'Para' Prototype Video - SOHO advertisement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7KrJB1kZQk&feature=em-upload_owner

A prototype version of an advertisement for SOHO, using gif files sourced from the internet, edited by me, also using my own artwork and voice-over. Playing around with various visual aesthetics, trying to discern how SOHO would advertise itself to an upper-Para or Outlands citizen. Will follow this prototype up with a version using my own sourced material. Because Para is such a secularized micro-society, I imagine the different sects of the city would mercilessly advertise to try and beat each other by attracting more citizens, business and attention.
I imagine this would be the kind of advertisement an Outlander would come across whilst flicking through Television channels in the early hours of the morning, sleepless in a cheap Para motel. Planning on creating a political propaganda video about immigration to follow this broadcast, hence why it is cut so suddenly. Considering using a combination of drawing and stop-frame animation for this second video, to juxtapose with the cleanliness of this advertisement.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bD4ts8eWY

One of my main inspirations for this piece of video work is David Fincher's 2011 movie adaptation of Stieg Larsson's 'Men Who Hate Women', renamed for Fincher's American production as 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.' The introduction to the movie is set to a cover of Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song', and the visual language of the intro is so sophisticated and beautifully horrible that it is inspiring. I hope to learn from how the piece is cut to music, its imagery, and also some of the camera techniques and post-production effects used.

Direct Observation Sketches

Shading Pastel Experiments

First time drawing with shading pastels

Masking tape, watercolour, acrylic experiment with oil details

Masking tape, watercolour, acrylic and pastel shavings experiment

'My Body Remembers' - Pencil, biro and oils

Pencil, biro pen and oils

Close-up shot

"I still get the body memories
In my heart and writing hand, until
I'm sick, sour-sweet, crushed
Underneath the stitches I didn't need - it's not a wound
It's what I need to breathe

Because 
I am done with feeling guilty
I don't need sutures.
My body remembers
Because seeds were planted in my skin that day
And it took them this long to germinate

My fallow wounds were built
For beauty and honesty
My fertile skin is soil for better things
My lips were made to sing."

'SOHO' - Lower Para Project

'Enigma' is a Steampunk cafe in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, filled with kinetic sculptures. Designed by Alexandru Tohotan and Zoltan Zelenyak, the bar is considered the first in the world of its kind to use mechanical innovation in coherence with Steampunk visuals. Tohotan and Zelenyak were approached by 6th Sense Interiors to design and create the cafe, and it took around two years to reach completion; in addition to this, the pair have also worked on other designs for pubs and bars, including 'The Submarine' and 'Joben Bistro'. The cafe features rotating wheels, metallic flowers opening up in the ceiling, an automaton bird and also a robot riding a bicycle with a plasma ball for a head. The aesthetics are reminiscent of H.R. Giger's artwork, particularly the robot automaton riding the bicycle, which uses the silver palette and characteristic repeated lines and patterns in the metal that we see in Giger's work.

The automaton appears to be plugged into a mains electricity panel, and you can see the way a plasma ball is used as a head, in addition to using a gas mask to reinforce the slightly disturbing quality to the sculpture

You can see the Giger-inspired use of designs and patterns on the automaton

A rear view of the way the plasma ball is used as the automaton's head

A network of cogs are used to power a large clock in the cafe

'Enigma' uses interior design to create an artificial environment that surrounds the observer; this is similar to the effect I want to achieve with my own work, but due to lacking the time, money and resources to create something as large-scale as this, I'll have to think of other ways to create an environment for the observer. Projecting video art and using sound, as well as creating installation pieces and drawings and paintings, may be an effective way of creating the kind of immersive atmosphere that is given by video games and physical environments, for example. Each different part of the city will have a different visual language, and Lower Para will be founded on neon and metalwork. The city revolves around the sex trade and that of Soubrettes, sex automatons, so the way 'Enigma' utilizes mechanics and mechanical imagery is inspiring when it comes to deciding upon the look and function of the Soubrettes.

Below is the work of Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger, an influential figure in modern art who inspired many artists and different media, including fetishists such as Eric Stanton and Touko Laaksonen (also known as Tom of Finland), and many record-albums, furniture and tattoo artists. Giger was known for his role in the special effects team for the movie 'Alien', and his work has left a cultural thumbprint on many video games, movies and artists to come. Giger was Zurich-based and studied Architecture and Industrial Design at the School of the Applied Arts from 1962 until 1970. His earlier work is almost entirely made using airbrush, until later on in his career when he began to work with pastels, markers and ink. His signature visual style incorporates humans and machines linked together in a cold bio-mechanical atmosphere, and his work often incorporates erotic suggestions.

