charlivingthedream-blog

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Group Assessment Three!

IDEA/CONCEPT

For our group assessment we wanted to think about the role that media has in events. As a result, we looked into what events were seen around us - mostly we saw exciting, funky and big events happening locally and globally. This prompted us into thinking about the events that don't get any ‘air time’ which are in our daily life. These mundane events are the basis of our assessment!

LINK TO THE CLASS SUBJECTS

Context and time

Our link is to the week 6 context and time class. Events are always a timed specific thing. Our assessment continues this theme in a comical way that shows the fleeting nature of time and how all the events are scheduled. However, our events are boring and as a result are exclusive. 

RESEARCH

Events in the media

The following are examples of the documentation of events. We are using a variety of formats including:

- Bookmarks

- Posters

- Newspapers

- Magazines

Facebook page 

Memes

Garage Sale Signs

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Referencing!

"Animals - Yosemite National Park (U.S. National Park Service)". in , , 2018, <https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/animals.htm> [accessed 18 September 2018].

"Bahamas Flora and Fauna". in , , 2018, <http://www.my-bahamas-travel.com/bahamasfaunaflora.html> [accessed 18 September 2018].

Green, P, & D Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature..". in Contemporary Sociology, 21, 1992, 407.

Mooallem, J, Wild ones. in , , 2012.

"Plants - Yosemite National Park (U.S. National Park Service)". in , , 2018, <https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/plants.htm> [accessed 18 September 2018].

"Sungjin Ahn Photographer Profile — National Geographic Your Shot". in , , 2018, <https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/profile/71695/> [accessed 18 September 2018].

"What Your Wallpaper On Your Phone Says About You". in , , 2018, <http://goodyfeed.com/wallpaper-phone-says/> [accessed 18 September 2018].

[charlivingthedream-blog]

THE FINAL ARWORK AND STATEMENT

PROMPT I’M USING!

1. Art and design often explore relationships between humans and non-humans, the environment and ecology. How can contemporary art and design propose new possibilities for imagining the ‘human’ and the environment?

ARTIST STATEMENT 

Who actually lives there?

Laptops, watercolour paper, watercolour and ink pen

Charlotte Mackenzie

Ecosystems and the flora and fauna who inhabit them have always been of interest to me particularly because of the relationship between different creatures, unnoticed unless focused on and camouflaged into their environment. I spent my childhood learning about the creatures that inhabited this earth and how they not only survive but thrive in the most unique and harsh ecosystems. I think it’s the variety that fascinates me and the scale, as we only know about 14 percent of species. The juxtaposition of the ability for these creatures to go seemingly unnoticed compared to humans is fascinating. Humans leave their mark on everything they touch, the earth is scared and shaped by humans.

 Humans have always been fascinated by the natural world. The drive to understand and discover has encouraged humans to want to know and document. We can’t help but want to understand how and why these creatures exist, we study them, capture them and examine them as we find pleasure in knowing about them. However, we separate ourselves from nature. We divide natural and unnatural, ‘manmade’ and organic, human and unhuman. 

 The book Wild Ones by Jon Mooallem described as “looking at people looking at animals” explains the idea of the study of animals as an interest of humans at arm’s length. This concept of observing whilst others observe is something that I find interesting as humans observe and discover. However, since the advancement of technology humans primarily discover, explore and learn not by seeing ecologies in real life, but by seeing them on the internet on computers. People no longer need to travel to these places or read text about them in books to learn, they learn about these creatures through a screen.

 Humans naturally like beautiful things and this is extended to technology wallpapers. I’m interested in the generic wallpapers options found on laptops, tablets, computers and phones which are mostly landscape photographs that are of unknown places. However, these photos are missing lots of information. Who took them? Where is it? Why did Apple choose these photos? Why do people have something generic as their wallpaper all the time?

 I struggled to find answers to these questions on the internet. Only one unconfirmed photographer has a similar picture to one wallpaper but no other photographers are evident. Some of the photographs are identifiable but others are not. It is unknown why Apple chooses these photos. Most importantly I still don’t know why people choose these as their wallpapers other than being beautiful and unrelated to them.

 However, I researched what flora and fauna live within the wallpapers seen on Apple products. I looked at the micro not the macro. After researching the three wallpapers I had information about where the creatures inhabit the environments that are depicted being forest in Yosemite California, mountains at Death Valley and the ocean at the Bahamas. I decided to create stickers of the animals and plants that make up these ecosystems. By doing this I recognised that they are in fact hidden within this wallpaper.

 I additionally used traditional watercolour paint to display these landscapes as colourful as they are on the screen. However, because they are paintings that are interpreted they are distorted and the colour is not true to image. These paintings are attached to the laptop screen forcing the audience to look at the same image. No software is seen, making the computer even more useless as they can’t function. I also used three dead laptops I have owned and used. This is a nod to the human; we use and get the latest technology within concern for the patterns of purchase and discarding we create. One is from 2002, 2012 and 2015 and I no longer use them regularly. This also brings a tone of environmental damage and the way that humans make and use technology without thinking of the long-term. I wanted to look beyond the human and non-human but at the ecology that are created together.

Together this artwork displays the way that humans see ecology and the relationship between the human and the natural world. My artwork proposes and investigates new possibilities by challenging how we view the natural world and humans as separate entities.

