Presentation

I'm presenting some manipulated stills and some short films. Both are on the subject of identity and feature my husband and I.

Software used:

Audacity - sound manipulation

Vidcrop - cropping moving images

MovieMaker - editing moving image

Picassa - simple photo manipulation

Gimp - photo manipulation with layers and filters

...and I recorded my progress, problems and research using a blog on blogger.com.

Hardware:

MP3 player/recorder

digital SLR camera

digital video camera

and a laptop with broadband internet access.

My concepts moved as I encountered a number of problems and as I actually dealt with the raw material I'd collected. The problems included:

(1) not being able to access files created in iMovie once they'd been copied onto my USB and put back onto a VU computer. This meant I lost a week's work. As I don't have a lot of free time to come and use VU Macs, I decided to move to MovieMaker and edit my footage there.

(2) In shooting the footage I was looking for reflections on water - but discovered that the orientation of the shooting location and the sun would actually mean there would never be a time when there would be reflections. Instead we shot our shadows in the original location and reflections of trees at new locations - which worked much better. The additonal challenge of the day was a large family gathering at one end of the location forcing us to shoot from only one direction.

(3) I even struggled with finding the right file formats for editing software as well as the process for getting footage from the video camera to the PC. And when I used Gimp - I didn't even know what file formats to save things in so I could edit them again - Gimp has many formats to chose from! and then the file sizes got so huge that my laptop failed to cope with them. Tasks that might have taken 30 minutes ballooned out into hours as the computer went crawlingly slow or hung up repeatedly!

(3) in switching to using MovieMaker I lost iMovie's ability to crop frames as well as gained (yipee!) a much cruder facilty for editing shots. Therefore, I had to do some research to find a utility that would crop. Freeware put a giant floating logo on the footage so I had to pay for the licence and then work out how to get that licence when it didn't come - although I was told it had - and then activate it!

(4) in using Gimp I found a highly complex tool I did not have the time to explore. Instead each time I wanted to do something I searched for tutorials on the internet that told me what to do - more useful than the manual! However, this did also mean that when something didn't work I had no idea what to do...and you'll see the resuts of this!

The theme of the photos is the way people in long-term relationships, to a certain extent, blend and become something new. I usually talk about there being three entities in a marriage: you, me and the relationship. But things are lost along the way in these three entities, some things change, some are added and the mixture is not necessarily always a comfortable fit.

Here we shot close-up face portraits of each other on a neutral background. Then I enhanced the chosen images by removing some of the effects of time and then transplanted our faces: my features onto his head and vice versa.

The theme of the movies is journeying within a relationship - a journey that is never done and it's never really clear where that journey is from and where it is to - only that it seems to contain some progress, some going backwards and a lot of repetitive behaviour.

Here, Mark and I shot footage in our local park, street and I also used some footage shot on this campus a few weeks back. From this I created three short movice, one of me, one of Mark and one of us showing us on journeys - my journey and what that feels like, his journey and what that feels like and our journey and what that feels like.

In VidCrop I removed as much of the ground as possible and any sign of physical bodies with the result that I have images in which no actual things appear, in which there is no ground on which to ground oneself. When one starts on a new journey or changes direction, it can feel that way - like there are no edges.

Within MovieMaker I could add transitions between shots and/or put an effect on a shot eg make it slower, roate the frame or colour it as it were a watercolour painting or a grainy film. I've used these effects to suggest loops or cycles which carries over the theme of the movies as well as reflects the action in the frame. I could also trim shots, so, for instance, I've used a lot of shots 1/10 second long to make a particular jerky, suspended effect. On short shots I could also add in a fade transition on either end and get a lovely overlapping of images.

I created the soundtracks in Audacity. While I found using the other pieces of software quite mechanical and sometimes frustrating, Audacity is where I had fun. The soundtracks are made up of conversation I recorded of Mark and I. So for the films about me or him we said the first thing that came into our heads about how it felt to be in a longterm relationship and for the film that concerned both of us I recorded conversation about how we would shoot the film. I combined words with clips from SF shows and a bunch of sounds downloaded from a brilliant site called FreeSoundProject. I matched sounds that seemed to echo our words as well as the images shot and tried to edit them into a soundtrack that also showed loops or cycles as reminiscent of the theme.

I'll just be using the projector to show you the work, but if I was hanging it I imagined it would look something like this:

There would be two lines of images identically framed:

(1) still images, on the left starting with me and on the right with Mark with the central image a blend of both of us and all the images inbetween showing an increasing amount of that blending.

(2) the movies installed in digital photos frames with Sarah on the left, Mark on the right and the us/relationship movie in the middle. There miht be a blopper reel too!

Finally, before I show you the work I'll just show you a few of the influences for this work, by showing a few of my Blog posts .

Show works.

Three sleeps to go...

...until presentation time; so how's it going?

Well, I'm putting in the hours but not necessarily getting the results and constantly thinking of work arounds and/or compromises. After Sunday I have very few hours to spare for this.

For instance, in the face transplanting in Gimp as I'm mechanically following tutorials I've found - if they don't work I'm at sea as I did not and certainly don't now, have the time to experiment. I'm also finding that Gimp is generating huge files which overwhelm this laptop's RAM with the result that they chew up heaps of time as they go slow, and both Gimp and MovieMaker have a tendency to hang up PC and I have to re-boot regularly.

Gimp issues:
Sarah on Mark transplant - skin colours are racidally different andI can't seem to colour balance them. In additon the gaussian blurr of just the cutout endge doesn't seem to be working.

Mark on Sarah transplant - can't seem to adequately hide Sarah's nose.

Movie issues:
I'm getting frustrated by MovieMaker's limitations with frame editing: its not as accurate as iMovie, and I wish I could lengthen or shorten its transition effects.

