Studio Gateway, ADAD1001/2

Photos from Hawaii  - Concept Statement and Final Images

My designed object, titled “Photos from Hawaii”, documents the enigmatic nature of the titular country through erasure of all elements of photographs excluding colour. The intention of my work was to explore the vagueness that can surround popular travel destinations through erasure of key places from my recent holiday there.

I was influenced by the erasure of subject in Broersen & Lukács’ Mastering Bambi. I chose to emulate this erasure of subject through obscuring the images through pixellation. The idea of pixellation came from experimenting with ways to edit the image on Photoshop. I then chose to digitally print the 15 images I had edited with a lustre finish and display them in a photo album to play on the idea of showing photos from holiday trips to friends and family. I also copied the style in which my parents used to label photographs in albums with the date/place to be in keeping with the idea of displaying a photo album of a trip.

My designed object playfully erases not only the photographs of the trip but also the purpose of a photo album. I took this idea of erasure of purpose from the focus of my group’s film for Assessment 2. While I feel that I could have experimented a bit further laterally, I don’t think that I could have refined the idea I’ve ended with any further through experimenting.

Link to work: http://1998tillinfinity.tumblr.com/

98 till infinity: a loop of captured memories, constantly looping for as long as the machines will sustain them.

The Gameboy Camera was once the Guinness World Record holder for being the smallest digital camera. It is a 4-bit camera with a f/2.2 lens an a focal length of 20cm, released in 1998 and discontinued in 2002. In curating my experiments as a series of six GIFs, “98 TO INFINITY”, I was interested in how I could use a totally antiquated standard of photography to document the present day. I was interested in a final curation of these experiments as a grid of square, embedded GIFs because I felt it was emblematic of current social media platforms in which we document and share our lives, e.g. Instagram, Tumblr. I’ve been interested in the niche of Gameboy Camera photography as something to become legitimately good at, knowing the technical limitations of the camera and (previously) the difficulty in digitising images. It was more successful under fixed lighting, such as in the mall and in class (the sky time-lapse was totally erratic because of fluctuating lighting conditions). As a result I conduct far more experiments than I ended up posting, however I had to make decisions on the spot whether to keep an experiment or try again if I was away from my computer/capture device (the Gameboy Camera cartridge only holds 30 photos at a time, and I produced these GIFs from a series of 24 photos to equal a second of screen-time). Some other locations I attempted were my street at night-time, a time-lapse outside the train window between Ashfield and Central, a gust of wind pushing and pulling a swing-set (I wish this one turned out well, but I got the sun time-lapse on this day) and an aisle of a shopping centre (to name only a few). I was interested in attempting something close to video capture; I had to upscale the images from their native resolution when compiling them as GIFs, and chose to render some of the animations in custom palettes (one of them an attempt to emulate the green tinge of the original dot matrix Gameboy). A stylistic influence was the Pixelvision sequence in Richard Linklater’s Slacker, shot with an extremely low fidelity camera that records onto audio cassettes (https://vimeo.com/70231373). The enlarged Gameboy photos are like a Rorschach test - you really need to step back to be able to harbour a guess at what you’re seeing. For this work I was motivated to take the best photos I could given the lighting conditions and the exceptionally low resolution of the camera, and I think I will continue this practice in the future.

my final work was a computer program which generates an image and reads out instructions for a human to follow to produce the image. the above video shows me carrying out this process.

I can’t think of a good name for it and I don’t like bad names so at the moment it’s nameless.

here is a photo of the finished image. I made a mistake in following the instructions but it’s hard to tell.

Touch Noise: Final Artwork & Concept Statement

In Pia van Gelder’s Noble Wave, a team of artists record the sounds of Mount Feathertop in Victoria, Australia. The organic sounds are accompanied by vision of the artists themselves, sitting peacefully with their instruments. Inspired by this, I looked into sonic art, starting out with a simple microphone plugged into a computer, recording the sounds of plastic, aluminium and rubber. Continuing on from my chosen weekly theme (experimentation), eventually I read ‘Handmade Electronic Music’ by Nicolas Collins, an accomplished sound artist himself.

