Keywords in this section with contexts:
The first acquaintance with projection mapping
Description of 'Rhyme' series(2018-2019)
The experiment of the Super 8 projector and the 8mm film
1. Appropriation from the everyday:
(1) Ways of using the readymade (the intended functions and the 'affordances' of objects)
In Advance of the Broken Arm(1915), Fountain(1917), Marcel Duchamp
Early Sculptures, Richard Wentworth
(2)Ways of using the imagery (the lightest touch of editing)
Walk Through, test no.2 (2009), Koki Tanaka
Lost Image Standing(2015), Crescent (Timekeeper)(2016), Sarah Sze
2. Juxtaposition
(from the confusion of objecthood and image to the transition between reality and visual presentation)
Hilary Lloyd's works at Turner Prize 2012
Katja Novitskova’s works
Troubleshoot
The first acquaintance with projection mapping
In the projection mapping induction held by Moving Image Workshop, I learned about how to use Isadora software to fold and stretch the projection plane to break through its flatness, set images free from the frame, and project the imagery on the surface of the object or into a three-dimensional space.
Previously, I focused on manipulating still images to evoke kinetic intention. Projection mapping gave me an opportunity to start understanding motions further by operating the moving images.
In my collection of ‘found art’, there are also many moving image clips. I started my first practice by using a clip about a jumping pigeon. I folded a piece of flat thin paper several times to make it undulate. At the same time, I got a few small frames on the paper, so I projected the pigeon on different frames, the order in which the frames were faded out and switched corresponds to the direction in which the pigeon moves.
Description of 'Rhyme' series (2018-2019)
With the experience in making sculptures using
ready-made objects, I immediately began to further
explore the characteristics of the projection
by combining it with ready-made products.
The little mouse was fleeing, the legs of the person waiting for the train kept shaking his legs, the aquarium trainer gently patted the beak’s forehead, young girls were sliding down the slide one by one, and the dolphin patted the fins, a woman twisted her toes up and down ...
In Rhyme (2018-2019) series, I landed the ready-made images about these motions on the surface of ready-made items(such as tape measure, pendulum clock, inflatable ball, dustbin, sticky notes, and wallpaper) via projection mapping.
Images and objects have become conflated, layered, fused, where the real becomes a platform(the screens) and unreal (the projections of virtual images) become real things. Gestures engaged with found objects and visual memory aroused by looping projection imagery interconnected to one another. There’s a delicate equilibrium within these transitions and tension.
1. Appropriation from every day:
(1)Ways of using the readymade: the intended functions and the “affordances” of objects
The concept of ‘affordances’ theorized by psychologist James J. Gibson is essentially about all the possible actions a substance or object will allow given its particular properties.
Objects offer themselves up to or invite certain activities that we can readily perceive from their specific design.
For example, a paper can be written on, but it can also afford being cut, being torn. A swivel chair is designed for seating, but it can also afford to be a temporary table.
In my works, I draft the intended functions of found objects and overlay the relative imagery about sculptural motions with them.
Pulling away and releasing the tape measure, slapping the ball, the pendulum of the clock swinging left and right…
The toaster popping up, Ejecting the CD-ROM, lifting, and pulling down the blind…(works created during Unit3)
Compared with Marcel Duchamp's titling or carrying the readymade directly to the field of art, thus tampering with the original function of the readymade. Or Richard Wentworth's and Sarah Sze’s sculptural practice about combining ready-made products with each other, grafting in the space, or even evolving into an architectural grouping that invades the entire display space.
I found my ways of using readymade objects is relative to Koki Tanaka’s methods about accepting the intended functions while treating them as a kind of art material.
Rather than use the material to illustrate something else, I emphasize the essential functions of the material and assort the same rhythm between physical objects and virtual imagery.
From a wheel mounted on a wooden stool(Bicycle Wheel of 1913) to a snow shovel inscribed with the title In Advance of the Broken Arm(1915), Marcel Duchamp falsified the meanings of daily items and describe his approach to art-making with the term ‘readymade’. In Duchamp’s understanding, sculpture no longer lay in painting, but in the eye’s ability to see it in the ordinary world.
Duchamp’s most notorious readymade, which is a standard men’s urinal signed by the artist with a false name, titled Fountain(1917), and exhibited placed on its back. Here, rather than fabricating it with his own hands, he chooses it and turns its established usage upside down.
While Koki Tanaka’s works focus on alternate possibilities about the affordances of objects by intervening objects with a series of subconscious performance.
“Just pick two or three objects and put [them] together, if there is a hole, push something into it, or tape it, break it, ball [it] up, glue it . . . [the work] is a ‘spontaneous reaction’ to the object, which was afforded by the form of [the] objects to me.”
Stacking a piece of paper between the two buckets, then tightly pull the two buckets together, putting the plastic shopping basket on a swivel chair, and then being swiveled the chair a few times. Placing a cardboard box on a part of the tape and then quickly peeling off the tape ... The artist is like a naughty child who wants to attract the attention of adults by performing ‘destructive operations’.
The artist just did not tamper with these properties of everyday objects or forced them to compose ups and downs plot, but directly, simply "used" them upon instant reactions, tested the physical properties of items, and invented new ways to rethink their intended functions.
In Walk Through, test no.2, the gap between an object’s intended function and its other possible uses yields a rich space in which to explore perception and alternate possibilities. For the artist, these simple and instant actions shift our perception from what is taken for granted in daily lives to what could be.
Sarah Sze recontextualizes a constellation of everyday materials that normally exists within the periphery of our everyday lives, ranging from mass-produced found objects and photographs to handmade sculptures and living plants.
By gathering a massive amount of readymade materials into a constant and delicate order of collage that invades the entire architecture of the display space, she exploits our ability to recognize them.
While highlighting their intimate details and reflecting our behavior in relationship to them, she wonders why and how the objects acquire value for us.
Two steel spheres, for example, hanging testicle-like beneath a domestic chair; a collection of brooms shoved through the surface of a desk.
By transforming the notion of ready-made and manipulating industrial and/or found objects that bear no relation to each other into aberrant assemblages, Richard Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification through his sculptural arrangements.
The experiment of the Super 8 projector and the 8mm film
Because of my experience in drawing on 16mm film, and at the same time I found a super8 / 8mm film projector at the Central Loan Store in my college, I also continued my analog film experiment while practicing the technique of digital projection mapping.
Due to the small size of the frame, which is not suitable for drawing directly on, and most of the 8mm film produced today is negative(it’s easier and more normal now，in the digital age, to be developed and transferred to the digital version as the negative film for photography.), which means it's not suitable for projection by the film projector.
In addition, at this stage, my art process is based on decontextualizing readymade information rather than becoming a film-maker, so I instead began to buy some second-hand vintage films and home films on eBay.
These second-hand films generally record the daily life of the family, such as attending the family parties, picnics, children's birthdays, etc., as well as animal shows in the aquarium, cartoons, and sports competitions. In the process of watching these videos, I cut out some interesting clips as another part of my resources.
🔧Solutions and strategies:
With the help of my course leader Edwina and Helena, the acting pathway leader of BA Fine Art: Print and Time-Based Media, I took part in a 16mm film workshop run by artist and experimental filmmaker Bea Haut, who has great experience in analog 16mm film. I signed up for a tutorial with her. She suggested to me that the way to prevent film burn is not to wrap the film on the wound of the projector too tightly, and also to increase the length of the film. Also, she mentioned that probably I could design a structure so that the film can be hung high and can correspond to the position of the film inlet.
Jack Perry from Moving Image Workshop suggested me to try the timer switch during my exhibition,
so I found the one which can be set
every 15 minutes to reduce machine operation time.
😭Troubles encountered:
-
The stability of the equipment: Old-school equipment (analog 8mm film projector as well as the films) are easy to get overheated and be damaged. During the exhibition period of Xhibit2019, I went there twice to repair the burned film, which is also part of the reason I suspended the analog film experiment. ️
❓Reflection:
Rosa Barba’s ways of install the 16mm projectors and the wound inspire me to improve my way of installing the equipment.
I also encountered some other ways of installing the film projector during visiting the degree show of different art schools. (e.g. Glasgow School of Arts, Slade School of Arts)
Research that will continue: In terms of media, the difference and similarity between digital projection and analog film projection
(Possibility:
(1)The frames and soundtrack are visible on the 8mm/16mm film -> The materiality of moving image
(2)The fragility of the image -> temporary quality)
A crushed box with a wineglass symbol indicating this-way-up; a gap in the double yellow lines on the road where someone clearly drove while the wet paint was still wet; an elaborately molded period window frame that is being installed in a basement… many objects seemed to lie in wait for being discovered - like an ambush.
In the early 1970s, Richard Wentworth began Making Do and Getting By, which has continued until today and now consists of more than 200,000 images of sculptural events, occasional and involuntary geometries as well as uncanny situations that often go unnoticed around the world.
He habitually spends much time wandering the streets of London observing minutiae(quirky details, visual anomalies) often missed by the untrained eye, and these observations then provide the nucleus for new ideas.
These images act as a private place of recognition, where the experience of being in life and being in art merge.
1. Appropriation from every day:
(2)Ways of using the imagery: a light touch of editing-set the imagery free from the natural procession of editing
My focus on selections: sculptural motion, physical gesture.
For all my imagery, the most part that I edit is to duplicate for looping rather than to adjust the hue or to clip them.
Sarah Sze’s ways of editing the images: debris(tearing the paper images apart), video snow with the slow loop
By arranging paint skins, torn paper images, and other materials such as wood, thread, and rocks, Sze explored our fragmented relationship to illusionistic images by focusing our attention on each object’s materiality.
Crescent (Timekeeper)(2016) is an immersive installation of light, sound, film, paintings, and objects, which scatters out to the entryway, across the walls, and onto floors. Moving pictures, scenes, and flickering light surround viewers in loops of personal, researched, and found scenes. The installation unfolds in fragments: moving images recorded by the artist, static image signals, flickering movement, or digital “snow” encircle the nucleus of the installation and create an immersive environment informed by a changing sense of gravity, scale and time across space.
Part constellation, the part debris field, Sarah Sze splices together disparate content that audience, upon wandering through space, edit together through the act of seeing and reading images to draw attention to processes of decay or transformation between our sense of materiality and a virtual sense.
Sarah Sze’s key point of selection: time
Sarah Sze selects from an endless constant flux of found images that we negotiate daily. She explores the image in motion, exploring our sense of time, place and distance, and the construction of memory.
The imagery itself often points to its own materiality or changes in material state, like water dripping, fire burning, structures collapsing.
The most memorable for her is some fluke in daily life. For example, she filmed the burning pot while she burned some popcorn while making it and threw it out onto the grass to avoid burning the house down, and then saw it circling in the pot because of the wind. Also, the videos of her daughters running around the pyramids of Giza and sleeping were totally spontaneous.
2. Juxtaposition
(from the confusion of objecthood and image to the transition between reality and visual presentation)
Katja Novitskova’s works focus on the lifespan of an image in a world full of visual attractions.
Photographs of living creatures are often used in Katja Noviskova’s sculptural work as the internet overflows with visual representations of animals.
For Katja, the digital image is a material carrier for attention-grabbing intensity, created, spread out in the world. She found the main attention is about cute animals. The animal photographs she chooses from the internet are printed on huge aluminum plates. If people only look at the documentation, the entire scene was as if all completely collaged in photoshop, but actually the pieces were real，so as the gallery space, which creates a cyborg-like scene.
Katja’s work creates a loop circular structure of the lifespan of the chosen images: The artist finds photos online, she prints the chosen images on huge aluminum to make sculptures of them, the pieces are exhibited in a gallery where visitors take photographs with or of the artwork and the visual material eventually ends up on the internet again.
What interests me the most is that, by creating the loop, the sculptures of images become images of sculptures, which refers to the much-discussed problem of the original in the age of reproduction. Katja’s work makes me think about the dual transition between reality and visual presentation: The original object(the animals in the reality) transforms to the visual reproduction, which later is concretized as artworks with artist’s manipulation. And then the afterlife of the artwork begins: the photographs of the artworks then spread out online again, which throws the reality (the artworks) again back to the online distribution of images. With the intervention of visual reproduction, the inner evolution of the pieces is always to commute between the physical and virtual space.
2. Juxtaposition
(from the confusion of objecthood and image to the transition between reality and visual presentation)
I think Hilary Lloyd’s piece at Turner Prize 2011 is another inspiring example of playing with the relationship between reality and visual presentation. Hilary Lloyd shows films on LCD monitors, which display images of the moon (multi images on two monitors); a wooden floor (three monitors), shirts (single images on two screens), and a tower block (multi images on a single screen). For me, the most exciting part is that there is a whole side of a window in this space, which keeps resonating with the virtual fragments in Lloyd’s work.
While the imagery repays some time spent by the viewer to capture palimpsest moments of beauty, the whole piece also invites the viewer to enjoy reality through this window. This specific site helped to make a multi-dimensional collage between reality and the one framed by devices.
