#concept statement

Final work and Concept Statement

The concept of human and non-human can also be perceived as natural and unnatural, through exploring the relationships between humans and the environment this idea of blurring the line natural and unnatural is what inspired the creation of my poster. Through blurring this line of man made being bad for the environment society can forge a new relationship with nature.

My work was influenced by the works of Eszter Burghardt (her series Edible Vistas, 2010) and Gustav Willeit (his series Perspe, 2017), who both made works that made the unnatural appear natural and the natural appear unnatural. Referring to my inspirations was a pivotal part of my process, as it helped me recover direction in my work and making.

In my experiments I attempted arranging and pressing flowers that I found in my garden, prioritising collecting flowers that have naturally fallen on the ground before picking the flowers off plants as a part of sustainable practice. These experiments were insightful as they helped lead my design process and create my final work.

In my poster I attempted to blur the line between natural and unnatural and is was done my arranging flowers into a human configuration and applying post photography editing. The use of flowers, that seen as distinctively natural is made to be unnatural, due to the human intervention. In the case of my poster it was the removal of the flowers form the outside and onto the page and applying a negative filter, further distorting the natural vivid pink flowers to more unnatural tones of bright blue, black and white.

Concept Statement: 

Perceptions of technology have long been characterised with scepticism and suspicion. New ways of doing things and seeing things and change are often greeted with reluctance and fear. This is in part way influenced by the relative complexity of the technology or its “perceived complexity”. This perception often walls off the mind from trying to understand further than the simple function of an object, for example, a lightbulb. How does it work? How is it made? Most people wouldn’t ask these question and just take a lightbulb at face value – a source of light.

I was inspired by the world of Star Wars and the technology of the Jedi which incorporate the Force (magic) into their lightsabers and holocrons. A holocron is a store of data, kind of like a Jedi usb but only someone Force sensitive can unlock its secrets. I find this to be an apt metaphor for technical expertise in the modern day. For example, an engineer and an end user, looking at the same piece of technology would have two very different outlooks on its potential.

I sought to recreate a holocron in real life (sans the hologram part) but instead of keeping my methods a mystery, I would be entirely open about the approach. The Jedi often kept their knowledge secret and hidden away in holocrons, accessible only under strict supervision but my design is of an open and free holocron, full of data to access and share and add to. The perception of technology as something akin to magic is broken.

Reflection:

This work was influenced by the world of Star Wars and its futuristic technology merged with magic. My design incorporates a wireless hard drive, wireless wifi dongle and led light to simulate a working holocron or repository of knowledge. However, similarly to Julian Oliver’s Transparency Grenade, I kept the coverings of the holocron transparent so you can see the inner workings. And unlike Lisa Jevbratt’s web which is locked and hidden away behind passwords and firewalls, I’ve kept the holocron open for use by just about anyone with a wi-fi connection. The holocron acts as a very conspicuous dead drop for peer to peer anonymous sharing of information.

Works Referenced:

Star Wars lore - Lucasfilm (1977-present) Transparency Grenade - Julian Oliver (2012) Every IP <<1:1>> - Lisa Jevbratt (1999-2002) Dead drops - Aram Bartholl (2010)

Special Thanks to:

Assessment 3 - Context and Time.

Concept Statement:

For this assessment we wanted to capture an event and recreate it in a classroom setting, to be easily applicable and participatory for all those present. We chose “childhood” as our main theme and what better way to encapsulate an Australian childhood than by the many snacks and party food we remembering eating as kids.

We chose to document our event using food because of the intimate relationship humans have with it. We use nearly all of our sense when interacting with food as opposed to just visual/auditory stimulus that most artworks incorporate. We use taste, touch, sound, smell and sight to evoke a long forgotten memory in participants and perhaps, as we compare ages, find that not so much has changed for Aussie kids.

We had our participants think about the last time they ate a fruit rollup or a party pie. We had them try snacks they knew about but didn’t eat during primary school for reasons such as money, religion, strict parents, fussy eating, etc. The class instantly knew what to do when they saw these items and quickly helped themselves. “I haven’t had this in ages” was a common sentiment shared by all. And we had to remind everyone that some day, it would be the last time they had some shapes or a slice of mud cake and they likely wouldn’t know it or think about it.

In this way, we address the issue of time and context because these snacks are readily available for all of us to buy and we think they’re tasty and have good memories associated with them but we don’t buy them now. Because at some point arbitrarily defined by society, our childhood came to an ‘end’ and our minds forgot about the food that made us so happy and shared with our friends.

Our artwork aims to explore the desire to escape mundane life through creating a calming environment. We have combined this with the desire for food (for survival and for pleasure) especially when hungry or tempted by our visual, auditory and olfactory senses.