A piece by Giger that brings together machinery and eroticism - there is also an Ancient Egyptian feel to the repeated patterns and the heads of the creatures that look like hieroglyphics of Ancient Egyptian gods. It is often difficult to tell where the mechanical ends and the organic begins in Giger's work.

Giger's 1978 drawings for the movie 'Alien', brainstorming ideas and consolidating designs for the visual look of the younger aliens that use human bodies as hosts. Even in these designs, there is latent sexual implications that make the work even more disturbing.

Another mechanical piece featuring what appear to be android/automaton females - there are references to the industrial revolution and mass production, and this piece in particular inspires the look of my Soubrettes.

Giger's work was an influence on fetish artists, whose work was a mixture of comic art and pornography. Tuoko Laaksonen's homoerotic fetish art heavily influenced late 20th Century gay culture, and he is best known for representing homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle policemen, sailors, bikers and leathermen. In 1956 he submitted drawings to the United States magazine 'Physique Pictorial', and this was his first time releasing any of his drawings to the public. He was credited in the magazine under the pseudonym he gave; Tom of Finland. Due to the strict laws regarding the abolition of gay pornography, Laaksonen's work was primarily published in 'beefcake' magazines, a genre that began in the 1930's. These magazines primarily features drawings and photographs of young, attractive men performing exercises, and they were advertised as publications promoting physical fitness and health. However, their main audience was gay men, and these magazines were often the only connection that closeted men had to their sexuality. Due to the homophobic and conservative society, any explicit work was rendered through private commissions.
In 1962, the United States Supreme Court ruled that male nude photographs were not obscene, and so following this softcore gay pornography gained momentum and 'beefcake' magazines were soon dropped entirely. Tom of Finland's work grew more explicit due to the new lack of limitations, and many years after, in the 1970's, his work gained gay mainstream appeal.

Laaksonen and other artists were so vital to their times because of the suppression of homosexuality, and their artwork often provided the sole way men could connect to their sexual identity without breaching laws. His work has an influence on my project in that I want to represent, adversely, how the media nowadays has reached the other end of the spectrum - gay relationships have gone from condemned to openly fetishized, lesbian relationships in particular. Patriarchal society has led to lesbian relationships being overly sexualised, and I want to explore how the media is reducing lesbian relationships to a fetish that exists for the satisfaction of heterosexual men.

One of Laaksonen's illustrations depicting a romantic relationship between two men, a visual touchstone

Initial sketch of a Soho Soubrette logo

More developed digital sketch with cleaned up lineart

Thinking about the pose of the Soubrette in relation to the Soho welcome sign

Inverting the colours of the Soubrette sign in order to prep it for becoming neon.

Sketching two different arm and head positions in white so that my neon sign will be seen to move, not just light up.

Screencap of the neon sign, showcasing the first position. Drew over the lineart with colour, applied a Gaussian blur then put it into 'screen' filter mode.

The second arm and head position, made using the same technique.

W.I.P of concept lineart for a Soho street

Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau and Art Deco - Research

1896 saw the birth of the Vienna Secession, led by Gustav Klimpt and a number of other artists. They resigned from the Association of Austrian artists because of the orientation towards traditional historicism. The Vienna Secession was a precursor to Art Nouveau and also Art Deco, and in its own way provided a foundation for Modernism. The group built a building named after their movement in Vienna, and it featured what soon became their defining symbol; a leafwork dome of gold. Joseph Olbrich was the one to design and build the construction, but it was artists such as Klimpt who took the golden leaf motif and made it iconic for the Secession, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. The movement did not have a specific style, however, and that was the point - it was truly modern in the sense that they wanted to create a new style that had nothing to do with historical influence. The phrase "to every age its art, to every art its freedom" is emblazoned on the doorway of the Secession building, and it sums up their views nicely.
Klimpt's work is linked to Freudian psycho-analysis in that Klimpt uses recurring visual symbols as an allegory to bridge the space between himself and the audience - he also draws upon myth and his work has a dream-like quality to it. Klimpt's representations of female sexuality in particular were seen as highly offensive, and he had a preoccupation with the female figure.

The Secession paved the way for Art Nouveau, a movement with a similar decorative style that was named after Siegfried Bing's gallery 'Maison de L'art Nouveau' in Paris. Art Nouveau had distinctly different subtypes depending on where it was geographically, but a good way to describe the overall feel of Art Nouveau is to draw on a description published in 'Pan' magazine of Hermann Obrist's piece 'Cyclamen', which has "sudden violent curves generated by the crack of a whip." Hence, the term "whiplash" is frequently applied to the characteristic curves employed by Art Nouveau. They were also influenced by movements other than the Vienna Secession, known to draw upon the 17th Century auricular style that you can see in Dutch silverware of the time.
Art Nouveau is also modernist in its erotic and sexual content, often pervasively pornographic, and its here that sex is used to advertise products for the first time. Chromolithography provided possibilities for mass communication that did not previously exist, and as a result advertising became an important staple in society. Among the artists to use sexually explicit material were Fritz Erier and Aubrey Beardsley. There was also a crystallization of attitudes towards homosexuality and androgyny at the time, with Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 making him a martyr for some. Art Nouveau existed against a rapidly changing social backdrop, and late 18th to early 19th Century French novelist J.K. Huysmans described sexuality as fluid in 'A Rebours', and his supposedly decadent work perfectly sums up the atmosphere of change that pervaded the time.

Art Deco followed this movement and embodies many of Art Nouveau's qualities, including the distinctive "whiplash" and streamlined curves. The movement was named in 1926 following a retrospective exhibition called 'Les Annees 25', which was held at Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. This was a commemoration of an earlier Exposition in 1925 that featured a range of unconnected styles and sources, including Cubism and Bauhaus. It differed from other movements at the time because it did not have a social philosophy or manifesto - Art Deco was purely decorative, and in this way it personified the Hedonism and love of beautiful things that followed the rigorous restraints of the First World War. It responded directly to the new age of the machine and to the invention of substances such as plastic, bakelite and chrome, and it was also luxurious and a sumptuous style characterized by individually-produced luxury goods. The 1925 Exposition had a major effect on art in the United States, and the American contribution to Art Deco is known as 'Streamlining'.
Streamlining used clean lines and strong curves and was applied to the lines of cars, architecture and furniture, and also various mass-produced goods such as fridges and radios.
Historian Bevis Hillier defined Art Deco as "an assertively modern style (that) ran to symmetry rather than asymmetry, and to the rectilinear rather than the curvilinear; it responded to the demands of the machine and of new material (and) the requirements of mass production."
Modern aviation, electric lighting, the radio, oceanliners and skyscrapers were all sources of inspiration; however it was not only strictly modernist developments that drove the aesthetics of Art Deco. The visual style itself is based on mathematical and geometric shapes, some of these being influenced by so-called 'primitive' arts from Africa, the Middle East, Ancient Egypt, Aztec Mexico and also some Greek and Roman art. As travel became popular, African safaris became a trend and animal skins, ivory, mother of pearl and tortoiseshell began to appear in the home. After the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, Egyptian visual motifs adorned everything.

The movement was an opulent style in reaction to the forced austerity of the First World War, and it made use of new materials such as aluminium, lacquered and inlaid wood as well as trapezoidal, zigzagged and jumbled forms. It was influenced by other movements such as decorative Cubism and Futurism. Some of the finest surviving examples of Art Deco can be found in Cuba, particularly in Havana. Another example would be Brazil, in Goiania and cities like Cipo, Irai and Rio de Janerio, and also Copacabana. South Beach in Miami Beach, Florida, has the largest collection of Art Deco architecture remaining in North America. Finally, the Empire State Building is perhaps the most prominent example of Art Deco architecture, designed by William Lamb in just two weeks. He used earlier designs for the Reynolds Building in North Carolina and the Carew Tower in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a basis. The building was designed from the top down and, even today, is a prolific building and a reminder of the changes to modernist art that Art Deco, Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession brought about.

'Para' - Project Brainstorming

Quick mind-map outlining the features and ecological background of Para.

"Para is an invented desert city that combines Western and Eastern culture with modern motifs - the spoken language is a cultural salad of different dialects including English, Korean and Japanese. Youth speak and new adaptations to language use Korean and Japanese more colloquially whereas older generations speak in English, which is accepted as the high register in the city.
Upper Para consists of high-rise Art Deco style buildings, corporate offices and gated communities and has a primarily white population - racism, sexism and homophobia are rife and hate crime is at an all-time high. In Upper Para migrants are not permitted certain jobs.
Middle Para is where small businesses flourish and there is a wealth of juxtaposition between Eastern and Western culture. Areas of greenery and traditional Japanese gardens permeate the housing estates and Soubrette shops.
Lower Para surrounds the entirety of the city and makes up at least 50% of the area and even more of the general population. It is known for squatting buildings, black markets, neon-lit strip joints and its infamous sex district. There is a prominent culture of drugs and prostitution, with corporations gaining a large amount of their wealth from the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. Immigrants, homosexuals, criminals and the poor are considered undesirable and so are locked out of Upper Para and left to live in Lower Para.
Outer Para is the desert surrounding the city, and is considered for the most part an uninhabitable wasteland. Rumors of flesh-eating crows and cultures pervade the city and no one ever leaves its borders - likewise, no one is ever meant to come in. This creates a xenophobic culture where people from outside the city are considered lunatics or diseased.
However, beyond the desert lie the Outlands, which are small village hamlets built around a waterfall and its surrounding glades. The people there live in relative harmony with the natural area and are not overwhelmed by Capitalism such as in the city."

