Initial Thoughts
Semester 1 / Week 2
In my Studio Project Proposal, I explained my initial thoughts about what I wanted to achieve and do this year in my studio project. Obviously this is just my initial proposal and will change as I explore ideas.
I want to create an artwork that envelops the viewer in a hopeful but melancholic environment that explores the relationship between digital objects, mental health and the natural world. I intend to explore connection of our minds to the world and the way I romanticise things I feel I am an alien to.
I want to create something that someone can be in, an environment that can be stepped into. I want to create a space. I have had this idea for a while whilst admiring art pieces by artists that achieve creating spaces. My initial references in my proposal were these.
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Kyle Edward Ball’s “Skinamarink”
This film is one of the best I have watched that transfer me into a space. The space leaks out of the screen and into the room I am in. Having watched it twice, in the cinema and at home, weirdly, at home was even more distressing. Surrounded by my own furniture and familiarity whilst the movie I am watching turns and twists into something utterly horrific. It reminds me of walking around my house in the dark, banging into walls on my way to find my parents bedroom. The film nostalgically reminds me of a horror of when my CD player caught an night time audiobook on loop. I’m not sure why. Talking about spaces I couldn’t not mention this film.
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Bill Vorn’s “I.C.U (Intensive Care Unit)”
This installation was apart of Sonica at the CCA in Glasgow. It did solidify the idea of wanting to create something that envelops. It felt like I’d stepped into a strange Cronenberg-esque environment. The hydraulic limbs of the humanoids twisting and turning. Each I.C.U bed was an instrument apart of the whole soundscape.
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Ryoichi Kurokawa’s “s.asmbli [ wall ]”
This is an installation I keep coming back to. It creates a space quite literally in a box with 4 projected walls of dilapidated buildings and imagery of nature. The stabbing electronic sounds as the exhibition is being etched onto the surfaces. Sounds remind me of Ryoji Ikeda’s audio work.
An ongoing theme in my projects have been with exploring connections to the mind and to nature. In my Extended Reality project, I “materialised” (in an AR sense) the writing I had written out of emotional catharsis. In my Imagined Environments project (which I didn’t satisfylingly finish) I explored my experience of going to places of peace and writing how it grounds me. My Audio Visual project combined writing and photos and audio recordings throughout my experiences of feeling present and peaceful, which were often out alone in non-urban environments. Grains of audio played alongside the etching of the words on screen. Finally my Expressive Data was a mapped out path I took in Lochwinnoch, which I then 3D printed. I then adorned with different bits of nature from there. I wasn’t entirely sure about this project, I feel torn about taking bits from there, even if small.
A project I did that made me realise even more about the power of sound was my Spatial Audio project. I set up a DIY octo-surround speaker setup and did some audio experiments. I thought these were quite incredible, especially accessible with software I already own.
October 2024