Month: April 2018

experimental interaction // final project

5- minute Video:

Members: Celine, Azizah, Hazel, Tanya, Karen


For our project we were told to choose a location, and then through the third space, incorporate elements of Do-It-With-Others and glitch. We immediately thought about using food for the project, because really, food is the best thing. Through a Facebook page, we communicated with several of our friends and family outside of ADM, asking them to help pick out a ‘recipe’ that our ‘chefs’ (Tanya and Karen) had to prepare for customers that wanted something ~*NEW*~ to eat. In a dilemma, our chefs decided to get ingredients recommended by people online (one ingredient per person), from the North and the East. We would then assemble this new dish in the West.

(N)orth + (E)ast = (W)est

And thus this N.E.W dish would be born from the help of ten or more people over the internet, commenting on the live and collaborating with one another to make a whole new recipe, while us as the curators, would help execute it for them.

Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Good-Enough-to-Eat-436813933437383/?ref=bookmarks

 

The glitch first started when we would tell them to give us anything as an ingredient, including inedibles. Our end goal would be something that ‘looked good enough to eat’, so as long as it worked on a plate and could be put into your mouth, it was an ingredient.

Some glitchy ingredients we got were: Cotton buds, condoms, rubber bands, straws, chalk, candles, white acrylic paint. Someone also asked for some My Little Pony toy. Basically these items weren’t in any way edible, but they could be manipulated in a way that would make them look edible.

For example: white paint as a salad dressing on pear, or straws/rubber bands being used as noodles.

Cooking utensils were also not actual cooking utensils. We used penknives instead of knives, and a cutting mat instead of a chopping board.

The idea of mixing actual food and inedibles was a glitch too, and we were extremely excited to see what our audience would ask us to do.


We separated the group work accordingly:

Pre-Production
Logistics/to buy food: Azizah (NORTH), Hazel and Tanya (EAST)

Production
Cast (chefs): Tanya and Karen

Facebook Live Commentator + video: Celine

Camerawork for documentation: Azizah and Hazel

Post-production
Video Editor: Celine

Assistance (direction, music, etc.): Azizah, Hazel and Tanya

Azizah is behind the camera HAHA.


Pre-production was asking our friends for an ingredient. We would assign around two to three people per group member and ask each person to give ONE ingredient. The group would then buy the necessary ingredients stated, from their specific locations (North or East). This was done a day before filming.

The following day, we would ask our audience for about thirty minutes of their time to watch our live on Facebook. It was seemingly like a cooking show, where there was a long table with the foods displayed. The chefs would be behind this table, and I would show them from afar, and then closer to show how they were ‘cooking’ with the ingredients. I was basically the person encouraging the audience and interacting with them the most directly, while announcing what the comments said to the chefs.

During this thirty minutes, our chefs would be panicked at the start, asking our audience to quickly conjure up instructions based on the various ingredients seen. The comments first came in slow, but more and more people came in eventually, and as people got more comfortable trying to tell the chefs what to do, their requests got more daring.

Many of them also used this space to talk to their friends who were the groupmates, which I found really interesting. I relayed these messages to the chefs, and it was an interesting conversation. Some others, who were not close to the chef, would comment on the ongoing process of the dish.

One problem I faced during the live was that not all the comments would show on my phone. Some comments only appeared via computer, and I was informed of this through Azizah, where some of the more creative comments were. Although we did not manage to finish everyone’s recipe instructions, the ones I did manage to read did make an amazing dish nonetheless.

I realised that I could have used a split screen function that we learnt in our earlier projects to show two things happening at the same time (since there were two chefs), but I also felt that that might have been too jarring to the viewers.

I found that this project was reminiscent of one of my earlier projects (micro-project 2): It’s Storytime, where my group and myself would have various rules/guidelines (ingredients, in this project, although it was also chosen by our audience) and everyone could write two sentences to continue a narrative (make a dish). We tampered with this project however, by putting a third space where everything had to be ‘filtered’ through the third space, and then processed through the hands of the chef, which I thought was a pretty neat touch.

locale // process

I started out looking through the millions of pictures I had of various cats I stalked, focusing on a few more eccentric kitties that caught my eye.

