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Project 4 – Evocative Objects – Research and Development

The severity of the issue

Singapore saw 170 new cases of anorexia in 2016, up 4 times from 2003. Average of about 10% increase in cases each year.

Factors include online fads such as A4 waist challenge (women waist A4 size) and the thigh gap craze.

The three most common eating disorders doctors see are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. People suffering from anorexia starve themselves as they are intensely fearful of becoming fat, while those with bulimia binge eat before purging what they have eaten through self-induced vomiting or laxatives.

Doctors say those suffering from anorexia have the highest mortality rate among all psychiatric conditions. They could be so malnourished that their hearts may stop suddenly or their kidneys could fail. Or they could be so depressed, they could take their own lives.

Worldwide, studies have found that between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of those with anorexia that is not treated may die, Dr Gudi said.

Sensitivity and confidentiality about this topic. Capstone project from NUS CAPT aimed at helping people w EDs had this issue.

Awareness and understanding is the first step to helping people with EDs, hence our project.

Our Project

Since the problem with the eating disorders stem from social pressure, our group decided to tackle it from the social standpoint, which is to raise awareness and allow for more people to be more conscious of what they say or do which may involuntarily promote eating unhealthily less. We attempt to do this through allowing for the audience of our project to have a visual and audio interaction with what we perceive to be thoughts in the mind of a person with an eating disorder.

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Project 4 – Evocative Objects

The idea of our evocative object came from a BMI machine.

The crux of our project was to allow for the audience to be able to interact with the art piece and have a feel of what it’s like to be in the mind of a person with an eating disorder, and we targeted it at people who suffer from anorexia and bulimia. The core issue with these 2 eating disorders is that they stem from an insecurity of a person’s body image, and our project aims to shed light on the pain and thought process behind a person with eating disorders.

The structure is a dome-like as shown in the image above with opaque walls and a roof. Inside there will be 14 panels that look like BMI machines that lay on the floor, and each one will light up to be a different colour when stepped on. As an audience steps on a certain panel, their attention will be drawn to a screen that will be mounted on the wall of the dome due to a frame of the same colour appearing on the screen. From there an audio clip will play of a voice that represents a thought in the head of a person with an eating disorder; it could be of a family member or of a friend or even of the person himself/herself.

The idea of this project is to raise awareness for the problems that people with eating disorders face, which primarily stems from the lack of understanding and empathy for their situation. Through a dark dome with lighted panels we hope to be able to simulate what it’s like in someone’s mind while playing with the audience’s sense of hearing and sight to be able to paint an immersive picture of the amount of social pressure that a person with an eating disorder puts himself or herself under.

Above are some examples of the sound clips that we thought would have been fitting for our project. The first clip is an internal voice talking to himself and having negative thoughts about his body image. The second one aims to imitate an asian parent telling his child to eat less and go outside and play more often.

Above is an example of what a lighted panel could look like.

Overall I quite enjoyed the project and it allowed for us to be able to really explore our options without having to worry about costs or other factors regarding implementation of the object.

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Project 3 – Sequential Thinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jYP0iqpbCg

Above is the link for my project on sequential thinking.

The idea for the project came from a halloween event i was planning for my hall. I wanted to illustrate the intensities of fear and feelings as you ran from something you were afraid of, while also being able to demonstrate ability to frame with the camera and tell a story about running from several different perspectives.

In the clip you’ll find my attempts at first person perspective, third person perspective, still shots and breaking the fourth wall. The various methods of framing myself running away from the red balloon were explorative attempts to find out what kinds of takes worked best for achieving different results. I felt the need to both capture the movement and the intensity of fear in the pictures at the same time and that proved to be somewhat of a challenge.

I also tried to inject a sense of humour into the skit, as seen from when I break the fourth wall. In terms of the narrative I wanted to give the viewers a break from all the intensity and to include at least one scene where a lighthearted laugh could be had.

Overall, I quite enjoyed doing this project as there was a lot of room for exploration and ideation without having the issue of having to worry about how different mediums had to mesh together or come together to form a cohesive product.

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Sound Art – Interesting Finds

The Singing Ringing Tree – Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu of Tonkin Liu

The Singing Ringing Tree is an architectural project under the Panopticon project by Mid Pennine Arts. Constructed with galvanised stainless steel pipes, the Singing Ringing Tree is a sculpture that overlooks Burnley in England, and creates sounds using natural winds that blow across the sculpture. Through clever variations in the width as well as curvature of the pipes, the architects allowed the sculpture to have an aural range of seven octaves.

