Time – Musings

Project 1 Time | Final work & Reflections

(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! ( please visit my page for a accurate timeline of posts though! )

Now that this project is over, it’s time to reflect. I’ve started his project with a very large and pretty unorganised train of thought. With some self reflection, I’ve decided to define time as a huge muddy sea of constants and variables.

Constants: The locations I visit, the timing of which I take the pictures, the subjects of the photo, the life I live, the society around me, the skies I get to see.

– Routines, structure, the inexplicable movement of time as the sun undoubtedly rises and sets.

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Variables: When the wind blows clouds over to cover parts of the sun, when a lady refuse to budge from her spot in my shot. How I see the world in a stressful morning, how I respond to it during a relaxed evening.

– Emotions of mine, emotions of others. The movement of nature, the inevitable bits of chaos.

How do we measure time in Singapore? This question still lingers in my mind.

I believe that in a society so obsessed with constants, are variables the only things left that at least give some idea that time has passed?

If we cannot control constants, we should try to be variables, or at least try to take note of the variables around us.

The Sun will always rise and set, but where its light touches, where a shadow is cast onto the ground. No two photos are the same, no two seconds are the same. Everything is always changing every day, every hour, every second.

The book is hence titled “In the light of” from the idiom,

In the light of something:

considering, because of, taking into account, bearing in mind, in view of, taking into consideration, with knowledge of

The title is a play on the fact that, yeah the photos are of shadows and things that have been under the light of the sun. But also taking into account the life around us, how time passes, how constants drive us, how variations change us and how we feel about those things.

Anyhoo, I’ve included the photo book for you guys to read!

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A friend told me that my photos reminded her of Edward Hopper‘s works. If you are unfamiliar with his works, Edward Hopper is a American painter who captures scenes and architecture iconic of America’s golden years of the 1920’s to 50’s. The catch is that his works are without a lot of the glitz and glamour that usually comes pre-packaged with these imagery, but it’s not overtly morose either.

Hopper’s scenes usually depict those of people being indoors. White spaces occupy most of the canvas, nearly empty rooms, characters in the painting ignoring one another, geometric landscapes with blocks of sunlight invading the scene… these are common elements in his works.

A sense of isolation, loneliness, melancholy and serenity could be seen in his works.

( One of my favourite works of his is Rooms by the Sea, 1951)

While the reference is unintentional, Hopper had been influential in some way because of how much of his works resonates with me. I’ve always somehow wanted to be in those rooms and scenes he paints because of how quiet, spacious and isolated it all is. I was pleasantly surprised to find a quote from him that accurately explains some parts of my project.

There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

Pathetic fallacy, chaos theory; check and checked.

Edward Hopper is renowned for his reluctance to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply summed up his art by stating, “The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

As much as I have lots and lots of themes and ideologies into my work, I think in the most basic reason we do what we do is ultimately for our love for sunlight and how it made a crummy rigid world slightly more beautiful.

As Hopper puts it,

Maybe I am not very human – what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

If he’s not very human, I’m not quite sure if I am too.

(Originally posted on 12/3/2016)

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.

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| More thoughts & Inspirations

(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!)

We are time’s subjects and time bids be gone. -Shakespeare

Time is unsympathetic and does not wait for anyone. We are only tiny pawns who have to live and act in the moment. In the awareness of our impermanence, do we really appreciate it? Can we appreciate it?

To us, sunrise and sunsets are the same day in day out, especially in our Singapore climate where you can guarantee one of two choices, a sunny dawn/dusk or a rainy dawn/dusk.

With our lives largely revolved around work and/or studies, dawn and dusk ultimately became associated with the banalities of life: dawn with one having to get up to work and dusk with one going home from work.

It made me wonder, do we appreciate the golden hour anymore if we are presented with the same thing everyday?

Sure we will enjoy sunrise at the top of mountains or sunsets at the beach but what about the sunrises we see peeking from MRT windows or sunsets from office buildings?

While researching, I came upon the works & words of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

“A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.”

“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.”

It made me think about how we can never control the surroundings around us but we can always document certain moments. As a photographer I am subjected to this amount of banality, can I make it beautiful?

I came upon Nobuhiro Nakanishi’s layer drawings while researching and is extremely captivated by his work.

They are not so much drawings as they are a photographic installation. As explained in his artist statement,

In “Layer Drawing #001—#081” (pp.12-13), by making up the whole picture with the accumulation of continuous changes of time and movement of each object and scene, he presents in a form the process of grasping objects beyond the two-dimensional visual image.