Using the book as a guide, I set out to create my very own, homemade contact microphone. I used a singular piezo element, along with an old XLR audio cable and a 6.5mm jack plug to make the mic. I purchased soldering equipment, electrical tape and industrial-grade rubberised plastic and followed the series of experiments. I learnt so much about cable anatomy, soldering technique, the circuitry of microphones and electrical safety (breathing solder fumes is actually bad for you…).

The result was a fully functional piezo microphone: I couldn’t believe I succeeded in creating it myself. It was also waterproof, thanks to the rubberised coating. What I learnt about these mics is that they are not a regular microphone – they only pick up sounds through contact and vibrations, not acoustically. Armed with this amazing tool to see the world in a whole new way, I set out to capture the unheard frequencies in our world.

Experimenting with several sizes of plywood casts ranging from small A3 to finally deciding on the 580 x 820 mm. I will be experimenting with new materials that i have never used, timber castings and concrete to produce and re-define a series of archival edits. This notion of using archival work to produce a new work was inspired by Marian Tubbs series at Kudos Gallery where archival artworks were re-purposed to successfully create a beautiful series of sculptures. Having hundreds of digital folders of photographs stored on my hard drive really gives no meaning or justice to my original style of shooting. 

So i decided to dig through my archives and have decided to edit the original image chosen above and re-purpose the image as a physical form in the way of photo-sculpture. Having recently found a new appreciation for the unique ways of exhibiting photography, (rather than the beautiful, classic aesthetic of a white frame and glass front on a wall) I was introduced to an artist who shares the same mindset as myself. 

Letha Wilson, Honolulu born, Brooklyn based mixed-media contemporary artist who works in sculpture, installation, outdoor sculpture and video. Primarliy working with photographing the natural environment on 35mm film using a Mamiya, Wilson then creates inspiring exhibitions using her photographs, presenting them in vague and unique forms. 

With the materials I had mentioned in my previous posts, I set out to build my homemade contact microphone. For this, I found an old XLR audio cable that I didn’t need anymore, and cut the end off. I then stripped away the outer cable, pulled away the insulation, and then stripped the inner core.

It was interesting to see the anatomy of the cable. There was like… cotton wrapped around the outer copper layer (1st pic). I then tinned the ends of the wires with solder (I realised I hadn’t soldered since year 8) and it took me several tries to get it saturated properly. But I got the hang of it eventually.

Then, I used a wire stripper and peeled back some of the piezo disc’s insulation. I soldered the respective ends of the mic to the cable. I repeated this process on the other end of the cable, soldering the two wires onto a 6.5mm (1/4″ jack) plug that goes into a standard guitar amplifier.

Lastly, I held everything together with some black electrical tape and put some over the piezo element itself to protect the delicate solder joints. It did muffle the audio’s high end a bit, but it was needed to keep the connections stable.

Tom Polo’s work really interests me. Is it weird to say it excites me? I really loved learning about him a few weeks ago in class when we were exploring the theme of, I think, failure. The work we focused on was his piece from 2014 titled ‘All I Know.’ Commissioned by the Campbelltown Arts Centre, the piece was a set of 6 billboards situated along the train line which runs between rural train stations Minto and Ingleburn. The idea behind the piece was formed when Polo decided he wanted to display a sentence in segments across 6 billboards. “All I know is that we keep doubting ourselves,” the sentence Polo went with, was essentially an interactive piece of art. The general public travelling along the train line would have to wait until the next billboard to see another segment of the sentence. They had no idea what was coming next; something I really enjoy about this piece. This piece has made me think about how I could potentially document the stories shared with me by the people at Morton’s Place back in Tasmania. When I interview them, I was only using a pen and pad to document what they were saying. Polo’s ‘All I Know’ has provoked me to think about how else I can document what they told me – whether it is perhaps recording someone/or a program like Google Translate reading what they said, or even writing it out and presenting it in segments over the top of the photos I took, for example. Below is Polo’s ‘All I Know.’

The Art of ER..A…S u r… . . e

Left: ‘How to learn about girls’ from Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon Right: The book as conceptual art by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.

Here i found some of the interesting erasure art which i think it’s simple but also have a depth concepts within itself as the works speak by itself at the same time