vary from the physical material realms all the way to the spiritual realms.

One of the works that intrigued me the most was Ringo Bunoan’s Endings and No Endings. The poetic intentions behind the work made me wonder about the depth of time and space that’s created behind every single book. How our brains are able to gobble up all the words and spit out images and create a time and space capsule akin to a cinematic space. Book endings are things we always work hard to get to and are goals we always aim for at the start of each reading. But the lack of events leading up to the reading renders the end point meaningless and in a sense making each ending anonymous and applicable to almost any situation. This lack of progression in reading makes us ponder upon the process of reading and our brain’s ability to process information. The lack of context impacts the ending of the story and how our brains try to decipher the new syntax of reading ending after ending.

After the museum trip, I felt immensely inspired by the peculiarity of each work and how each artist dug into the constructs of the norms and pulled out meanings from there. From here, I realized that I feel like doing something that accentuate on the cultural aspects of our current society and create a form on commentary on time and popular culture at the same time.

It was an enriching trip in the midst of the chaos caused by the massive amount of works being piled up and I certainly did feel rejuvenated in a creative sense from this.