Telok Ayer publishing a Zine

Finally with all the illustrations in place, I decided to compile them and add some of my thoughts onto the pages.

Page one was given a title. Looking back at it now, maybe i should not have put my name there, kind of ruins the effect of the cover page. I wanted the title for this Zine to reflect how confused I am to describe Telok Ayer uniquely.

The second page reflects the food that you get there, I wanted to put it in a sort of menu like setting, hence added the borders.

Page 3 i felt was quite self explanatory, how there are random statues placed around like tourist attraction, and everyone does just that in its presence.

Page 4-5, I left it be.

Page 6, I remembered looking at the shop houses during one of my trips there and wondering what the definition of preservation is. Whilst i believe it is good to re purpose these old shop houses, I think the area of Telok Ayer also begins to lose its uniqueness as it houses more modern shops now.

I let page 7 be as well.

page 8, this was a statue as well, I remembered looking at it ad saying this was probably something iconic to Telok ayer in the past. Now they can only use it as an odd tourist attraction, hence this sort of cynical reply at the end.

I did not have much time to print as I spent a lot of time redesigning the illustrations on Illustrator, but i ended up printing it on art card. Which i felt was sturdy and reflected the sold colours and lines of my Graphics well.

   

Though maybe i could have explored more on printing.

Telok Ayer, developing a zine

After touring Telok Ayer for two days, I really wanted to base my zine either on the old and new architecture in Telok Ayer, or the ornamental nature of the Temples and shop houses.

However, it soon became quite prominent that those ideas were more common then I thought. Hence, I decided on my second trip that i would start looking around the surrounding areas of Telok Ayer, specifically Amoy Street as it still has the ‘old historic’ look that echos Telok Ayer.

It became even more prominent that the harder I looked for something unique to echo Telok Ayer street, the more difficult it became. There is not much left of the Historical Dock that used to be there. Rather, the iconic shop houses were made new, painted in various shades of colour, the shops now catered international food like Korean barbecue, Thai food, western, and various bars. The temples had self inserted gift shops and some became museums, or hotel fronts in attempt to preserve the building.

In its own way it is interesting, to see how much has changed. However, with the brief in mind, to ‘portray the essence of the street’ it seems my street is giving me a run for my money. Everything that makes Telok Ayer Iconic, I feel, is the same thing that makes another place iconic. I see shop houses along Chinatown and Little India. I see Ann Siang hill and Telok Ayer green, as small inserts of green spaces common found in every other place. Bars are iconic for places like Clarke Quay, and the restaurants there are no longer serving local food.

I would describe the place as commercialized, or a Hodge-Podge of things put together in an attempt to make use of the space.

Hence I went about thinking about making a Zine that reflects this confusion that I felt for Telok Ayer, and an idea that revolved around the temple narrative. Ultimately the temple narrative got rejected, because i felt that it might be too in literal.

I still wanted to insert the intricate designs of the temples and shop houses, but to keep the graphic element of the illustration, I decided to minimalise the style into flat planes with a single coloured shading.

I made a list of what elements I wanted in the art work:

  • Telok Ayer Green, the randomly inserted park, with statues of fisherman of the past. It feels like a tourism spot, but a tourism spot to chance upon? it is honestly not very well known place. I asked my friends if they knew where Telok Ayer is, only one response came back positive, and he said he went there to drink.
  • Ann Siang Hill, actually placed at the corner of Amoy Street, it feels a bit colonial walking up the hill. It felt out of place when you think of this unchanging place called Telok Ayer
  • The surrounding Temples how they are still being preserved
  • Fuk Tak Chi Temple which became a museum or door front for Amoy Street Hotel, coexistence of old and new.
  •  The food revolves mostly around bars and restaurants for internationl food. It rarely reflects the traditional food that Telok Ayer had in the past.
  • The shop houses which are so iconic to Telok Ayer, we see almost everywhere else like in Chinatown, Little India, etc. They were also modernised and upgraded with aircon vents and elecrical boxes, which makes for quite an interesting sight.
  • There is a mosque, Al Abrar Mosque, which I felt was very isolated. I went there close to chinese new year, hence the temples were bustling with people, compared to that the mosque was quite and quite isolated. I wanted to go in but did not. It did not feel right of me to enter. i want to illustrate that sort of quiet, isolated feeling.
  • There was also a heritage center there that was closed, i like the aesthetic of it though. It was a very interesting contrast in comparison to the temples.

I began to sketch what I felt represented these aspects of Telok Ayer digitally.

I managed to get a really good shot of the pagoda that I felt reflects how Telok Ayer is. Its buildings rarely change, as it is being preserved for the culture aspect, but its surroundings does. hence i created this sort of digital aesthetic to the skyscrapers, which look as though it has been edited into old ‘Telok Ayer’.

I also wanted to illustrate the food in Telok Ayer.

I had realised, walking down the streets of Telok Ayer is that most eateries there are either Cafes, Bars or restaurants that cater Korean food, Thai Food, International food, basically it no longer reflects ‘traditional Singapore’.