I also gave them names extremely stereotypical English names, thinking of possible news scandals that would normally catch the eye of people who read gossip magazines.

One of my bigger problems when starting this project was using photographs — I usually draw my projects from scratch. Having photos added into the composition was a limitation to me, especially with how cluttered the entire zine would look with the kind of aesthetic I wanted. I had to work around all the colours, and I realised that I couldn’t work directly on the images on InDesign (there was no editing function). I decided to work with an A3 canvas with bleed on Photoshop, and plan a base with it. I placed the .psd file in InDesign and used the Update Link option to constantly check if my edits would fit into the zine.

I also found it very hard to plan ahead for this project, and decided to just go ahead and grab some photos of the cats, plop them onto photoshop and start playing with the colours. Some of the effects I went with was relevant to our semester 1’s Forrest Gump project, where we played around with effects to change/filter the images.

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I decided to go with a more saturated effect with the colours, to give an obnoxiously loud and surreal feel to the cat images. The fact that I was personifying cats into a human gossip magazine was pretty weird already, so I wanted to make it feel a little trippy.

In my initial consultations I realised that visual hierarchy was very important in making this zine: it was important to lead the viewer’s eye to where you wanted them to look at first. Words also shouldn’t be too big, because the viewer would be overwhelmed by the text.

Boxes and texts did not have to fit the horizontal and vertical lines and could be diagonally placed, which gives it a bit of personality that someone might focus on. I slowly tried to work around creating a hierarchy with all these cats.

Without realising that my files were constantly overrid when I updated links, I did not take many work in progress pictures. But when I was done thinking up content for my various gossip stories, I had this:

 

I realised at this point that this way wayyyy too red. The colours I used were all warm, and when asking a friend for their opinion, they admitted that nothing really popped up since everything was just warm.

I went to print a black and white version for Week 12 consultation and forgot to take a picture so now its all messed up when I was moving stuff from hall to home WHOOPS.

I went to consult Shirley and she mentioned about how uppercase letters gave the viewers a harder time to read. She also told me to change my Monaco font. HAHA.

I’M SORRY IT’S SO UGLY HAHAHA I COULDN’T SAVE IT @ THE TIME.

Other things Shirley mention that I could ‘cross boundaries’ of pages, rather than stick to objects and text fitting into one page. She helped me make my text boundaries neater as well, and I changed the font to something else (Krungthep). I realised that InDesign automatically makes the fonts all uppercase. No wonder.

ALSO I printed it at the ADM library. But for some reason the images were not aligned, and when I was cutting them the back side would be affected. I also found out I’m not good with penknives. Nor rulers. Nice. NTS: print extra.

So came the point I had to figure out how to make my text pop out from my background. I decided that I wanted to keep my warm yellow texts and reddish themed cats, so I had to change the background instead to compliment the various objects.

I decided to go with a light blue. It helped make the reds, pinks and yellows stand out better.

I kept with a muted yellow/orange on the right to show the serene, calm nature of that cat (Nathan), but followed Shirley’s advice to make the title bigger. It then lead to the next title, where the box is a super alarming red. I tried to go with a title that was very click-baity (I know, internet jargon, but that was the only word I know), like ‘3 hints that ____’ or ’25 ways he shows you love <3′.

I made this the highlight page of the zine, to reflect my coverpage. Like a highlight story in a sense. I actually like how this page turned out, because there was a black cat and I really like black cats. He looks very suave. I called him Ray. There’s the huge blaring title of WHAT IS UP WITH YOU JANET???? With a big Janet picture (which Shirley told me to make bigger and have it cross to the other side of the page) and followed by a lead of darker images of the very Handsome cat. I also tried to create a little rumour box where I put the final text, ‘Or is she cheating on him?’ Which I think is a pretty cool effect, like it was a rumour just ~*passing by*~.

In this page I gave it a chiller sort of vibe, explaining the life of a cat I named Uncle Lucas, who prays under a tree. The colours flow in a less jarring way, and they blend together better rather than stand out like an obnoxiously sore thumb. (Not that I assume that the other pages were obnoxiously sore, just more… outstanding, I would say.) I also placed a mini map to find various important staff of this ‘company of cats’ that you can find. Because they do not technically have contacts, I just gave tips on where or how to approach them, because that was what happened when I first did.


