2D Project Emo

6 lines, 6 emotions, 1 emo me

First, I play with ink

After playing with a lot of ink, I observe what I have created and pick textures among them that can evoke emotion.

From here on, I refine certain textures to create one I desire.

Aaaand it’s finished!

The six emotions are, from top to bottom, Adoration, Content, Shock, Resentment, Regret, and Horror.

3D Project 3 – this makes no sense – The Jabberwocky

Rube Goldberg machine, a machine where you perform a series of complex tasks to have a simple end result. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting The Jabberwocky, a nonsensical poem by Lewis Carroll. Does that mean I can make something that doesn’t seem right to go along with the theme? Hahahaha

Here is a visual interpretation of the poem. I split the poem up by stanzas and tried to emulate each scene that appears by picking up certain key words and phrases.

Beginning from the head, we have a curved slope. Simplified, the first/last stanza really just says “it’s 4 p.m. and things go round”. Hence I start and end off the machine with the metal ball going around.

Next is the warnings, followed by the description of the claws that catch. I created a sudden fall of the ball to show the immediate danger of the motion, and made a small claw on the second platform to emulate the “catch that catches”. In the third stanza, the vorpal blade comes into play. In the poem the vorpal blade is the key item which slays the Jabberwock, so I wanted it to stand out and appear soon. The vorpal blade here is a spinning fan with razor blades attached to it. It was intended to create the mysterious design and the ability to cut, which was an intended feature later in the project. Initial prototype involved the falling ball to flick off a cap which held the blades. Apparently if the fan is turned on, but you have a cap loosely put in place, the blades will not spin, so I could create a delayed activation of the blades. Certainly it seems dangerous playing with spinning blades, but I was pretty careful when handling and testing it, so I made a blade that has the cutting ability, yet stable enough to not fly off and injure someone. After the mention of the blade, the poem describes searching for the Jabberwock, hence I placed a curvy path that goes left and right to emulate the search, followed by a short fall to show a break in motion in the X and Y axis – before the Jabberwock shows up.

The dominos in play hide the face of the Jabberwock. It will only be apparent when they have fallen, thus creating the illusion that the Jabberwock finally “appears”. The final piece of the domino will hit a contraption, a band that holds the vorpal blade in place. Upon so, the blade will fall towards the Jabberwock, which is held up by simply a single thread. The Jabberwock will collapse and fall towards the ground, hitting the second ball below it, bring it into a curved path and to the end. The domino pieces which represents the head of the Jabberwock will also fall into the “home” as shown in the fifth stanza where the head was brought back.

A look at the final outcome as the Jabberwock collapses and the head falls.

Considerations: using materials such as wire to build the frame. The design was revised several times, previous models had trees and such in the scene the Jabberwock appears. While they look nice, I felt that they spoiled the immersion of the dream world that Alice (from Wonderland) enters. I decided to go with a minimalist approach and cut down things that make the work messier, and even the slopes the ball falls into paths made of only wire. I could have used cut paper rolls (which was much cheaper and easier to use) as shown in the above photo but I wanted to preserve the airy dreamlike sequence hence decided not to. Suspending the second platform in the air and actually having the ball flow took alot of work, but it works (mostly). The other easy path I cut was to have the ball move left and right only with a wall to support everything. Since it was a 3d project, I wanted to play with space and have the ball move in both the X and Y axis as it drops via the Z axis while it moves, hence the structure is formed as it looks like now.

I had quite a bit of fun during this project. It was interesting to see what I could do with a three dimensional space within a frame, and what I could do by starting simply with a metal ball. The theme of Jabberwock was also interesting as there were many ways to approach it; if I was given the same assignment again with the same theme, the final outcome will probably look different altogether.

 

3D Project 2 – An art of cryomancy and pyromancy

Project 2, to emulate an object with another. My object of choice was something rather common. It’s a paper clip.

But not just ANY paper clip. It’s a paper clip I have kept for six years.

For reference, the paper clip is almost 8cm in length. So this flexible piece of metal has more solid grip to it than it seems. It is actually feels more comfortable to hold than a pen. Back in secondary school I bought it to use as a fidget toy. I can open the paper clip up, use it as a rod, fold it into a star, fold out a edge; the paper clip can be more than just a paper clip.

How I wanted to emulate the paper clip: using ice. Why ice? Ice has an oddly large number of similarities to a paper clip. Both have an original purpose, to hold paper, and to cool objects. Both here however will be used for a different purpose, through a transformation. The paper clip can become a 3d model or shape, used for fidgeting in the hand or to observe. Ice can be molten to create water, a process which can be made visually appealing if the process is hastened… specifically by burning. Both objects that go through a transformation will also no longer be able to change back, hence here I will present the one-way transformation of ice to emulate the paper clips I obtained six years ago.