Image result for mc escher tessellations

(Source is taken from: https://www.wikiart.org/en/m-c-escher/bird-fish)

I wanted to create a sort of food patter which encompasses the variety of the street, like what M.C Escher does with his textiles as seen above. I wanted this sort of overwhelmingly compact illustration.

However, it was ultimately ruled out due to the difference in style. So I went with a more food wallpaper style, with cute illustrations of food on it.

 

Image result for food wallpaper

(Source taken from: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/540572761507280597/)

However, it did not tie with the cover image as well. So I made a compromise.

Following the previous image, I had the ‘newer’ products drawn with lines, as though it were digitally add into the environment. That way there is this somewhat cohesiveness to the art style. Meanwhile the ‘traditional treats’ or food items that were used in the past but maybe not in that way are coloured in, showing that they had existed already.

Related image

(Source taken from:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ann_Siang_Hill_Park_2,_Dec_05.JPG)

I also had the chance to wander around the streets nearby, and I was quite amazed by how the image of a place can change so easily from one street to another. Walking about Ann Siang hill was like walking in a colonial inspired park like Fort Canning, which would not have been place here till recently, seeing as Telok Ayer was more a Chinese settlement in the past, or a place for docking. Thus i wanted to show how the place seemed to new aesthetic wise, among the traditional shop house structures.

Following the similar aesthetic of the previous images I came up with this.

Subsequently, I started looking at Telok Ayer green which is like a self insert modern park in a small part of history. Though it was more of an attempt of tourist attraction with all these statues of the Chinese migrants of that time.

From there I created two illustrations:

 

I attempted to stay close to the geometric lines as a connecting theme in my work, but i felt maybe i did not do too good of a job at that.

Subsequently, i moved onto the shop houses, wanting to illustrate them in an ‘upgraded’ manner, with the glass windows and air con vents.

Finally came the temple, where we see even less of the geometric lines.

I think this image was the most interesting to work with, despite having one of the least cohesiveness to its image. I liked the interesting cropping, and so did many of my classmates when they gave me feedback.

Overall, I think I could have done better aesthetic wise if I had more time, because right now, the illustrations look as though they had more potential to be even more cohesive.

Playing Stranger Things

The Final Project

For our final project for Experimental interaction we are asked to create a social project that will allow us to interact with others. We formed small groups and began brainstorming what we could do for the interaction portion. Mostly our project revolves around ‘playing games’ with strangers that we meet on the streets, in a way to see how willing people are to interact with other strangers. The end result is ‘Play Stranger Things’.

Play Stranger Things

‘Play Stranger Things’ is a collaborative art piece where strangers become the artist and is tasked to draw a human face. The only catch is that each stranger can only draw a single feature of the human face, and each feature is dictated by the coloured sheet that they draw from our ‘box of features’.

The point of the game is to get as many people to play as possible, and document the developement of the image on an instgram page, @letsplaystrangerthings (https://www.instagram.com/letsplaystrangerthings/). Also each time we are rejected by a stranger we record it in the form of a black screen, indicating a glitch our collaborative work which referenced Glitch art. Subsequently, the final picture is placed side by side by a character or person a stranger said it looks like.

 

(Screenshot taken from our instagram)

(Screenshot taken from our instagram)

Creating the project

Initially, the project took the direction of drawing a well known person, for example ‘Amos Yee’. However after a quick test run, we realised that even as art students, interpreting a facial feature like ‘long curly hair’ would take form in many different ways, and the resulting image will not look exactly like the human.

Hence, we scrapped the idea of creating a known person, and researched variations of each facial features, example ‘eyes’, ‘nose’ and ‘ears’ and have someone guess who they are at the end of the drawing.

The features colour coded:

Yellow: face shape

Red: Eyebrows

Purple: Ears

Green: Hair

Pink: Mouth

Orange: Nose

Blue: Eyes

We then put them in box and went out to Northspine NTU to conduct our project.

Reviewing the project

The point of the game is as mentioned before, the test the willingness of strangers to play and interact with other strangers, and so far, most of the people we approach are quite willing to be approached and contribute to the art.

Of course there was quite a fair bit of rejection as well, and we were intimidated by how busy everyone seemed to look, and sometimes did not want to intrude in their time. We also approached a lot of groups of people after awhile, as they seem more keen to play the game with their friends. Overall the interaction seemed to be more positive when in the presence of their friends.

We also ran into a group of sponsers at the Humanties and Social sciences building, which we had a trade with. We do their survey and they played games with us.

In Conclusion

I feel that our project is like Blast Theory in the way that we let pur audience take control of the project, and we let them interpret the instructions that we give them and react in the way that they want.

The Online World

Hyperessay

The third space network is a live video broadcast, which focus on broadcasting creative dialogue all over the world.

At the start, what becomes prominent in the broadcast is the various technical issues that appear in the broadcast. Glitches with the sound system, where the poor keynote speaker could not hear everyone else. Glitches in film, where the video would pause but the sound would run on. The speakers would sometime speak out of the microphone and no one can hear them. The intresting thing is how people adapt and make do in this highly connected world, where something goes wrong, there are a few other devices that can be made use of to keep the symposium afloat.