I also seem to have too much soundtrack: I have a number of separate sound environments I've made, but not enough space or a clear idea about how to assemble them with the visuals. It seems to be a case of work on movie. Then go back to sound and work on that a while, influenced by the patterns and rhythms I've seen in the shots and then return to the film and see how what sound combinations I've made affect the editing.

A key Audacity issue is sound speed. Unless I want to make an effect with non-matching sound speeds, I have adjust files form different sources. This is a trial and error approach of copying and pasting the sound into a base file and adjusting speed to match it (and sometimes pitch and tempo as well) until it seems to sound okay!

AaaaaH!

W11 Gimp Transplanting Faces

This week I'm creating two new photos from a mixture of Sarah and Mark. The results should be one of Sarah with Mark's face and one of Mark with Sarah's face. I'm using instructions from a previous post...

Gimp video Tutorial for transplanting faces
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQBKYtIc7g

...and another with written instructions...
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Blending-Faces/17474

...and finding out where various tools are using user manuals created by Gimp fans rather than the official Gimp manual - which is dire. The principal tools for a transplant are:

Transform tools: http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp/transform-image-gimp.htm

Layer Masks: http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?node44.html

As the rotation and size of the images is pretty similar, my chief 'transplanting' issue in these photos is Mark's beard! In the Mark on Sarah photo I need to eliminate everything except Mark's features and keep Sarah's skin. On the Sarah on Mark photo the situation is reversed, I need to eliminate as much of Sarah's skin as possible. To remove skin I make sure that black is in the foreground of the mask and to put skin back from the original layer I toggle back to white as the foreground. This means it's easy to do finer and finer work choosing exactly what I want to keep and eliminate.

Colour Matching:

Our skin tones are extremely different so I selected the cut out layer - not the mask - and then Colors, Color Balance. I altered the settings for a better match. Here I had to think about what I was seeing: what tones are in Sarah's skin and what colours are in Mark's skin eg whose has more red (ie pink) on the midtones or who has more green and so on.

For the Mark on Sarah photo this changes were:

Midtones +52, +31, +4

Shadows -28, +7, +13

Highlights -1, -16, 16

...and then altered the Hue-Saturation

Hue -5,

Lightness +10

saturation -3

Blurring edges between layers

I used this tutorial: http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/softening-the-edges-of-your-cutouts-p268828.html

The edges of the cutout layer are very sharp, so even though colours might now be similar the illusion is ruined! Select mask - not cutout layer - then Select, Shrink and 1 pixel. Then Select, Invert - so only the edge of the mask will be blurred. Then Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur. On the Mark on Sarah photo i used 200 px blur!

And that leaves us with the beard issue! I've used the heal tool, but I really want selction from the Sarah layer to use on the Mark mask layer and that doesn't seem to work. What I've ended up doing is blurring and lightening the Sarah layer around the nose which leaves a 'five o'clock shadow' effect.

Movie Soundtrack References

Attribution list for movie soundtracks.

Sarah:
rutgermuller 2009, Radio Noise', downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=179538), on 27 April 2009.

Mark Movie:
Various SF clips: 'Open Wav Events', downloaded from WaveEvents.com, on 16 May 2009.

Us Movie:

acclivity, ByTheRiver55s.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=37876, on 9 May 2009
Cbakos, Cordless phone ring.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=103482, on 6 May 2009
Digifishmusic, Magpie_carroll.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=29541, on 6 May 2009
Digifishmusic, Writing.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=29541, on 9 May 2009
DJ Chronos, Clamp.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=103319, on 9 May 2009
Fastson, WritingMarker.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=586391, on 9 May 2009
guitarguy1985, printer.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=533680, on 6 May 2009
JonathanJansen, Scrolling a mousewheel.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=15882 , on 9 May 2009
JonathanJansen, sneeze.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=54505, on 9 May 2009
JustinBW, Creek Ambience 2 plane at end.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=1022651, on 6 May 2009
K1m218, 00553 coughing man 2.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=63102, on 9 May 2009
nicStage, TinyWaves.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=43853 , on 6 May 2009
NoiseCollector, mysterybirdlouder.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=58000 , on 5 May 2009
ReWired, 00_CHAIR.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=26695, on 6 May 2009
Robinhood76, 00094 tasma klejaca szeroka.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=321967, on 9 May 2009
Rutgermuller, Hardisk External Starting Up.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=179538, on 6 May 2009
Sagetyrtle, Sigh4.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=60671, on 9 May 2009
scarbelly25, Breathing.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=33939 , on 5 May 2009
Streety, laptopkeyboard2.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=52052, on 6 May 2009
vibe_crc, paper_crumpling.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=333536, on 9 May 2009
visionari1, QueenlandKookaburrra16sec.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=82269, on 9 May 2009
vixuxx, crow.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=28679, on 9 May 2009

W10 Results of GIMP enhancements so far

REsponse to Archiving Issues with Digitial Art papers

Work may well become inaccessible over time – hardware or software becomes obsolete or hard to source, knowledge to operate either may be lost, storage media degrades.

The work can be (repeatedly) updated to new software, hardware and/or media, but this very updating could violate the work. There may also be privacy issues with documentation and/or storage if the work involves the data of other people. The Rhizome.org project recommends uploading work and/or documentation of the work to the Internet. Maybe other current answers include creating galleries in Second Life or creating universal formats.

An archivist’s main task becomes storing old technology, updating technology, converting formats where applicable. A completely different skill set is required for this. Also requires a new budget and storage space – a second museum. What responsibilities do artists have to update their own work?

There are new ways to display material and generate visitor interaction. What are the correct combinations of venue or occasion and frequency to exhibit digital work? In addition, there are value issues for the museum: what is the original? Adjusting artist and curator and collector ideas of originality and control (work can be altered to pixel level, copied and interactive works have multiple originators). What value is such a work without the right hardware and software to access it?

Maybe we just have to adjust our ideas about permanence? There are strange conflicting forces at work. One circular force tells us that longevity is part of an art work’s value. Conversely, the forces of globalisation and rapid technological developments and their commercialisation work against permanence but for innovation. Maybe we just have to let works pass away?