First we get ice. I tried experimenting with various colours of ice with various liquids to attempt different burning effects. The photograph above for instance, shows ice made with water and red and green alcohols. But in the end I decided to pick a green mixture which seems the most icy.

Attempts with various amounts of regular ice and mixture ice. I scattered more alcohol around the glass to have a sense of burning outside the ice; I figured it looked more visually appealing that way. Weirdly enough, I could create ice that doesn’t melt rapidly when lit, so I can take more photographs and a video.

Video link: https://drive.google.=sharingcom/file/d/1Z4BIbdGr8NYQ5TyKda0Txs19sZRdM9YR/view?usp

Sometimes the burn fades out, sometimes it regenerates. The ice is like our life; we can live it the regular manner, or we can ignite it, which may lead to interesting effects.

The project was flexible and interesting, I quite enjoyed it more than the last (my fingers were only scorched, but at least they weren’t pricked). Being able to pick a medium and direction I wanted to attempt was also nice since I could freely experiment with different mediums to create different results.

Anyways if you were wondering about the glass, I did attempt to make the glass out of ice, but molding was different and mistakes were made. Here’s the last mould I attempted to use before I decided to use a regular glass to hold the ice instead.

3D Project 1 – String Project

Project 1 was to work with strings, to create a 3d model

My thoughts on the project was that it was going to be annoying, and indeed, it was! Sewing with a needle and thread goes under the “meticulous work which is easy to mess up and undo” and “self-harm” category which I’m not a big fan of. Here, I plan to create a mythical wyvern, which will look like a hybrid between a lizard, a scorpion and a seahorse.

The first step begins with imagining the shape and drawing an outline on the plastic sheet. Then I cut it out and prepare to create the structure.

Next we  poke holes. Poke poke poke.

To give the structure more form, I begin sewing the ribs of the wyvern. The wyvern is becoming increasingly visible as I do this.

To complete the shape of how I pictured it, I used a red string to flesh out the body, the red string resembled body muscles and also gave the transculent wyvern more colour; white string which was less visible was used to bend the limbs, body and tail, this allows the wyvern to curl inwards, creating it’s final pose.

Completion!

I have mixed feelings about the project. While it was freeform, the restrictions to a sewing medium sure brought a lot of pain (emotionally and physically, needles are prickly). While sewing does create a unique since of a product, I’m not the dexterous person around, and I spend almost as much time repairing broken threads as creating new ones. I do enjoyed working on most of it, but I’d appreciate if I never have to sew another project again hahahahahahaha.

Project 3 Thinking Sequentially, Impossibilities of Being

*Will upgrade to a video rather than a gif file soon*

To start and to end the sequence with sleeping. In this project I took way more time than I should have sketching out the scenes I wanted and hence didn’t have enough preparation time to execute it. Originally the first and the last scene (right after the dream sequence) was the look almost the same, then similar to the first scene, it zooms out but to the character waking up instead and realising it was all a dream.

I wanted to play to the concept of a twist at the end, but due to the lack of execution time I had to simplify the dream sequence and make the best of what manpower I had available. It was in slightly bad coincidence the model I used had a recent breakup, hence reducing the manpower available, but I tried capture his emotions and feelings into this sequence to show how he feels.

I have mixed feelings ’bout this project. While it’s phrased to be flexible in content, the odd 90 frame restriction meant the sequence must have a slight requirement for content but we cannot fit too much into it. The storytelling prospects hence felt a bit constricted, hence I had to redraft many ideas until I got this one which could fit within 90 frames. Previous ideas involves waking up in alternate worlds, but the issue with those were that the frame count restricts the adventuring the character can do as well as they felt they lacked meaning and expression. If I had more freedom, in budget and requirements, I should be able to fine tune this further to emphasize more on the shock and impact after the character awakes and that he is still all alone.

Project 2 Text and Images – Before and After

 

Project 2! This is the food item I obtained – Myojo Mee Poh Dry

The project involves text to express the item, specifically in the form of an advertisement.

 

Here was the initial idea I proposed – Messy and vulgar, enhanced with a local touch. Here I was trying to bring out the elements of noodles rather than making a standard advertisement to sell the noodles. The elements I went with involved: Simplicity, Fast, Flexible, Convenient, Foolproof, and Subtle; these elements (except the last one) are spread across the suggestions of text.