For a final touch, I added little pawprints, as if a cat decided to stand on my zine. I was actually tempted to go there and get them to autograph their pawprints. But I didn’t want to risk holding their paws to clean them and get scratched. Guess I’m pussy. /: This will have to do.

I went to print the zine and realised that the font was changed, although I was fine with what turned out, and because I have no money I’d rather not reprint since it wasn’t a major mistake.

I also have extremely clumsy hands and bad rep for cutting things so it took me 3 tries to get the zine to resemble a proper book.

Besides the wrong font (that still looks okay? I’m just really angry at myself) everything looks good and I am satisfied with how it turned out. To make myself happier I’ll probably go to the printers at North Spine to try again. I realise InDesign hates me with a passion but I’ll try to work with it in the future.

UPDATE: I tried North Spine and they only had normal A3 paper but I still tried anyway, and they have the same alignment issue (the dude told me to align my files according to their machines I’m like ??? okay sure).

The colour was also varyingly different, the sunshine plaza one looked way nicer. I think something I could have learnt from this was that I didn’t need a thick paper for this project (something I always usually did with my other projects), and I needed to always convert my fonts to objects (I learnt that I could do this from Tanya, who learnt it from Shirley, and I still don’t know how to do it but I learnt that you could do this).

Notice the small text difference!!!

My takeaways for this entire project would be that wow I can make zines now. I wish to make a zine with my illustrations in the future, and this was a good first step for myself. Especially to learn how to make the file suitable for 2-saddle stitch. I also had a lot of fun stalking cats for hours. I’m going to give the zine to my friend’s grandma because she let me have dinner at her house every time I went there after cat-stalking, and she never knew there were that many cats in the area. Ahma don’t worry I found them all for you.

 

locale // marsiling research

I decided to go to Marsiling for my location.

In my initial plan, I had intended to go to Woodlands Town Garden, as it was recently closed down. After taking pictures for a few hours and heading to a friend’s house nearby, I realised that the neighbourhood was full of cats.

I decided to go on a second trip to fully understand their personalities. They were all very different and in my head I tried to personify them into company stereotypes.

Along with that I decided to give “stats” to each cat, for how they reacted to their surroundings.

There was a common rumour that all cats liked to be patted on the butt just before their tail. It was very wrong with the cats in Marsiling. Only a quarter of the cats allowed me to touch them, and only a quarter of those cats liked the butt-patting.

My initial idea on the get-go was to make a tabloid magazine on my assumptions of the cats. To basically create a super obnoxious looking zine that represented the whole ‘Company of Cats’.

My other ideas were to make use of the stats that I have found, and build a fantasy world. But after consultations, I decided to go with the tabloid zine.

I looked up on zine aesthetics that I wanted to try out, and referenced tabloid covers a lot.

Retrieved from pinterest

 

Bagbagbag

My initial idea was to basically make a sling bag. I have always been a fan of bags that allowed me to display parts of my interests so I wanted to make a version that was more sleek, rather than cutesy. The closest I could find to something less cutesy was this black bag:

Retrieved from: https://sanshee.com/products/galaxy-ita-bag

It’s called an itabag, which basically means pain bag, because everyone puts things that are relevant to their interest that some people might not particularly like.

I basically wanted a sling bag version of that.

I looked into vertical messengers, crossbody bags and barrel messengers for reference, often looking at those that were made of leather.

Retrieved from http://www.bagswish.com/544-mens-leather-messenger-bag-vertical-messenger-bags.html

I then began looking into types of bags I could make.

I had several requirements when making my bag: I wanted it to fit my A5 notebook, and have some pens that were easily reached. I also wanted to display my plushies and stuff, basically create a vinyl segment that represented me as a person (or basically because I love cute things).

And the general aesthetic of a leather bag was what I wanted to go for, something more structured and sleek that could contrast with the cute.


I planned out the various parts I needed, just like a leather bag. and tried to make the base. This was based on my knowledge of watching video after video of leather bag making.

My first attempt was then done using thick-ish yellow paper, double sided tape and UHU stick glue. The vinyl bag was done with book protector plastic.