Our work is very heavily focused on our desire and consumption of food. For our final work our group decided to create a desire fulfilling event which embodied a relaxing environment through the use of food. Our work intercepts the audience’s expectation by creating a soothing and natural soundscape which is interrupted by footage of food causing the audience to realise that they are listening to the sounds of meals being made rather than a rainforest escape. We took everyday mundane tasks or actions to juxtapose the assumption of sound with the real life actions creating them.

For our work we took inspiration from food and and soundscape artists. Cevdet Erek and Samson Young were key references to our work because in each of the video clips, we created sounds with the ingredients, that without the visual aid would be mistaken for a different scene. For example the sound of frying salmon can be mistaken for the sound of rain.

Art and design often explore relationships between humans and non-humans, the environment and ecology. How can contemporary art and design propose new possibilities for imagining the ‘human’ and the environment?

From the research the ecologies are divided into five stages, the first stage is soil, the second is plants, the third is herbivores, the fourth is the primary predator, the fifth is secondary predatory. In this assessment, I will continue and explore the relationship between the natural environment and the human. In this project, I based on the ecologies and plastic pollution. As we all know, the human lifestyle is related to the ecologies. People are always talking about recycling problem, with the rapid development of the social economy and the high concentration of urban population, the domestic garbage is gradually increasing, and the trash is surrounding our home. In the daily life, we are hard to avoid to use the plastic bag, plastic bottle and cosmetics packaging etc. Also, a large part of those consumables cannot recycle or reuse. It is a severe risk for the human, while the pollution is increasing the natural environment also changing. Some of the rubbish is non-degradable, if we incineration of garbage, it will release the toxic chemicals, that is one of the reasons carcinogenic and people easy to get sick. The other hand is water pollution. The amount of waste generated is increasing in the world every year, now is reaching 50 billion tons, that will require more land to heap up the waste. However, it needs a particular landfill to pile up the garbage, but it becomes more and more difficult to find the suitable landfills to use now. So the trash will pour into the ocean; moreover, it is harmful to the marine life, every year tens of thousand animals because of eating the plastic and the other waste that lead to death. Overall, many kinds of pollution are destroying the ecologies now; if the humans do not do any change, the natural environment will getting worse.

I have done three experiments in this assessment. The first experiment , I have collected many kinds of rubbish waste, such as cosmetic packaging, make-up pads, cotton tips, plastic bag, receipt, matches and hair band. After that,  I made a waste sort. This experience aims to know what kind of consumables we are using every day. The second experiment is I collected the discard water bottles, and then pour all of the waste into the water bottles, to telling the audiences the environment not only facing plastic pollution also the has waste pollution. The third experiment is to go to the beach and the water bottle and other plastic utensils into the water, also, recorded the plastic waste always floating on the water.

I used photoshop to do my work. First, I took some photographs of the plastic waste in different places, beach and garden. After that, I used the photoshop to create the images as a filmstrip, because I wanted the project feels historical and looked like a documentary, recording the changing of the ecologies. I have done two series images; the first one was the origin, the other one has changed the colour at the edge of the images, it was a black and white, the centre of the images was colourful. Also, the layout of each photo was different; it looked Staggered together, it is looked like more connection with every picture, to tell the audiences the beach and the garden has a strong relationship with each other, they all came from the natural environment.

Conceptual Statement

Can creative acts be rebellious when rebellion has become canonized in art, design and media histories? What would a contemporary creative rebellion look like?

For my assignment 1, I explored rebellion against the stereotypical and archetypes of the graphical medium of the poster. One of my original ideas that I used as part of my inspiration and research for my first assessment, was an interactive poster that allowed engagement and activity with the audience. Because a poster usually used signs and symbols to communicate I thought interactivity would be an interesting twist on the concept of a poster. After my assessment, I thought it would be interesting to focus more on the interactivity of the artwork – rather than just passive viewing of the artwork by the audience.

As part of my research, I researched into interactivity and how it is a growing part of the medium and digital technology today. What I gained from this insight is the growing importance of interactivity in technology and digital media today and provided many examples of interactivity throughout art forms such as Architecture Product Design, Fashion and Textiles, and it provided insight into the “inputs” and “outputs”. I decided that rather than going with a traditional based artform such as painting or drawing for my project that I wanted to do a more modern approach to more artwork. I decided that I solely wanted to make an artwork which was experienced solely through touch.