The overall design was a mix inspiration of food magazines as well as food advertisements you might find in places like a hawker center. The food is portrayed in a rather simple manner, while words surround them, giving a bombardment of information. I tried to make it a mess, so the focus was not on the noodles, but on the text, hence to amplify the subtle element of noodles. After all, noodles is a very subtle dish by nature, the noodles are carbohydrates as a medium to make the soup or broth more filling and practical to eat.

The main issue however, is that while I try to bring out the subtle element of the noodles, I fail to present the advertising factor as they kind of contradict each other. Hence I moved on with a different design.

Revised, I decided to scrap the whole messy vulgar idea, and tried something more straightforward. The elements I decided to go with this time are the homeliness the local noodles variety present, and the portability of instant noodles. This time the noodles are presented on a china bowl with accompanying soup and chili. These objects give a sense of eating with family, eating at home. The idea I presented here is that while you might be elsewhere, for example living in a school dormitory, you can always bring these noodles along to emulate the sense of home. Since we have to have an image of the original item, I placed the photograph of the noodles at the end of the chopsticks. This makes it nicely put at the corner of the advertisement to accompany the words, as well as show that you can hold it with your chopsticks, showing the idea that it is a desired choice for a food product.

Overall the project wasn’t as “fun” as project 1 where we were more unrestricted in making whatever we want, but I do felt like I learnt more ’bout structuring text to complement and/or to compete with the image for attention, both fulfilling different possible objectives.

 

Project 1A – Strange Encounter

Final Submission

Without filters

Taking a train and waking up in a strange world? What might this exciting event bring us and who might we encounter? The world I have chosen is the “fake” world of images, which was inspired by instagram photographs. In this world, individuals may customise their body to their liking, and appearances will demonstrate their personality and capabilities. Basically, it’s a world where appearances mean everything.

The first individual (which I endearingly dubbed fboii) has the image of a male who often works out at the gym, believes he is stylish and overall acts as a hipster. I placed various body enhancements such as the muscular chest, strong arms, and even the twenty-four pack to suggest his image of being powerful, he believes working out at the gym makes him almighty and better than others. To point to others his “superiority”, he has his fifth arm (yes he has five arms) hold a photo to take a selfie while the other four pose and lift weights. To further show how he is “different” from others, I picked out a location with graffiti’d walls to get the hipster sense. The watermarks on the location are placed to further emphasize on his attempts to be at somewhere “normal people” don’t appear at. Thus fboii represents the overly egoistic male who presents so through his body.

The second individual (which I conveniently dubbed fgal) is conceptually similar to fboii, after all they come from the same world. The individual enhanced their “melons”,  upgraded their face to a barbie-like one, and even have hair with the glimmer of the galaxy. The location picked was a fake-looking hawaiian beach, this shows her ability to travel and keeping up with the trends, complete with a cocktail in hand as well as a ukulele to show the hipster/popular hybrid. The eyes on her arms show that while she flaunts her appearances, she is keeping a close look at others to see if she has been outdone as well as what impression others have of her. Thus fgal represents the narcissistic female with a competitive personality that struggles always be updated with the times.

The third individual (which I lazily dubbed fburger) shows the type of people who only takes photos of food. This particular individual deems themselves a food critic,  someone of reputation and enjoys a large variety of food of no particular style. Hence the design is a mix of food items that you might not expect to go together, for example the fruit tart placed on the bowl of ramen noodles. I tried to give this character the café-hopping hipster feel so I supplemented the design with glasses and a mustache, which also makes the individual seem more anthropomorphic and blending in as a character better to go with the other two.

The project was interesting, I got to mix and match many elements of people and emphasized on stereotypes. The freedom to modify the characters and the world setting also allowed play on whatever we wanted, so I could create a “fake” world here, rather than only creating physical and less fictional sounding worlds. This project allows us to use body and visual elements to demonstrate features of characters to be inferred despite no other information granted, which is interesting and allows various experimentation and various results to be seen. It also seems great as an icebreaker project as we get to know one another’s thoughts on what kind of characters someone can create and what they can do. Overall a very fun project.

Project 1B Paradox Final Artwork – Fun at 2 a.m. (feat. my shadow)

A continuation from the last project, we have a paradoxical image with us somewhere in it. Here I attempted to playfully hide my real location by creating various distractions in the image while I blend off into the background to hide. This image shown here was been projected to be cleaner than the physical version (which was intentionally done to make myself barely visible by the way) so I am more visible.