W10 Using Gimp to Enhance Facial Portraits

As an utter novice, how do you learn what to do, where things are in such a short period of time - especially if you're a person who has zero patience with non-intuitive software tools? On-line manuals just tell you what's under the menu and what it does, not how to do X. Instead I searched for video tutorials on what I wanted to do.

How to remove face wrinkles:

http://revver.com/video/1215400/how-to-remove-facial-wrinkles-from-photo-gimp-26/

- uses heal tool. Select non-wrinkled face near wrinkle and click to cover wrinkle with this selection.

How to enhance eye colour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6qBts7qZ6I

- uses ellipse tool to select pupil and Colours, Hue Saturation to play with colour.

How to cover facial hair, scars and blemishes:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1385102/gimp_26_photo_software_covers_unwanted.html?cat=15

Create a new layer and set to transparency.

Return to the original layer and chose the Colour Picker Tool - in clear skin near the unwanted thing. Select Air brush tool - larger the brush the more diffuse and natural the result. Use the colour and airbrush on the transparent layer to cover the blemish. Keep re-picking colour as you move over the face. Reduce opacity in brush to cover non-blemished areas.

How to change hair colour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6WPkDQtsbE&feature=PlayList&p=454D0EC9D954EAF2&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=37 - uses path tool. Move around hair and select its edge carefully. Select, From Path. Colours, Colour Balance. Adjust settings as desired.

How to remove face shine:

Use Colour Picker to select skin near the area.

Choose Airbrush and increase Scale, Reduce opacity - lower means more natural look, but more brushing required - and choose a fuzzy brush.

How to increase eye whiteness:

Choose Path Tool. Select around the white of the eye. Click Selection from Path. Click Colours and Brightness-Contrast. Adjust both to increase whiteness so it still looks natural. I also blurred the edges by picking the colour of the eye white and using a fuzzy air-brush with low opacity.

Response to Future of (Digital) art papers

If ‘digital’ as a prefix will disappear, will ‘reality’ as a suffix as well? Where boundaries are blurred and, perhaps, dissolved, are others necessarily erected? We have seen that as technology and transport allow commodities, money and people to cross national boundaries, those boundaries have legislatively and administratively tightened.

What will become of personality, identity? If we can transplant faces, why not personalities, minds? Maybe cryogenics is not the way towards immortality, but a personality transplanted into cyberspace.

What will become of choice and freewill? If a character we create for SecondLife can carry a camera and shoot a film, what if a camera can be implanted into the pregnant womb? Surrogate recipients can survey their developing foetus – and maybe the foetus can do the reverse. What would that mean about ‘when life begins’? What would that mean about choice – what if a foetus could reject its parents prior to birth?

Is there a possibility of the death of the artist with this supposed equalitarizing (just recall who actually has access to the technology versus who has never used a phone) of art production in the way critics have signalled the death of art (we lost aura, we lost reality, we lost the canvas…)? Or is the individual artist collectivised or will she be further commodified? Perhaps we will trade in artists, rather than in art?

What will become of galleries and museums, projects of empires past? With growing calls for the return of artefacts to their place of origin (although ‘origin’ is a contentious idea too, just look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark, the [now copies] of statues of horses that adorn St Marco, Venice). Maybe physical international travel will become unviable (until teleport arrives) and the way to see artefacts and painting will be to construct a virtual gallery of our own with our own openings and commentaries. What indeed will become of the value we place on ‘ownership’, ‘creator’, ‘origin’ and ‘originality’ in an ever more intertextual world?

Getting a camera

Here was another compromise to time. I could find the time to do a health and safety course and book out, collect and return a camera or buy one. We bought one. Well, Mark bought one - he's longed for one for ages but I'm always 'what do we need that for' and 'we'll never watch it'. I still think that's true, but at least I had a purpose. It's a sexy little thing - easily fits in a coat pocket or handbag. It takes photos, stores and plays back music - i dare say if one could fit a film on the card you could play back that too. Its zoom needs a soft touch, it's hardly a smooth or gentle transition! The transfer from camera to PC is clunky. Silly me, I thought 'ah, a card, I can stick that into the computer and copy them off and that'll be that'. But no. They need to come from the camera to PC via leads and its own software and you have to know to push a little function button on the camera to make the whole thing work.

Changing ideas about editing and sound

Having ended up with shadow shots as well as water movement, tree and rock reflections, I've re-thought how I treat the footage and sound for the 'us' film.

I found a great site, The FreeSound Project - a YouTube for sound - where, once you've opened an account, you can search for and listen to whatever people the world over have uploaded. I listened to a lot - for the pleasure of it and to reflect upon what would work with the footage and the story the combination might then tell.

So, here's what I think I'll do. I've downloaded a variety of water, bird and office equipment sounds. I've chosen files that feature sound that comes in very discrete bites eg a hawk calling, or that builds and dissipates, eg a PC booting. In combination with the shots and the conversations I've taped between Mark and I, I want to build in a sense of escalation and dissipation and a movement between natural and built environment. This reflects not only the conversation, but also how much of our identity ('our' in the general and specific to Mark and I senses) we invest in the so-called natural while we spend so much time hooked up to technology.

Editing escalation/dissipation: build to shorter and tighter shots and then reverse (Hitchcock's technique).