I referenced a box pouch for the initial vinyl pouch, but realised it was very hard to flip it over with just double sided tape holding its sides (it had to be sewn). It also looked really awkward since it was a compartment that stuck out.

I also made the base way too big, and when placed along my hip, looked really funny.

 

The inside looked like this, to fit the notebook.

I realised it was a pretty tight fit, and tried to adjust it accordingly in later attempts.

Failed box pouch is failed box pouch.

My second attempt: I used a harder artcard for my material, which were leftovers from the previous semester. I stapled the sides, to represent the sewing done on a leather bag.

It ended up really boxy, but it was holding together and becoming what I wanted it to look like.

Next up was my 3rd attempt with soft black felt (1.5mm), which I sewed together using a sewing machine. Using the same methods with staplers, I used a cross-stitch and created this effect.

It looked alright, but it could not hold its form. I tried using cardboard at the bottom and was given the suggestion to glue cardboard at the back. I wanted to use foam along the sides as a decorative and safety measure so that the whole gusset would not lose its shape and stretch out too much.

I also realised that the black inside pockets could not be seen at all. I then learnt that lining was important, so that you could properly put your things into the pockets, and easily find them to take them out.

And thus, my final attempt. I used black felt again, but managed to find moulding/craft felt that was 3mm thick. I also used cardboard for the back of the bag for sturdier support, which is sandwiched between white felt that was my lining. This allowed people to easily see where the pockets were.

I sewed this piece together using the sewing machine, but also used superglue and fabric latex glue.

As the felt was sturdy enough, I was able to create a structured flap and added magnets instead of clasps like I originally wanted to. This made it oddly convenient as you only had to pull the flap in order to easily access to your notebook.

The strap was catered to a specific measurement – where on my body it as most convenient to reach for my pens and books. If it were made into a real bag, it would probably have the adjustable strap.

The white felt helped a lot: I could now see my pockets. And look my A5 notebook fits well!

The vinyl pocket was something I regretted doing last, as it was hard to sew it on on a sewing machine when the bag was so structured and hard (it did not allow space for me to bend and manipulate to fit the small area that the sewing machine had). To combine the vinyl pocket, I ended up hand-sewing the plastic on.

I also changed it into a simple shape that fit nicely against the bag, as the box pouch was too awkward.

Since the form was way sturdier than before, I decided not to add the foam since nothing stretched as much. The felt could handle the weight and maintain its own form as it is.

hyperessay // social broadcasting

The idea of a perversion and the vulnerability that comes with an alternate social world, being a form of art and meaning has intrigued me after the Symposium. Agency art: the idea of looking into human behaviour as a form of aesthetic, was something I learnt. I was drawn to the ideas Matt Adams brought up during his Keynote on Day 2, which coincidentally resonated amongst the performances seen on Day 3, where he mentions various Blast Theory projects such as Kidnap (1998), and My One Demand (2016), featuring the enhancement of emotional value through the ‘abuse’ of vulnerability of the human self.

There was a lot of cinematic views + music being used to create another layer of emotional value. My One Demand (2016)

The use of anonymous third space behaviour allows for people to open up. My One Demand (2016)

My essay will look further into the concepts of ‘raw feelings’, as mentioned in depth by Matt Adams, and by the igaies crew directed by Jon Cates. In a quote mentioned by Jon Cates in a previous interview with Randall Packer:

“For me this approach to noise or noisiness, or dirt, or dirtiness, is a way to foreground as you say, an aberrance or perversion of normative message or what we might perceive to be logical reasoning.”

— Jon Cates, Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates by Randall Packer

In an alternate social world, it takes away many boundaries that one were binded to in a society like my own: Singapore. A country full of rules and Asian traditions, we do not usually seek the unseekable, nor speak the unspeakable. Words were all taboo, and there were many risks with speaking your mind. For a Singaporean Chinese with rather strict parents, it was an eye-opening experience for myself to have been able to witness the discussions of many other artists out there. In a sense, it felt like peeking into a life that I could not ever achieve, and it peeked my interests in many ways, evoking emotions and questions in my head that could not be answered by a fellow Singaporean. To me, the fact that the performance was so different and ‘raw‘, that I wanted to look at it longer, and further understand why they wanted to perform that way. It was due to this glitch, that made me require a knowledge of what was going on.

