PEGGY MAREE COFA1002

[peggymareepullencofa]

Research for Final Assessment

Before finally settling on our 'confusion/random/things as they aren't' theme, we were looking at illusions. This is some of the research I did while looking into various illusions.

3. illusions: (sensory distortion)

David Copperfield (magician)- The Flying Illusion. perfectly alined wires, fan.

Aviation, sensory illusions- pilots cannot rely on own senses when flying an aircraft. Visual illusions.

We come across illusions while undertaking ever day activities, such as when driving a car on a straight road (similar to the Aviation illusions), the road appears to meet at an apex at the horizon. Also our car mirrors- "objects in mirror are closer then they appear".

Interesting illusions to try at home:

 * Purkinje Lights. closing eyes, face sun, wave hands in front of face see colours and flashing. perhaps a hallucination.

 * The Ganzfield Effect. turn on a red light, listen to white noise while blind folded, will start to see images

 * CARBON DIOXIDE illusion. http://www.grand-illusions.com/acatalog/A-Party-Trick--540.html

Personal notes:

optical illusions most well known- perhaps i should do something else? smell illusion?

our brain sometimes fills in the extra information from its memory (peripherals). illusion? Could be perceiving it wrong?... phantom sensations- missing limbs still felt by amputees

9. light spectrum:

Colours: red apple, absorbs every colour but red, therefore we see the apple as red- but is it really red? what colour is the apple when there is no light present? 

Why is the sky blue? Is it really blue? Blue skies and red sunsets-clean air scatters blue light more than red wavelengths, and so the midday sky appears blue. What are rainbows, are they colour, or an illusion?

when all colours of the visible spectrum hit your eye- white is perceived. 

Ideas for experiments at home:

 * Infrared camera- view heat through the camera, notice the colours.

 * Split Light Into Spectrum- (Small mirror, a piece of white paper or cardboard, water. Large shallow bowl, pan, or plastic shoebox. Window with direct sunlight coming in, or a sunny day outdoor). 1.Fill the bowl or pan about 2/3 full of water. Place it on a table or the floor, directly in the sunlight. (Note: the direct sunlight is important for this experiment to work right.) 2. Hold the mirror under water, facing towards the sun. Hold the paper above and in front of the mirror. Adjust the positions of the paper and mirror until the reflected light shines on the paper. Observe the coloured spectrum. http://weirdsciencekids.com/SplitLightSpectrum.html

Personal notes:

Water- strange way the body looks when swimming in a pool or body or water, like it is almost glitching.

Not sure if this is exactly what Tim is after for this assessment. Will confer further with Abbey and Isabela. 

[peggymareepullencofa]

confusion is confused

when i looked up the definition of confusion it gave me this explanation: 

"the state of being confused"

very helpful, thankyou

[peggymareepullencofa]

The next idea I approached was word and text based. Sentences that convey meaning but are not necessarily understandable or are just odd/random in there meaning. 

I played around with both 'I am nowhere near white chickens' and 'art is higher than jam'. Both could be either try or false, depending on where the viewer is physically located as well as their view of the world. 

I originally wanted the text to be the main focus, but thought that was perhaps too simple and not quite as intriguing as it could be. The final text pieces are in the assignment, which I will share in pdf form later.

I have also played with the idea of 'it is what it isn't'. For instance when food photographers shoot 'ice-cream' they use mashed potato in its place, it looks the same, but it doesn't melt while photographing it. I found this interesting. Mash potato becomes ice cream in every sense of it... maybe it could even begin to taste like it if we believed enough. 

[peggymareepullencofa]

Abbey, Isabella and I were working on the idea of confusion and randomness. I liked this approach as most of the time I am in a confused state anyway.

I started thinking of images that were just random in that I wouldn't usually use them in an assessment, had no meaning behind them, or were just a little strange.

I always have a love hate relationship with Tom Cruise, so i thought to randomly place his noggin on one of the slides, along with another person I don't know well enough to hate- but still do- Justin Beiber. After a while I thought it was just too simple. One night a thought just popped into my head- what if Tom Cruise and a piece of cheese had a love child- the controversy! Totally random, so i thought that was perfect...

More ideas to come...

[peggymareepullencofa]

Catch up

Week 11- Static, noise, interference, glitch 

Transmission distorts the message, eg. Chinese whispers.

Repetition changes the message. It can either weaken the message, no longer having any impact, desensitisation. Or it can strengthen the messages impact- some artworks use repetition extremely well to push a point, seen often in street art. 

The medium is the message.

What distortions are there in assignment 3? Different interpretations of the question- our different upbringing, understanding of language, life beliefs etc can all distort how we see a theme or question, we will never all look at a subject in exactly the same way.

[peggymareepullencofa]

Catch up

Week 10- Collaboration and community

SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: In your group for Assessment 3, map out the collaborative network—who does what, who will do what, how will you work together, how will your different contributions cohere as a whole? Think about any external collaborators (softwares, hardwares, communities, resources, materials etc.) and think about how you’ll work as a group. 

As I have been away for the last month I have relied a lot on my group members. Isabella and Abbey are my group members. They have been extremely helpful (and patient!). 

Our theme for assignment 3 is Visualising the Unseen.

[peggymareepullencofa]

Catching up

Week 8- Uncreativity

This is my 'uncreative' work alluding to assessment 2. 