The first layer of paradox, is what is happening in the image. We have a person replacing the merlion, and he is breathing fire instead of projecting water as we expect. Also by comparing size and scale, he is a human of much larger size. The various other people that stand out from the crowd at the bottom also have their size and scale modified, some even in the foreground of the picture, showing less defined fabrics of space and placement. The top half of the image also depicts night and an upside-down Clarke Quay the night while the bottom shows Sentosa in the day. Some characters even seem to be interacting, such as the girl at the left cringing and backing off the flame, while others such as the dude on the bottom-right posing towards us, as if he knows we are observing them. The characters are also placed around the image, with the most blank space in the middle of the image, this is for implying there is no real “main focus” and the attention should be spread throughout, especially if you are actually looking for my location which was made less obvious.

The second layer of paradox involves me, who titled the work “Fun at 2 a.m.”. Contrary to the title, I was fairly tired and was not exactly having fun at 2 a.m. This image was taken as a reflection of me staring at a laptop screen while working on a collage to show paradox. Hence I am, in fact, the paradox.

The focus on the picture was made to be spread out as the image of me was spread over half of the screen. Thus to observe the paradox, one must open up their attention to see the big picture.

This project was overall pretty fun to play with. I know I did mention that working on it physically was not fun if I was worn out at night, but creating the concept was interesting. Personally I don’t like putting myself into art, so I cunningly thought of a means to portray myself as the focus yet not making it explicit. After all, where is the fun if everything is pointed out for you? Thus I purposely hidden myself so the class can have the first layer of fun to discover me (granted, it was pretty hard) before they get to experience another layer of fun as a explained my concept.

p.s. here is my btw if you haven’t found it 

Can you trust your memory? (updated)

For maximum effect, do pay attention to the audio while observing the images, and do not rewind to previous images before you complete viewing the entire gallery. However, you may take your time to admire each photo before moving on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post class discussion:

Additional information on the story told in the first 7 images

The pairs opened, in order:

The Fool & The Lovers

The Emperor (twice)

The Fool & The Devil

The Hanged Man & Death

The Hanged Man & The Lovers

The Devil & Death

The Fool, the main character of the story, wishes to get together with The Lovers. However such a path is blocked by The Emperor with has appeared before the two of them. As man, The Fool has no means to defying the Emperor, hence he searches out The Devil for aid. The Devil promises to grant The Fool’s wish, but at a price. The process to remove the Emperor out of the picture will be by Death. Agreeing to the deal, The Fool corrupts into The Hanged Man, which is also known as the traitor, for he has plotted to remove the Emperor. The plan has succeeded, and The Hanged Man now gets together with The Lovers. The Devil reappears however, and take his reward – the life of the pair.

The variant story told in the 9th image involves forgetting the sinister plot by The Fool, and the roles of The Emperor and The Devil being swapped, hence The Fool has been knighted by The Emperor to slay the Devil, being the hero instead. The forgotten Hanged Man fate, was left by the bed where the dream occurred, abruptly cutting off into oblivion.

Sound Art Reading Assignment

What is sound?

Sound is a form of energy that creates the feeling of hearing. Sound exists in wavelengths and can be transmitted through all three states of matter before reaching our ears to leave an audio effect on us. Humans can hear sound waves with frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, and the frequencies can be adjusted to even have selective hearing to certain people or animals. Sound can be manipulated to create music.

How has it been use in culture and society?

The most basic usage of sound in society is communication. Starting from the lungs, humans can generate vibrations through the air past our vocal cords to create sound in the form of speech, singing, crying, laughing and such. Humans make use of sound to create communication alongside writing and gestures. Sound has also been used to create music, either via the human voice such as singing, or via instruments to by producing vibrations in sound tuned to something pleasant to one’s audio senses.

What makes it an art?

Sound is always around, but to appreciate it, one must learn to listen. Like any other art form, sound requires one to actively observe to gain an appreciation for it. By manipulation of sound, we can create sensations that make invoke different emotions similar to observing literature or art performed on physical mediums. Before the 1990s sound art was a type of experimental music and before “sound art” was made a term, sound art was even viewed as an extension of written poetry rather than an art of sound.

How does advancement in audio technology affect our sense?

Sound art used to be created by voice and instruments performed, but now with advanced audio technology we have recordings of sound, convenient playback of sound, even editing of sound. But however, even though technology has made sound art more commonplace and more easily accessible, it has also made sound art too easily taken for granted. One just needs to press the play button on a device to hear the recorded and edited audio which may have taken a long time to create, yet not appreciated in the least, unlike going to an orchestra in the past. Audio technology may have dulled our acknowledgement for the sound arts, unless one truly sits down to listen, and to understand and appreciate it.