Research

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4D: Controversial Artists

Pompompom- Kyary Pamyu Pamyu

For our last project, we are tasked to do a research on controversial video, song or performance art. I don’t know why but the first thought that came to my mind was a MV called Pompompom by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

This video mainly consists of nonsensical elements like broken arms and funky bright colours. I was one of the few people that witness the backlash it received when it first came out whereby people were saying that this video was a bad educational material for kids and should ban children from viewing it. However, it’s quite interesting that shortly after it was released, people actually start viewing this as an art and actually start liking it. Although it is out of the norm and quirky, I feel that to be able to incorporate a video with so many interesting elements and still create a strong constant dynamic is a great feat and admirable.

Drawing Restraint – Matthew Barney

DRAWING RESTRAINT (1987-present) is a significant and long-term project for Barney, in which he proposes art-making as parallel to athletic training: the development of form occurs through resistance. Begun while still a student at Yale, Barney was influenced by his background as an athlete and sought to foreground the physical body and its tensions in a studio practice.

http://www.ago.net/matthew-barney-drawing-restraint

One of the performance art that caught my eye from this series of Matthew Barney is Still. As shown above, Barney attempts to mark the ceiling and the walls while bouncing on a tilted trampoline or tethered at the thighs with bungee cords. He being an ex-athletic, tries to draw upon an athletic model of development in which growth occurs only through restraint. As a result, his muscle will encounter resistance, which becomes engorged and is broken down, and through healing becomes stronger. In my honest opinion, while I do understand his underlying concept to recreate an athletic’s body structure, however, I cannot fathom why he would want to recreate these performances through other mediums when he could go through the normal athletic routine to achieve similar results. Also, the whole series has been around for 3 decades which is I feel is a great feat to be able to hold on and continue performing.

Get Back- The Beatles

One controversial song is Get Back by The Beatles. The controversial with this song is that some said to be about getting back to your inner child and inner peace, whereas others believe that the tune is a covert attack on immigration in the United Kingdom. There are also some who say that this was meant for the xenophobic politicians and racists in England at that time. While I can’t comment much about the song as I do not have much knowledge about the situation and history then, I feel that this is an interesting example whereby a song can create such a huge commotion and discussion with different perspective and ideology.

4D II Project 2 – Soundscape

Artist Statement

EmOCEAN is a soundscape that reflects emotions through the use of an ocean landscape. It explores the happenings when emotions take over tranquillity. I made the audio to be under the night sky as the night always exudes a feeling of a mystery to uncover which fits my aim to let the audience uncover the emotions inside my soundscape.  In the audio, different elements like thunderstorm, rain and waves were utilised to paint the landscape of an ocean. Also, windchime to represent tranquillity. Emotion is not felt based on just one element but many. Hence, this project gave me a good opportunity to uncover the abstrusity of feelings.

Research/ Concept

My original idea was to actually record an audio about a day of my life. However, I tried with some test shots and I felt that the audio was relatively mundane- there weren’t any layers and complexity to the audio. It felt mono. Furthermore, the idea was kinda cliche. My next idea was actually an inspiration from a song in my playlist which I was playing on my way home.

The introduction to the song was actually my most favourite part of the song whereby it plays the sound of waves and windchime. Hence, I decided to do an audio on an ocean/ sea landscape. However, during the consultation, I realised this was another cliche idea but I insisted on the ocean concept due to my obsession with the introduction of the song. So Lei suggested me to incorporate emotions to my original idea.

Yeap, that was the start of my misery. How in the world am I going to incorporate emotions to my audio? Like how? Do emotions have an audio to represent it? How do I even invoke such emotions in my audio? I decided to do some research on emotions through sound and below are some of my inspirations.

The audio in this clip made use of repetitive rhythms to evoke feelings and emotions which inspired my to use the sound of wind chimes throughout my soundscape.

Through this video, I decided to include some foley elements into my audio like rainfall which I created through the crushing of plastic and blowing into the mic and doing some post editing after that.

Making of Soundscape

The making of the soundscape was another challenge for me as I have no experience with audacity although we did some exercises in class before and having an extra clear recorder wasn’t helping much either as it tends to record other disruptive audios too. For the waves audio which I recorded, it was actually filled with many background noise like footsteps, the rustling of the leaves and people talking. Also, this problem arises in pretty much every audio of mine- the sound of the crickets and frog. After much struggling and playing around noise gate and noise reduction, I managed to tune down the background noise to the best I could and cover the redundant sounds by underlaying it with a constant base audio.

To ensure that the audio does not sound choppy with the many different sound elements that I incorporated, I translated a picture of waves into audio. I used this image as it has a sense of motion to it- an ambiguity towards whether it is a stagnant wave or a moving wave, hence, a neutral stand in terms of wave.

 

 

 

So after much talking, here’s the end product~

The dynamic in my soundscape is actually quite simple. First, we start off with equal audio from both the wind chime which I used to represent calm and neutralness, and the waves which paint my scene. The use of crickets here is to represent the night sky. As we proceed, we realised that the crickets started to disappear and there is a short moment of peace before it is replaced by a storm/ thunder which mimics strong emotions like anger and anxiousness or even anxiety that we are bound to feel at any part of our lives. My intentions with the raindrops which came after that was to evoke a sense of turmoil within the audience. The wind chime is still playing here as I intend to show that anger has taken over and our emotions are skewed now. In real life, we always hear frogs croaking after the rain stops, hence, I included that to show that it is not raining anymore. Lastly, I tune up the volume of the wind chime to illustrate the comparison between emotions before and after the rain.

Credits

Thunder

I was praying for thunder for the past week but it only rained and thundered really softly sigh so I had to get the thunder sound from an online source below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkG4Fd1Igg

Wind Chime

I walk the whole mall and they don’t sell wind chimes sigh. Henceforth, the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw_1PsJQP9Y

TATA.