Final Year Project #05 Project Update

After meeting with Prof LP, there is a few question that I would need to find out to make my project direction clearer:

  1. Why do I use devices? 
    Because device is tangible object, its a physical thing that we can interact with. Although screens is also an object but the interaction are display it did not provide a physical, touchable and tangible interaction.
  2. Why am I doing this? 
    Capture different kind of reaction by different kind of people.
    Experiment or study of human behaviour?
    BUT WHY?
  3. What I am going to do with the photos?
    Create a conversation?
    Making it into gif? Showing each authentic reaction of individuals.
    Process of Action[device] —> Reaction [Viewer’s reaction]
  4. Am I getting reaction or expression? 


    After looking into the words, I realise reaction is more towards an instant responds while express was describing the look on someone face that convey an emotions. The direction I am going for are more towards reaction, the instant respond of the viewer. Even it is a slight raise of eye brow are also a reaction respond.
  5. Why reaction? 

I was actually quite stuck with my idea and I begin to research some research paper.

  • Some emotional state may be displayed by different expressive action such as facial gestures or body posture.
  • Unintentional Transmission of affects across individuals highlight the intimate correspondence between perception of emotion and expressive motor reaction.
    [unseen facial and bodily expression trigger fast emotional reaction 2009]
  • Emotions are intense, relatively short-term affective reaction to a specific environmental stimulus.
    [The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior 2002]
  • Behaviours and ideas are spread by copying and imitation.
    [Evolution & Social behaviour  philosophy of biology 2014]
  • Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal & opposite reaction

After all these, I felt i should narrow down to the core of my project and brunch out and strengthen it along the way. I would put aside the part where taking photograph of the view and concentrate on the reaction:

Using devices to create reaction from the viewer.

Why reaction? 

When the viewer interact with my devices and when they have reaction = they are in the present, being there with me. They might not realise it but by giving reaction they are living in the present and changing themselves from a viewer into a participant.

Final Year Project #02 Research

I think this is quite interesting where they uses the detection on the device to triggers the sounds. It makes the users move around to interact with the artwork which I felt its a different experience.

Maybe I could hang my camera this way for more feasibility.

In this artwork the photographer are portray in digital while also directing the model to move to the correct place for the photoshoot.

Using kinect to track the view’s position and react to the picture, just like they are right there at the frozen moments.

Melting could also be a way to suggest my idea of deteriorating memory.

This is my favourite project out of the all where it includes a sense of humour. I laughed out when I When both phones are on video call, this machine will starts to turn from slow to fast. It reminds me when both party held hands together and starts to turn in circular motions. Yet, now in a digital side.

Final Year Project #01

 

After the first meeting the feedback given was:

  1. Have a clearer direction and justify the problem
  2. Refine on the title
  3. What is the difference of camera in the olden days and now?
  4. How can you take photo in art form?
  5. Research about assembly line metaphor
  6. Capture of feelings / we feel something every seconds
  7. Simplicity

 

I went on to research more in photography, two most prominent book that stands out to me was 100 Ideas that changed Photography by Mary Warner Marien and A Matter of Memory, photography as object in the digital age by Lisa Hostetler.

Points that I find it interesting

  • The camera obscura, projecting the real life into a dark room through a small holes. Sometimes artist make it a live movie theatre where there is moving figures and active skies
  • In the 1850s people believe that the Daguerreotype possess unnatural powers, such as able to cast spells, able to reveal the moral character of individuals and even bringing a token of the dead hopping the daguerreotypist would conjure up the spirit.
  • Making digital photographs weakens memory by Dr Linda Henkel, from Fairfield University. It will impact our ability to recall and understand the past.
  • In Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, stated that the studium is the general cultural context that one perceive in photograph. There is a famous photo photo depicting Barthes’s mother at age of five who she died shortly before Barthes wrote the book. The image, Winter Garden Photograph reminds him the passage of time and he explains:

    “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium; period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.”

  • Photograph freeze moments of life of an individual in order to ensure their remembrance.
  • The tendency of deleting photos instantly after we create. We might missed some valuable images that will be useful next time.
  • Photos as tangible objects, it will turn old and yellowish. Something not permanent. It charge with historical, emotional and rhetorical values. While photos appear on screens is forever the same.
  • Transformation to visual information draws attentions.The difference between the past and NOW:
  • Record purposes for scientist to take photo and go back to research more about it or explore the places that is unreachable / cameras is more common nowadays we take photos for record purposes as well
  • printed on paper / appear mostly on screen

I draw out the points that stands out to me and narrowing down to 2 points:

Making Digital Photographs Weakens Memory

I though that this is really an interesting topic to touch on especially in today’s society. I am a living example that overly depend on camera to help me capture what I suppose to remember. Excessively capturing would also affect on personal experience, preventing one to enjoy what is happening in front of them.

  • Impairs memory by disrupting attention engagement
  • Offload the information automatically in a way assumes that it will be available later.
  • Expecting camera to remember things for us

 

Ideas: Computers Remembers Better Than Us

Placing 3 cameras around the exhibition when the programme detected faces it will be capture. The photos will be flashing in my booth in small screens play with the ironic of computers remembers more than us.

Also there is a pin hole with a display of a pair of eye looking and blinking. They can open it to look though with another pair of eye looking at them. At the same time they will be recorded as another pair of eyes. It was to mimic the computers are always watching us.

 

Photos as Tangible Object 

Nowadays most of us will stores our photographs in the cloud or hard disk. However, photographs that are printed has a different values where its tangible and it is not permanent. It changes over time and its there to remind you about the event. Yet, in today’s life photographs that are easily accessible, seldom being taken out to look again. As a result the value as compare to printed photographs are vary.

 

Feedback from second discussion:

  • Let them experience it so they will realise it.
  • Create scenarios?
  • React in the present?