Tag Archives: project

Final Signal & Specific to Site Reflection

The final project brief for specific to site was exhibited at ‘Signal’. This creative arts studio aimed to provide a space for young artists of all mediums. With the assistance of classmates, our tutor, and the employees at Signal we were able to put on an exhibition for 3 nights in the heart of the city on the Yarra. Our team worked hard and cooperatively in particular groups to prepare, promote and run the show. The different groups included the tech team, the installation team, PR, project managers and the documentation team. I was a member of the public relations team, and through being appointed this job I had a variety of responsibilities to ensure the success of the promotion of the exhibition. One of my main tasks consisted of constructing and the distributing of visual promotions. These included assisting in the construction of the website, placing of posters, and cutting and dispersing of the flyers.

Our team had a group conversation via the social media platform, Facebook, to keep in contact to keep on top of activities and to brainstorm and collaborate ideas. It was here we voted on placing posters in spaces in which are often densely populated and thus would have a higher chance of being identified. This included the library, building 80, the student lounge, RMIT connect, and the media and communications building 9. (See blog post here). However, when I asked the librarian’s permission to put up the posters, they declined kindly and informed me that we are supposed to seek permission from RUSU on where to dispense posters. After speaking with RUSU, we had permission to place posters in RMIT connect, the pillars of building 8 and we had to seek permission from individual buildings for the other places, and therefore we also placed them in building 9. Another job of mine was working with Rose on developing the website, providing potential viewers the opportunity with a link to each individual student’s Media Factory blog, blurbs for their work and a portrait of themselves. (See website here).

Overall, this semester has been far greater than semester 1, the ‘Specific to Site’ studio has taught me a lot on methods of exhibiting, editing skills and collaboration. I enjoyed being able to work and produce all forms of mediums for media, such as photography, audio and film. As the semester progressed I have a made a lot of new friends, as well learnt a lot of valuable skills such as editing for film. We were provided workshops on particular programs such as Premiere Pro, and that plus the help of classmates and my tutor I was able to learn a completely new program and work with arranging multiple footage on one screen, cropping, sizing and edits of reversing and slow-motion. The signal exhibition, the backpack projection night and Project Brief 3 for Testing Grounds really extended my skills on collaboration and allowed myself to experience working in the media industry professionally, working with real artists, and real employees of the studio art world was very valuable and a great insight to the media environment. It also allowed myself to immerse in the struggles with communication, and hardships of putting an exhibition together, especially if there is not a mutual understanding on collaboration and effort.

Furthermore, through this studio my conceptual process of creating films has expanded immensely. Robbie has expressed to me a new understanding of place, and the relevance of set, scene, and studio galleries. I was able to challenge the idea of place and non-place and match it amongst the art world. From this, I believe that any sort of space could be made into a place, depends on one’s interpretation, project brief 2 really helped me to explore this. (See blog post here). I had such a small understanding of curatoring and studios, however after being exposed to Testing Grounds and the Signal studio, I have developed a deeper understanding for galleries and exhibitions.

Moving away from conventional exhibition spaces whether it is a gallery or exhibition space, we have focused to explore more alternative spaces that would compliment our work. Although traditional exhibition spaces may offer “perfect” lighting or an ideal colour scheme, alternative spaces such as outdoors or projections from a building offer a sense of ambience or atmosphere that other spaces could simply not offer. While observing works in the outdoors, each viewer has a unique experience, while being offered the opportunity to be influenced from external factors. Making art seem fun to the public, rather than mysterious, incomprehensible and solitary, has led a growing list of artists and municipalities around the country to create open studio events (Grant, 2010). Therefore, with the influence of readings, Robbie and the Project Briefs, I have deferred from the idea of traditional projects of artwork and been exposed to more non-traditional places, redefining the “place” of artwork, and becoming more specific to the environments of production of artwork as well as the display of art.

