bellaatcofa-blog

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Still Narratives Pt. 2

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Still Narratives Pt. 1

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Waveform Spheres

Took the waveform of ‘our daily routine’, and instead of mapping the topography like in previous experiment thought it could be more expressive, more of a narrative than representational data: free hand digital drawings of the waveform layers.

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Waveform Spheres; in progress

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Our Daily Routine

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Small World, Patrick Pound

He is a master of juxtaposition. The thought-provoking assemblages of found photographs are full of poetry and whimsy. They are, quite literally, found to be telling things. In the title work Small world, the combination of images such as a girl blowing bubble gum, a couple of monkeys hugging, a plane in the sky and a pair of hands typing shouldn’t make sense, but somehow it does. The mixture of scale - an oversized fingerprint next to a small picture of large buildings - adds to the ambiguity. As no clear link is made between the images, the viewer feels compelled to determine their own, bringing their particular history and way of thinking to bear on the works. Photography is found to copy the world in microcosm. Somehow Small world, with its collection of pictures of the small and large, the significant and insignificant, animal and human, paints a funny, poignant portrait of the human condition.

Here

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Small Stories, David Lynch

“Still images can contain stories. Mostly, still images contain small stories. And, as it happens, sometimes there are interesting stories that are small. Small stories take place during a very short period of time. However, the mind and emotions can become engaged by looking at a still image, and small stories can grow into huge stories. It depends, of course, on the viewer. 

It’s almost impossible not to find some kind of story emerging from a still image. This, I think, is a beautiful phenomenon.”

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Iteration 3: Aural Topography

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Iteration 2: Waveform Layers

Sought to give temporal aspect and movement to a failed audio experiment but created what looks to be an aural landscape - a valley just to the left of the centre, two large mountains, foliage.

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Iteration 1: Articulating speech as music

https://soundcloud.com/sodafolk/experiment-1-droplets

https://soundcloud.com/sodafolk/experiment-1-elysian

https://soundcloud.com/sodafolk/experiment-1-chaotic-mess

I choose a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (in which an inmate commits suicide and the protagonist attempts to strangle the nurse) to make abstract not just because it is a really shocking, breathtaking, emotive scene, but because the soundtrack has as much to do with the creation of the narrative as the visuals do:

The film opens with original music by composer Jack Nitzsche, featuring an eerie bowed saw and wine glasses: the score gives "a profoundly disturbing feel at times -- even when it appears to be relatively normal. The music has a tendency to always be a little off-kilter, and from time to time it tilts completely over into a strange little world of its own...”

+

"Lately I feel films are more and more like music. Music deals with abstractions and, like film, it involves time. It has many different movements, it has much contrast. And through music you learn that, in order to get a particular beautiful feeling, you have to have started far back, arranging certain things in a certain way. You can’t just cut to it.”

Using FL Studio, converted the audio of the scene (found here) into pure notes then ran this track through various synths.

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Abstracted speech; still find it as unsettling as the first time I heard it.

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Theatres, Hiroshi Sugimoto

Condensation, layers, of the time and movement of hours into a still image; the beginning of the basis for my experiments.

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger, Performance Piece, 1978

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Lernert & Sander:  De Volkskrant - Cubes

Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant asked us to make a photograph for their documentary photography special, with the theme Food. We transformed unprocessed food into perfect cubes of 2,5 x 2,5 x 2,5 cm. ( Lernert & Sander )

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Louis Brennan’s gyroscopic monorail, 1909

[bellaatcofa-blog]

FINAL CONCEPT: Transforming a series of abstract boxes on a map of Sydney

Experimenting with abstracted/vague boxes in the last experiment caught me looking at a map and being mystified that it could be so inaccurate - how could this inch long pale grey box be deemed to truly articulate the imposing but beautiful lines of the White Bay Power Station, an abandoned site that I love. So I decided to transform the “boxes” of different abandoned places around NSW and translate them into what I deemed was a more accurate mapping.

[bellaatcofa-blog]

Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture EMBANKMENT began with an old, worn cardboard box. She found it in her mother’s house shortly after she died. Whiteread was going through her mother’s belongings when she came upon a box she remembered well. It had had many lives: it used to reside in her toy cupboard next to piles of board games, and at one point was filled with Christmas decorations. Over time its sides started to collapse, the printed logo on the outside faded, and the lid came to shine with the traces of all the Sellotape used to bind it up over the years.

Although the inspiration for EMBANKMENT came from the single box she found in her mother’s house, Whiteread selected a number of differently-shaped old boxes to construct the installation for the Turbine Hall. She filled them with plaster, peeled away the exteriors and was left with perfect casts, each recording and preserving all the bumps and indentations on the inside. They are ghosts of interior spaces or, if you like, positive impressions of negative spaces. Yet Whiteread wanted to retain their quality as containers, so she had them re-fabricated in a translucent polyethylene which reveals a sense of an interior. And rather than make precious objects of them, she constructed thousands.