I feel that this piece of art is a stroke of genius as the artists were able to bring about an aural experience to something as natural as wind which would otherwise have been ignored as environmental noise. Not many notice the subtleties in the sounds that winds make, and this sculpture is about to shed light and bring attention to artistic and aesthetic potential in a force of nature that was once latent.

 

The Whispering Room – Janet Cardiff

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/whispering_room.html

 

The Whispering Room is an installation by Janet Cardiff, which consists of 16 speakers in a dark room where a video plays. Through the 16 different speakers, a different voice is heard in each one and across speakers, certain dialogues can be heard. By walking around the room, the audience would be able to make out a story by carefully listening to the conversations that the individual speakers have.

I feel that this piece was innovative and incredibly immersive as it requires the audience to move around the room and interact with the speakers. By forcing the audience to paint a picture in their head through the information that they receive from the speakers, Cardiff creates a unique environment where audiences are able to immerse themselves in a story that she has created, making them want to find out more, and they would only be able to do so through multiple listens of the numerous voices. Her idea to use sound and dialogue as a means to tell a story instead of simply playing a video with audio truly captures the essence of art in sound.

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Sound Art – Reading Assignment

  1. What is sound?

Sound, by a very physical definition, refers to vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear. In art, sound commonly refers to music. In a musical point of view, music can be composed of organized sounds and silence, as proposed by Edgard Varese and John Cage respectively. Very broadly, sound refers to the aural component of almost any and every activity.

 

  1. How has it been use in culture and society?

Sound is the crux of communication; to speak, to record and to communicate verbally all hinge on the very essence of sound. Sound can be represented in art through a variety of exhibitions, which include, and are not exclusive to, music, kinetic sculptures and conceptual art pieces. The most notable example of sound as art comes in the form of popular music.

 

  1. What makes it an art?

Sound can add complexity to art pieces for audiences of art. Through several layers of sounds, listening to an audio piece repeatedly can provide more and more information to an audience for them to better paint a picture of what goes on in an art piece by allowing them to pay more attention to subtleties in the audio piece that they would not have noticed before. Such subtleties include the noises the recording instruments make, or the sounds of the environment in the backdrop of the tape. The lack of sound can also add to the overall aesthetic of an art piece. For example, silence can invoke mystery or suspense in an audience. Through manipulations of sounds, artists will be able to express themselves and invoke thoughts and feelings in an audience, which serves the same purpose as art.

 

  1. How does advancement in audio technology affect our sense?

 

The development of phonography has undoubtedly allowed for better freedom of expression for sound artists by allowing sounds to be more reproducible and editable. Through recordings artists would be able to add several layers to sounds to perfect the audio piece that they want to send out. One example lies in pop music, where artists pile layers and layers of beats and sound effects to mask surface noise and create a more enjoyable audio pleasure. Artists may also choose to emphasise on surface noise as a tool to invoke suspense, as Theodor Adorno had pointed out.

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Reading Assignment : Rhetoric of the Image by Roland Barthes

    1. What are some of the key questions Barthes aims to investigate in the article?

    i. How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

    ii. What are the functions of linguistic message with regard to the (two fold) iconic message? Anchor and Relay

    iii. What is a lexicon? A portion of symbolic plane (of language) which corresponds to a body of practices and techniques.

  2. What are some of the key terms/concepts introduced and discussed?

    First Message : Substance is linguistic, i.e. caption, labels, etc.
    Connoted message : Interpretive association
    Denoted message : ‘dictionary’/literal meaning
    Second Message : Iconic Message – coded or non coded

    Polysemy : the ability for an image to have multiple meanings or interpretations

    Anchors : A means to direct the audience’s attention or focus to a particular interpretation or view of the image.
    Relay : Text that provides information not provided by the image itself. Text that pushes the image forward to add an additional layer of information and strengthens the core idea or motive in an image.

  3. Do you agree or disagree with his argument and point of view?

    I feel that Barthes’ way of looking at an image and creating a structure or format for others to be able to more accurately interpret and look at a piece of art or an image was well thought out.

    Barthes’ perspective covers many fundamental bases in a very practical way. Using an advertisement (a ubiquitous form of media) as a core example to reinforce his arguments helped shape the scaffold of his argument and allowed for the audience to better relate to his examples.