The project will likely involve as many different techniques and forms of art as possible, including painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, video and performance. Creating a fictional universe and producing art that is meant to exist within the said universe gives a lot of scope.

Photograph showing the installation aspect of 'Vermillion Lake.' Martelli and Gibson have created a true-to-life trappers cabin.

Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli's piece 'Vermillion Lake' from 2011 combines installation work with aspects of video art and game programming to create an immersive experience of a specific environment. The artists were inspired by a recent trip to the Canadian Rockies in their creation of the piece, and it forces direct audience participation with the piece via use of a rowing boat within the trappers cabin. The observer must sit in the boat and use the oars in order to make the rowboat in the video game move, hence there is direct interaction with the installation. Exterior virtual space is bought into the interior gallery space in a way that is deeply engaging and original, and the use of the hut around the rowing boat ensures that the audience is not distracted by their surroundings. In this way, Gibson and Martelli have complete control over how the audience perceives the work. In a partner piece entitled 'Where The Bears Are Sleeping', there is a depiction of glaciers, forests and frozen lakes in monochrome. This is a prime example of how different types of media can be used to convey a singular concept, and I plan to embody this is my own work. In both works, either a friendly or malevolent force is indicating, with suggestions of the tracker being tracked and the hunter being hunted. In my project I hope to convey atmosphere in a similar way, exploring aspects of sound and found objects to flesh out Para.

A photograph showing the inside of the installation and the way in which Gibson and Martelli use physical objects in cohesion with video and sound.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM0hHSKfZw8 

A still from 'Happy Birthday!!' where a head emerges like a tombstone from the ocean.

Ed Atkins' 'Happy Birthday!!', a video piece from 2014. The way Atkins uses allegory in his work correlates with the way I want to represent the city, and also the monochromatic backdrop and the use of video game technology to create a realist effect is something that wants exploration.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RkHCnfqdh8

A still from 'Hisser', showcasing the way Atkins creates a realistic and detailed environment that feels credible to the viewer.

 Ed Atkins' 'Hisser' uses atmospheric sound and the power of one extended shot to engage the audience. His use of ambient sound is reminiscent of video games, particularly walking simulator 'Everybody's Gone to The Rapture' by The Chinese Room. Both projects have this desire to create a living environment, not a commercial storyline, which is what characterizes them as art, not as video games. 'Hisser' is built upon the feeling of tension and anxiety we get whilst viewing the bedroom, and each person is sure to experience the piece in a different way. The hissing noises can tell of an escaped pet or creature waiting in the unoccupied bedroom for its owner to return, and judging by the aggressive vocalizations of the animal, it sounds as if it will hurt whoever comes in. Whether or not this is Atkins' intention, the feeling I get is one of waiting for something horrific to happen. The creature that is hissing, probably a snake, is never seen, and remains a disguised threat. When the light beyond the door is turned on at the end, it makes me think that the person has returned home and is about to enter their bedroom, and Atkins is making us imagine the attack that will follow. There is also lots of animal imagery in the bedroom, suggesting the occupant is a lover of animals, which makes the foreshadowed attack both ironic and deeply sad. 

Likewise, 'Everybody's Gone to The Rapture' involves lots of participation from the observer. It creates a vision of 1980's Shropshire after the Rapture described in Christian theology, whereby the player experiences the echoes of human life before the Apocalypse via golden beams of light. No characters are ever seen, only voiced, and the player uses their imagination to piece together the narrative. The only technical difference between The Chinese Room's project and Atkins' video art is the level of audience participation - the former requires you to navigate the world yourself and explore, whereas Atkins uses forced perspective to create a feeling of powerlessness and fear. 

I want to explore the way video art is used to create emotional responses, as both of these pieces create a powerful atmosphere and, most importantly, an environment that has character. Seeing as my project is primarily based around a fictional place, there's a responsibility to characterize the city in order to make it feel real.

Life Drawing - Week 6 (final week)

One two-hour charcoal drawing

Favourite Life Drawings

A collection of a few life drawings done over this term that I feel show the most progress or are the most accomplished.