I wanted to focus on different textures and the variety of textures that I could use potentially in my work. Form my last assessment, I was interested in playing around with the use of textures – that I had gotten from Reverse Garbage. I decided to use found objects such as scraps of cloth, plastic and other objects that had interesting texture in my home. At first, I was influenced by trash art, a movement that involved the use of materials considered “trash” to make stunning visual pieces. I thought it was quite interesting of the incongruity and beauty of using unconventional materials such as trash to make traditional art forms such as sculpture or an artwork. I decided that as part of my work, I was influenced by their use of materials and unconventional ideas of using trash and unwanted bits and pieces into an artwork that had a message. I have used many types of materials such as paper, fabrics, and even slime to create a unique and shocked reaction.

However, one of the challenges I faced with the mediums of “trash art” was that I had limited time, resources and the scale of the works. I noticed that many of the works were quite large in scale – and due to my limited time and resources I feel that I was not able to produce a work of similar quality. I have always been interested in the exploring the sensory experience of touch - since I feel like our sense of touch is not used as often as the other senses in our life such as sight, hearing or taste. After that I went back to brainstorming and thought of a way that allowed people to interact with my work and I could combine it with my unconventional choice of materials.

One of the artists that influenced my practice is Kate Newby, and Kathy Temin. What both of these artists have in common is that they use unconventional materials for their sculptures. Temin uses unconventional material such as synthetic fur in order to communicate her ideas of memory, history and loss, and alludes to softness, childhood and fun. I’m influenced by the way she uses her materials to create tension between the binaries between her sculptures. Likewise, Newby focuses on the fleeting nature of interactivity, by focusing on the everyday items in our life. I have been influenced in how she uses the nature of interactivity in her work – drawing upon the audience’s individual experiences – and my work is quite vague and draws upon the individual’s unique experience. Similarly, like Newby, I have drawn upon objects from my everyday life – cut up scraps and materials that are common in everyday life.

References

Floryan, M. (2010). Interactive and Participatory Art | Art21 Magazine. [online] Art21 Magazine. Available at: http://magazine.art21.org/2010/06/03/interactive-and-participatory-art/#.W6Ne5WgzbIU [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].

Webdesigner Depot. (2009). Non-Trashy Recycled and Trash Art | Webdesigner Depot. [online] Available at: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/12/non-trashy-recycled-and-trash-art/ [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].

Extending the narrative that I had first established with my poster of a future humanity’s literal oral consumption of planets as a projection of our current exhaustive relationship with non-humans has been the objective of my practice-led research in the formation of this suspended artwork. This time I wanted to convey a more intrusive anxiety of the human greed and intense hubris that would lead to destruction of such vast, beautiful and unattainable planets and stars for the purpose of satiating desire for excess and control over all. This ugly tendency towards exploitation and values of entitlement is a consequence of capitalism - an economic system that has historically encouraged imperialism and genocide, as capitalism as a culture drives people to stomp out competitors so that all resources are owed to them, and as Edward Said states, "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them."

With the intention of constructing an immersive work, I have moved along the timeline to a secondary stage of eating: digestion. Being a suspended piece that one is able to enter, I intended for the audience to literally be posited within somewhat of a “belly of the beast” experience - a literary device wherein the individual faces a seemingly impossible and unfortunate situation.

In the research I conducted - inspired by the shape and colour of Louise Zhang’s “Pinky”- I found that using colour pencils to draw a fleshy pattern and fine lines on the outside of the artwork would subtly create the visceral sense of tissue and life of an organ, and would intrude into the inner aspect of In the Stomach through the transparency of the tracing paper surface. Additionally, led by the dust jacket from the publication of Jacqueline Rose’s “Traces”, I had chosen tracing paper as a drawing surface as the muffled translucency had the potential for creating variation in depth through physically layering drawings and the manipulation of tones in drawing techniques.

I used a mixture of hatching and smudging in graphite and charcoal to create patterns of the night sky that appear to naturally merge with one another, such as the large form in the bottom left hand of the work that has mimicked that pattern of water through the use of negative space in constructing the linework. I then used the vaguely oblong shapes to break away from the pattern and transition into the cloud-like texture of the charcoal smudges I had created with my fingers. Slowly layering the charcoal through smudging was a simple technique that I discovered in my second experiment to establish depth and a sense of celestial. Contrasting the matt finish of charcoal and the reflective capacity of graphite, I intended for there to be both glimmer and absorption of light in order to mimic the infinitesimal qualities of space. 

In being displayed outdoors, natural elements such as the wind and sun would interact with In the Stomach; the angle of sun transforming what aspects will create glare and what shadows would be formed in the layered drawings; the wind causing the paper to crackle and sway - movements and sounds I hoped would feel organic and living to further convey the sense of being in a functioning stomach. 

Bibliography

Rose, J. (1999). Traces.

Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism.