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Experiments

Just testing out different layouts and styles for publication.

Above is a distorted effect on the wrist when I layer the picture over each itself but make image smaller every time.

Below are two potential layouts for a double page publication:

Playing with text on a background:

Colour vs monochrome

Although the color stands out more, we decided that monochrome fits the aesthetic we want to achieve more.

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Really love the aesthetic of Kate’s work. We have all discussed maybe placing a handprint in the powder to show physical evidence of leaving a mark but also to relate back to Chloe’s experiment using hands and paint.

Edits

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I began mixing the colours throwing them onto the page from different angles

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Pre edit. I started layering the powder as I threw it

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MAKING YOUR MARK

for this experiment I threw powder onto the ground, growing more and more violent with it. Representative of the frustration we feel towards making a mark in the world in the now The idea of feeling like time is running out and we haven’t made our mark yet.

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experimenting with long exposure to try and show the fear associated with being just a number and not leaving your mark on the world

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Reflecting on Chloe’s work - I really love the contrast of black and white and how intense the marks look which just emphasises how desperately some people are to try and leave something in this world that others can remember them by when they are gone.

experimenting with the idea of trying to make your mark, used paint on black card and scratched at it with my nails.

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Another video showing just how fast the population increases which makes it more difficult to stand out from everyone else and make your ‘mark’ in order to be remembered.

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Research

In Wheel of Fortune, one aspect of the work Chance, French artist Christian Boltanski's uses his giant scaffolding installation to comment on and ponder the question of life and death. In the work pictures of baby faces run one after the other, similar to a production line. Meanwhile digital counters add up numbers of births and deaths. 

I believe this work relates to our concept because it shows the beginning and end of the ‘now’. You have this mechanical process of thousands of babies being born every day - it’s like they are apart of a production line in a factory.

These babies still need to get to the process of actually living in the ‘now’ but will eventually see that because there are so many people in this world it is difficult to stand out from the crowd.

Eventually, a fear of not making a ‘mark’ in this world will develop and there will be an obsession of trying to do everything right in the ‘now’. Hense, they will lose the true meaning of living in the moment and appreciating life.

We are reminded that the ‘now’ comes to an end with the digital counter recording how many people die per day, which emphasises how fast time passes and how little time we have to make a mark in this world and be remembered once our lives are over.

taken from: http://johnmcdonald.net.au/2014/christian-boltanski/

taken from: http://johnmcdonald.net.au/2014/christian-boltanski/

taken from: http://venice11.umwblogs.org/chance-french-pavilion/

taken from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/christian-boltanski-takes-a-big-chance-with-installation-at-carriageworks/news-story/1c9cd1cbea1908b87b7e1e20e767c6ac

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Images showing fear, anxiety, the passing of time and ‘mark’ making to go with our concept of fear of not leaving a ‘mark’ as spoken about in my previous post.

Concept images for assessment 3

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This video is in the ‘now’.

It shows the ever-changing population as some people’s ‘now’ begins and others ‘now’ comes to an end.

Focussing on the numbers and how fast they change really makes you realize how quickly time passes and how you only have a short time to make a name out of yourself.

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Concept

We have decided to interpret ‘now’ as being continuous yet separate moments that contribute to life. When we sat down and really thought about it, we found the ‘now’ to be really scary and intimidating.

The ‘now’ is what comes between life and death and it is what you make of the ‘now’ or the moments in your life that determine who you are as a person and how you will be remembered once your gone.

There is a very dominant presence of living in the ‘now’ which can be rather intimidating and scary. There are all these expectations in society to excel and achieve in order to be deemed worthy. This can be overwhelming and create an underlying fear and anxiety within a person.

Our overall concept is fear of not leaving a ‘mark’. We are all born, and we all die - that is just life. The fear lies in not of our beginning or end but rather what is in between... the ‘now’.This fear is whether you have done enough in the ‘now’ to be remembered later. 

We believe that this fear makes us so obsessed and frantic about the ‘now’ and all the moments, events and experiences in life, that we lose the actual meaning of what life is.

The repetitiveness and focus of trying to leave a ‘mark’ in the kind of blurs the real meaning of life. This fear leads to us not appreciating or understanding what now is.

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Inspiration

General aesthetic and layout Kate, Chloe and I agreed upon and felt inspired by. 

We really like a simplistic approach with contrast, muted colours and tones, and sharp corners and edges.

