Curating space

I plan to use the space under the staircase at Staircase No. 5 on the basement floor as it is small and enclosed. In the space, I plan to set up a bed, a lamp emitting blue light, the blanket half crocheted and a curated array of failed pieces of crocheting.

The atmosphere of the space is intended to be other-worldly and secluded. The bed and the half completed blanket will suggest presence of the subject – without the subject being present. The identity and state of mind of the subject is further hinted at by the chaotic mess of incomplete and unsuccessful attempts at crocheting – unsuccessful attempts at creating comfort for the self.

Comfort objects comfort me

Installation is a tricky thing. What makes installation installation and not sculpture? The line between installation and sculpture, I would say, is a fine one. From looking at installations and reading up a bit more, there are a few boxes that installation ticks off:

  1. Immersive
  2. Multi-sensory
  3. Site-specific

So these are the criteria that I have to keep in mind as I plan out the space for the installation.


On comfort objects

In dealing with the space, I at first wanted to recreate the room I had set up in my previous assignment. However, it didn’t make sense for me just to recreate the room as I realized it wouldn’t retain its meaning when placed out of the context of the video like that.

The installation has to carry meaning on its own.

Continuing on the theme of loneliness, the train of thought went to ideas of coping – ways to cope and deal with negative situations and emotions – an emotionally charged subjective space.

I then realized that, for myself, shutting down has become an immediate coping mechanism – going to sleep means the world and its problems are no longer there. Specifically – going to sleep with a blanket.

The blanket then acts as a comfort object that protects and shields. There will be a blanket in the installation.


But then how do I transform the space to make it look lonely?

One of the artists I looked to to find the answer to this was Tehching Hsieh. While his one-year performances are not installations in nature, they are highly site-specific.

In one of his one-year performances, he confined himself to a small cell for an entire year.

Hsieh’s works are highly ritualistic in nature. This action of doing something mundane over a long period of time/over and over again, while simple, conveys strongly a sense of mania and emotional charge. I feel that using a similar repetitive approach would help me convey the sense of “coping mechanisms” in my own work.

In terms of subject matter, Hsieh’s 1978-1979 performance of confinement in a cell strongly features the bed that he slept on. The idea of sleep is echoed here, and the sense of isolation/desolation/lack of human contact/aloneness/nothing to do except sleep align with my own similar ideas.

It is befitting then, that I should use the setting of a bed + blanket in the installation.


To imbue the ritualistic elements in my own piece, I will hand make the blanket (as opposed to buying one and setting it up just like that). In this way, the comfort is created by the subject seeking the comfort. It implies a sense of trying as opposed to stagnant depression. And perhaps in trying one fails, but what is important is that attempts were made to cope – “coping mechanisms”.

Starting with pre-production

For the first time in months, I left Pulau NTU for home. It was a difficult journey. It was long. It was arduous. But I was home. And I got to work setting up the room for shooting.

Decluttering.

I had stuck cellophane to the ceiling light so that it would bathe everything in blue. Because blue is the warmest colour. What? No. Blue is cold and blue is sad and blue is lonely.

Also I think that I used blue because in the Ganzfeld Experiment colour is used to alter mindstates so I blue here is meant to suggest and induction of loneliness in the character.


The original shots were a little bit low, so I tried playing with a higher angle of the camera for this master shot.

Checking for headspace – this might be a too tight.

Another angle to alleviate headspace problem? I decided against this because of a few reasons.

  1. The changes in movement of the character causes variation in size which could indicate hierarchy, which is not ideal
  2. The frontal master shot before was much better in portraying the idea of an objective physical space due to it’s straight on, ‘scientific’ observation.

In the end, I went back to the frontal master shot with a slightly lower angle. Headspace works well.

Starting with sound

In the Ganzfeld Experiment film (previous post), I also observed the sounds that were used to complement the images. What I noticed was repeated through the piece was a sort of low-frequency buzzing/whirring/pulsation in various forms being used intermittently throughout the dreamlike hallucination bits. At this point in time I am not too sure how to go about achieving this exactly, but as a first step I went about recording what sounds I could in the spaces around me to see if I could imitate the sounds I heard. Here are a couple from the collection –

In the end, I couldn’t really get a sound that felt correct to me. I eventually turned to freesound.org which I found was a great resource for, well, free sounds. A quick search of ‘alien’ sounds gave me quite a big variety of the ‘low-frequency buzzing/whirring/pulsation’ I was looking for. I was particularly fond of these two:

https://www.freesound.org/people/ERH/sounds/70960/

https://www.freesound.org/people/Connum/sounds/11705/


Somewhere along the way an ADM student made some sounds –

made this soundscape for his 4D submission –

Original OSS post [here].

The original intent was to portray an idea of omnipresence – of being everywhere/in several places at once, but along the way –

…I listened to it again and it dawned on me that it sounded like someone attempting to perceive something unperceivable.

