Project Statement for Mediated Performance
When I told the lecture about merging this paper with the other elective paper (sound, image and space) in the beginning of the semester, I've been told one thing I need to be really careful was the outcome in the end might be pretty similar or even the same, how am I going to separate and declare different themes from the outcome. I was a little bit worried about this point because the other elective paper was already in cooperation with the studio paper, which means I was having three papers working across each other and I need to be able to descript which part of the outcome represents what project.
Our original idea was to create a camera obscura environment, either set up a live obscura space or using recorded camera obscura footage project onto the wall. The advantage about the first idea was it will be live, there is going to have so many possibilities, no one knows what will come inside the shot the next second because what’s been projected is exactly what’s happening outside; and the advantage for the second idea is we will be able to have more choices of image location, unlike the first idea where the audience can only experience the view outside that single location, what we are presenting are different views we have taken with the self-made camera obscura box. Also we will have more control over the quality, content and colour of the image.
All three projects are having relationship with the camera obscura theory, the work I have done through the whole semester was to keep working on developing this idea with these project themes but at the same time maintaining clear boundaries between what I want to achieve for each of them. Camera obscura idea was originally the base idea for “sound, image and space”, when I decided to have it work with studio Animation paper, I was thinking to create an animated clip that could interact with the obscura image in some way, so at that time the idea for Mediated Performance was the design of involvement of a performer in the interaction work. The performer would lead the audience through the whole video, and hopefully will have some help for audience to better understand the idea of the video.
We create the video for animation using stop motion, the focal point in that video was to present the working process of an artist while he’s trying to set up a camera obscura space and interact with different objects he’s got around him, it’s all about the action and steps the artist take while creating his work. The video I have created for mediated performance is also using the scene of camera obscura footage, also in the same environment as the animation video. It may be similar stuff when you look at it, but what I want to present in this video is the changing of the visual when the object was placed in front of the footage. Which means for mediated performance I wanted the video to focus on the footage instead of the artist, that’s why I have left around six minutes in the beginning of the video time without the artist just to let the audience to take a better look at the interaction and effects objects created with the obscura footage.
The last thing is the audio of the clip, while I was creating this video, I have considered finding a soundtrack that suits it, because while we are shooting the footage, the camera recorded the environment sound as well, so it contains the sound of us chatting, people shouting, car moving and all kinds of environment. Since I have recorded this performing inside interactive suite, at the first I thought it’s not suitable to use the original track, but in the end when I couldn’t find any satisfied soundtrack and tried adding original clip sound to it, it surprised me that the original sound kind gives the video another layer, because people hears the actual sound but sees flat images, it’s another kind of illusion that adds to the video.