The pieces look three-dimensional without reality contained in small shining boxes (the image seems to be floating in a small box because 24 slide-mounts are piled up). However, this object is not three-dimensional with depth. It has another dimension, that is, the element of continuous movement produced by continuous changes in the object and scenery.

Nakanishi’s work is interesting because he captures every single second of the scene and amalgamating them to become this big block of time. You could actually see the changes in colour in his works as the elements inside it shift as he is photographing them and I find that really interesting.

Inspired by these works, I’ve decided to choose photography as the main medium for my projects because of how easily it captures the ethereal nature of a single moment of time.

Hence I decide to work/ set myself limits onto how I should work on capturing Singapore’s banal beauty.

All the photos must be taken in the golden hours of 6 – 9 am or 5 – 8 pm
The photos must not be taken outside of my usual routine (I cannot go to special scenic places to take photos just because, unless there is a field trip or special events such as weddings.)
The photos must contain a drastic light and shadow element to it
I must document the location and time of the event

I forsee that this project will not really be a viscom-y project as it is more of a conceptual fine arts work but we shall see.

( originally posted on 18/2/2016.)

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”

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.)

Project 1: Golden Hour | Golden years

Time is fickle as it is unsympathetic, it could not stop and will never stop. A reliable constant, a cruel constant.

Golden Hour, Golden years, golden ages.

Time seems to be fraught with our nihilism and our enthusiasm. The hope for a good day as the first rays of light peeps through window grills. Watching the beautiful melancholy of sunsets slowing sinking behind rows of HDBS in a packed train home. Admiring the day’s dying breath, while something gnaws deep inside of having wasted a day or perhaps a year, or a life.

The golden hour is often used in photography to signify the times when the sun is close to the horizon of the earth. The atmospheric light is diffused, colour is enhanced. Sunrise, sunsets, both are good. Although we see it on a almost daily basis, that short period of magic, where light seems heavy and the world looked a tad more beautiful, time becomes a bit more precious.

Time is full of paradoxes, of contrasts. Light and shadow.

Time Keeping Devices – Water capillary action

Group: Allan, Marilyn, Rachel, Elizabeth

Time Keeping Devices: Water Capillary action and Time Candle.

Our first experiment was largely inspired by the Chromatography experiment that we would all do during our secondary school days. Ink chromatography relies on water capillary action in order to separate various elements in a compound for identification. Your mysterious compound sample (in our case, food dye) is placed near the bottom of a vertical strip of paper and placed onto a small puddle of water barely covering the base of the paper. The cool thing is that water through capillary action would go against gravity and travel up the vertical piece of paper, bringing the dye pigments up together with it.

Photo credits: Birdandlittlebird

Capillary action happens due to the cohesive and adhesive nature of water molecules. Water is able to travel upwards when the adhesion of the water molecules to the walls of a vessel ( the paper fibres) is stronger than the cohesive forces between themselves. But of course, there is a limit to this when the water is too high up to be able to counter against the forces of gravity.

The question now is, will the rate of water traveling up the paper be that consistent enough to be an accurate time keeping device. True enough, during our research we came upon an wonderful art piece by Oscar Diaz which uses the same scientific principles to create a calendar. Hence we were largely convinced that the time keeping device should be accurate at keeping time to a certain degree.

In our experimentation, we used various types of paper and see how well the medium could facilitate the movement of water. In the time-lapse video below, we’ve used a 25 cm strip of magic-clean paper towel with a concoction of food dye and water.

It took roughly 10 mins for the dye to travel from one end to another, well… only for that one strip. The others that we’ve tried took longer or shorter than 10 minutes largely due to the fact that the dye would not travel all the way to the end of the strip despite the fact that the strip itself is completely soaked with clear water.

We tried another experiment using a longer strip of paper cut into a zig-zag pattern and have the dye poured onto the strip instead.

While you can see the capillary action going on with that experiment, the rate of which the water was travelling was way too fast as compared to the previous experiment. Where did we go wrong? We are not too sure.

We compelled a list as to which elements could be a factor to the different rates of which the dyed water could travel up the strips. Maybe it could be the height of the container holding the dye water, or the dye-to-water ratio. Perhaps the length of the strips of paper or the amount of fibres in one strip, or -gasp- a mysterious scientific phenomenon not yet discovered by man?

Well, we don’t really know and we were pretty pressed for time, hence we have to find another time-keeping device. While our experiments sort of failed, this does not take away the fact that the gradual colour-changing effect of the strip is pretty neat though.