The piece begins and is sustained by a low whirring that exists in the background. It then is foreground by a selection of piano strokes which does well to imbue an uncomfortable-ness in the piece. It then moves into higher-frequency distorted sounds. Towards the end, there is a crescendo that seems climbs to a high frequency, that seems to suggest a breakthrough into sorry I am probably butchering this but another dimension/state of mind of sorts. Then the whirring. That escalates and builds. Then. End.

TLDR; it spoke to me and with permission, I will be using it.


As I had decided to use jtan304’s soundscape in certain parts of my filmic piece, I now need to find accompanying sounds that could complement existing part of the soundscape in order to maintain coherence throughout the film. What stood out to me in the soundscape were the intermittent piano strokes used throughout the piece.

I then thought of using piano melodies to sustain coherence for the rest of the film.

At this point in time I have somewhat decided on the shots I’d like to sequence, and I know that I require something that could suggest a dream-like presence or state of mind from a first person perspective. So after many years, I touched the keys again –

I played with a few chord sequences and eventually came up with these that I felt were right(ish) –

Chord sequence from Jhene Aiko’s Eternal Sunshine

Chord sequence from Eery’s Her.

V hapz 2 play muzak agn.

Starting with visual representation

There was a film I watched that was quite lovely.

It deals with an interpretation of the Ganzfeld experiment which is used as a measure of detecting ESP (Extrasensory Perception).

Extrasensory perception, ESP or Esper, also called sixth sense, includes reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind.

The contents of the film are not so important as the way the visual aspects of this “extrasensory state” are dealt with.

In the extrasensory state, the character dreams/remembers/sees what seems to be memories in surreal and dreamlike sequences. What is interesting (to me) about these sequences are the colour and image distortions used to alter the images (aka glitch effects). In contrast with unaltered footage, it very effectively suggests a kind of alternative mindstate

In contrast with unaltered footage, it very effectively suggests a kind of alternative mindstate – one that is beyond objective perception in the real world. I am quite keen on exploring a similar style of image alteration in my film as well, to portray the perceived contrast between the objective physical world and the subjective lonely state of mind.


I downloaded some glitch apps on the phone to see what kind of visual language was accessible to me in image alteration. There were some really good ones like (Glitché) but that wasn’t free (on top of paying for the app itself, you have to play like $5 more to access most of the functions) so forget that. #brokeandhungryandsleepdeprived.

I ended up really liking (Bent) for its many suitable filters and functions. But one downside to the app was that I couldn’t import existing videos into the app for it to alter the image. Meaning if I went with this I will have to shoot on my phone straight from the app as opposed to using a proper camera.

Life is for dangerous living.

I went with it anyway.

Here is some footage I got to see what the app could do –

4D: This is where it starts.

I wanted to make a film about loneliness based on the story I wrote for Narratives class. It was about loneliness – how a girl hallucinates her body parts as being separate entities from herself, sentient beings that speak to her and talk to her. She thinks her body parts are her friends, a sort of twisted kind of imaginary friend.

The thing is – no one else sees these body parts as sentient beings. And so it is significant to consider that loneliness is a state of mind accessible to only the individual experiencing said loneliness. And said loneliness is experienced through a lens that distorts the objective physical world through emotions and skewed perceptions.

I also realized that what I did for Assignment 1 also aligns with this idea somewhat – on the idea of perception.

So, this film will continue on the theme of perception – subjective versus objective perception of spaces. Specifically, alterations caused by loneliness.


There is a book I want to read.

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

But I predict I will not have the time to read it + think about it + evaluate my thoughts + come up with a concrete conclusion about the book that would inform my thought process for the film in time for submission.

But I did read a Brain Pickings article [here] that talks about the book and about how Laing describes her loneliness.

It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.

Beautifully poignant. But also, I think these did not do much to inform my thought process about the work, more so, it has cushioned my own feelings of loneliness.

Some say that one does not know loneliness until he/she has felt completely and utterly alone whilst in the company of others. Then perhaps Laing has alleviated some part of this lonely 20 year old girl by speaking words she herself is too crippled to form.


In response to reading about other people’s Lonely, I thought more about my own Lonely. Here are some raw thoughts from the stream of consciousness (if you are interested):

Idea of loss
Emotions associated with losing somethings that was once there
Losing objects/people/things in general
Missing the lost object

Why keep objects?
For their sentimental significance
Sometimes this gets a little manic and illogical – the kinds of items we keep
There is no objective reason to keep these items but
We keep them to justify/ the last thread to the thing that is lost
Objects of permanence vs memories/feelings of impermanence

How does a lonely person live life?
Either succumbing to the loneliness
And therefore crippling themselves, not doing anything for long periods of time
OR by distracting themselves with things to do, people to see


At the end of it all, here is my conclusion:

The film is (will be) a representation of the objective world and the lonely state of mind of the artist.

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.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
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.