 

References:

  1. Grant, D 2010, Selling Art Without Galleries: Towards Making a Living from Your Art, Allworth Press, United States.

Project Brief 4 Reflection

Obsession is defined as an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind. The over-arching theme for our Project Brief 4 linked all the students’ work together, as well as allowing us to branch off and explore this particular theme through our own interpretation. Initially it was challenging to think of an individual theme to branch off ‘obsession’, as there were so many different paths to go down. Beginning with the idea of balance, with further brainstorming, I finalised my theme to “Gravity”. With this, I wanted to breakdown the perception of gravity, creating illusions with movement, exploring the freedom that flight and slow motion provide, with use of film and digital effects. Vladimir Frieder’s journal article, “Overcoming Gravity: Pushkin on Freedom and Art” had an interesting perspective on comparing gravity to life as he states “the kind of freedom and ease enjoyed by Pushkin do not come easily; they are the result of overcoming the gravity of earthly life, its injustices.” He relates gravity has a sense of stabilisation in one’s life, and I found that very intriguing, as without gravity, everything on Earth would be crazy, and therefore, challenging gravity would create a form of chaos.

Nake Frieder mentions in his journal article, ‘Spectacular Bodies’ (2002) that “the human body has… been a prominent subject of art through almost all its eras and styles” and to execute the idea of gravity, I incorporated the human body as my main subject and worked with a high level tumbler performing gymnastics skills on a sprung floor and trampoline. I utilised this to enhance the idea of movement especially with flight and rotational actions involved with majority of the skills he would perform as the freedom of movement and expression of the dance and art activities allowed [establishment] of homeostasis between self and world. (Rebecca Burrill, 2010). I filmed landscape shots to portray the flight, and some close up shots and mid-shots to highlight the movements of the body, however majority of the work was done using iMovie and Premiere.

Utilising these programs I was able to manipulate the speed, the angles, and the cropping of the footage. By employing slow motion to certain parts of the footage, it allowed the viewer to distinctly observe the multitude of movements occurring, however, I only utilised this editing skill on some parts of the film to maintain the viewer’s attention. To really accentuate the questioning of gravity, some of the film was reversed, played back to front, and I also placed some of the footage upside down and mirrored it against the other screens, as I had 4 small screens within the “Crossbar template” playing at the same time, as that is not able to occur in real life, all movement is in the same time, and whatever comes up, must come down.

Screen Shot 2015-10-20 at 10.35.42 pm

The main issue was the lighting and colouring of the set. However, I was limited to the choices of places to film, as I required certain equipment for the Project Brief to be produced. Therefore, I placed the gymnast in all white clothes to stand out from the accumulation of colours surrounding him, as well as the colour represents light, and purity, adding a sense of freedom of flight to my work. The colours came across dull through my lens and thus, to enhance the idea of freedom and elevation, I manipulated the colours in iMovie to become more saturated and vibrant. The array of colours also worked well into falling into the theme of challenging the perception gravity, as it enhances an abstract, pop culture aesthetic, to make it look a little unreal, as these particular movements do not occur in reality.

Creating the audio was the most challenging part of this Project. There was already so much occurring in the film that I did not want the sound to distract the viewer from the footage and therefore, I manipulated the same spring sound on repeat. However, utilising the program Garageband, I placed the same three audios over the top, and altered one of them to keep a consistent beat through the entire piece and then I manipulated the flex range in order to create an unusual, abstract edit to the audio to enhance the idea of distorted reality in terms of the perception of gravity.

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 3.42.29 pm

There were a few disappointments in the screening of my work at Signal, the footage was grainy, one of them was over-exposed, and one did not match up perfectly on the windows. However, overall, I was content with the finishing work for Project Brief 4, as I believe I conveyed my theme across the four pieces of footage and thirty-second audio. The film worked well with representing my theme, portraying the ideas of gravity, freedom and flight, through abstract colours, being obsessed with movement and the distortion of time and speed within my work.

signal exhib

 

References:

1. Burrill, R 2010, ‘The Primacy of Movement in Art Making’. Teaching Artists Journal, vol. 8, no.4, pp. 216-228
2. Frieder, N 2002, ‘Spectacular Bodies’, Leonardo To Now, vol. 35, no.4, pp. 455-457
3. Kantor, V 2000, ‘Overcoming Gravity: Pushkin on Freedom and Art’, Russian Studies in Literature, vol.36, no.1, pp. 50-61

