Que Sera – Final 4 – Semiotics

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My name is Kim and I’m a Pastry Chef.

To make this type, I selected materials that would be commonly used specifically in baking – such as cinnamon, flour, sugar and cocoa powder. This was to avoid confusion with other kinds of cooking/cuisines that might involve a wide range of ingredients like rice, pasta, prawns and vegetables to name a few. I arranged the ingredients in a meticulous matter, even adjusting the photograph in post-process to ensure that the lines looked neatly arranged. This was to convey the idea of precision that is often needed in baking – where one has to accurately weigh out specific proportions of ingredients else the pastry might turn out tasting wrong, or having the wrong texture. The main colours in this composition are earthly tones of brown, yellow and green as I associate pastries as being from the chocolate variety. Texture-wise, I wanted to play with the natural textures of each ingredient. However – one distinct deliberate adjustment I had done is on the triangular shape of the flour that makes up the ‘K’ on the left. Left untouched, it has a very smooth texture, which I felt may have caused an imbalance in the whole composition with the left side having smoother textures (sugar, flat flour) and the right side having rougher textures (cocoa powder, grains). Therefore, I deliberately made a disturbance on the side of the white flour triangle to introduce a rougher texture onto the left side of the composition to make it more harmonious.

geographer9

My name is Kim and I’m a Geographer.

For this type, I wanted to play with the shapes of naturally occurring landforms and transform it to look like alphabets to convey the idea of a geographer – somebody who studies the land and the way it changes. As such, I went for a more organic form to the letters (rather than standard block letters) and morphed them such that they ooze and flow into the negative space as well as into each other – to emphasize on their organic, ‘natural’ shapes. The idea is that one could possibly find these forms in nature. As for the choice of colour, this had much to do with the depth associated with certain parts of the ‘landform’ – darker colours to denote depth, transitioning to lighter colours as the landforms rise and become closer to the viewer.

bacteriologist14

My name is Kim and I’m a Bacteriologist.

With this piece, I wanted the environment to play a part in creating the mood for the type piece. Here, the pale yellow hue in a circular shape suggests the idea of a petri dish that is cultivating bacteria (the agar that is used to grow bacteria is a pale yellow colour), and the slightly polarized colours in the background work together to create a slight distortion/a slight unsettling effect that evokes the idea of ‘another world’ that one would encounter when looking through a microscope to see these bacteria – what you see through a microscope is vastly different from what we experience in reality – almost dreamlike, almost like another world. Lastly, I added additional textures to really drive across the idea of it being bacteria in a petri dish – the wiggly shapes next to the alphabets. I do feel that there are certain aspects that could be improved such as the readability of the alphabets and bringing more emphasis to the alphabets itself – such that it stands out from the background.

botanist8

My name is Kim and I’m a Botanist.

For this last piece I wanted to play with two aspects of botany – the theoretical and practical aspects of the scientific study of plants. To convey the theoretical aspect, I illustrated the alphabets in the style of botanical illustrations, and created fake labels for the parts of the plants. I also added small annotations to make it look more like a scientific diagram to put across the idea of theoretical plant study. For the practical aspect, I decided to play with physical items to contrast it with the illustrated diagrams. As the test tube is cylindrical in shape, and it accurately conveys the idea of scientific experimentation, I decided to use it as a vessel for a plant/flower that I had collected to show that as a botanist, I would collect and study plant matter.

Contaminate this space. Roughly.

In my sleep the universe told me to shoot ink drops falling into water, so I did.

Keeping in mind that these shots are what I wanted to project onto spaces, I wanted the opening and closing shots to be polar opposites – to suggest a change, to suggest that the space has been changed.

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Projector-camera-shot set up.
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Originally, black chairs.
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Black chairs and distracting power socket.
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Originally I wanted to use the entirety of the room, with its things and people and everything, but it was way too messy and each thing served as a distraction in itself. So no.

The whole thing is really slow and boring to watch but what is important is how it opens and how it closes.

The composition is purposefully cropped, one sees the edges of the projection onto this corner. It is clear that this is an artificially created setting, rather than an attempt to make real something that is not. There is an attempt to artificially alter the space.

What follows is drop after drop of black ink penetrating the projection, beginning with individual drops that blossom into flower-like forms, then slowly engulfing the projection with black. This blossoming is in harmony with the two empty chairs, which suggests human presence, implying conversation as the shadows dance across the space, eventually engulfing one in darkness before the other.

Black. The space is now contaminated with memories.

Revelations and portable projectors

Of course the space has to be manipulated, it can’t be represented objectively. Something has to be done to it.

I thought of how I could bring the memory into the space and it kind of made sense to project images into these spaces. At the point of this thought, I wanted to make the whole thing a personal experience, so my first thought was that I had to visit spaces in Singapore, aka places with no access to power plugs and such.

Luckily the internet had tutorials on how to make iPhone projectors –

Unluckily, by the laws of physics, the images produced from this were way too faint to be workable. But here they are anyway.

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I’d say this is 5 times brighter than what the naked eye sees.
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And it gets worse with coloured images.
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Cool pix with ambience light but unusable but nice so put on OSS.
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Cool unusable pix but nice so put on OSS.
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Haha bacteria. Contaminated spaces.

So obviously the portable projector business wasn’t working out as well as I needed it to. The next solution is to borrow a proper projector.

Due to logistical limitations, using a proper projector now requires proper power points. So that kind of limits me to locations with access to power. Perhaps it is easier to create a symbolic universal representation of contaminated spaces, rather than a personal documentation of contaminated spaces.