Image in frame to show a movement between natural and built environment:
- no ground - or less and less ground, perhaps?
- no 'real' objects ie us, only reflections and shadows upon 'natural' surfaces
- move from slime shots, to tree reflections, to us reflections, to water movement, to shadows and back again

Sound tied to frame showing both escalation/dissipation and a movement between natural and built environment:
- start with quiet and slow rhythms eg water lapping, creaking office chair, pen writing, exchanging ideas conversation
- PC booting, Printer booting, typing, paper crumpling, (parts of the sound that show movement, get louder, faster)
- sighs, coughs, sharp comments, hawk crying, phone rings, sticky tape
- rising din of birds and typing, conversation becomes lost
- PC booting, Printer booting, typing (parts of the sound that are even and repetitive)
- end with quiet sounds and slow rhythms: magpie carolling, water lapping, pen writing

W9 Shooting the movie footage - changes ahead

So, Mark and I had a window of opportunity last weekend - the time and sunny weather. Sun was necessary to generate the reflections I wanted and time was, basically, in short supply. As I kept saying to him - it has to get done today, we're both around and there will not be another opportunity. He has been very obliging, especially surprising considering what bad moods we were in that day.

The location for the 'us' movie was Newport Lakes as it has stepping stones. i envisaged that we would film each other - or bits of each other - crossing these and our reflections in the water. I failed to account for a large boozey family fishing outing at one end (eventually moved on by the tireless ranger) meaning we could only shoot in one direction and, far more seriously, that I'd failed to account for the direction of stones versus the location of the sun. That is, there was no reflection!!! So this meant an immediate re-think on locations and shots. Instead, we found that the smaller lakes were better angled for reflections and shot some great footage of not only our reflections, but of tree and rock reflections and water movement. We also found that we cast great shadows, rather than reflections, from the stepping stones and so shot shadows instead.

Thus, the actual footage shot, rather than the planned shots has in turn influenced how I will edit and the soundtrack I'll contstruct. More in the next post.


Creatively, I'm realising that a lot of my time is spent in non-creative technical problem-solving and I can't say I find this very conducive to the process overall. In a unit where (VU having removed 25% of our course hours) we get one 3 hr session (minus late comers and the health and safety 'break' that no one takes) to play about on a variety of software and then decide what to create on what software and then do it - there's not a lot of time for 'mulling' or explorative experimenting that could fail.

W9 iMovie Doom and Gloom, bring on VidCrop

Having committed to use iMovie, I committed myself to a common problem as the Apple site later attested to: do not move your files. If you do when you try to re-enter the iMovie project; it won't work. At VU we do not have permanent server space allocated to us, instead we have to save files to USBs or external drives.

If one has the right software at home one can do work there even using a PC and this was true for Gimp and InkSpace, but not for iMovie. As an alternative I could use Windows MovieMaker, but only in an either/or senario: I either used iMovie to make my movies or MovieMaker which created scheduling issues for the remaining workshops available to me ie what can I do in the lab at all. Or it meant finding other times to get to the campus Mac Lab - very unlikely given my uni schedule.

Thus, last Wednesday, it came down to me and the tutor trying to work out a technical way around the problem of neither being able to reopen projects (not even copying everything back to where it had been in my temporary server space worked) nor import MPEG files as the help file said iMovie could! Miserable.

I resolved in mind that the test version of what I'd shot for the Going Nowhere movie, plus the completed soundtrack, might have to suffice for that art work and that the rest I'd edit on MovieMaker. This left the problem of how to deal with what MovieMaker lacks.

iMovie is an easy-to-use interface even if it lacks the capacity to do things like reverse, flip or slow or speed-up film and it has the abilities to manipulate the colour quality of the image and to crop the frame. I saw the potential of the cropping facility immediately. Not only did it mean that I didn't have to be so rigorous in what was in/out of frame when I shot - rigour meaning time-consuming - but, in effect, cropping is like an extra zoom. And the colour manipulation also gave me the option to add in a further loop of the movie. Having shot the film I'd now lost all these options!

Instead I Googled for shareware and found a free version of VidCrop, which I later tested. Very easy to use and compatible with MovieMaker. I did have to buy it, of course, as the cropped film would have a huge floating logo otherwise! And, the installation process, while easy, was obscure and required some detective work to compare what the support person said should be so - a registration email with instructions - but wasn't and how to search though and use what was actually available - a web-based receipt.

So now I can crop all the footage and import it into MovieMaker's library and edit all three movies. I have experimented with the effects library and I may be able do to some looping visual effects although not the same as iMovie and it does have the capacity to slow down, speed up and flip the shot. I can also publish the film to DVD in the same package which overcomes any potential problems with trying to work out what files are needed and how to transport and recreate the file structure for iDVD at VU - I just don't want to go there!

Artists who work with reflections, identikit-style work

Daniel Crooks

from: http://nga.gov.au/fullscreen/06/details/crooks.cfm
'works that distort time and perspective.works that distort time and perspective.'


Saule Good/Lance de France in Sophie Gammon Gallery






from http://www.saulgood.com.au/gannon.html
'...the anonimity of the individual...'

Giles Revell and Matt Willey




from http://www.gilesrevell.com/portfolio/photofit/

'...In providing each sitter with the same tools – a 1970s police Photofit kit, the process by which they created their self-portrait was democratized; the immediate, tactile qualities of the kit enabling them to tell their own story as a likeness falls into place, piece by piece.'


Gimp make-overs
There are a whole series of YouTube clips where people use a photo of themselves or a celebrity and then 'improve' them with Gimp, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QTJJnBZTUE&feature=related



Gimp video Tutorial for transplanting faces
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQBKYtIc7g

another with written instructions:
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Blending-Faces/17474

W8 - 1st week on proposal

Re-edited reflection footage to remove ground from frame.
Re-cut movie so that there's a more of a journey never complete - actually able to use such small pieces that i looks like I'm hobering bsck and forward.
Wrote up a schema for altering the visual elements of the image in iMovie so that there's a visual loop.
Began work on the soundtrack using a very short piece of audio from me and adding in white noise, repetitive sounds to give the idea of an aural loop.
Also signed up for The FreeSound Project - a YouTube for sound - and downloaded a piece on radio tuning. I thought I might this add in too.

Proposal thinking

I want to shoot 2 new face portraits and present the left side of mine, right of his – manipulated as in enhanced for vividness and attractiveness. So the idea is one of ‘best we can be’ in a traditional and public and specular kind of way that is valued in western societies.

