About Entangling Media
Entangling Media was an experimental course which encouraged us to put our hands on numerous mediums which was indeed challenging but also incredibly useful. For example, we have never made a website before, but My and Lilli’s group pulled it off with such an interesting and eye-catching scroll-based website for their project Stories Beneath the Skin. A combination of visual interview, sound interview, and the moving quotes from a diversity and variety of others about tattooing works so great in portraying the vast range of opinions about the ritual that has such a rich history. That is also what is lack from this website, a bit of an insight of the long heritage of this ritual, from different timestamps, different countries, different cultures, all of those has their unique way of using tattoo. At the end of the road, tattoos are used to tell a story, also to identify, and it would be great to see this group give this aspect a focus.
This studio also focuses on the use of the medium of physical space and/or objects. We personally used space and fabric to smoothens the crack of machines, My’s group used monotone prints, which also adds on to their tattoo theme and gives audience something to bring home, or Ruby’s group recreates the colourful light show in The Capitol. But Quinn, using written poems on bondage and a mannequin for their Soulbound project, did a phenomenal work bringing their words to life. The poetic writing is beautiful using different boldness of text, accompanied by the drawing, the tattoo, a page of a book full of scribbles the brings out layers and layers of thoughts. I don’t know Quinn personally, but the personality, the thought process and the experience are all too clear in this work, making it more like of an art piece. However, as we went through the course, it is understood that multimodal media should be displayed on a website or social media, therefore I would recommend Quinn to utilise the website to make the piece engaging and create more layers of meaning for their work.
About Poetic Video
Poetic Video, as the name suggested, is a studio where they convert personal stories and emotions, poetically, on the medium of video. It challenges the normal traditional narration of a story (having a beginning, a middle, and an end) and highlights the richness and the multi-faces of the reality using mode of listing and experimental techniques.
The first project that caught my eyes is Surge by Nick O’Brien, Auley Ryan, and Kal Zhang. Surge as described, is an immersion of emotions of fear, lust, and intoxication using three separated narratives for each emotion told simultaneously. The group stated that the plots are not the main focus, but the ‘moments of affect, the moments between moments, the moments of emotional reaction’ and its effect on the characters. I adore the idea of diving through the surface of narrative and delving into the deepest within emotions, and I think they carried it out well using a phenomenal soundtrack and rhythmic editing.
However, emotions are hard to be defined or named with just one word. They are not one dimensional but root from somewhere to become this and turn into that, they have levels, and sometimes what a person feel is a mix of different emotions. And this group accidentally done that (I’m not sure, but they did not mention this in the blurb) by combining the three stories and at some points merging them together. If this aspect was more highlighted and experimented consciously, it would bring the piece lots more depth and prove the understanding of the makers of the topic of emotions.
Another amazing work and this one left me in awe, is Life in Plastic by Em Cox and Isabella Cook. Stepping away from pure emotions, Life in Plastic is a provoked reaction surging from researches of the relationship between human existence and capitalism via the life of a plastic bag. On the surface, it is a documentary, using stop motions techniques to capture the plastic bags, bottle caps, accompanied with moving images, creating a comical look. The video explores the plastic bag’s journey in stillness and in movement, its impact, its consequences for the environment around them. Putting a single-use plastic bag within beautiful sceneries immediately makes it ugly, making the bag a villain to the aesthetic.
Right here, the video goes to its second layer of meaning. the bag is made under the influence of capitalism, is consumed by human beings for convenience, and both of these parties never once think about the mega harm that they leave for the environment and for themselves. Cox and Cook also used marine life and plastic as a metaphor for ‘entrapment’, which again enriches the human-under-capitalism theme. This digs into the existence of human, subtly critics and mocks our own decisions (of creating capitalism, falling under it, and enriching it). Outstanding work!