    His scaffold helps us be able to understand what the artist was thinking when he came up with the image, which was to cater to an audience. Essentially, we understood the artist’s motives and through Barthes’ scaffold, we were able to see how the artist cleverly places certain subject matters where they were placed in order to better be able to direct the audiences’ attention and focus to the topics that the artist wants them to concentrate on. It also shows how the artist was able to make use of the audiences’ subconcious minds and their ability to draw links between different items or subjects (such as Italians and pasta) to add an additional layer to the image, allowing for a deeper connection and understanding of the image from the audience.

    Generally, Barthes’ scaffold allows for both amateur and experienced artists alike to have a formula to fall back on should they not know how to approach an image or art piece. It is well formulated and is a good foundation for which people can refer to to know how they can start interpreting and understanding images.

    However, his scaffold is limited to the audiences’ knowledge of the context and background of the art piece or image. While his scaffold does help with finding a start line for the interpretation of an art piece, it does not give a concrete answer as to what the artists is thinking nor would it be able to give contextual information or information that was not provided in the image that could help the audience better understand the separate layers behind the image. While this is a limitation that is out of Barthes’ control that undeniably cannot be helped by scaffolds of any other kind, it still stands as a limitation to his viewpoints and arguments on how an image should be viewed; if an audience cannot even begin to comprehend a piece, what use would his scaffold be?

  4. Provide a brief analysis (200 words) on an advertisement of your choice by using the terms/ concepts proposed by Barthes and discuss the role of text and its relationship with the image in the advertisement. Please include an image the advertisement in your post.

    Several elements in the image attached helps paint a picture of the background of the story that the advertisement tries to push forward. Such elements add to the non coded iconic message in the center of the screen, that Budweiser, in conjunction with fold of honour, has a campaign to help fund scholarships for military families.

    In the background we can see old pictures of a soldier on a shelf, with the connoted message being that the home desk on which these pictures lie belong to an ex-military personnel. Through the use of blurring, the artist anchors the audiences’ attention to the center and forefront of the desk.Right in the front of the desk lies an acceptance letter for a scholarship appeal addressed to a female, presumably the owner’s daughter. It connotes that the soldier in question has a daughter and that their family is in need of financial assistance for the daughter’s opportunity at higher education. Thus, even without the text in question, a picture has already been painted of Budweiser as a company; that they care about their customers by engaging in charitable movements and campaigns that help consumers of Budweiser.

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Strange World – Research and Development

Defended to death, Peter Kennard, 1983

About The Artist

Peter Kennard is a photomontage artists who turned from painting to photomontages to better address his political views.

Artist’s Website

http://www.peterkennard.com/

My Thoughts On His Work

Defended to death speaks volumes to the world by conveying a very conspicuous message; the space race between the USSR and the United States was harming the environment.

The most compelling feature of this piece is it’s simplicity; the message is very direct, very little editing was required yet the power behind the message was not compromised.

Substituting the eyes in the image for the flags of the USSR and the United States was symbolic as it represented the myopia behind the space race; the public was generally never in support of lunar exploration until 1969. The gas mask surrounding earth suggesting that humanity as a whole were suffering from the negative environmental consequences of the space race was a touch of genius to me.

 

Human Flowers, Cecelia Webber

About The Artist

Cecelia Webber is an artist based in Montreal, Quebec.

Artist’s Website

http://www.ceceliawebber.com/

My Thoughts On Her Work

I particularly liked this piece from Webber’s natural human series as I felt that the way she orchestrated this piece truly brought out the essence of fragility and beauty in human life.

By substituting every element of a rose with a human in a different pose, Webber was able to give an otherwise ordinary object a very unique touch.

Her placement of each person involved in the piece was critical to the message that it tries to bring across as well. At the very center lies a woman who is in fetal position; the position in which a fetus develops. The center of a flower is also where a flower begins to bloom. All the other people involved in this piece are put in very uncomfortable positions, and this is a metaphor for the amount of effort that goes into caring for our offspring.

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Ground Zero.

“Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom.”

Jean Rasczak, Starship Troopers

Mural (1943) – Jackson Pollock

 

Such was the philosophy of artists Jackson Pollock as he embarked on his adventure into post-modernism. A pioneer in what was then a new and groundbreaking era of art, Pollock defied the norms and ground rules of art that were laid down by modernism, and began creating something so refreshingly new that not everyone could agree with how radical his movement in the artists’ society was. Pollock questioned if art was truly about it’s destination; the final piece of painting or work that would eventually be framed for eternity and left to hang for the ages to admire. He saw beauty in the process; the same kind of beauty most people find in the walk of life more than the destination of living itself.