[charlivingthedream-blog]

MAKING THE ARTWORK

[charlivingthedream-blog]

IDEAS THAT DIDN'T WORK OUT

 (and more importantly) what I learnt from them

1.     Taking photographs of different landscapes around me as new wallpapers that apple had not just taken in the USA but of a different country

-       I learnt from this that I need to expand on this idea if I wanted to do it. I found it to simple so worked on making it ‘more’

 2.      Making a monopoly with not just “man-made” places but natural environments (I was interested in the idea of ownership like in my poster)

- I like this as a concept but I think the final artwork would look unimpressive. Its more of a conceptual work. However, I learnt that I wanted to make a conceptual and physical work

 I also learnt that practice-led making can be more conceptual and thinking

[charlivingthedream-blog]

How I had ‘thought’ experiments about our different prompts

Affect and body politics

-       Essentially this class made me think about this verb definition of affect “To have an influence on, to impress or move, to produce a change” and how this can be incorporated into my artwork. Although it didn’t finally end up influencing my work it was part of the process to getting there. I wanted to think about what message I could give that moves or produces change within the audience. I think that this is a key aspect of what it is like to be artist. It made me think about what beyond this ADAD class my art stands for. As we learn, the personal is the political.

 Context and time

-       Context and time was a class that taught me about the influence that context and time has had on me as artist. I had never taught about my interest in animals and the earth however, I am influenced by the climate (pardon the pun) that we live in. We can’t help but be interested in the earth, as it is going through so many changes. I realised in this class why I always want to have an environmental aspect to my work and why so many artists do as well.

 Value

-       This same week in SAHT the lecturer talked about students valuing their artworks until they are marked and then they are carelessly discarded. This is something I had considered before and find fascinating. It’s made me consider about what I do with the art I make for uni and for myself. It made me want to continue to make pieces for assessment that are worth keeping post-marking.

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Wallpaper for laptop number 3

FAUNA

- Black bear - Sierra Nevada Red Fox - Pacific FIsher - Mountain Lion - Great gray owl  - Red breasted nuthatch  - Golden-mantled ground squirrel

FLORA

- Ponderosa pine - Crimson Columbine - California poppy  - California black oak

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Wallpaper for laptop number 2

FAUNA

- Nurse shark - Spotted dolphin - Bahama duck - Bahama Parrot - Angelfish - Clown fish - Great Barracuda - Nassau Grouper - Green sea turtle - Sergeant Major 

FLORA

- Elkhorn coral

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Wallpaper for laptop 1

FAUNA

- Jack Rabbit - Coyote - Kangaroo Mouse - Road runner

FLORA

- Desert gold flower - Lilac Sunbonnet flower - Bear poppy flower - Joshua Tree 

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Wallpaper meaning

I started researching why humans have the generic wallpapers that are usually beautiful landscapes or they have personal ones. I came across this goody feed article that is What your wallpaper on your phone says about you...

“Are you constantly changing your phone wallpapers? Or are you simply sticking with the default wallpaper of your phone?Forget about horoscopes, because now, the thing to determine your characteristics is your phone wallpaper.”

1. Your significant other 

2. Your pet

3.Your vacation

4. Your selfie

5. Picture of a aeroplane wing

6. Your drunken friend

7. Default wallpaper

8. The deep quote

9. Your idol

10. A Tumblr wallpaper

Source: http://goodyfeed.com/wallpaper-phone-says/ 

[charlivingthedream-blog]

History of the wallpaper

X Window System

The X Window System was one of the earliest systems to include support for an arbitrary image as wallpaper via the xsetroot program, which at least as early as the X1OR3 release in 1985 could tile the cream with any colour or any binary image X BitMap File. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_(computing)

[charlivingthedream-blog]

IDEA BRAINSTORM

IDEAS FOR ASSESSMENT 2:

ASPECTS TO CONSIDER

* Dead laptops

* Wallpapers of beautiful landscapes

* Landscapes

* Flora and Fauna in landscapes

[charlivingthedream-blog]

WHO MAKES APPLE’S WALLPAPERS?

Research on wallpapers

I did some research about who takes the photos for apples wallpaper. After SO much research I could only find one photographer who had a similar photograph to the wallpaper and neither confirms nor denies the relationship. 

I find them really interesting as why do people have such beautiful yet impersonal images that they see everyday.

Below are two images that are from Sungjin Ahn who takes landscape photos.

This is the apple wallpaper

This is the artists photograph directly taken from National Geographic website (link below)

Other photographs by this photographer

https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/profile/71695/ 

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Week 7: Value

12 - September - 2018

This week we investigated what makes something valuable. Our studio activity was to find something and make it valuable by claiming it.

Are flowers more valuable if they are on the plant or picked?

Why do we purchase flowers?

Is picking flowers stealing?

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Research on Donna Haraway

SIMIANS, CYBORGS AND WOMEN

THE REINVENTION OF NATURE by Donna J. Haraway

Definitions:

Simians

- An ape or monkey 

Cyborgs

- A fictional or hypothetical person whose psychical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body

What she studies 

Writing on the scientific research on monkeys and apes that is arguably the finest scholarship in this tradition.

She is analysing accounts, narratives and stories about the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs.

Key concepts 

“This book is about a cautionary tale about the evolution of bodies, politics and stores. It is a book about the invention and reinvention of nature – perhaps the most central arena of hope, oppression and contestation for inhabitants for the planet earth in our times.”

“The idea that nature is constructed, not discovered – that truth is made, not found – is the keynote of recent scholarship in the history of science.

Source: 

https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Haraway_Donna_J_Simians_Cyborgs_and_Women_The_Reinvention_of_Nature.pdf

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Week 6: Context and time

29 - August - 2018

This week we focused on context and time. I enjoyed the activity (as pictured above) where we had to take a object out of context and into a new one. This was a simple exercise but had some really cool looking photos! 

I’m keen to consider context and time within my artwork for assessment 2!

[charlivingthedream-blog]

Week 5: Affect and Body Politics

22 - August - 2018

This week we:

- Studied affect theory and body politics

- Started thinking about assessment 2

- Started researching assessment 2 information