It brings me back to the Keynote by Matt Adams — that there was always an innate need in a human for voyeurism. I know there is a more sexual meaning to this, but looking it up gave me this meaning:

voyeurism:

enjoyment from seeing the pain or distress of others.

A sense of looking at someone without their permission; voyeurism. Picture: Kidnap (1998)

 

With the idea of glitch; the concept of someone doing something different from you in their most intimate of spaces, brings up another point that Matt Adams made during his Keynote:

The empowering nature of being intimate or vulnerable

Not only did the viewers have their own feelings about the performance, it gave a sense of power to the performers as well. They shaped what the audience could see in their performances, giving them a right to limit what they wanted us to know. It was through their actions that we could evoke any sort of emotion at all. It was also through these limitations that we experienced various emotions.

 

One example would be the puppy by Shawne Michaelain Holloway, who featured themself as a puppy in tight black straps, being dragged down by a television screen (I would presume). It felt like an initmate moment that was usually practiced in a personal and extremely private space. First of all, to have been able to put one’s self out there for a public audience, not to mention a cyber audience that you had no idea of (nor what they looked like should you need to track them down), was an extremely vulnerable but powerful moment. And the angles we were given to witness this private moment, were two cameras:

Performance by Shawne Michaelain Holloway. Top right is a closer angle. Top left is an angle that’s seemingly like a surveillance camera. Performing on bottom left is Akteria, Arcángel Constantini drawing on petri dishes producing live Noise soundscapes.

1. A camera on the floor, near the puppy. It was on a eye level lower than the puppy, and it gave us a sense of ‘we shouldn’t be here seeing this’. It also gave the feeling of being ‘face-to-face’ with someone not on a ‘human’ level, like you could share this moment. Either interpretation is okay.

2. A camera high above, seemingly like a surveillance camera footage. It gave the viewer yet another breech of privacy, and we witness the puppy’s back and how extremely vulnerable they would have been if someone else were to come up behind them.

There was no eye level that was similar to that of a physically capable adult, and it leaves you with a sense of curiosity, endearment, and perhaps one’s own vulnerability to not be able to climb up to one’s own eye level.  It was like the audience were hiding and had nowhere to run, while witnessing this, and it was entrancing in its own right.

Thus brings back the idea of perversion, voyeurism and maybe, masochism. Humans, and I would say, Singaporeans, are all coded in ways to receive these ideas with a sense of shame, and lack of knowledge over them. It is mostly through unsettled emotions and thoughts that these things are mostly viewed and then dismissed quickly. Going back to Blast Theory’s Kidnap (1998), one could only watch as the kidnapees were held hostage, but lacked any sort of power in changing anything. It was through this practice of garnering emotional value from an extremely vulnerable source, that I feel Blast Theory succeeded in, and the risks they took for this to happen was very noteworthy.

The showing of Kidnap (1998).

Their other project, My Neck in the Woods (2013), looked into the lives of teenagers in their comfortable places, learning about them through the third space, achieved the same results (if not, differently in terms of acceptance).

My Neck in the Woods (2013). Learn about the lives of teenagers and where they go to, and how they’d act around a camera.

My Neck in the Woods (2013). One gets to learn about these teenagers’ lives, and get to ask questions like these. It was a conversation through the Third Space, while the broadcast themselves.

I have learnt that ‘raw’ wasn’t necessarily bad, because it brought about thoughts that one might not have considered in a safe, controlled environment. Sure, these experiments and performances might have been controlled spaces in ways, but they were certainly in no way safe, and it was only through the idea of social broadcasting, a space where many others could contribute and learn things together, that it could really thrive as an art piece. And now I end the essay with another quote by Jon Cates:

“Those systems might be broken, they might be glitched, and they might be imperfect and noisy, and that might be what attracts us or me to those systems. But still they are functional or functioning in one way or another systematically. So they are connected to one another as assemblages.”

