creative industry report // nick seluk

Who is Nick Seluk?

Seluk is an American cartoonist or known as the Awkward Yeti. He graduated with a degree in psychology, while only taking one art class in college. He worked in several jobs, such as an art director when he realised that his passion lied in cartooning. He quit his job and return to his childhood dream job.

What does Nick Seluk do?

Seluk is famously known for his comics that personifies the human organs, as well as the character, the Awkward Yeti.

He creates children’s books, comics, games and animations.

He first started his comics with the character, Lars.

Lars is an awkward blue yeti that found it hard to fit in with the rest and is an introvert. The inspiration for the character Lars, was actually Seluk himself and meant to represent him who always had to battle with his anxiety and introversion.

Seluk then introduced the Brain into the Lars comics to dive a little deeper into the bad decisions and anxiety that plagued Lars. To act as a balance, he added the Heart where Brain represented logic and introversion while Heart represented emotions and extroversion.

With the popularity of Heart and Brain, he expanded it even further by introducing more human organs into the mix. Seluk designed unique personalities for each organ. One of the most popular characters is the Gallbladder, known for being the sad, underappreciated small baby.

Why does he inspire me?

I first came to know of Seluk’s works through his card game, OrganAttack. I’m a huge fan of card and board games and OrganAttack was easily one of my favourites. I became curious about his other works and thus stumbled onto his comics.

One key takeaway from Seluk’s works is his relatability. He knew how to capture his audience by creating content that the general public could easily understand and relate to, evident from his huge following of 2 million followers on Facebook, and 1.8 million on Instagram. His Heart and Brain series was also a New York Times Bestsellers.

The content of his comics deals with complex physiological processes, where his degree in psychology probably aided him in conceptualization. Even though the content could be difficult for people to comprehend, he “dumbed” it down to make it easily understandable and comprehensible to his audience. This is important because you don’t want to be an artist that displays works that are “if you get it then you get it”.

Also, his comics have helped many people through dark times and I aspire to do the same or hopefully make the world a better place.

In the Subconscious // flashmob

(Collaboration between Fizah and Tanya)

In the Subconscious is a mini flashmob, consisting of five performers, orchestrating a symphony of trivial questions through text to voice translation on their phones or laptops.

Score:
  1. Walk into ADM lounge and spread out.
  2. Once seated, first participant can begin the flashmob by playing the first audio.
  3. During Wave 1, participants are to wait 3 seconds after the previous audio to play their audio.
  4. During Wave 2, the waiting time drops to 1 second.
  5. During Wave 3, participants can play their audios at random sequence and timing.
  6. Wait for the cue from the first participant to get up and leave the performance area.
Concept:

Inspired by the recent ads from Apple: “Some things shouldn’t be shared. That’s why iPhone is designed to help give you control over your information and protect your privacy.” – Apple

In The Subconscious focuses on vocalising the collective subconscious minds of people; creating a space where these subconscious thoughts seemingly become public, easily accessible to everyone.

wk5: what needs to be done // fyp

Topic

Find a more unique approach to tackle the endangered animals subject or loss of biodiversity

Current problem statement: endangerment by urbanization

  • Dig a little deeper into how urbanization in Singapore has impacted these animals
  • Other than just the removal of habitat, what other ways of urbanization (e.g. plastic consumption) contribute to these problems
  • could try to link back to the original problem statement about coexistence
Interaction

Current interaction: motion sensors that track human presence that will trigger animations of human impact to the animals/habitat

  • Explore other mediums other than interactive projections
  • Think of interactions using objects where their actions create a reaction to the artwork
  • Try to see if participants can contribute something to the artwork
  • Find more artworks that are related to this topic.
WHATS WRONG, FIZAH?

Currently, I am terrified of choosing the wrong topic. I want to make sure that I have my topic right and be confident about it.

That’s probably why I’m taking a bit more time in the conceptual phase.

Other than that, I slightly regret choosing the topic of animals for several reasons:

  1. obviously this topic is very overdone, so I have a huge burden to think outside of the box and make something different and unique.
  2. difficult to incorporate self-expression. When I reviewed other student’s works, I could see how the artwork represents who they are, and I feel like I’m starting to lose my own identity in my project, by focusing on “solving the problem”. Now, I need to find the right balance of “self-expression” and “problem-solving”.

But there is no going back now. I’m going to stick to this animal topic and find a solution.

By the next meeting, I hope that I can have a solid problem statement and have a rough idea of what interactions/narrative I would like with some possible small prototypes.

the rope choreographer // micro-performance

An empty stage.

 

 

 

 

Performers are usually given a blank canvas to perform in. In that empty canvas, they bring in their own performance that occupies the space.

What if we designed the space and instead of them performing IN the space, we make them perform TO the space?

In my project, I wanted to explore the idea of letting a space choreograph a dancer’s movement. Essentially, the dancers come into a space with no choreography in mind and move according to what the space tells you to.

For this micro-performance, I decided to scale it down by using objects instead of space.

Dancers/ often used props that have been choreographed into dance.

Similarly, what happens when we let the prop choreograph your dance?

Subject:

The rope choreographer  – rope and dancers

Context:

Two participants will control the rope, while the performer has to dance to the movement of the rope.

The performers experimented with two different instructions on how to react to the rope.

  1. Avoid the rope.
  2. Always touch the rope.

I enlisted the help of two of my dancer friends of varying dance backgrounds, Mus (contemporary dancer) and Shah (Lindy dancer). I (an old and retired modern dancer) also took part in this performance.

Part 1 – Avoid the Rope

Part 2 – Always touch the Rope

Thoughts

I believe the rope started becoming the fourth dancer in this performance. While perfoming, I was entranced by the rope, and it instinctively becomes my “dance partner”.

It’ll be interesting to see a variation of this where it becomes a human and machine dance collaboration, where the dancer has to move according to the movements of the machine. I would very much love to venture into this for my semester project.