Final blog submission

My final blog submission is one on:

Sound
Space
Montage/collage
Colour
and Perspective

Ive chosen these because they were the only topics i was even slightly engaged in for this subject. Even then, I wish we had covered more on them. The perspective task from the beginning of the semester really lay down the basic foundation idea of what perspective is, so it was a important one for my learning. Colour plays an important role in the communication of many things and i think it is an important part in human perception. Montage and collage can show how an image can change by adding other images or changing the order they appear. although our lectures for this were scary, i think its important. Space and sound go hand in hand and i believe that sound and space operate in similar ways but with different functions, so those two are contextually linked, as so i believed from lectures.

Sound

From my current stand point, I am sitting in my room tuning in my perceptual sound frequency in to the XX playing on my iPod speakers, pen tapping on my note pad, hearing the faint sound of dishes clumsily clashing and tapping vibrations through the walls from an exhausted working mother in the kitchen. This is home, these separate elements of sound collaborate a networking of sound that interact in my mind creating a framework with which I associate to be my home environment. Of course, they do differ. Sometimes at frequencies, pitch and intensity. I can usually tell the kind of day my mum has had just by the way she treats the dishes. I don’t always listen to music. And my pen isn’t always tapping. It glides at times. But what sounds still make this environment I’m in, home? Is it the familiarity of these sounds? What is it about the sounds that fill my home environment that I find so tranquil, safe and even meditative; completely settling my mind.  

Space

It is amazing the spaces we have in our worlds. My home alone is over 50 years old. Imagine the bodies that had occupied this space before me, how they would have lived and the people before them, how they lived here. I know for a fact, the previous people were a grandmother and daughter, both older women. It would be very contrasted to how I live in my home now, having friends over, blasting music, and my room which was once empty is now a complete mess.

In our everyday lives, the spaces we find a normality like the hustle on the street, the silence in a library, the expressiveness of a classroom or the packed atmosphere of a sports stadium all use the spaces they have in a way they were designed. Even though the library may have once been a thumping club, that space in now dedicated to silent reading and research. It is funny how our minds can link the way a space is set up and its function. It is why many people cannot study at home, yet find it so much easier in a library.

Montage/Collage.Sequencial Images

The way that images are put together can deliver an idea or message just by the placement of them. The order they are placed, a collection and even a collaboration of images can change and create a message or idea.

In our lecture we looked at artworks that had been manifested in a way using collage as a key component to converse an overall idea of an image.

We were told to pick one and change it, which was difficult. By bringing other images in, it again changed the idea of the image; from a girl spinning, then adding a ufo to the image after creates the idea shes spinning by force. a laughable concept, but none the less a change.

Colour

I found it really interesting how colour can be interpreted with an emotive response and even sounds.
Colour can be used to express a given atmosphere. For example Blue can often be associated with sadness and despair where as a bright and bold colour like Red can be associated with 'vibrant' feelings like passion, anger, romance, and can scientifically make a persons mouth water at the sight of the colour.

In film, the colours aqua and orange are used together because they contrast and compliment each other so beautifully. Not only is it used on the movie cover, but some of the scenes; like sunset and opaque fore ground. It helps give the feel that something is offsetting, not right or doesn't quite match up. The colours in contrast excite the viewer by the aura of difference and that makes them curious about what actually goes on in the film.

Home

 With flash                                                                 Without flash

This is a corner behind a small cabinet that we have in the kitchen. Being have recently moved house, I haven't found out much about a lot of my new house. However, I chose the tiniest, cosiest place I could find.

The orange/brown colour of the timber of the floor makes the corner look warm and almost inviting. It has collected a little bit of dust from the one month of human traffic past the cabinet. I can imagine a lot of the dust would have come in through on peoples shoes from the party I held a couple of weeks ago. It gives the indication that this house has definitely been lived in.

I thought Id be curious and unsettled by a new space I hadn't yet encountered, but I am actually not. It makes me feel real in a way. It makes me think about how the dust got there, how the cabinet occupies that corner space and what else could have occupied that space before we lived here. This piece of this house is over 50 years old. So much human traffic would have come past it, so many things could have called this space home. Now, its mine. It homes my cabinet. I feel happy that its now a part of my history as I am to this house.

Making Maps

This is a map to my dreams. The outer 'Suburbs' of the map is reality. It gets 'Dreamier' as the map connections move further into the centre of the map, consiting of suburbs like 'Good-dream downs', 'Falling-awake Dale' and 'Morning smile dreams'.

The south side of the map is more pleasant dreaming, like 'South-city awesome dreams', 'Day-dream ville' and 'Imagination island'. Where as the North side is more nightmarish, like the side of a city that might have a higher reputation for crime. It houses suburbs like 'Heart-palpitations heights' and 'Vivid-vale memories'.

The outer most areas are beyond waking consciousness, places like 'Coma county' and 'Memory-loss meadows' are places you don want to be.

The overall map links to dreaming (inner) and reality (outer) and dot points all that lays between and beyond. The overall image, is of a sleeping woman.

Dérive

ADVENTURE TIME

I wasn't quite sure how i'd do this. But I did.