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Chloe’s version of the experiment inspired by Tehching Hsieh.

Reflection

We all agreed that we didn’t connect with this concept. Although we thought that  ‘now’ is a temporal concept and interpretted that in being a moment in everyday life, we found this particular experiment and approach to be mundane, boring, and not fit the aesthetic or style we wanted to have for our publication. We want our work to relate to time but in a more interesting and thought-provoking way.

a photo every half an hour from 9 - 9.

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An outing to the Art Gallery of NSW saw us finding inspiration in all things metallic. From balloons to statues, rails and locks, we really liked the gloss, sheen and simple elegance of all these materials and surfaces.

We all agreed on a simple overlaying layout for a potential pdf publication.

METALLIC

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Experiment

Relating to the idea of semantic satiation, I wanted to experiment repeatedly writing out the word “now” and see the initial affect it had on me.

Chloe, Kate and I decided that we see “now” as all the experiences and events – whether they be mundane or significant – that fit between your start (aka birth) and your end (aka death).

Now written with Now

I decided to write the word “now” with smaller “now” words. I interpret this experiment in the way that it shows how our big “now”, being life, is made up of all these smaller moments which are important because without them there would be no foundation for life.

Circle of Now

Here I have repeated the word “now” and fitted them inside of a circle. I like the idea that we have lots of little “now” moments but we have to cram them into this circle we call life.

Lines of Now

In this experiment, I decided to repeat “now” into linear rows. I feel that the consistency of the recurrence of “now” emphasises its dominance in our lives and how “now” moments are continuously happening.

Now on Now on now

Here, I have just frantically and messily written the word now over and over again. This gives it a more “rushed” sense in comparison to the Lines of Now experiment and it gives off the effect that there is so much we want to do in life that we have to rush all our “now” moments to fit in everything we want to do.

The initial affect this experiment had on me was that the more and more I repeated “now”, the more I didn’t understand what it meant to me and eventually the concept of “now” just seemed so strange and unfamiliar. This affect relates back to my previous research about semantic satiation where as you repeat a word you will temporarily lose its meaning and the world will become odd. Reflecting on this Reflecting on this experiment a few hours later, I realized that in life we become so focused on the “now” and what is happening at that exact moment that we begin to lose appreciation for our surroundings. We are in such a hurry to make sure that we complete everything we want to do in life, that we don’t appreciate life itself. In further conversation with Chloe and Kate, we spoke about how we are in such a rush with completing all these “now” moments because there is this fear people have of not leaving a ‘mark’ on this world before our time is up and life is over. 

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Research

Whilst exploring the meaning behind the word “now”, I found myself repeating the word over and over again. The more I repeated it, the less I understood what it actually meant. 

I googled “repeat a word over and over again and lose meaning” and came across the idea of Semantic Satiation.

Semantic Satiation is defined as a phenomenon whereby the uninterrupted repetition of a word eventually leads to a sense that the word has lost its meaning. 

Examples of this are:

 1. Disconnection of Signifier and Signified

"If you stare continuously at a word (alternatively, listen to it over and over), the signifier and signified eventually appear to fall apart. The aim of the exercise is not to alter vision or hearing but to disrupt the internal organization of the sign. You continue to see the letters but they no longer make the word; it, as such, has vanished. The phenomenon is called 'semantic satiation' (first identified by Severance & Washburn 1907), or loss of the signified concept from the signifier (visual or acoustic)." (David McNeill, Gesture and Thought. University of Chicago Press, 2005) A 

2. Closed Loop

"If we pronounce a word over and over again, rapidly and without pause, then the word is felt to lose meaning. Take any word, say, CHIMNEY. Say it repeatedly and in rapid succession. Within some seconds, the word loses meaning. This loss is referred to as 'semantic satiation.' What seems to happen is that the word forms a kind of closed loop with itself. One utterance leads into a second utterance of the same word, this leads into a third, and so on. . . . [A]fter repeated pronunciation, this meaningful continuation of the word is blocked since, now, the word leads only to its own recurrence." (I.M.L. Hunter, Memory, rev. ed. Penguin, 1964)

Basically, if you take any word and say it over and over again it begins to sound strange and unfamiliar. Sometimes when this happens to me, I even question whether the word is real or if I have actually made it up in my head. 

Here’s a video if you want to learn a little bit more about semantic satiation: