Originally, I wanted to have a performative video piece of myself engaging in a slow process of crocheting the blanket to accompany the installation. However, as the installation came to develop, I realized that I had too many wall-hanging elements and that adding another video onto the wall. Therefore, I needed an intangible element that could add on to the work.
Then, I ventured into sound. And this was when I was fully about to concretise the concept of the installation into a streamlined idea –
This soundscape is a sonic representation of the artist’s struggle with panic/anxiety/depressive episodes. Recently the artist has been having more of these episodes due to various reasons. Each occurrence is terrifying and debilitating and crippling, leaving the artist exhausted and fearing when the next episode would attack.
The soundscape begins with a chilling atmosphere, with whirring sounds. Melodic sequences are then layered upon the consistent whirring. These melodic sequences are unstructured, in order to evoke uncomfortable/ anxious feelings within the viewer. The viewer then understands that the work is sinister in nature. The melodies then continue in fragments, eventually building to a segment where “33 music boxes play at once”. This is the most turbulent part of the soundscape, representing the highest point of fucked uppery that the artist feels. (Feels like there is nothing worth living for/there is no happiness in the world at these moments). Eventually, this segment ends. The storm is over. This is signified by bird song, which give off a more positive vibe. However, the underlying sinister whirring sounds that were repeated throughout the soundscape continue throughout the birdsong, signifying that the underlying illness is still present, that it is never completely gone.
As it was important to me that the idea of ‘creating comfort’ for oneself be portrayed in the installation, I wanted the hand-make a comfort object, as opposed to simply finding a suitable one and buying it. I found some simple instructions on how to crochet a blanket here:
It seemed very manageable.
The original plans were to crochet a full-sized blanket to place in the installation. However, due to time and money constraints only a baby-sized blanket/adult sized shawl was possible. Which actually doesn’t matter too much as it does not take away from the idea of ‘creating comfort’ for the self.
It was also important to me that the idea of ‘failing’ be portrayed in the work as well, because in trying, things are not always smooth sailing and things are not always beautiful.
Failure bitsCrocheting
Altering space
In continuation of the last film, wanted to extend the idea of altering space and perceptions of a space through altering the lighting of the space. Continuing the play on blue light, I altered existing light fixtures by taping blue cellophane over the bulbs to create the blue light.
There is a visual association to a table lamp when using a lamp like this.
Trying out different modes of lighting and evaluating the shape of the lighting fixtures, I found that a lamp like the one above gives off a more ‘homely’ feeling, which marks it as a homely and safe object.
However, as I wanted the blue light to embody the element of a foreign, dangerous object, I used a different light instead.
This fluorescent bulb gives off a more sinister vibe with its shape.
I also played with the placement of the light. Above, I placed it in one corner of the space. Below, it is placed horizontally on the wall. When placed like it is below, it seems more as if the light belongs in the space like all ceiling lights do, rather than above, where it sits in a corner – removed from its natural environment (on the ceiling), and therefore can better act as an ‘object of danger’.
I also wanted to put the idea of danger across more strongly, and so thought of creating an accessory that could go onto the light to imply its dangerous nature.
Metal netting
Moulding and painting the light fence
Usually, dangerous objects are kept out of reach, and usually, there is a barrier between said dangerous object and the person so to ensure the safety of the user. As such, borrowing this idea of a safety barrier, I decided to create a metal netting around the light to imply its dangerous nature.
Finished light
Further altering space
In order to further imply the idea of an alternative space, I thought of ways to imply the other-worldliness of the blue space. In particular, I was quite keen on the idea of playing with time as an elementand using physical clocks to imply this idea. As such, I bought IKEA clocks to see how I could use both clocks to imply different spaces.
I thought of the idea of altering time – either slowing down time or reversing time to portray this idea of ‘other worldliness’. At first, the idea of slowing down time seemed the most fitting, as I wanted to convey an idea of a sluggish mindstate and an inertia associated with sadness and loneliness. However, I realized that this was not impactfulenough and that there is some difficulty in portraying a duality between ‘real world’ and ‘subjective world’ – if one clock were to run slower, it would run so slow that the time would be completely out of sync with the other clock and the presence of two contrasting times would confuse the viewer and might lead the viewer to interpret the installation inaccurately (different time zones? weak battery in one clock?)
As such, I wanted both clocks to portray the same time, except that one is mirrored to the other in order to convey the idea of an alternative, reflect world – another dimension – a subject headspace inaccessible by most.
Creating the reflected templatePasting the reflected template onto original clock
It is quite easy to reverse the clock. Usually, there is a ferrous core in the inside that just needs to be flipped in order for the mechanism to switch. Just gotta keep track of the gears and where they go.
Yay
Implying presence
To really tie it back the idea of ‘subjective space’ as perceived by a human being, I felt that elements of human presence must be implied. First, I thought of stuffing the comforter to imply a human presence under the comforter.
Here is I, casting me leg –
It was a good idea at first, but I realized that the shape of the limbs did not show very well. The only way to really imply their shape was to really tuck the blanket under the legs. But that created a lot of creases in the blanket, which made the set up look very haphazard and distracting.
Instead, I thought of implying presence in a different way instead – creating positive space rather than creating an invisible negative space.
Casting hollow hands with plaster bandages.
This was the original placement I wanted to have the hands be placed in. However, I realized that the position of the left hand is very passive, which makes it look kind of floppy and dead. As such, I casted a second hand tobe placed in a more active position of holding the piece of crocheting.
New left hand is much less passiveOld hand finds a new home
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:
Immersive
Multi-sensory
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”.
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.
The changes in movement of the character causes variation in size which could indicate hierarchy, which is not ideal
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.
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:
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) –
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 –
All the photographs in their entirety can be found here:link
Initially, I wanted to have the focus of the zine be on portraying objectively the data I had collected. However, upon feedback, it was pointed out to me that the style of data visualisation above was too cold and ‘corporate’, which did not fit the whimsical nature of my concept. Deliberate and intentional superficial judgement (especially when the one who judges is consciously and purposefully making and dramatising skewed judgement) is best portrayed in a more fun, playful manner.
As such, I will be loosening my style for the final zine direction, and will be playing with hand-drawn illustrations and fun colours instead.
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.
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
4. Play video from phone
Unluckily, by the laws of physics, the images produced from this were way too faint to be workable. But here they are anyway.
I’d say this is 5 times brighter than what the naked eye sees.And it gets worse with coloured images.Cool pix with ambience light but unusable but nice so put on OSS.Cool unusable pix but nice so put on OSS.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.
