Who do you want to be?

The new brief was set by Shane R J Walter from One Dot Zero. Essentially, it’s about self representation, how we present to the others, what we want to present and what we don’t. How much we want to them to see or not? Where?

“What you see is what you get”

‘Selfies’ was a reference for the brief – in today’s culture we present ourselves as we want them to be seen. Photography was perceived as something true, but nowadays is not that trustworthy in my opinion.

Face Substitution from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Facial Puppetry from Jason Saragih on Vimeo.

So the brief in it’s official form was:

“Who do you want to be? (and who are you?)

From the first moment I got the brief I wanted to show a self-portrait, whatever that could be – perform my own self-portrait, in a way. So, I was thinking of really random and spontaneous stuff I do which I can’t really explain – like the other time when I was getting out of the class and came across with a really long staircase and I threw the bottle I was holding, just to see if I can reach the end of the staircase.

But how can I visualise spontaneity? How to plan something unplanned and random? How am I going to record it? Am I going to show it too fix? Frame it in a way that we really understand the act?

My outcome this week is again disappointing and nonsense as doesn’t say anything in particular – it’s just me going mad and throwing bottles (!). Here are the videos:

Spontaneous acts I from Savvas Zinonos on Vimeo.

Spontaneous acts II from Savvas Zinonos on Vimeo.

I feel I haven’t been critical enough about this (obviously) and I think that’s my main problem – I need to be aware of what I’m doing, ask questions and take the idea one step further.

When they asked me at the crit why I did it and what I’m trying to say I was struggling to find a reason and the only thing I said is that I repeated the act so I can understand the act, or make others understand it. But.. fail.

I actually had a second idea, which didn’t work well either. My idea was to have a performance which would lie between fiction and reality

The idea was to have a screen – a sheet of tracing paper, that is – on which I would project my self on it, which myself would be behind the screen and the audience would be in front of the screen. I wanted to play between fiction and reality so I wanted to have a camera/webcam/laptop camera filming me and projecting it on the screen at real time and film that was recorded a bit earlier. So it would swap between real-time video and recorded video with me doing the same thing the whole time, without the audience realising which one is real and what is not. Basically it’s like a projection of the projection etc. I know, you don’t get it, it gets so confusing that I’m lost too. Also, I worked from a quote which was “We assume that the self is an actual living thing, but it’s not. It’s a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death” by Thandie Newton on TED.

My feedback was that working from a quote is limiting me and also the idea of playing with fiction and reality and projections is a familiar theme since the television was invented – I should find a more challenging way of presenting this.

Regarding the videos with the bottles I should challenge it more as well. Do I see this as a performance? What do I want people to understand from this? Is the next step to disrupt this act? By, maybe, dropping one bottle at a time since the whole place is filled with bottles?

For the time being, this is a project not well articulated which I hope I will revisit at some point later .. (?)

Drawing with drawing pins

This term I’m doing a compulsory elective ( in addition to the Design Without elective). This one is called Visual Research and it’s essentially about drawing, even though the tutors brag about drawing in a broader context. Anyway, I have very weird feelings about this elective, I don’t want to say more about this.

Here a response to a brief which asked to take one object/environment and abstract it.

Pins came to my mind and this is what I came up with. After a talk with my personal tutor she called this video ‘drawing with drawing pins’ so I’m using it as it actually works!

In general I’m attracted in mass produced objects and what can you do with it – putting them in different contexts.

‘Drawing with drawing pins’ from Savvas Zinonos on Vimeo.

Where do we go from here?

It’s a thursday and I’m blogging about the project I showed yesterday (the post for the new brief will come later).

Well, ok, the brief for the past week was about coercion, de-facto and generally how governments and politicians control the masses with consumerism so they can have them distracted from their evil acts – like wars and nasty deals with corporations.

Referencing:

This video talks about theories of Freud and Edward Bernays and how they managed to control the masses in the 20th century by creating desires and ‘happiness machines’.