I chose the Paper Plane (option 2) because it was a little bit bizarre and I was curious to see if I would get lost trying this. In the beginning I threw the paper plane a couple of times and it just kept on flying back towards my house. At that point I could have taken a hint and went back inside but I kept throwing. Once a direction was chosen by my magical paper aeroplane.

Once I'd gotten to the end of the first street, my instruction was to walk "westerly", so I practically had to do a 360 degree turn and walk back the direction I'd come. All of the streets in my neighbourhood are long and windy so it took a couple of minutes to get to the first street. I passed a lot of street tags on the way.

From this point I had to turn "left then right". There was a lot of greenery on this street. It had a really natural feel to it. Ive never walked around this street before and I liked it so I think i will walk there again in the future.

After turing right, I had to take the first "left then walk another 100m". The first half of this stretch was quite, hilly. No people, not much green. Very brown and bland. I didn't like it. I had to walk around a fallen bin and a fallen tree branch. After that I saw that the environment kind of warmed up a bit. There was some cars driving past. I got beeped at by a stranger! Which is always offsetting and uncomfortable.

I then arrived at a familiar street that I realised that I walk home on everyday from university. It was easy to "get back to my original point using an alternative route" because the road I had turned "left" onto goes straight home. My entire journey took around 22 minutes in total. The streets were very long and its also the reason why there are fast times lapses in my 'Adventure Time' video above. It was good to be home :)

SOUND PROJECT

For my Sound Project, I have chosen to conceptualise the colour GREEN because it is my favourite colour.

I did a little bit of self reflection on my feelings associated with this colour.

-Nature/natural
-Relaxation
-Fresh
-Raw
-Tranquil
-Healthy
-Real; are all qualities I brain stormed that could be used to describe this colour.

I also had a look online, researching "How the colour green makes you feel".  I was interested to see
'Jealousy' as a feeling. I guess that can easily be associated with being "green with envy". It also outlined that:

-Green symbolises nature
-Is a symbol of fertility
-Has a calming effect
-Relieves stress
-Restful
-Soothing
-Health-giving

After collaborating my ideas with the research I'd conducted, I thought of utilising my skill in creating a sound environment by combining sound elements of that environment. My first thought is to use my feeling associated with Green and pairing them with ideas of fertility (mother nature) and naturalistic landscape that is both calming and soothing; a forrest.

Due to difficulty downloading Audacity, I decided to use my default sound editor on my MacBook, Garage Band. I found this to fit well with what I want to do. The sound effects that I used were all downloaded using an MP3 converter from YouTube. I imported the sounds of A bird chirping, water dripping, soft rain, twigs crunching and bamboo/trees creaking. After doing this I began to 'Split' the sound tracks and move them around into a random order to create more of a natural sounding space, so as not for my sound creation to sound like a repetitive loop. I shortened a lot of sounds to make them more of a singular effects which I copied and moved around to use again.

After I was happy with how it sounded I compressed and exported the experimental, Green environment piece to my iTunes to then upload to SoundCloud.

This is Green.

Please click this hyper link to hear GREEN! 

Perspective Drawing Exercise: Tute 1

 1 Point Perspective Drawing of my bedroom.

Naughts and Crosses game. Looking a circles and lines. We talked about organic forms in nature and pretty any natural thing has curves, where as the only real straight line is the horizon. However, even then, the horizon is just a part of a bigger circle. 

1 point, 2 point ans 3 point perspective drawings! 

Image Project

I was really excited to start using Adobe Photoshop to recreate an image; to change its perspective and re-invent it. My choice of images is a photograph of city buildings by Romain Jaquet-Lagreze. The angle of the shot is taken so that the camera points directly upwards so to appear that buildings city scape is ascending into the vanishing point in the centre of the image; thus creating a one-point perspective shot.

Just thinking about perspective made me think about all the things that help to change our perspective in every day life of everyday images and sights. For example, a magnify glass, tinted glasses, shadows and shade, brightness and light, a pixelated image, art, and even an altered state of consciousness. I thought about the image and decided i'd turn it into a Kaleidoscope, using the city buildings as the main body of the tunnel.

I started off using a blank Base Layer in Photoshop and making the city image as Layer 2. By using the Magnetic Lasso tool, I began to select the inner white section of the city image then removed it to make an opening in the layer to expose the layer underneath. To soften to cut edges of the buildings and to make it appear as though light was coming in through the other side, I used the Erase tool and merely adjusted the brush side and hardness of the brush. I used this around the top edges of the buildings.

I then imported another image to Layer 3, which was an eye. This tied in well with the idea of perspective because its all about observing your personal view of a subject in space. I clicked and dragged Layer 3 below Layer 2 and adjusted its size to fit well in the centre of the image behind the city  image so to look like a person is peering in through the tunnel.

The 4th Layer was a Kaliedoscope-like constructed image of elements found in token cities all around the world, like London, New York and Rome. I kept this image in front of the city image and just adjusted the Opacity to make it look more transparent, almost like tinted glass, to see the city and eye behind it in layers 3 and 2 respectively. This really completed the idea of a 'City Themed Kaleidoscope' presented in an abstract and contemporary perspective. After, I wanted the buildings to stand out a little more. I went back to Layer 2 and added a dark edge artistic filter to bring out the buildings.

This final image is the product after I merged the image visible. Looking at it now, I could have lifted the Opacity of Layer 4 about 5-10% more to create bigger impact.