Then there is a centre portrait, like a Mr Potato Head, or an identikit of bits of our faces cobbled together to make a new face. Together we make something different, which is not altogether lovely.

Meanings: the me-you are different to the us. But this is also a moment – how real is it? how long does it last? There are lots of moments and what does a single moment mean? How does it change? It could also be read as ‘if there had been children….what would they have looked like?’ And if children look like their parents, do we get to look like each other the way they say dogs look like their owners.

The process of involving Mark in creating this work – and the problems that will result maybe I should blog them – the underlying theme and its link to Hughes and Plath, this subconscious desire I’ve had for a mentor-muse partnership and the senses that this does and does not exist.

The bottom triptych will include motion, evolution.

I want to do an interview. Me of him, him of me. Maybe about a central question: who are you, who am I, who are we? I can then manipulate this audio so that there’s a track of me and him on my identity, me and him on his identity, and us on us to apply to 3 movies or slideshows. The audio manipulation might be more that editing interesting extracts, it might also involve repetition of key words or phrases or silence and deletions, looping – depends what emerges.

So what does that mean? …

What are the three movies?

Left me: I wonder about setting up the work plan and style of the outcome, but leaving the subject matter to what’s in the interview…not necessarily reflecting what’s being said or directly related…maybe something that isn’t being said. Could just be that Going Nowhere footage re-cut (remove ground, just focus on windows), as there is a middle-aged feeling of time running out, seeking meaning and going nowhere.

Going Nowhere: loops within loops. Me, reflected, struggling to move forward and then shown just repeating the same thing. What’s the reflecting about – the actual me is not seen? For Jung middle-life transitions are about finding meaning, about integrating all the bits of one’s self and accepting them.

Central us : slideshow of existing photos. Maybe intercut with shots from the interview. Past and present. What of the future? How do I represent that? Blankness? Romantic music???? images of movie stars? Objects desired? Fears? Old age, disease and death

Right him: ditto to ‘left me’

And do they mean? …

Construct a work plan

Week 7 - Presentation opportunities

on-line visual diaries and storage sites: scrapbook, flickr, blogger, deviant

Off or online publications might seek submissions

cafes, art stores often exhibit.

artist run spaces - exhibit, sometimes for free, but after submitting a proposal

join on-line newsletters

watch for festivals that might have opening (perhaps government initiatives) or be dedicated to digital media (ones that support first time artists, youth etc)

But also how will I present it: 

Photos or video on a gallery wall. On-line in a visual diary or someone elses. Using bluetooth to send to mobiles and who's and when. As a slideshow uploaded to YouTube.  Setup a gallery in Second Life. Show a film in an unusual or thematically linked place.

Week 6 - iMovie

Video art began in the 1960s with artists such as Andrew Pike and the Fluxus Movement. His first video art was of the pope's visit that he subsequently screened at a local cafe. Used to document performances of performance and body artists as well as installation. He also used magnets to distort his images. 

YouTube has many such films:

In Zen for Film, he uses a mostly white screen with the occasional blotch.

Bruce Nauman, 1967 - Walking in an exaggerated Manner...

Pipilotti Rist, 2001 - Open My Glade - a feminist performance artist. Images of her smearing her face against an invisible surface. Screened on a billboard in Times Square to say something about the way women trap themselves with the way media portray themselves.

Mathew Barney, Cremaster - filmic techniques and costumes...symbolism, goo and lots of money!

Video art relies upon concepts and aesthetics.

Another Proposal Idea

In this photo from The Age (http://www.theage.com.au/world/march-of-indias-big-parties-halted-20090327-9e8o.html), campaigning hordes of politicans (and these are just ones from Bangalore) are made more identifiable through the distribution, I'm assuming, of masks of their faces. What does altering one's face do to one's identity? How small can that change be?

Mobile Phone Artwork: MeMe

This is what I did as a test of some ideas:


- captured photos of myself in a mirror on mobile.
- transferred photos to Mac via Bluetooth
- captured sound with MP3 player and transferred to Mac

- edited sound file in Audacity to multiple the voice and play with timings
- created a PowerPoint slide show with animated transitions, timings and sound
- cropped and edited each photo to show a range of effects
- downloaded a PPT to AVI Converter and recorded a movie of less than 100Mb.
- uploaded to blog.

The only thing I don't understand is why the sound didn't work.

Proposal Ideas: Fiddles with Identity

Jane Eyre Ch 16 - Jane draws a chalk drawing of herself on rough canvas in order to highlight her imperfections. She draws a second drawing of her rival, Miss Ingram, on fine ivory with light strokes and small brushes in order to supra-highlight the reality that Rochester is unobtainable.

In Ch 19 Rochester disguises himself as a gypsy to read the fortunes of his house party guests, or rather to play with them, and tests Jane's loyalty and good sense.

Introduction to Film Art - The cinematography chapter details the range of camera motions for different effects, for instance, surveillance footage.

Multiple views of same person, Morphing from one person or family into another, Viewing of body parts or items a person owns - which is 'me'?

Identity Theft via my mobile:
http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/2009/03/20/235356/my-phone-stole-my-identity.htm

And intentionally identity removed to protect the innocent/guilty:

Bag as identity!

What's in my Bag, 1 Feb 2009 entry: http://jadearlindita.wordpress.com/ -

A place to search for advert campaigns, http://www.visit4info.com/

Nivea 'paper model' person advert:
http://www.visit4info.com/advert/Sure-Skin-Care-Deodorant-Paper-Model-Sure-Deodorant-Range/57621

Dove 'Evolution', the retouching model advert:

Dove Campaign For Re..
Watch the ad...

Week 5: Mobile Phones

Mobile Phone software and capabilities:

Music, internet, photos, video, games, sms, recording audio, flash messages (and other formating such as blinking), bluetooth, up and downloading, phone surveillance software, ability to personalise (eg assign ringtones to particular callers)...