(An image of the group chat slightly after the first symposium started. The Key note speaker could not hear anyone speaking, so cues were given through the group chat.)

Day 1, 29 March 2018, 8pm-11pm

The first day starts of with Keynote speaker Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou who talked about the telematics art.

From Google, the definition of Telematic is the branch of information technology which deals with the long-distance transmission of computerized information. More simply put Dr Chatzichistodoulo describes Telematic to be live/liveness and interactivity.

She says, ” It transform the screen into a live encounter, in that sense it joins the space of the live performance and the audience, making them co-performers.”

This ability to link people in real time, gives the audience, once only silent witnesses to an art form, a chance to interject their opinions and ideas into the work, influencing the views of their fellow audience, and sometimes the work itself.  In a way this form of art embraces the connection between interaction and the media. Once, the media had only carried the recordings of art works. The media then could not influence the its audience in that contemporary moment and time, however, through telematics communication technology, everything is brought into the now, no matter where you are, so long as there is a screen before you.

Image result for hole in space

(Source taken from: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hole-in-space/)

 

Dr Chatzichristodoulou brings in works like ‘Hole in Space’ by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, to emphasis the potential that interactivity gives performance art. As we explored in a previous essay, ‘Hole in Space’ is a satelite connected projection of two areas in USA, one in Los Angeles and the other in New York City.  The projection had first invoked curosity from the people of these separate states, before they started to make use of the opportunity to ‘meet’ each other, on screen for the first time in many years, for some. It creates a sort of unpredictability as various people come together with different intentions in mind. As such this experience, would result in very different reactions which creates a unique shared experience and can influence the audience better as it involves them. 

(Screen shot of Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou explaining the work ‘Telematic Dreaming’)

Subsequently she mentions this work ‘Telematic Dreaming’ by Paul Sermon. ‘Telematic Dreaming’ is done in two locations, the first with the artist and the other location has the audience. The work features a projection on a bed, and the audience and the artist can interact with each other on the bed through this live video projection. What was interesting about this work was a scenario Dr Chatzichristodoulou had pointed out, where a memeber of the audience had abused the artist projection on the bed. Dr  Chatzichristodoulou had then begun to question the idea of ethics of such actions, whether this abuse would be considered as such, just because the artist was not physically harmed.

It  made me consider the power of the third space. How in this day and age, how millenials spend so much time on the third space that it almost seem as though we could be physically in it. This kind of abuse, we label it as Cyber bullying, where one would spout or post various threats online to ‘hurt’ others but not really.

Subsequently, Annie Abrahams had done a live performance. she had collabed with a few other people who were from different parts on the world, relating to the idea of politics.

What i fould most interesting was the various voices and statements that were said, “excellent”, “status”, “3.961”, “144”, “excellent” “300,000 milliseconds”, it is like a computer comming online. Also, alongside the various images above, they would say various sentences, that they believe were something related to politics. It just brings across the point that in this day and age, it is so easy to connect and bring people of various backgrounds together to collaborate and make art.

Day 2, 30 April 2018, 8pm-11pm

The speaker Matt Adam’s had spoken of Blast Theory. Blast Theory is a pioneering artist group creating interactive art to explore social and political questions, placing audience members at the centre of their work.

(screenshot of Matt Adams explaining ‘Kidnap’)

His First example was ‘Kidnap’ which revolves around two voluntary members of the public winning a lottery to be “kidnapped’. Subsequently they were kidnapped and taken away to a safe house for 48 hours, with the video recording streaming them live for the entire 48 hours.

“Once you put on the bag, it feels very real” says one of the volunteers, “Like you are not in control of anything.” and it is true to an extent, handing all control to strangers, and trusting that everything is an act, when they do actually have the ability to make you feel vulnerable, to harm you.

(Screenshot of Matt Adams explaining ‘Uncle Roy’)

Subsequently there is ‘Uncle Roy’ which has two roles to play, the first being the people off the street with only 60 minutes to find the missing uncle Roy, through clues provided by a hand held computer. The second being the people online, whom can moniter the progress of the street player, and guide them by giving them instructions to where uncle Roy could be.

It brings across this idea of team work, and bring people of different communities together. It is almost as though they looking for Uncle Roy together in the same place. In the end they were made to answer a few questions regarding stranges, ‘whether they would help a stranger in a crisis’. I find this quite interesting, as it does reflect how connected the person is to society, how willing they are to help each other. It makes me realised sometimes, despite being so well connected, and willing to connect with strangers online, it makes some people reserved when meeting face to face.

Conclusion:

I feel that the idea of collaborating with others through online platforms has a larger potential to influence more people across various countries, so long they have the internet. The third space, that we have constantly talked about also has a various platforms and tools that can be explored to make art works more engagine and interactive. We consider them playful, and almost whimsical as collaboraters can create contrasting images, or interact in a certain way that goes beyond the boundaries of the physical plane.