Brendan @COFA1002

Touch -

To visualise the physicality of the house and home we all collaged our fingerprints. This aims to evoke how consistent physical contact and closeness with objects and a place turn a house into a home. This very basic human ability to interact with the inanimate and invest our emotions into them is central to the concept of home. By plainly putting our prints on a page it shows the house and home as what it truly is: simply a consistent and familiar point of interaction.

Shells -

In our research the group became interested in the idea of exoskeletons and shells. In the animal kingdom, the shell is often perceived as a mobile home. In this way I wanted to simply correlate between the homes/habitats of animals and the homes of humanity. At there core houses are about protection and survival. Every human has the desire to be safe and always feel at ease and I was trying to get that across with these illustrations. They visualise the home being a lingering human experience whilst emphasising the importance of the physicality of a house: as protection, as a retreat, etc.

#househomemgopbd #assignment3 #cofa1002

Sculptural Visualisation -

This page was planned very differently initially but as I had never made a mould of anything before I failed somewhat and had to refigure the representation.

What was initially planned was a plaster hand with roots extending from it/growing from it. However, I made the mould to shallow and when I tried to remove it, the plaster broke into smaller pieces. I did still like the aesthetic but it wasn't the original idea.

The components of the visualisation could still be expressed though so by having grass shoot through it I aimed to demonstrate that organic life bursting from the hand.

This is a visualisation of home as the roots to a person. As a person becomes more ingrained in a physical space through presence and touch (ie the hand) it slowly begins to nourish and sustain them. The home is a place where a person can renew and grow from a day and that is what I was attempting to visualise in the final photo/failed sculpture.

Visualising Home as People -

Whilst recording out family conversation we did three drawings each of a family member. Mine is of my mother and progresses from quick sketch, to one line drawing, to sketching without looking. In this way we wanted to find an interesting aesthetic to represent home through. To visually deconstruct the people who live with us is to highlight the very deconstruction and visualisation of home that these people represent and that we are doing throughout our PDF.

It is important to know that this is accompanied by the sound of household conversation and as such should evoke the personality and emotion required to form a home.

Visualising the Taste of a Home-Cooked Meal -

Although the scan isn't great, it is clear to see that I used warm intermingling colours to represent what I taste in home cooking. After eating schnitzel I tried to translate the sensations as best I could. I feel the warmth and 'splashiness' of the colours evokes a sense of home and comfort and therefore acts as a further iteration of home.

Object Out of Context -

These were some of the photos which were my contribution to the group page which focuses on the objects that seem to make a home being displaced. By recontextualising objects that you immediately associate with home (for example a lamp that has been in my family almost as long as I have) it immediately becomes evident that a home is more than the sum of its parts. What was an attempt to visualise a home ended up more like a house - a collection of objects which don't really spark an emotional connection.

Home Photos -

With my visualisations of home I decided to go for curved, organic lines, colour and things that evoked shelter. These were the opposite to the house and therefore felt right for the home. This is interesting because they often seem so inextricably linked.

The image of the buoy in the bay was the outlier which to me symbolised the home being a guiding safe zone. I think the home acts as an anchoring, perpetual point.

#househomemgopbd

House Photos

When I visualise a house rather than a home I think of angles, lines and constructed objects. Things that are not organic. So when I was taking photos that is what I looked out for: patterns, lines, angles - all of which were constructed.

The one exception to that was my image of the recycling. With that image I was looking at how the by-product of the home also defines the house. The materiality is more household than homely.

My Jobs for Assessment 3:

House V Home: How do we visualise the house and home differently?

Group Pages:

6 disposable photos of house + home.

Photos of homely object recontextualised (lamp displaced)

Watercolour the taste of homely food.

Record household/homely conversation and do a one-line drawing, quick sketch, and sketch without looking of a family member.

Individual Pages:

Mould and plaster a hand make then glue roots extending from them.

Draw person wearing a shell, crab shell or snail shell, etc.

Concept Statement 'Wait' + Bibliography

As soon as I embarked on this assessment I knew I was addressing a topic close to home. In my poster I had fallen upon the idea of ‘wishing’ within the subject of desire. I was interested in how desire in theory could be motivational but mostly had the capacity to leave a person completely unmoving. A ‘wish’ seemed to be the perfect example of the immobility desire generates in people. I define a wish as something an individual perceives beyond their will to achieve despite having a strong pull towards it. I decided to use film media to make sense of my thoughts and express the polarising nature of desire. By sourcing numerous films I was surprised to find a glorification of the characters who wished. ‘Wishers’ were largely presented as noble, innocent, and idealistic, perhaps with their only downfall being slight naivety. This demonstrated to me a longing of both filmmakers and the audience to make wishing productive. They aimed to rationalise the process of wishing so that it seems less wasteful and acted as a positive reflection of a person. They aimed to give hope that even when we do nothing we deserve the best, simply for being ‘good’. In this way it confirmed for me that the common experience of desire was a negative and overwhelming one.

In both my video and interactive program I am trying to highlight the fruitless nature of wishing and by extension the largely passive desires we all have. In the video, iconic characters such as Aladdin, Cinderella and Dorothy are left in the inescapable loop of wishing because I have removed the possibility that their wish will suddenly be granted like in the films. It demonstrates how film media expresses the desire to make wishing something productive, something which positively reflects on the person who does it (which invariably why these films have such broad appeal). The escapism of these films for adults relies on the nostalgia for a time where wishes were indeed granted without our active effort, when we were children. Similarly, my program is my way of further emphasising the futile nature of the wish. No matter how many times you go through the tricky process of stopping the star and wishing on it, nothing happens. When someone uses the program I want them to question why they are doing it at all, what the purpose is and why I bothered to make it. By using the symbol of a shooting star I am hoping to bring forward the entrenched and customary forms of wishing that people readily accept. Birthday candles and shooting stars are wished on every day and this says to me that society relies on dreaming without action far more than we are aware.

Ironically, I think the process I went to create the work more honestly presented my ideas than the final product. Throughout my time working I was constantly hoping for a better idea to explode into my mind, something completely transformative and brilliant yet I did very little to actually stimulate it. The process of making the artwork suddenly became spookily reflective of the theme I was exploring. As time kept creeping towards the due date I found myself longing for the instant gratification experienced by the characters I had researched. Despite having a solid vision and great interest in my relevant artists (ie SODA_JERK), I still desired an earth-shattering idea and this desire negatively impacted my devotion to my idea. I felt no motivation to simply experiment and allow practice-led research drive my idea as I was wishing for a fully-realised perfect idea and unless that happened I felt averse to deviating from the vision I had created. I had fallen into the same trap I thought I was so aware of and in this way became completely sure of the assertion made in my artwork. Even when proclaiming the uselessness of wishing and damning desire as largely the enemy of productivity, I was still letting it control my process and determine my success. Word Count: 674 Bibliography:

Aladdin. 1992. [Film] Directed by John Musker Ron Clements. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

Brave. 2012. [Film] Directed by Brenda Chapman Mark Andrews. USA: Walt Disney Studios.

Cinderella. 1950. [Film] Directed by Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson Clyde Geronimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

Coraline. 2009. [Film] Directed by Henry Selick. USA: Laika Pandemonium .

Freaky Friday. 2005. [Film] Directed by Mark Waters. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg. 2012. Cinemagraphs. [Online] Accessed 4 September 2014: <http://cinemagraphs.com/>

Labyrinth. 1986. [Film] Directed by Jim Henson. USA: Tri-Star Pictures.

Microsoft. 2012. Cliplets: Juxtaposing Still and Dynamic Imagery. [Online] Accessed 8 September 2014: <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/clipletsdesktop/>

MIT Media Lab, 2014. Scratch. [Online] Accessed 14 September 2014: < http://scratch.mit.edu/>

Sleeping Beauty. 1959. [Film] Directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman Clyde Geronimi. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

SODA_JERK, 2009. After the Rainbow. [Art][Online] (UTS Gallery, Sydney). Accessed 3 September 2014: < http://www.sodajerk.com.au/video_work.php?v=20120921063645>

Spirited Away. 2001. [Film] Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Japan: Studio Ghibli.

The Little Mermaid. 1989. [Film] Directed by John Musker Ron Clements. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.

The Wizard of Oz. 1939. [Film] Directed by Victor Fleming. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Final Submission Links

Please Click Here to view the two components I am submitting, both a video and interactive game.

Please Click Here to view progress and research chronologically.

(apologies for the wavering quality of the video, unfortunately YouTube caused this to happen each time I attempted to upload it.)

Video Editing

To do the final compilation of my video I am using the program Videopad. This is a free software which I have used before that I have an understanding of, though it is imperfect.

This is the general program set-up. This image demonstrates how I have arranged each loop in equal ten second groups.

I compiled the images in colour and then exported them so when I was adding effects I could adjust them consistently over the entire video so there was no jarring between clips. The following options were inputted in order to make the video come across as security footage:

Following this I added a subtitle for each clip that would act as a time-stamp for the recording. To determine this time I researched the date each film came out and then attributed a largely random time. In instances where that same film is used more than once I use the time-stamp to suggest time passing with nothing important occurring. Each frame now looks like this:

I have found locating academic articles on my chosen subject surprisingly difficult. In an attempt to better understand the criticism of the 'wishing' trope in film I had hoped to find some scholarly articles on it but there simply was not anything that directly addressed how I was considering it. Oftentimes, it is briefly addressed as a poor catalyst in children's films but I am sure there are some articles that I haven't found which do address my thoughts.

As a result the most helpful website I found was this TV tropes website (title is a link). This website aided me in seeing the common threads throughout films and what the tropes actually added to their respective stories. The 'Be Careful What You Wish For' aspect of the trope (linked above) is found in all my chosen films and I found it interesting for a number of reasons:

It largely assumes that a wish can be fulfilled at any moment and stresses the articulation of wishes over the process of wishing.

It seems there are largely moral undertones to the trope. As it is largely present in children's media it seems writers have largely used it as a means of preaching the idea of appreciating what you have which once again contrasts the argument that desire is and should be constructive.

The arduous process of achieving a desire is made to be entirely absent within the wishing trope and I think once again it reinforces the expectation many have that a wish only is worth achieving if no effort is expended. Therefore, this creates the idea that true desire is a burden rather than something to motivate.

Scratch Code -

This is the screenshot of the program I have put together in Scratch. Though it looks very simple it was (sadly enough) a bit troublesome to reach something that functioned and I was happy with.

This program makes a star flit about the game screen at a high speed. Every time you hover over the star it asks you to make a wish, once it has been inputted the star continues it's path and repeats that simple loop.

In this way I aim to demonstrate the fruitless nature of 'wishing on a star'.

While I am happy with the impact of my current idea I just want to add something more to it as I want to show a wider variety of expression. As a result I wanted to experiment with programming a simple game which would demonstrate my overall point about 'wishing'.

As I have never programmed before I looked up simple, beginners programs and found Scratch (linked above), It is a highly simplified drag and drop program system that I have been fiddling with in an attempt to create a simple interactive experience. It is aimed at educating kids how to start programming so I am sure I will be able to create something from it that might add another layer to my final submission.

MIT Media Lab, 2014. Scratch. [Online] Accessed 14 September 2014: < http://scratch.mit.edu/>

More Cinemagraphs

The process of downloading each film, determining workable frames and then creating the loops in Cliplets has proved surprisingly time consuming which means I have just been creating as many as possible before the due date. Here are a few of the GIFs that I have already created however there are more now and will be more by the conclusion.

Once again, these will be further edited when I compile them.