'Inside Veins' - Final Video

Life Drawing - Week 5

Four five-minute charcoal sketches

One twenty-minute drawing

Two approximately twenty-minute drawings

Video Piece - 'Inside Veins'

A screencap from 'P.T.' showing my favourite camera angle and lighting

 My inspiration for the video piece stems from a combination of literature, music, ambient sound, video games and art. The above is a screenshot from 2014 game 'P.T.', an interactive teaser for 'Silent Hills', a new survival horror game title by Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima that was since cancelled after Konami pulled out of the project. The game uses ambient sound to create a rich, disturbing atmosphere and also uses repeated visual motifs in a unique way that gets a huge emotional reaction from the player. Weather is used for pathetic fallacy, lighting is used to create tension, and ambient noise makes use of minor sound distortions like TV static and radio interference to create a textured sound-scape. There is often the sound of rain against the windows, a lamp creaking, distorted groaning, a fly getting electrocuted by a naked light-bulb - all these ways of using sound to build atmosphere are incredibly inspiring for this video piece.

Likewise, indie horror game 'The Path' uses ambient sound in engaging ways, usually to foreshadow future events. The game has a different repertoire of noises such as swings in a child's play-park, birdsong, trees rustling in the wind and moaning vocalizations that sound either from pain or pleasure. 'The Path' is produced by small Belgian company Tale of Tales, led by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, and explores Gothic motifs reminiscent of 19th Century art in their re-envisioning of the Brothers Grimm fairytale 'The Grandmother's House.' There are recurring visual symbols used in the game and a way of editing cutscenes that gives a surrealist effect, inspiring me for this piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnp4-RoRxSo

The above link features the opening credits sequence to Naughty Dog's 2013 title 'The Last of Us', which features monochrome time-lapse footage of fungi spreading. I've been using the clip as a visual touchstone for the palette of our own piece, as the high contrast and monochromatic filter would create a brilliant tonal contrast. We want to create images of a heart attack occurring, and also display the way that the organ shuts down and eventually withers, and perhaps by taking some vegetable or plants and allowing them to decompose will create a similar effect. If we take photographs of the decomposing matter each day and string these images together to they give the illusion of a time-lapse video we may be able to achieve a similar effect. I hope to use photographs in a stop-frame animation way during this piece as it will add visual texture to the video.

A selection of screenshots from the opening sequence, to showcase the visuals that have been inspiring me

I created a short piece of video experimenting with colour filters, cuts and sound so that I've got a distinct idea of the kind of feel, sound and type of cuts I might want to use in our final video. This was made quickly and spontaneously so that I will have an idea of the tone and atmosphere I want to use. Audio clips are from the internet for the sake of time and creative freedom but in our actual video we will devise ways of creating sound beds ourselves.

A photograph taken before shooting the short video

The above is another short piece of film, this time using only text and sound. I wanted to use fragmented poetry to convey a narrative behind our concept, perhaps even to illustrate the character of the person who is having a heart attack and create a motive and personality for them. I used my camera and filmed myself typing, as I felt this was more nostalgic and interesting than merely typing into iMovie, and it also meant I provided typing noises that felt calming and relaxing. Over these, I sourced rain sound from youtube and layered the sounds to create something soothing. This video is deliberately simple, relying on the observer's ability to use their imagination to create images.

A screencap of the original piece of poetry

We used footage of bubbles in a sink of running water and various filter effects in iMovie to achieve this look of blood rushing through an artery.

The above video is another finished segment of the project - this particular section is made primarily of close-ups and detailing the process of a heart attack. The audio is sourced from online.

  

Unedited clips that we used for our movement section of the video.

This video is our texture section of the piece, whereby we used our own images of blood cells and textures we thought were appropriate and combined them into a slideshow of images.

 

 The video above is a stop-motion piece of animation representing the flow of blood around the body and the processes occurring in the body before a heart attack. In the final few frames, the camera zooms in on the heart to represent entering its cells, which links to the textures in the next part of the video.

We collectively brainstormed ideas and edited together. I wrote, shot and edited the text and close-up section, the ink section focused on movement was Abbey's concept and driven by her, and we all participated in making the footage. Katie edited the pieces of film and put them together, and she also had the idea for the stop-frame animation section, which she directed. Abbey and Katie also used their own photographs of cells and edited each photo before we put them together into a slide-show. We chose sound clips and music collectively and most of our efforts were as a group, not as individuals. Our concept behind the video was on portraying the process of a heart attack, and in particular the journey the body and the emotions go through prior and during the heart attack. We were also inspired by the idea that a person will know when they are about to have a heart attack, and that they will have an impending sense of doom. Perhaps the video takes place in the moments before a heart attack occurs and shows an internal perspective, both physically and psychologically, on the process.