This shot inspired the whole piece. It has a dark, sinister vibe to it.
I wanted the juxtaposition between a utopian environment and an industrial feel.
The theme of lonliness and emptiness was present throughout.
I wanted to convey a very industrial feel.
An
example of selective greyscale. I wanted to emphasize the EXIT
sign, as well as draw the eye towards the end of the hallway.
An example of my attempt to emphasize texture.
A clear, crisp shot with vibrant colors.
A grainy, high-contrat black and white shot.
Emphasis on the effect of color.
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Description:
My first ACTLab project was a slide-show style presentation of various
photographs set to music. At first I was inspired to make sort of
a film-strip art piece by printing photos on transparency and looping
it around in a Mobius Strip shape. I wanted to emphasize the idea
that there was no beginning or end (and actually a Mobius Strip only
has one side, as well), just as it is sometimes hard to tell when you
have awoken from a dream and when you are still dreaming.
Considering more the presentation of the project and the feasibility of
showing a piece that would have to be passed around, I opted to go for
a digital version of the same idea, and hoped my photographic narrative
would be cyclical enough to suggest that dream-loop. While
brainstorming ideas for my narrative, a friend suggested I go take a
walk and take my camera with me, so I did. I walked around the UT
campus and took various paths I had never taken before. I took
over 300 pictures of various buildings, alleys, courtyards, etc.
A few hours later at the end of this walk I had the basic idea of the
story I wanted to tell. I had been drawn to the
industrial/mechanical/factory/laboratory/concentration camp type
feeling of the campus at night, and looking over the photographs I had
taken, I found a common theme of lonliness, abandonment, and industry.
A lot of my shots focused on various types of machinery (from the
chilling stations), fences, pipes, steam stacks, empty parking garages,
empty lawns, etc. Everything was well-kept and running, there was
just an absence of people.
So I took this idea and ran with it, and developed a story about a guy
(me) waking up in an unfamiliar place with no one around, and exploring
this strange factory/laboratory-type environment, dealing with his
lonliness in a place that shows every sign of use and activity, but
never any actual human presence.
How:
Over 110 digital photographs, each individually edited. I only
used basic editing techniques (crop, contrast, brightness, greyscale)
via JASC Paint Shop Pro 9. All of the photos were taken with my
Fujifilm Finepix F30. This camera is great for low-light
conditions, which suited the project well since most all of the shots
were taken between 7pm and 3am. I set the camera to the
"Night" and "Color" settings to get vibrant color in the dark, and I
set the ISO to 100 and used a tripod to get clean, crisp shots.
This setup worked well, and my only real difficulty was
photographing myself (framing the shot, setting the timer, running off,
standing still, running back, checking, doing it again...). It
was interesting to see which doors were locked or unlocked at night and
on the weekends, and no doubt I would have different shots had I
wandered to different places.
After the slide show was compiled, I chose various songs from the Donnie Darko
soundtrack since they had the strange industrial vibe I wanted. I
wanted to fit Air's "Run" into the presentation, but it didn't match
well with the other songs, so I placed it at the beginning, before the
show, to play as I was setting up.
Theoretical:
- The
slide-show stlye presentation was inspired by the film "La Jetee" we
watched in class. It had many still photographs which flipped
through as a single narrator read a story. The film appealed to
me because it showed that a movie-like narrative could be told using
still photographs just as (or perhaps even more) effectively than a
motion picture.
- Most
of the photographs were taken at night because I really liked the
lighting. The campus seemed to contain itself, to light itself,
without any input from the outside, much like dreams are self-contained
and don't necessarily take in interactions with the real world while
you're sleeping.
- The
idea of making lighting an important aspect of this work came from my
studies of Plato, and his suggestion that sunlight was the purest form
of "truth" (or reality) in his allegory. Because I originally
wanted to make a filmstrip of the photographs, I wanted pictures with
good contrast so that there would be an interaction between the light
in the room and the pictures the viewer is looking at. This would
relate to the fact that dreams are often reflections of reality, and
without light (without some "real" experience) there would be no
picture to see. In my adaptation of this idea to a digital work,
I chose to emphasize color as it would represent various shades and
degrees of reality. As color is the absence of other colors in
pure white light, it is the distillation of the complete spectrum.
Similarly, colors in my photographs are meant to be shades of
previous "real" experiences filtered through the mind into this dream
narrative.
- Some
photographs are in color, some in black and white, and others a mixture
of both (using layers - basically a selective greyscale). I did
this both for aesthetic reasons, as well as a tribute to the cliche
that some people always dream in black and white, and others dream in
color. Personally, I have dreamt in both. As I was
arranging the photographs in the order of my narrative, it just so
happened that the black and white images clumped together and the
colors images looked better next to each other. This
represents waves of color and greyscale images, as if the dreamer faded
in and out of color imagery (or in and out of reality, as one might
interpret it).
- The
narrative itself is cyclical, both beginning and ending with a lone
image of an arm lying on the ground. The interpretation is left
to the viewer whether or not he is sleeping, passed out, laying there
awake, etc. Similarly, one can "wake up" from a dream only to
find themselves in yet another dream, or the same dream all over again.
- Just
as some images are in color while others are greyscale, some images are
extremely clear and crisp while others are grainy and have high
contrast. This represents once again the range of dreams people
can have. Some remember their dreams very clearly, while others
have trouble recalling anything specific and instead can only remember
a general feeling or a blurred image of a figure, etc. I also
like the idea of "cold media" that suggests that something actually has
more meaning when it isn't easily distinguished (such as a grainy black
and white photograph) because the viewer is forced to interpret it and
give it his or her own meaning.
- I
also tried to give some photographs an emphasis on texture, because I
liked the idea of doing more than just seeing and hearing things in
dreams, but also feeling, smelling, tasting, etc. It's rare that
I use other senses besides my sight and hearing when I dream, but I
wanted to at least try to give the sense to the viewer that dreams can
actually have you touch things, and feel textures, as well. What
would a blind person or a deaf person dream about? Certainly
they'd have more emphasis on their other senses.
- My
narrative also begins rather suddenly, with many setting-establishing
shots to show everyone had disappeared. This was intentional, and
meant to imply that sometimes you are just "dropped" into a dream, with
no lead-in or setup. You are just there, no explanation given.
Not everything makes sense in a dream.
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