OUTCOME 3 and Audience and Exhibtion

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf8YyDz3grfNxzZCINrI1qw

^^ My third and final outcome. Himeros 9700. This is a YouTube Channel where I have displayed a selection of my video work. Here I have extended my audience to the online realm creating a digital artifact to stumble upon. The presentation is minimal with little description just a series of interlaced videos.

As well as a general fine art audience, for my previous two outcomes to be viewed in the exhibition, this channel is intended for an anonymous online audience. Whoever may find it may view it and absorb it as much or as little as they desire. I would love for it to be taken, stolen and recycled and generally spread through internet space. The emphasis here is on the free nature of the work when displayed in this way. I like the idea of sampling and being sampled, the re-use of images further evolving and TRANSFORMING these 'objects' forwards into history? the psyche? or the void?

Exhibition

In Exhibition of my work I will display the triptych of Prints and my video outcome. The prints have been framed ready for display and will be presented alongside an Ipad (depending on availability) showing my video on loop. Along side these Prints there may also be displayed some photographic prints of stills from my video and other photographic collages. Also, printed in time for the exhibition  will be a load of handouts, free to be taken,  which have been developed from a series of quick hand style drawings done in markers. Some of these handouts will contain QR codes which when scanned by a smart phone which will give a link to the YouTube Channel mentioned above. These will be set alongside my work at the exhibition.

With more budget and time I would have displayed at least 6 prints and have multiple screens displaying various of my video experiments. Alongside this would be a sound installation of music/soundscape/spoken word to accompany it. Audio is something I would have liked to develop further in this project but with the video and print being so time consuming it wasn't possible to explore it greatly.

Print out designs below:

Final Video Outcome - Untitled

Here is my Final video outcome. In this work I have continued my ideas from my prints and video experiments creating a compilation of imagery. A recurrent motif in this piece and project as a whole is flesh, whether of a fruit or of the body itself this imagery permeates the work. Flesh and skin are a universal aspect of humanity and within it we live, held together by this biological fabric. The birth, life and death of this fabric, this essential transformation, spurred by the non-stop change of the body.  

Moving on from my print outcomes this work shifts from classical to digital. The boundless collections of flesh found on the internet pulse from the masses, mirroring the billions of bodies that scrabble in physicality. Layers, fresh and fluid, rendered in pixels make-up the composition, abstractions and observations of the body and our views of the body. I am pointing in ambiguity, the body is essential yet impermanent and there ain't nothing we can do about it.





Abstract - Actual
Feminine  - Masculine
Real - Virtual
Introversion - Extroversion
Life  - Death
Good - Evil
Sanity....................................................................................................................................

Print Outcomes

This triptych of etchings makes up one outcome of my project. These etchings etched with copper sulfate on aluminum plate have developed from earlier prints and video work. The content of the pieces differ somewhat but generally form and anatomy have been explored and I have developed my own visual language the body and of its sex. The Prints form this trio through a change apparent above from left to right, where line becomes tone or vice versa.

The right hand print is the most tonal with at least 5 etches were made in the acid, with four different tonal areas created using Straw hat and Brunswick varnish. This etching has the most depth of the group with subtle line details shadowed by the roughness of the plate.

The middle etching was the clearest follow on from my earlier prints and was the first to be etched out of the three. This print has three distinct tonal regions separating the folded forms. This was a definite continuation of the fluid style that I originally developed.

The left hand print was the second to be etched and comprised entirely of line with any tonality being dictated by the frequency and density of the lines. The vague scrawl forming some lettering in it's lower half was in reference to the carved plastic of the bus seats I have sat on while journeying to college throughout the year. I liked the deeply textured surfaces of the plastic, which is carved and often melted. It was interesting to position this harsh texture alongside textures of the body, viewing the similarities and differences between plastic and flesh.

I'm very pleased with how this outcome has turned out especially with how well the prints interact. These also pose an interesting contrast with my video outcome (in the next post) which explores the same visual language but made digitally as a pose to the traditional process of etching. It was nice to see the images transcend this divide in the medium and create an overlapping set of outcomes.

The tonal print with just the lines in before tonal areas were added.

Slit Scan Developments

Here are two developments using Slit-scan effect. 

Meditating man briefly melts and spins as he reaches ecstatic plane

In the above clip I combined contrasting imagery, such as the wall-hangings and incense with a tattooed Tristan, all neatly wrapped up in a pink ribbon, to give another strange piece. Here the audio, an echoing Britney Spears loop, hints at the metamorphic nature of my artistic process creating a puzzling (even to myself) mash-up.
In reference to my earlier questions and speculations this piece has veered away somewhat, but it has certainly explored the language of the body and maybe sexuality, in a more slapstick way.