😭Troubles and doubts encountered:
2. The difficulties of recording the artworks:
(1)The frame rates of analog films and digital ones are different. Some of the images seem kept bouncing when shooting the record.
(2)It’s hard to tell what the found objects are when keeping the projection sharp in dark projection space.
(3)Due to the small projection area, simple scene shooting can not see every part of the work clearly at the same time, which means it is not an effective way to make the works understandable through documentation.
🔧Solutions and strategies:
1)With the help of Jack Perry and Ursula Pelczar from Moving Image Workshop, I learned how to choose the right Fps mode(there are two standards called NTSC and PAL), and balance the shutter speed and aperture value to get the best results.
2)With the help of Nick Manser from Photography Workshop, after I set up all my installations, I first turned off all the projection, photographed the space scene (with the found objects). Then I turned off all the ambient lights, turned on all the projections again, and adjusted the appropriate setting in DSLR to start my recording. Finally, I superimposed them through Adobe Premiere Pro. (Tips: This method requires sufficient time after setting up the show and to be patient during adjusting the settings.)
3)I tried to use the 360-degree camera for recording, but the currently available 360-degree cameras still have many limitations in adjustments(ISO, aperture, and fps), which still can’t make the small projections sharp enough.
Then, I try to take a tour by holding the camera and pause for seconds to show clearly each part of my works. My only concern is that as an artist myself, I decided the tour order of a group of works from my single point of view.
❓Reflection:
Finding more recording methods suitable or make replicas of different kinds of works for people who can’t be present in the exhibition site to see the works, breaking through the limitations of photography records.
😭Troubles and doubts encountered:
2.(1) The arrangement of equipment and related parts: The view of the installation seems slightly messy during my Unit1 assessment as there are several pico projectors and film projectors, tripods, cables.
(2)Professional skills to install exhibition works: choose the right accessories and the relative color of them(the support, the stand tripod, the mount, the cloth tape, the cable clip, the cable tie, and the sticky pad)
🔧Solutions and strategies:
In the exhibition of Wanying Art Imagination, an electrician worked closely with me and he rearranged the whole circuit according to my needs in the room of my work. With his help, the placement of each part of the artworks in the space was cleaner.
When I watched the exhibitions of some installation artists, I learned about the different approaches to arrange equipment for different artists in different art spaces, which provided new ideas for the arrangement of my works.
Nam June Paik at Tate Modern
Dates（17th October 2019 - 9th February 2020）
In the last room of the exhibition, it is an immersive video installation filled the room, including the ceiling, with approximately 40 projectors switched at random between videos, all playing at the same time.
There was even a fan for cooling down this huge group of equipment, and countless cables, which were all professionally tied on the support and then connected to the central controller.
I realized that if I needed to show a set of installation, I would definitely be faced with an extremely messy set of equipment. I could solve layout problems and safety issues by carefully designing a structure that fixe and connect all the components, plus enough patience.
❓Reflection:
Is the equipment part of the artwork? Is that possible to expose the equipment/let equipment visible? (without affecting the viewer's personal safety)Does the appearance of devices present the sculptural aspect of the whole installation?
Hilary Lloyd gives me strong inspiration on her precise use of projecting equipment as a decisive part of the work's mise-en-scéne. The equipment(monitors, projectors, stands, and cabling) used by Hilary Lloyd to display her images form a highly visible aspect of her filmic installations. The monitors, projectors, and DVD players suspended on columns, highly visible support structures, cabling lined across the ceiling between the AV equipment and power cables, her works give to technical equipment a concrete sculptural quality, and occupies the gallery in a deliberately object-like way.
Tony Oursler prefers to include the pico projectors to complete the construction of his installation. Videos of human faces talking are projected onto his puppet-like objects. In doing this the lifeless dolls come to life.
For me, the nearly obstructive presence of the technologies of audio-visual display compels a physical dimension to the act of looking as well as to the architecture of the space. I think the appearance of equipment may enhance the association between the characteristic of different mediums, the imagery displayed and the sense of space, which also throws the emphasis on the act of looking and being looked at.
It’s necessary for my works to make the equipment visible even for cables
-whose exhibiting fate usually involves being obliterated and hidden under wall-matching gaffer
tape as well as they are under the professional arrangement. They are as vital as the images
themselves.
Moreover, it’s could be a way to offer viewers an optional route by arranging all the equipment. Viewers could gain the bodily experience of the objects as he or she walks through space.
(The position occupied by the projector is an obstacle, so people while figure out where is the viewing point and make the detour.)