I have just taken an image straight out of a Vogue magazine, a Porsche Design advert and placed a question mark, also taken from the magazine, over the models face. I chose collage as the medium as I saw other students doing it on my tumblr feed so decided to 'steal' the idea from them. This piece of 'uncreative' art took hardly any time, and it did not involve a creative thought process or any research or experimentation to reach the final product. 

[peggymareepullencofa]

Catching up

Week 8- Uncreativity. The ethics of appropriation, to what extent can a concept be original?

My final artwork for assessment two is displayed above (the first image). I chose to create an image like this as it is something different to what I have done before. But i cannot say it is something that has never been seen before. There are images created by artists previously of people with their heads removed. I think in this day an age it is almost impossible to create or think something completely original. We are bombarded with the same images, the same ideas, the same opinions and news, that we are bound to come up with similar concepts. Life has existed for sometime now- surely someone has thought the same way as me in many aspects.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Take some of the work you have completed for Assessment 2 and try to remove the ‘creativity’:

If I were to remove the creativity from my 2nd assessment I think the easiest way to do that would be to google the topic and take an image from google images. 

I have googled 'what is the meaning of life' and 'why am I here', very general questions relating to my assignment. Many very generic images appeared- many including question marks (which i had considered using in the assessment but didn't as i felt it was too obvious).  

I have displayed these googled images above as inspiration for some uncreativity (images 2 and 3).

[peggymareepullencofa]

Final Artwork

(handing in early as will be away from next 4 weeks).

I was researching the concept of humanity, and continuing on from the expansion of human from assessment 1. 

I chose to focus on the way we as a species tend to question everything about who we are and why we are here- the big life questions. 

This is my explanation of the above work- as stated in my concept statement: 

The final artwork represents how the answers we seek as just out of our reach. The head has been removed from the body, representing a lack of knowledge. Questions spew out where the head once was. The questions we all ask and never find the answers to. We have not yet developed enough to find the answers. And perhaps we are not yet deserving of the answers anyway. 

[peggymareepullencofa]

String experiment After creating my own 'how long is a piece of string' small concept representative I decided to get some more people involved. I presented the participants with various pieces of string, different lengths, colours and materials, and asked them to represent what they thought the meaning of life was with their piece of string. They could do anything they wanted with it. These are the results of the people who wanted to show theirs- some people I asked didn't want theirs to be shown as they thought it was stupid (their words) or couldn't come up with anything to do with there string. The top one is a question mark, the second is my knotted mess. The third I found interesting. It is a representation of a double helix/DNA. I think it's interesting that this person sought something quite solid and factual to represent life. The forth is a piece of red string which has been knotted up into a circle. This person is currently going through a hard time in their life which I think is represented well in the size, colour and shape of this string. The 5th is even more interesting- a noose...we all die.

[peggymareepullencofa]

Calvary

I watched the movie Calvary on the weekend and it was quite confronting. It showed the way a small community viewed God, religion and life. I am not a religious person myself- but I found it odd how people were so disrespectful to the priest, the main character in the movie. None of the towns folk seemed to care about the bigger questions in life, or whether what they were doing would doom them forever. This sort if attitude, although not to the degree shown in the movie, I see often while people watching. Everyone is so obsessed with such little things. They are distracted from what our life meaning is.

[peggymareepullencofa]

Maybe I am focussing too much on finding answers? 

Perhaps I should focus more on the drive we have to find the answers and why we ask the questions in the first place? 

Although I am not quite sure where to start....

[peggymareepullencofa]

Assessment 2 so far

Key Words:

existence, happiness, free will, the soul, the afterlife, knowledge, oneness, ultimate reality, sensory, mortality, unending, thought, questions, unattainable, time, universal

Questions:

What is the reason to live? What are we living for? 

Why are we here? 

Is there more?

Philosophies on life:

Platonism- the meaning of life is to attain the highest form of knowledge.

Cynicism- the purpose of life is living at one with nature and with virtue.

Stoicism- the meaning of life is freedom from suffering. By being objective and having clear judgement- not indifference.

Kantianism- the meaning of life comes from underlying principles and duties. It doesn't relate to emotions or end goals.

Empiricism- knowledge come only or primarily from sensory experience. Cannot rely solely on intuition or reasoning.

Ideas for my final work:

A set instructions with a performance piece, focusing on meditation and the act of questioning

A wall hanging that conceptually represents the universe and the way we see ourselves in it. centring. 

A conceptual representation of knowledge not being attainable- either through a box or a door

[peggymareepullencofa]

to be human is to question everything

[peggymareepullencofa]

Arthur C. Clarke said that Douglas Adams' use of "don't panic" in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, was possibly the best advice that could be given to humanity.

Zebrowski, George, "Arthur C. Clarke looks back on the lifetime of influences that led him to become a science-fiction Grand Master". Sci Fi Weekly. July 2008. Retreived 9/09/14.

[peggymareepullencofa]

Paul Gauguin's 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' from 1897.

Does this image show Gauguin's questioning of life's meanings, or is it an observation of what he had seen and experienced in other people?

Whatever the image represents, it shows that the answers to life's big questions have evaded us for some time.

[peggymareepullencofa]

In class exercise: Create something that goes beyond the context of the assignment. I wrote a letter to a stranger. In this letter I speak of my desires to know the answers to life's great questions. I hope that by the time this letter is found and read by the stranger, that some of the questions may have answers. I ask them to share these answers, as even though I will no longer be alive, I can feel a sort of peace of mind in knowing the stranger will share this knowledge with someone else. I am yet to decide where I will put the letter to ensure it will not be read in my life time.