Tom Balchin, working with Neville Brody at Research Studios, who came and set the brief pointed out that society is struggling because we no longer understand our own environment and this understanding is what has always facilitated our own evolution. Ads and generally all this propaganda always give us options – like Coca cola and Pepsi – but is it really an option? They’re both pure consumerism and brainwashing.

So the brief was: “As communicators we are the key players in the evolution of all new reality. Where do we go from here?”

The keyword I picked up was manipulation. I found interest in the language the politicians use, and how they deconstruct reality and re-arrange it to persuade us and manipulate us. This whole re-arranging thing reminded me of the Rubik’s cube. Rubik’s cube is confusing just like the politicians. But what’s the real message behind the fake one? In order to find out the real ones, I need to decode the fake ones and study propaganda language. I found interest in creating an object of truth.

So I started collecting words related to politics and society, they all had to be 9 letter words or 12 letter words – the 9 letter words would fit on one of the surfaces and the 12 letter words would fit in one row on all surfaces.

And this is after you re-arrange it – God knows who could someone solve this!

Later on, I had the idea of the Rubik’s cube showing you the real message of a fake one. So a propagandistic message is written on the Rubik’s cube and then when you re-arrange it the de-coded/real message appears. Mind blowing I know, it would take ages to make this.

This is Knitting Book by Jinyoung Joung – a friend showed me this and it actually relates a little bit to what I’m doing here:

Knitting book
“Classic Yi is a syllabic logographic system of 8000–10,000 glyphs. Although similar to Chinese in function, the glyphs are independent in form, with little to suggest a direct relation. There are 756 basic glyphs based on the Liangshan dialect, plus 63 for syllables only found in Chinese borrowings” (From Wikipedia). The columns and rows of Yi glyphs printed are seen on the two pieces of paper. From this one pair, a story can be generated as you move a row of glyphs all the way across along the fixed columns. Moreover, if you bring another row of glyphs, this one page book tells another, and another, different story. Isn’t it amazing?”

Later I had the idea of making many cubes together connected with a string so different sentences can be arranged. A really bad mock-up here:

My second idea, which I did during the crit yesterday, was coming from the idea of change, how can we change this, how can we bring change. And change doesn’t come by talking in a room, change comes with people in the streets. So, invited everyone to take their chairs and join me outside of the building, which represents a system, an institution, and talk about change. Also the theory of the hundredth monkey says, if a certain amount of people adopt an idea/behaviour, then that behaviour is distributed to the others and at some point all the species can act the same.

This is the first time I’m doing something like this and it was really revealing and powerful for me, there was actually a big change in my work. Although in the end we didn’t take our chairs because another person in my group had a similar idea of taking everyone outside. His idea was to put arrows on the floor, drive everyone to go around the building and finish at the room’s window – but outside of it. He, in a way, managed to get back in the room and talk to us from inside the room and asked us ‘ Where do we go from here?’. So our projects were connected, in a way. It’s a shame I didn’t film myself talking about it before we got outside. Here are some pictures from the part that David drove us to the window:

The background story was also interesting, David called me earlier in the morning to organise the project, he was outside the window telling me on the phone to join him, although I wasn’t sure. Next to the room we usually have the crits, there’s an emergency door leading to where the path he created, which when you open the alarm go off. I used that door as a shortcut, to go and find him. Neville saw me and told me to come in – he thought I was smoking. I didn’t know anything about the alarm, he informed me. Then I went outside from the opposite side of the building, still looking for David, and as soon I got outside the reception woman came to me and said ‘you opened the emergency doors and you’ve set off all the alarms! You’re not allowed to do this!’ I apologised, but I didn’t really care, I got in and returned to the crit room pretending I was looking for the ones that didn’t turn up yet. Again, it’s a shame I didn’t film this part either, as it ‘breaks’ the system, even accidentally.