— Jon Cates, Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates by Randall Packer

We live in a world where social media is, simply putting, the root of the existence of many. The lives of many are shown, and seeing how many of these artists are trying to make use of the idea of social broadcasting to allow others to look deeper into their lives, I realise that humans are all flawed individuals who basically are artistic in the way they are made. To look into the way humans react through a medium that they would normally be honest on, be it on an anonymous platform, allows one to study the raw intensity of the human emotion. They bounce off each other, and together, are able to function as a whole human race. This is what I have found interesting after the three days of Symposium, and I am glad to have found a chance to have been part of this, even if I was merely part of the audience. Thank you for the opportunity.

 

References

Packer, R. (2014, July 16). Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates. Retrieved April 06, 2018, from https://hyperallergic.com/134709/glitch-expectations-a-conversation-with-jon-cates/

Packer, R. (2018). Program. Retrieved April 06, 2018, from https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/program/

 

micro-project 7 // o k a y

 

 

Music credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cw_YAHwcf8

Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

In this video I am in my room, writing in my journal, and as I continue to write words, they start to lose their meaning. The music playing in the background is a song called ‘good day’, played at a slower speed, creating a slow rhythm and eventually, a sense of distortion to the perception of time. There’s a sense of dissociative blurriness as the VHS filter glitches every so often, with its red, blue, white, black.

A room is a safe space. The music conceals yet shows the confusion that I have collected over my year in university. The writings are what I want to be, but cannot achieve, because OK has lost all of its meaning.

I have never dabbled into the world of art, not in the way most people have. I went into art with a lack of deeper meaning, and have never known art in its contemporary form. As I stare longer at meanings that people try to bring forward, the repetitiveness to causes gets lost within me. In a sense, this video selfie would be the workings of my mind as I process how people view art. I realise that I am not that individual, but I am also the individual. I realise that what I show — a person who can speak, who can smile and write coherently – is not like that within the self, and thus creates that alternate identity. I lost myself in coming to the realisation that art was not what I thought it was. I concealed myself with the idea of coherency in my own words of reassurance, but when you look long enough, the depth of it is gone.

As deep as I may sound, I wish to create art for my, somewhat shallow, individual. To present what I see of the world, from what I perceive which has lost its initial meaning. To reconstruct things in what my mind was able to pick up, and to better understand other individuals, I evaluate them with what my overactive, overthinking mind can comprehend.

tl;dr, I’m dumb, and I wish to understand people better but it’s hard because people all talk like ^ until I also cannot understand. Help.

 

micro-project 6 // a day in the life of super-participation

 

PAGE LINK: https://www.facebook.com/napndonth/

Our page: Nap And Do Nothing.

Members: Karen, Naomi, Nok Wan, Celine

(did not post it previously sorry)

As observed, all of the group members were more superficial about sharing, while half of us were unwilling to post pictures of our faces, opting for videos and pictures of what was around us instead, or the faces of friends whom happened to be around us. We were also kept “anonymous”, choosing to not write our names, using the page’s admin anonymity to hide behind. (We could, however, look at who posted the various posts, with our administrator roles.) Many of our posts were updates about what we were doing, things like eating, going to the toilet, or sleeping. These were all mundane activities, and there was the occasional talk about spending time with a friend. Many of these posts involve things we have already spoke about to the people around us. There was also the rare thought about something that had happened, and a comment that was empathetic in relation.


So this micro-project is about being a super-participant. So what is super-participation to me? I’d like to think it’s about the concept of over-sharing, and about the need for transparency in order to be accepted and validated as a whole being. I thought it was a very interesting topic to touch on. When we were kids, we were often told to “not talk to strangers”, and since that was inevitable with the rise of the Interwebz, parents compromised. Do not give unnecessary information, do not put your feelings out there, do not put your real name. Basically we had to keep our private details away from this public space.

Of course, this changed over time, and for the past few years, many internet celebrities have put every single little detail about themselves onto social media, be it sexuality, transitions into new lives as progressive adults, mental health issues, relationships and its details, etc. Some try to keep it slightly more personal, only having mutual friends on the web know about their personal lives, while some just let the whole world know about what they think about a certain thing, or what they are going through with the certain point in their lives.

Likewise, this has influenced the way many of our generation view the internet — everyone was freely sharing whatever they were doing, whatever they were feeling, at any given time. And this is what we did in our project.