Project Brief 4 – updated

After listening to Robbie’s feedback about my video, I decided to redo my first and second sequence to create more of an abstract aesthetic, in which questions the perception of gravity. I also was not happy with my audio, and Robbie told me to work with the spring sound i originally had. I attempted to mix it in with the old audio, and make a new one but I wasn’t having much success, with the assistance of Robbie and Jordan however, we decided on placing the same piece of audio three times, and altering the sound by enabling the flex range in garageband. The sound that was produced from this matched up well with the theme I was going for, it was abstract and unnatural, which supports my theme of questioning gravity/movement. Here are the two new videos and audio sounds:

Media Studio | Wk. 12

Today is our last lesson for the year and I presented my Project Brief 4 to the class. Robbie’s feedback was very beneficial, he liked the idea of questioning gravity, and preferred the last 3 films, and to work on the second and first to match the others, to make it more abstract. Originally I thought the sound of the spring of the trampoline wasn’t good enough to use in the audio of the overall piece, however, Robbie really liked it and therefore, I’m going to go back and work on my audio again.

Media Studio | Thurs Wk. 11

Today, I brainstormed what I was going to film and record for my Signal – Project Brief 4. I’ve asked my close friend Evan, who is high level tumbler (person who can do flips) to come into the Gymnastics centre I work at, so perform some tricks for me, and then I’ll aim to do all the main work for my film on the computer. I’ll capture it with my Nikon D3000 and the lighting in the gymnasium isn’t very good so I’m going to have to edit that on the computer as well. I’ll film in 3 different places, 1 on the main trampoline, 2 on the full gymnastics floor, 3 against a plain wall. I want to film the same set of tricks on each place with different angles, so a low angle, a mid-shot, a upward angle, and film the bottom half of the body, then the top half, so I have the ability to move around the same action across different screens with different angles. I’ll also get my subject matter in white clothes so he stands out against the equipment as the multiple colours in the room may be distracting, as well as it will represent life, and flight.

Media Studio | Wed Wk. 11

Today in class, I sat with Robbie and we finally sorted out my theme, from balance, to movement, I feel like I like to expand off movement and work with gravity, and question the art of gravity and how it functions, working with slow-motion, and rotating and mirroring of images, films etc. As I didn’t have any footage to work off in class, I decided to do some research on the RMIT library to help me out, I found quite a couple good articles on gravity and relating it to art. Vladimir Kantor’s journal article, “Overcoming Gravity: Pushkin on Freedom and Art” had an interesting perspective on comparing gravity to life as he states “the kind of freedom and ease enjoyed by Pushkin do not come easily; they are the result of overcoming the gravity of earthly life, its injustices.” He relates gravity has a sense of stabilisation in one’s life, and I found that very intriguing, as without gravity, everything on Earth would be crazy, and therefore, challenging gravity would create a form of chaos. During this tutorial, Nicolette also helped me download the program Premiere, and taught me how to use it so once I had my footage I would be able to edit with ease with this Adobe program.

 

Media Studio | Wed Wk. 8

Today marked the beginning of our presentations for Project Brief 3. A lot of the class had some really great videos. This week we presented our group projects for Project Brief 3 to the class, with Joseph as a guest to help with some feedback. Overall, our group received great feedback, one thing to work on was our audio piece. We attempted to create a sense of ‘Arie’ within the presentation to imply that he has his own world for his art. However, they way in which we aimed to portray that did not come across as successfully, Robbie suggested we could have made that more obvious, and made it more abstract to suit his type of artwork. Joseph also suggested we could have included more about his work in Testing Grounds, unfortunately we did not have much footage of it given from Arie, nonetheless Joseph mentioned he had lots, so we could have extended our resources further to include everything that we wanted. Overall, I’m very happy with our group and how well we worked together as a team to produce our Project Brief 3.

Project Brief 3

Nowadays the world of art is much more diverse, artists have moved far beyond the traditional art forms of painting, drawing and sculpting into a digital revolution of photography, video formatting and more. The artist we formed a documentary on was Arie Rain Glorie, and his main art medium was video works, installations and curating for other emerging artists. Conducting an interview requires a lot of work. We had to seek permission first by emailing him, and then arranging a suitable time for us to meet to film. Elle, Nicolette and I planned our interview questions before we arrived, researched his work through his website, and then we hired a Canon DSLR, tripods and the Media 1 video recorders to capture our project. Elle and I did the filming and we originally had issues with finding a location to shoot as the photography rooms were locked and classrooms were too noisy. Thus, we decide to film his natural working place, in his studio at RMIT. We set up two cameras, one up-close to represent personal thoughts and emotiveness and the second further away to establish the location and quirks of his personality, such as hand gestures, and the way he works.