Emerging art forms:

Text or character based art, poetry, stories built up by a round-robin effect, creating ring tones, short films, video art, screensavers, sound pieces from ring tones, sculpture from mobile phone bits, dynamic collage (each recipient adds a piece), stop-motion animation,

Phone-related themes:

Texting language, Portability, identity, privacy (eg upskirting), size of device, multiple recipients, ownership, individuality, space-time (transnational borders and time zones, expectation of immediate response), collaboration

One can use the phone as a production tool, as it contains some software for manipulation, but also as a method for presenting your art.

How to connect Mac to Mobile:

Click bluetooth icon on the right top menu bar.
Make sure Turn Bluetooth is On.
On phone find Bluetooth setting and ensure it is turned on and Find Me.
On Mac scroll through Browse Files to find phone and use as a file manager.

Phone asks if I want to 'bond' with the computer - Yes.
Enter a password - hit 1 key three times and enter.
When corresponding password box comes up on Mac, type in 111 and Ok.
Browse screen comes up.

To send a file:

Click Bluetooth icon and my phone name and Send File.
Select file to send (make sure it's an acceptable file format and size) and Send.
The file is transferred to my phone and I must select Accept in order to complete the download.

Websites:

dlux.org.au/mobilejourneys
portableworlds.anat.org.au



Clayanimation:

How to make a claymation animation on a mobile: www.clayanimation.com
To download a claymation freeware: english/stop_motion_animator.htm

Be aware that 24 frames = 1 second of film time

Could also use a series of stills, turn into a PowerPoint presentation and add music and voice over narration.

Week 4: Painter Corel X...more proposal ideas

Confronted with a third highly powerful piece of software and only a short time to get to 'know' it, and this one without a freeware version to use at home, I cannot imagine pursuing this software. I didn't so much experiement with strokes and layers and the 700 tools, but drew how I felt, which was not well and software overwhelmed. So, I drew a child-like drawing - because I felt childlike (put in the position of being a novice yet again) and because I found a combination of brush types and textures I liked: chalk which was sharp, grainy or dull or various thickness on a paper surface of my choice, and I chose a simulation of a natural cotton fibre paper. So I experiemented with colour mixing and fill - plain and patterned - and drew a child-like family drawing.

DRAWING

A lesson I learnt was, never draw on the canvas, put everything on a layer which allows you more flexibility in turning layers on and off or rubbing bits out to show layers below, or swapping layers around. However, given my lack of Corel at home, I'll be using this as a JPEG, not Corel format.

As I drew I had more ideas about identity, family, masks, which is interesting me for my proposal. I imagined what I could do with this childish drawing. An adult drawing such a drawing of a family has a particular meaning - apart from 'she's suffering from a reality attack about her abilities' - and how that might be combined / blurred / rubbed through / mixed up /morphed with other non/idealised pictures of families.

Here is such an idealised family:

They are easy to find and often used to sell something as in moving services (abcmovingcenter.com).

Mind you, even 'happy families' can be disturbing as on Dude I Rock http://www.dudeirock.com/ where the writer digitally alters all sorts of photos to insert himself: in this case all members of this family are versions of him.

Further, I imagined taking a series of photos of one person morphing from one expression to another: from a public mask of politeness into their truth feelings of whatever, perhaps boredom and disgust. On Flickr, I found a Japanese artist, Ogawa Mari http://www.flickr.com/photos/8497209@N08/2988405919/, who has included as series of shots of masks of her wearing a mask of her own face:

Here's an exhibition called Artifacial Expression, for instance, http://artifacial.org/the_varieties and http://artifacial.org/face_shift, that document changes in normal facial expression in a way that suggest reduction to digitisation for computer programs in robots.

Digital Photography Artists

It's not difficult to find a lot on Cindy Sherman (see http://www.cindysherman.com/). This week's coincidence was reading about mis-en-scene in my film studies unit: what elements (and how) within the frame that the director choses to control. Re-visiting her 'film stills', I know understand a little more about them. For instance, how carefully she lights each image, its colour design, the setting if any, its costume and makeup, the pose...all these guide assumptions we make and, thus, the story we construct as a viewer.

Whereas Sherman is all about the face, Tracey Moffatt, is about the setting (see http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/26/Tracey_Moffatt/ - First Jobs series). Her choices say to me: technicolour 1960s, function dictates form, setting is more important than person, cheerful optimism that technology will solve all ills.

Sophie Calle (see http://www.galerieperrotin.com/artiste-Sophie_Calle-18.html) for instance includes "portraits of young offenders used as targets during the training of police officers in the city of M" whose identity has been 'protected' simply by covering their eyes - perhaps identity is not merely int he whole face, but just the eyes! In another set she presents 'Iconic portraits mutilated during the civil war in Spain'; these are Christian statues constructed in a time when realism in art was of critical value to the Church. Perhaps the fighters recognised that cutting off the nose of a saint was as powerfully symbolic as cutting the nose off a fellow citizen? And in a third series, posed human and artifical figures are posed as they read a message addressed to themselves, "Take care of yourself": we read the figures as reading a message of care.

Week 3: Digital Camera

This week we took photos around campus and then had a bit of a play in Gimp (download here: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/). I've also used Picassa (download here: http://picasa.google.com/). I love my click-and-shoot camera. I can take almost as many pictures as I like - and see them or delete them or adjust the shot or the camera and shoot again! Some people take that as being skill-less as if the quality of (or interest in) the photo depended entirely on the quality of camera! However, our lecturer reminded us of two principles, that in taking photos we still need to take photos with an intention and, therefore, need to make some decisions, for instance:

• set up the shot with poses, costume, framing and so on, or


• impose some kind focus or rule (completely candid, a theme, particular patterns etc) upon our photo-taking,

and are we choosing to take the photo:

• using automatic settings, or


• using automatic and manipulating digitally, or


• adjusting one or more elements of whatever can be adjusted on the camera

Or any combination of the above.

