Category: Process

Project 1 Time | Process

(N.B I haven’t been tagging these posts right last time hence I’m reuploading them in hopes that they appear in the class pages again!)

Photos Photos Photos!

“Oh dear… Do I have enough content?” Is a number 1 worry of mine working on this project for about 2 weeks and running. Being a subject of 24 hours is bad enough, being a subject of roughly 4 hours a day is worse.

Certain takeaways that I have learnt from taking photos,

1) Do not ever ever ever think to yourself that “it’s alright, it will probably look the same tomorrow anyways”. It wouldn’t, and a perfectly good shot would be gone forever.

2) Shucks that aunty is looking at me weird, maybe I shouldn’t take this shot. (Refer to point 2)

3) Man! I’m really a hermit huh!

Points 1 and 2 made me think about the butterfly effect or chaos theory:

As American mathematician and a pioneer of chaos theory, Edward Norton Lorenz’s explains,

When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

What this means is that a single small element of the past could lead to a larger chain of events and changes that is beyond our predictions.

Sure, that day could be sunny, but I could leave the campus later that day, or my phone could have not enough battery to last for the day etc etc…

Several factors have to come into play including the limits that I have imposed upon myself while taking the photos.

a) It must be a sunny day. (it made me hate rainy/ cloudy days)

b) My phone, of which I take the photos from, have to have enough battery/ memory space to take photos

c) No one must be in the photo ( personal preference)

d) I do not have a shaky hand while taking the photos

This inspired me to also document these factors, how many elements does it take to be able to document a beautiful mundane scene? How much of it is fate, how much control I could I have over this scenario?

These photos in some way or another feels to be the collaboration between fate, time and me. After all, I’m just a tiny person trying to capture little scenes of time against the larger factors of the universe that I can never control.

routine map

I’ve also created a routine map of the places I often or only visit in a week. (Click the photo for a bigger view.)

It looks really empty for now. Perhaps I should add a few more data such as time spend travelling in those routes, when I’d usually go these places etc etc.

(originally posted on 4/3/2016)

 

Project 1 time | Idea generation|Pathetic fallacy and the body clock.

(N.B I haven’t been tagging these posts right last time hence I’m reuploading them in hopes that they appear in the class pages again!)

Ideas Ideas Ideas, there’s too much of them and too little time, however I decided to narrow down what I’d like to do into two main aspects.

1) Pathetic Fallacy

2) Emotional clock

So what is pathetic fallacy?

Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic fallacy is a kind of personification that gives human emotions to inanimate objects of nature for example referring to weather features reflecting a mood.

For example, the sentence “The somber clouds darkened our mood” is a pathetic fallacy as human attributes are given to an inanimate object of nature reflecting a mood.

so what does that have to do with time?

While researching, I came across the chinese body clock. (x)

Our bodies feel emotional changes throughout the day, largely fuelled by the hormonal balances of our bodies. I find it interesting that they name different hours of the day with different organs.

Anyways, as mentioned in a previous post, I decided to focus on the golden hours of roughly 6 – 7 am and 5 – 6 pm in Singapore. Why those hours, I believe that the time represent beginnings and ends at the same time. The end of day and the beginning of night or the end of night and the beginning of day. I believe that Pixar’s Day and Night animation represents this the best.

While photographing my life during those hours, its rather difficult to differentiate from both. The high contrast between light and shadows and the warm lighting are almost the same.

Why the focus on high contrast between light and shadow?

I like playing with the idea of dualities, polar opposites and contrasts. One of my favourite works of all time would be Vincent Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field With Crows”

wheat-field-with-crows

This work has some history going behind it. It is documented that a few days after he finished this painting, Van Gogh, on July 29, 1890, killed himself with a gunshot to the chest. He sustained a gunshot injury to his abdomen while out in those fields before dying in an inn two days later. On his death bed he revealed he had shot himself.

A common analysis on the work is that it shows Van Gogh’s struggles with his bi-polar depression (known as manic depression during Van Gogh’s time). The dark night against the bright field of gold wheat does not make sense in the natural world. To me, I believe that the painting can go two ways. Either Van Gogh started painting in the day and finished when the sun was setting or he was expressing his own emotions onto the landscape as he normally does with his masterpieces. The unnatural contrasts of light and dark stood out as a clear contrast between maniac happiness and depression. The joy of a journey ahead as one is to traverse in to the path of gold contrasted with the onset despair of doing so in a dark night. One just feels trapped in this flurry of emotions, indecisions and beauty.

The golden hours feel sort of like that to me. Chiaroscuro.

Chiaroscuro

:  pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color

:  the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art

b:  the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or character)

:  the interplay of light and shadow on or as if on a surface

:  the quality of being veiled or partly in shadow

( originally posted on 13/2/2016.)