Research& Critical Reflection
Urs Fischer
Holes in the wall
This is the work "Holes in the wall" by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer.
With a rubbery thunk, a tongue suddenly pokes out from a roughly gouged hole in the wall. It retreats back into the darkness just as rapidly.
The elements in this work include 'confession' and 'hole'. The openness with which he uses materials in the research process has turned my usual way of thinking about space on its head. It made me start to rethink the traditional approach to things.
So I abandoned the idea of using tinfoil to pour real holes in my work Shish! Because my sound installation has the same effect as the tongue, I borrowed his way of presenting my work by cutting holes directly into the wall.
“IT’S NOT WHERE YOU TAKE THINGS FROM – IT’S WHERE YOU TAKE THEM TO.”
Jean-Luc Godard (Swiss film director)
Sophie Calle
Hotel Rooms
Scattered objects, hidden wardrobes, messy suitcases, a snoop's eye ...... For more than a decade, 'hotels' have seemed to be Sophie Calle's passion, with the earliest practice of hotels dating back to 1984 in The Hotel.
Sophie Calle got a job as a room attendant at the Hotel C in Venice, Italy, and thus began the "Hotel" project - she hid her camera and tape recorder in a mop bucket, and while cleaning, she quietly She hid her camera and tape recorder in a mop bucket and quietly recorded and compiled clues about the lives of the hotel's residents while cleaning.
During my research, I learned that in the 21 diptychs generated from the 12 rooms, Calle wrote text for each exploration - from the moment she entered the room, to the description of the bed and pyjamas, to the list of other items... ... some of the texts come from documents harvested on site, others from Calle's analysis and association with the objects there.
Sophie Calle is an artist I had researched in Unit 1. At the time I did not really understand the relationship between public and private. Through studying her series and her personal experiences over the year, I found that I was inspired by her in overcoming my fears in the interview, and that even though her motivation was "voyeurism", she is indeed a very good storyteller.
So for my third unit, I drew on her ideas and approach to capture more details to enrich my subject matter, such as my visit to the library where I found a secret book of many people's secrets, and The national covid wall.
Gillian Wearing
Family stories
Gillian Wearing's work: Family Stories presents a multifaceted understanding of the alternating experiences of sadness and joy in everyday life. She uses documentary photography, film and television techniques to construct the concerns, words and actions of ordinary people in their everyday lives through subtle manipulation of situations.
Gillian Wearing is interested in real life. In her art she gives perfectly ordinary people a voice, examining and documenting the relationships between them.
She often incorporates herself or members of her family directly in her art, raising questions about how relationships with other people help shape our identity.
“I just look for situations where there is an element of truth. People can’t relate to a made-up fantasy of what a family is; they might aspire to it for themselves. But if they are to view someone else’s situation then they want something that is honest,” says Gillian Wearing.
This work, which places the viewer in subtly manipulated situations, makes the viewer feel uneasy: I am forced to question some of my inherent prejudices in the face of Wearing's work.
After watching Family Stories, I decided that my video work should not habitually focus on 'tree holes', so I began to explore again, discovering corners and specific objects that actually held information and secrets. In the city of London, with its changing times and records, a cultural environment vastly different from the one I lived in in China, I discovered 'Love Locks' on Westminster Bridges on my way, a place where real people hold their secrets of love. "I have recorded them as a continuation of my theme.
About the Aesthetics of Black and White and Color in Movies and Films
The relationship between color and its effect on human emotions have long been established, and evidence suggests that it might even date back to the early days of human civilization. Neuroscience can now be used to better understand how color perception and processing work in the brain, although the connection between color and affect in this field needs to be explored more. (de Villemor-Amaral, A. E., & Yazigi, L. 2022) But studies suggested that from the spectrum level, dark colors such as brown, black, and gray tends to be a visual cue for negative emotions as they often remind people about rainy days or sad events.(Michael Hemphill, 1996) Therefore, the video used a black-white filter to imitate the low-spirited, depressed atmosphere to stimulate viewer’s emotions, thus to better support my work.
For experimental film, the aim is more about to let the viewers think what they’re seeing and feeling rather than just watching what’s unfold in front of them. Some techniques such as sound manipulation, rapid changes in image size and style, quick switch between still image and video, and other visual expressions to create an unusual visual stimulation.(Rees A L, 2019) My choice of switching between still images and video is trying to seize the moment of certain images that i feel to have powerful messages, and play the video to still creat a feeling of moving on, or moving forward just like life does.
Sometimes black and white is used in a color film as a way of establishing a biographical past for a principal character. This technique is used in Mishima (1985) and Zelig (1983). Sometimes it establishes a point of view, as for a gay man looking down desiringly on a group of schoolboys in If … (1969). Other older experiments with black and white and color include Portrait of Jennie (1948) and Eisenstein's great experiment with ideologically mixing it up in Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, Russia, 1944).
Mel Brooks's comic homage to an earlier horror era, Young Frankenstein.
Shimmering black and white: still with Marlene Dietrich from The Devil Is a Woman.
About background music
For my Video work, I have edited secret recordings of 50 people as background music. At the same time I selected the song Promised Land from the Groove Music Library, a film and television soundtrack studio Audio machine from Los Angeles, USA, as the bgm. It fits in well with the images that appear in my film of exploring secrets in the woods and enriches my theme.
The song uses the classical guitar flutters into a dark cavity of truth exposing a tough human moral dilemma.
Drama, Intro, Montage, Solo Instrument, Mysterious, Tension, Brooding, Wonder, Beautiful, Romantic, Building, Inspirational, Emotional, Plucked, Boom, Strings, Acoustic, Guitar, Piano, Drone, Percussion.
On a plain of solitude, wind and dust, by a reed fire in the dead of night, and the sound of wind-blown trees. On the plains of solitude, wind and dust, by a late night reed fire and the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, all these scenes are presented in the rich and detailed melodies of Nomad and delivering a slightly subdued but powerful emotional impact.
About Research Festival
Based on my exploration of the theme of secrets, I collected fifty secrets from different countries and ages and found that most of them were confessions or negative emotions about her past experiences. To a certain extent, this is similar to the confessional in a church.
According to the research and the theme of Yifei Sun's work Sukhavati, people struggle with all their desires in their practice and if they want to be reincarnation in Sukhavati, they have to follow certain rules in their future life to achieve their practice. On this basis we will be doing more questionnaires at the Research Festival.
Reference
1. de Villemor-Amaral, A. E., & Yazigi, L. (2022). Color and affect: A long, never-ending history. Rorschachiana, 43(1), 70-88
2.Michael Hemphill (1996) A Note on Adults' Color–Emotion Associations, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 157:3, 275-280, DOI: 10.1080/00221325.1996.9914865
3.Rees A L. A history of experimental film and video[M]. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.P92
4.Kelly, A. E., & McKillop, K. J. (1996). Consequences of revealing personal secrets. Psychological Bulletin, 120(3), 450–465.
5.https://www.creativeartcourses.org/context-in-art/
7.https://ursfischer.com/searches/hole
8. https://elephant.art/gillian-wearing-family-stories/
9. https://www.smk.dk/en/exhibition/gillian-wearing-family-stories/
10. https://youtu.be/ASHufts1feU
11. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/hyundai-commission-tania-bruguera
12.https://browzine.com/libraries/479/journals/33417/issues/current
13. http://www.groove-musicsearch.com/labels/detail/album/track/261579
14. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRuEUl3ItCGGo-wCSwG3wbw