I chose to take my photos on automatic settings and manipulate later. The theme I imposed upon myself was that of surveilling students unaware (see previous post). Here's one of the results:

In this photo I have applied various filters to make the photo more grainy and saturated as if it was old and taken under difficult circumstances. I have made the target appear to glow - the way once we put something in our attention we are immediately hit in the eye by the many examples in our environment. I have also added a collage element to give a more 3D effect. The girl in the foreground was cut out of one photo and pasted onto a new layer which i then re-sized and used a mask to (roughly!) brush out her original surroundings so they are invisible.

Maybe this is the 'camera never lies' element, but it's rough so we know its a fake - we might forget that the audience can usually read our text! Finally, I pixelated the girl's face, partly to protect her privacy but also to suggest an air of covert operations and the format of so much news where broadcasters must have something to show, but must also stay within the Privacy Act. This says so much about our need to show 'progress' in daily events as our assumption that identity lies in the face.

Proposal Ideas 1

In thinking about my proposal, I'm trying to remember my interests in identity.. in the ideas below I'm thinking about 'realness' and identity and the technique would be digital camera and digital manipulation.

Un/Masked:
From before, during and after the moment of awareness. My assumption being that 'unmasked' is a moment of genuineness - the real person before they assume one of their public masks. I imagined taking series of photos of people unaware of my presence and lost in themselves and then continuing to shoot as they become aware of me.

Obsessive Surveillance:
Having just seen the latest episode of 'Skins' (UK teens trying to discover themselves, particularly their sexual identity, see http://www.e4.com/skins/guide-series2-episode2.html) in which a young woman obsessively follows and photographs a young man in sitations where he is both unaware and lost in himself and with a public mask on, I wondered if I could do something similar. Perhaps of my husband...the idea being not questions of fidelity, but about well do I know the real person. Presented in some kind of photo-wall I'd have many many versions of my partner, many many versions of my partner. There would be some that I know, some I don't and some where he is completely himself and others where he is utterly masked.

Reflection upon presentation of assignment 1

Questions wisely asked during my presentation allowed me to realise that an influence carried over from 2008 is Mark Rothko who eliminated figurative content focussing only on colour, paint texture, canvas scale and shape and installation. Here's an example, Untitled 1953:

It's the sort of work that just makes me feel. And what I feel is what Freud and others called 'the ocean sublime', a sort of collective spirituality.

Here's a huge feature on the artist, his life and work from Washington: http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/

From admiting that influence I was able to recall that colour had an on-going importance to the vividness of the imagery of Plath. Maybe colour made Plath feel too?

I was also asked about scale, whether I imagined Brown Arc larger than this blog, perhaps projected on the side of a building like the truism texts of Jenny Holzer (see http://www.jennyholzer.com/list.php). I answered I was interested in scale, but possibly for the opposite reason - that sheer size alone does not necessarily equate to 'getting noticed' and I gave the example of 'an alien in a crowd': if an alien walked down a crowded Manhattan street, no one would bat an eye - we are so numbed by SFX that seeing the odd in the everyday we'd just take it as a SF nut off to a convention! Here's just such an example from Bobby Breidholt (for more see http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/User/Bobby%20Breidholt - I like his pattern and SF influences):

All this led me to wonder about my next assignment, a proposal for the artworks I'll hand in as my folio.

Assignment 1: Preliminary Artwork and Critique

In this blog you'll find my first assignment created in Inkscape 0.46. The title of this piece is Brown Arc and is a response to Sylvia Plath's poem, 'Ariel'.

For context you can read about Plath's life and work at http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html,
see the text of this poem at Poem Hunter
(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ariel/)
as well as read some commentary on this complex work at http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/plath/ariel.htm.
Maybe what you 'should' know is that 'Ariel' was a poem written during a highly creative period and within a year of her suicide.


I barely understand 'Ariel' myself, it 'contains' so many images, multiple meanings and several intertexual links within its brief form and I'm loathe to extract phrases from its structure. However, what follows are the sequences I'm responding to matched to the element and technique in the image above.


(1)
Line: "Stasis in darkness/Then the substanceless blue/Pour of tor and distances."

Element: blue background to the left of the image

Meaning: A freedom from stillness, trappedness and suffocation to brightness and space. There is both certainty and shapelessness. Note that a ‘tor’ is a hill. Plath was in a small house, in a cold winter, with small children and a turbulent marriage to British Poet Laureate (a poet appointed to write poems for special events on behalf of a nation), Ted Hughes.

Technique: I created a bottom layer and added to it a square the size of the page with the shape tool and then added a colour with the colour wheel, increased its translucency and added a gradient with a stop that decreased the colour right to left.

(2)
Line: "...sister to/The brown arc/Of the neck I cannot catch,"

Element: the brown arc coil.

Meaning: Horse and riding imagery to express movement, freedom and escape into the distance. There is identification with a 'twin soul', perhaps Hughes, but a sense that satisfaction can never be complete. Note also the sense of moving from brightness into darkness as identity becomes less focused and more uncertain with distance.

Technique: Drawn with the calligraphic tool, colour adjusted, sculpted for shape, cloned, dragged into a sort of coil with each arc increasingly blurred to give a sense of depth and upwards movement.

(3) Line: "Nigger-eye/Berries cast dark/Hooks ---//Black sweet blood mouthfuls,/Shadows."

Element: darkening filter to the right of the image

Meaning: The imagery is said to portray eating succulent blackberries, something you might find on an autumn ride in rural Britain. Although the imagery is sexual, like many of these lines, it is also dark, unsafe and portent-filled. (Note that commentators seem to get caught up in the use of the still taboo word ‘nigger’ by a US poet writing in the 1960s, a time of ‘freedoms’ emerging for non-white, non-middle-class, non-men in Western-style societies).

Without this overlying filter the image is bright and unambiguously cheerful; the filter suggests that the poem is richer, more complex than any single meaning we might feel more comfortable about. For instance, notice that in Plath's word imagery and my digital imagery brightness and darkness are linked. They are inevitable and a part of one another: one leads inescapably into the other - day to night, happiness to sadness, desire to its absence...and so on.

Technique: I created a separate layer and added to it a square the size of the page with the shape tool and then added black with the colour wheel, increased its translucency and added an effect with gradient left to right.

(4) Lines: "And now I/Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas./The child's cry/Melts in the wall.//And I/Am the arrow,/The dew that flies,/Suicidal, at one with the drive/Into the red//Eye, the cauldron of morning. "

Element: Red 'sun'

Meaning: In these lines there is hard and soft beauty, freedom, a momentary escape from earthly/domestic ties in an intense climax from the riding and/or sexual encounter and the drive and energy released that nourishes one afterwards. But there is ALSO danger, death and violence constantly present and towards which this vital energy is also directed.

Technique: I drew a circle with the Ellipse Tool, coloured it as red I could and applied an Object, Filter Effects – basically a blur, saturation and brightness.

Week 1: Introduction to Digital Art

So why am I here? Well, the really cynical and pragmatic answer is: I could could fit two units into one day, which is convenient given my cross-institutional enrolment. And the other reasons? Truth, maybe? That phrase, 'the camera never lies', such an untrue statement in itself, is worth exploring. Can greater truths actually be told through digital manipulation? And can those truths be extracted using not necessarily the most complex tools and techniques, but by stretching the most basic and most widely available tools? Can those truths be found in the most mundane subjects and themes rather than the most extraordinary? I mean, look at this photograph (ABOVE) of the northern lights in the Yukon, Canada. This extrordinary moment is a photo of 'nature', it is 'natural' and stunning - what would be the point of me trying to replicate that unless perhaps it was a SFX for a film?

I'm a blank wacom drawing tablet really - whatever that is. I've dabbled in the most basic image enhancement and audio file stuff that's been useful for everyday purposes and to get from this through education and research to art will be an interesting journey.

Before the semester began I was looking at faces particularly from the 'Black Saturday' Victorian bushfire media coverage (see http://www.theage.com.au/national/bushfires), a documentary on the origins of facial plastic surgery (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dd18c and also http://www.gearability.com/2007/11/03/the-origins-of-plastic-surgery/). Plastic surgery is an example of discovery following the need for innovation in war, in other words it was developed and practised largely upon male soldiers with facial injuries but becomes transformed into an industry practised largely on women who have been socialised to be dissatisfied and anxious about their bodies. And, finally, my interest in a new US drama,'Lie to Me', which is based on uncovering the villian by analysing facial micro-expressions (see http://www.fox.com/lietome/).

Faces seem to be such a vital seat of 'identity' and the items above raise such questions for me as: What or where is my identity if I have no face or a damaged face; particularly as a woman and that whole history of investing worth in beauty? If we give away our true motivations through our faces, why do most of us miss most of the clues and get into so much trouble with each other? Are my expressions me? Do I control them? Or are they biology and evolution?

In addition, faces are also used for 'identification' as in 'I identify with this other person because they seem to be like me' or 'there but for the grace of God go I'. So in terms of the February 2009 bushfire coverage there is an astonishing array of photography, much of it Destruction Beautiful, and much of it tugging at our emotions by displaying faces unmasked, naked, raw. This is a sort of commercialised truth. This collecting and publishing of what seems to be to be private grief and trauma, clearly, is not a neutral activity: there are reasons for printing such photos. They create drama out of emotion. Emotion and drama cue responses in us, including anxiety through identification. To soothe, or further excite ourselves, we buy more papers and more commercials (through tuning into TV news)...when and why did such graphic, extensive and personal coverage of disaster, funerals and accidents become news?

It seems likely that in these aroused states people become more open or susceptible to other actions or forms of persuasion. For instance, a political agenda has been attached to this tradegy, that is Kevin Rudd's Annual National Day of Mourning, these events appear to be being moulded into 'Our Australian identity'. Maybe the thinking is something like this, 'If bushfire is a way of life in Australia...even back into Indigenous burning practices...and, after the disaster, 'we' show our 'true colours', our 'unique' Australian 'values', through our compassionate response, then QED it must be part of who 'we' are as a nation. Thus, if an overseas early 2oth century military disaster can be converted into a location for national identity, why not this which happened in our backyard?'

Anyway, I like to pay attention to the 'coincidence' of these materials coming into my attention and I hope that something will emerge from this, maybe family photos and holiday films and the truths and lies that they depict? Maybe it would be very cool to learn how to use Second Life, build a family home, create a family and run the films and slideshows there? I've got no idea how long that might take...anyway onto the journey.

Week 2: Inkscape

After a very brief introduction to Inkscape and its complex language, here are some results:

(1) Blues1 (ABOVE RIGHT): Using the calligraphic tool to create ribbons that I can change the colour of the inside, stroke (ie the outline of the ribbon) and turn into solid shapes, create multiple layers and gradients and fill effects. I decided to use only blue, partly because I find it calming - and learning software is contraindicated for my calmness - and to experiment with a very limited palette.

(2) Sunshine (ABOVE LEFT): Using the Text tool to enter text, which can be formatted, stretched, contracted and made to flow into shapes or around curves and spirals. In this case it has been turned from an Object into a Path and the Node tool clicked. Individual and multiple nodes can be selected and stretched, moved and overlapped for interesting effects. If I had multiple objects and turned each into a Path I could use further items from the Path menu to cut out bits of shapes. In this case the text I used was SUNSHINE, which I then proceeded to completely obliterate.

(3) Stairway (BELOW RIGHT): Using the 3D Boxes tool, Node tool to stretch and alter the shape, Group to group several boxes and Clone to Replicate groups and I also changed opacity to get a translucent effect. All three of these images have been Exported to Bitmap, but this one does not seem to save quite as the drawing file did?!