Body Watch

Here animation has been combined with a slit scan effect on clips from an earlier video experiment Grape Jizz. This has taken on a much more abstract feel, with the blinking eye fading in and out of the fleshy liquid texture.

Slit scan

Here are three experiments I did imitating the effect of Slit-scan photography. The effect was created in Adobe After Effects using a time displacement map with a black and white gradient. The gradient imitated the way the a moveable slide would be used in front of a piece of film. The time displacement effect would displace different areas of the video depending on the shade of grey. As I used a top to bottom wash seen below the slits are horizontal. 

There were a few problems I encountered when trying out this effect, the main one being banding illustrated in the second video displayed below. This was due to a variety of variables such as the amount of shades in the gradient map but mainly the frame rate. This was solved by filming in a higher frame rate (50 fps) and also speeding up the video, also giving a higher frame rate. Although I feel with the second and third videos this distortion adds to the grainy tone of the clip. This was solved in other experiments, such as the first clip below.

I enjoyed using the effect as it transformed quite mundane clips in some bizarre ways.

The above clip used a gradient which started black at the top became white in the middle and then black at the bottom. This can be seen as the bands flow from the middle. The way the video is almost liquefied here complements the video of feet underwater in an interesting way. It appears a digital imitation of a natural physics.



In the above experiment as Nabeel twists in front of a still background this combined with the time displacement map shifts is body from top to bottom. This creates this curving effect where parts of his body seem to twist around him. As well this effect I added Arabic text on top to explore the way text and language can transform the tone of imagery. I liked the humorous feel this has given this clip.



The above  clip turned into another odd montage. The original music used on the clip was removed due to copyright grounds on YouTube so was replaced through the free music available. The video consists of three experiments of a hand being distorted with the time displacement map.
Intended music was Mariah Carey's - Fantasy.

Below is the gradient used with the displacement map on the bottom two of the above videos.

Animated development of the fleshy abstractions

Here the puppet tool was used in after effects to create points whereby you can essentially transform your image into a puppet with joints at the nodes you have selected. Using key-frames these were moved over time so the object would reshape, bend and distort over a given time period. I chose to let each transformation happen over approximately 15 seconds as after experimentation this felt like a nice pace for the work. Each of the pieces contains four separate transformations. The fleshy shapes were in a PNG file format which meant they had no background, this kept distortions to a minimum as it was just the shape itself which was being manipulated instead of some of its background as well.

Above are 2 of the experiments there are altogether 5, the other 3 can be find my following links on these videos to the YouTube channel they were posted on. I was pleased with the effect of these pieces with a very literal transformation occurring in them.

-When does obscene become clean? 
-When does something become obscene?
-Define obscene?  
-Awareness of the changing state of obscenity?

-Explore the language of the body and it's relationship to the language of sex/sexuality.
-Look at the humorous nature of the anatomy and this line between obscenity and decency.
- Look at the textures of the body and the textures of the different mediums I have explored and their relationship to the central theme of transformation. 

The above questions came from my early experiments. These have further been explored in this work. The questions have resurfaced and new questions have arose. 
  
A question I often get asked of these works (filming and animating flesh and the body) is: WHAT EXACTLY IS THAT? . This straightforward observation has been important in shaping my work and has reminded me of their ever-changing subjectivity/objectivity as well as between the actual and abstract nature of these pieces. This is a frequent way transformation has been used and explored in this project.

Flesh side_by_side

Early video experiment made of two separate bits of video stuck together. Using masks and changing their positions using key-frames so the two pieces of video both fade to black in the middle. The mask can be seen below ( the yellow lines with square nodes connecting them), this has effect of cutting off the video along this line. As the background is black it has allowed me to lay the two videos side by side without an intersection, where you can clearly see the edge of the video. This has the effect of the two videos appearing to be one. It also covered up where at one point a hand flicks across the background which revealed the border of the footage. The edge of the mask was also feathered which meant if the video brighter flesh did cross the mask it was less obvious as it faded into the black rather than hitting a sharp line.

I am pleased with this experiment. I like the sharpness of the image which was filmed in the photography studio, with lighting, giving the dark background. It was fun attempting to collage video further literally laying and sticking the video side by side. To develop here more footage could be imported so I would be collaging 3 or more individual bits of video. I could also using some gentle distortion to warp the  flesh more creating more layered forms.

Questions here: What is that?

If you cannot tell what something is, it lands in the middle ground of obscenity and decency: ambiguity. Ambiguity is another recurring motif of my work, look into this.