Nicolette focused more on the editing, she cut down all the unwanted footage and in class we worked as a group to put all of it together, making decisions on how we wanted to portray Arie, and what we felt was important to present in the documentary. Utilising the program Premiere we put the footage together, and we decided that we would demonstrate his love for the art world, and his sense of “place” within it as a main focus for our film. We utilised his artworks to explain his artistic ability and the way in which he works as well as his time with testing grounds. We had a couple issues with filming, as the camera was on auto-focus and therefore, kept adjusting while filming which caused a lot of distractions. Another was that Arie said “um” quite frequently during the interview and didn’t answer in full sentences, which caused confusion and repetition. Nonetheless, we worked on minimising these issues to being displayed in the documentary with cutting of footage, and putting external photographs and footage over the top of his voice, creating a narrative throughout the documentary.

Arie Rain Glorie is an amazing, introverted artist with so many intricate and creative artworks, as he states he likes to make his work “kind of familiar but the audience wont be able to quite place where it’s come from”. Arie’s work relates to Gaston Bachelard (1969) as he states, “imagination argues the values of reality”. Arie describes art as his lifestyle, it his “constant thought” and he wishes to produce his diverse place of thought of life through his work, especially video works. He is dedicated to the art world, not just as an artist but as a curator as well. He curated a trilogy series entitled “Love/City” which was set up at Testing Grounds. Arie enjoys challenging the place of the traditional art viewing, he wishes to defer from museums and galleries and create a new sense of place for artworks to be displayed and this is why he chose Testing Grounds to view his curated project. This is also accentuated by his work itself, Arie loves working with videos as it allows him to manipulate time, place and space, in which one cannot do with live performance. This also coincides with Michael Jackson’s book, “At Home in the World”, as he expresses that “life cannot be pressed into the service of language”. There is never conversation or narration in his works, he rather communicate his thoughts through art and have the audience decipher their own meaning.

Project Brief 3 was the most challenging so far, I say this as working in group dynamic does allow a little difficulty when it comes to task allocations, finding similar availability to meet up, and you have more people to rely on than just yourself. I have had a lot of trouble with group assignments this year, not one assignment has run along smoothly, and therefore I favour working individually. However, Elle, Nicolette and I worked really well together, and although our timetables clashed we managed to work around it. We assigned tasks to be done by certain dates, and when things, out of our control, did not go according to plan, such as, response from Arie, and extra footage needed to complete the film, we worked cooperatively to solve the issues. Communication within our trio was excellent; we met up at every class, twice outside university, and had a constant group conversation on Facebook. Overall, I am happy with the final result of our assignment and how we reacted to the problems we faced, as we produced an documentary that represented Arie, his work, his creative ability, and his sense of place amongst the art world.

 

References:

Jackson, M 1995, At Home in the world, Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 1-8

Bachelard, G 1969, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston

Media Studio | Wed Wk.7

This week was mainly focused on the production of our final edits for our Project Brief 3, we had few external footage of his work and so we were researching to find more, we also had noticed auto-focusing issues within our footage, and Arie said “um” way too many times. We worked together in the studio suits on Nicolette’s laptop so that we could try minimise these issues. We found footage off his website that we put in, and we tried to only have footage where the auto-focusing didn’t occur. We also suggested to make our own audio that had an Arie aesthetic to it with all of his um’s, so that’s another thing we will attempt to do before the deadline. Overall it is looking nicely, his audio is very good, and he has a lot of interesting answers. We’re hoping he replies to us in time with extra footage so we can finish our assignment!!

Backpack projection night

Tonight was so fun, instead of going to classes this week, our entire class shared a night of drinks and food beside a fire, while exploring the backpack projections at Testing Grounds. Everyone contributed with food, and conversation and it was a really nice night to get to know more about my peers and tutors. The best part of the night was when we got to utilise the backpacks, Linda, Jordan and I were in a group and we plugged my iPhone into the projector and we roamed around the city projecting a music video along the water, walls, signs, it was very exciting. Here is some of the footage we captured below:

 

backpack 3 backpack 5 backpack 6 bakcpack 2