Documenting thoughts and works in progress
Other people’s work and ideas
References
Danny Yount’s Title Sequences
Amit Pitaru’s Sonic Wire Sculpture
Clemens Wirth Hypnotic Experiments With Cameras
Madame Tutli Putli
Jill Magid
“I’ve always called the archive her lover. To marry one man, she negotiated owning another man, whom she’s devoted her life to. It’s a weird love triangle, and I’m the other woman.” – Jill Magid in“The Architect Who Became a Diamond”, Alice Gregory
References
Woven Signals, Anne-Marie Lavigne
The form is the outer expression of the inner content. One should not make a deity of form. And one should fight for the form only insofar as it can serve as a means of expression of the inner resonance. Ultimately one should not seek salvation in one form.
– Wassily Kandinsky, “On The Problem of Form”, 1912
Guest Speakers
Sarah Rothberg, Narrative in Immersive VR
Narrative: a way of organizing occurrences into a coherent sequence
“Narrative” means any technique that produces the visceral desire in a reader to want to know what happened next.
– Bob Baker, Los Angeles Times
Virtual Reality: a “kind-of” reality immersion, presence, agency
Things to Consider in Immersive Digital Experiences:
The Question Bridge is a multi-format documentary that explores the multifaceted identifies of Black men in America. Initiated in 2012 by artists Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Bayete Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair, it has since been exhibited as a video art installation, translated into an interactive website and app, and formed an education curriculum for high school students.
Narrative
The piece is composed of video interviews with individual subjects which are collectively brought into relation through a question-answer sequence, a technique called the “Question Bridge”.. Although the various subjects are not speaking directly to each other, the sequencing of the footage puts them in conversation with one another—asking and responding. This format of interweaving the various stories showcases the layered, complex and multidimensional identities and narratives of the subjects. By presenting narratives which both enforce and contradict each other, the artists attempt to dismantle and frustrate the media’s presentation of a presumptive singular identify that “Black Males are.”
Format
In the “Explore” mode on the interactive website, the content can be explored through two lenses: the conversations or the individual profiles. A second layer of organization provides navigation by index, geography, or tag.
For interfaces that provide a multitude of navigational and organizational structures, I often wonder whether the piece would be stronger with a single mechanism for organizing the content? Are users overwhelmed by the many ways in which they can explore and does this overshadow or distract from the content itself?
The homepage arguably provides the opposite level of agency to the user. Various videos composited from multiple clips automatically play when a user visits the page. The artists have created a narrative out of the individual clips, placing them visually side by side and playing them in a predetermined sequence.
These two formats provide the user with different levels of agency and in turn the two formats respond to the idea of “narrative” differently. The “constructed” narrative playing on the homepage presents a point of view established by the creators. They have chosen how long each clip plays, the sequencing of the clips and which clips respond to the question asked. In contrast, the “explored” narrative is continually being constructed as the user engages with different clips.
What underscores both narrative forms is the consistent directorial style. The subjects of the videos all speak directly into the camera, simultaneously engaging with their fellow video subjects but also with the viewer. Through this technique, viewers are intimately placed actively within the conversation rather than positioned passively outside of it as an observer.
There’s a great scene in the opening of episode 2 for Fleabag in which everyone on the subway sudden contorts their faces and bodies in pain along to the music of Sail’s Awolnation.
I’m inspired by this format: a steady state suddenly erupting into unexpected action and just as unexpectedly returning to the steady state. But I’m also interested in combining this with animated succulents and cacti. Cacti in particularly have features that seem inherently expressive: a sprinkling of neon freckles, sharp spikes orderly arrayed along a smooth skin, the juxtaposition of vibrant colours.
My animation will explore the emotional rollercoaster of a cacti seeing itself in the mirror for the first time. But while the “Fleabag” clip has a great punchline, I’m still searching for the ending of my plant narrative and how to reconcile seeing itself…
Things I Learned
Photogrammetry is the science of making measurements from photographs, especially for recovering the exact positions of surface points.
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References
“Using the mathematical relationship between string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music's underlying structure and subtle shifts”
Sound of Picture Production Library – repository for instrumental music
Theo Tagholm, Simulacra
Theo Tagholm, Drift
Doug Bayne’s animations for The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting