Assignment 1 – K I M .

I Love You Like Me: Final

Artist’s statement:

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.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Originally, black chairs.

Black chairs and distracting power socket.

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 –

1. Find a box and cut a circular hole in one end

2. Paint the inside of the box black/could find proper paint so line it with black paper

3. Obtain a biconvex lens and attach it to the hole

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

Processed with VSCO with m3 preset — I’d say this is 5 times brighter than what the naked eye sees.

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.

The struggle of contamination

Master Zhao mentioned this one work by Tan Pin Pin where she visits sites in Singapore where people have died/have been killed. It sounded along the lines of what I was trying to achieve, so I went to look it up online:

The Impossibility of Knowing

Can a video camera can capture the aura of a space that has experienced trauma? I made a list of places I knew about where accidents had happened and we filmed them. But my camera did not “capture” anything. It could be due to the limitations of physics, but the canal remained a canal, the house, a house. Maybe the aura we sought doesn’t exist. Maybe you can see better than us.
– Tan Pin Pin, 2010

The film comprises of still shot after still shot of “traumatic” locations, accompanied by the natural sounds occurring in those spaces, with the deep, slow narration of the traumatic stories that accompany these spaces.

I agree with Tan that the camera is not able to much beyond the objective representation of the space. The “aura” that seeks to be imbued was only possible through the narration of the story associated with these places. The experience of said “aura” then comes through through the viewer’s own imaginations, a sort of “fill in the blanks”, a trying to picture what is not pictured.

Now, what am I to do with my contaminated spaces?

Evidently it doesn’t really work to just document these spaces. Something has to be done to it. Visually through altering the space/visually through providing accompanying texts/auditorily through narration.

But how do you elegantly depict what is invisible i.e. how does one depict aura?

How appropriate it is that Robert brought us to see this one show “WHAT IS NOT VISIBLE IS NOT INVISIBLE”.

I think of all that was there I really enjoyed this one the most. So poetically captures and imbues physicality to air. I think it was really smart of them to open the show with this first work. 10/10 (Y)

But how does one imbue physicality to “aura” and memory? Crei.

2 strands. Word Vomit.

The way you navigate the world is the way the world tells its story to you.

– Robert Zhao, 2017

Lately, I have become interested in stories. The whole idea of story-telling and its intricacies and mechanics started to make more meaning of itself in my head than before. There are no bad stories, only bad story tellers (this is an opinionated fact), so in my first assignment for Shifu Zhao this year, I will aim to be the best storyteller I can be.

I have two stories I might want to tell this time round. As of the typing of this post I am still trying to wrap my head around the execution of both because both seem like very abstract concepts to deal with, especially visually.

A story about noise.

For the longest time, I have been quite sensitive to sounds. (All other senses as well but sounds seem to affect me the most). They almost always trigger my physical body into a fight/flight state which is very sucky when I’m stuck in a situation that demands me to not run away from these triggers.

Repetitive sounds – pen clicking, rhythmic whoosh of cars passing by, knocking, loud keyboard typing, feet tapping etc.

And, whistling.

I have yet to consider where to even begin harvesting a story from this idea, but first instinct is to:

Pair annoying trigger sounds with peaceful environments – disparity between what is experienced by the self and what is experienced by others.
Overlaying massive amounts of noise together to make some sort of grotesque symphony of visual and auditory stimuli
Make a pseudo-documentary of Steve (name changed) – a guy who whistles too much all the damn time fucking gets on my nerves fuck.

A story about contaminated spaces.

A thing happened recently that got me thinking about the spaces we occupy and the things we do in these spaces – and the subsequent memories that are formed through our interaction with people in these spaces. We tend to perceive spaces differently after having experienced either positive or negative (mostly negative/significant/impactful) interactions in them.

“You know, I hate that this room is contaminated now.”

“Yeah, memories.”

I think this idea could be much stronger than the other one. I will ask Robert tomorrow. Or Tuesday.

Again, I have yet to figure out ways to depict this visually, but again, first instinct is to:

Photographic stills of spaces that are significant/contaminated to me/others. But how does the audience distinguish the contamination? Physical alteration of the photograph? (Draw things, cut things, blur things, erase things, add things) Or maybe it is the way the photograph is treated to bring out nostalgic effects? (Lighting/mood/composition)
GIFs of the empty space, and the space altered – lapses of people/conversation floating omnipresent in the space
A short film that conveys this concept through narrative and sequencing. A little bird told me that there is a film that has similar ideas to mine – Before Sunrise (1995) – I will find time to watch it soon.