I have decided to put my work up on the website in order to visualise how it would look like if it was in an exhibition space. I would use the same design as I used on the website with the backdrops of nature against my photos.
I would also add nature and city sounds to compliment the display and offer a more thorough audiovisual experience.
After a discussion with my tutor, I have come to a decision to use crops on my photos in order to empathise certain parts of them, make them look more interesting and engaging.
Here are the new version of my selected photographs, with a few more added
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Here are some of the shots that came out of the triptography technique that I applied with my film camera.
In this series of images human relationships and behaviour is juxtaposed with the architecture of the human culture.
William Burroughs has a theory “logic of control” about languages of aires and control structure. Burroughs uses cut ups as a technique to cut through the rigid aspects of reality. He speaks about the governing structures of language and thought that control and trap us in our everyday lives – cut ups act as hacking and breaking through the structures of the language. Burroughs and Deleuze claim that globalisation, late capitalism, psychoanalysis, representation are all names of control.
I use cut up technique in my project as a symbol for breaking through the structure of my dreams and thought in order to open a new perspective on a representation of reality. My photographes were guided by these texts and thus they represent the resistance to the norm and the standard of living. This is also demonstrated through my photos by the usage of triptography as it shows reality in a different dimension.
On the photo above you can see the linear quality of the urban environment, like a web. It represents that we as humans are being trapped within the structures of urban environments, unable to escape them. Typography which appears around the city acts as symbols of language that also structures our life in a certain way.
It empathises the fact that humans created environments around them that have become the structures that trap and constrain us. Blake describes this phenomena as “mind forged manacles”, a sense of not being able to get outside of the representatives of the culture around us, the stories and the narratives that we created for ourselves.
On this image you can see a contrast between the cold, empty and shallow office room and a street protest full of people. Here the chaotic organic human behaviour is juxtaposed with sharp lines, the structure and the architecture.
These people are crying for apolitical action and are strong believers in the power of the democracy and the freedom of speech. However, at the same time the shallow and dark office room that “hangs” above them acts as a brutal reminder of the order which persists in out everyday life.
There is a sense of chaos and disorder on both of these pictures from the climate protest. The flow and crowds of humans here are overlayed by the buildings symbolizes once again our urge for the freedom which is constrained by the city structures and regulations.
It shows how we, as human beings are very interconnected with our environment. We have an ability to compartmentalize, we can be marching on the climate change process however at the same time disconnected from the effect that our actions have in the real world.
Again, the humans on this photograph appear to be trapped within the city, capped by the roads and the order of the pavements, straight lines. They are serving food in their uniforms and it symbolises how we as citizens serve to the civic powers within our governments.
I wanted to show the impact that our actions have in culture, resituating people within the environments that they are interconnected with. For example, on the photo above the DJ is manipulating the dancers directly by twitching the knobs on his controller.
Human behaviour is fluid and water on this image acts as a symbol of this fluidity.
The contrained and regulated space of the railway station is juxtaposed with an open air free space in nature. It is the relationship of the city and the nature – the contrast between the freedom of being and the constraints and regulation of the city.
A contact sheet from my second film roll
My original plan was to make shoot and develop at least 4 full film rolls, however given the current restrictions posed by the global pandemic, I was only able to shoot 2 rolls of film. Therefore, I have a significantly less amount of material to choose from.
However, despite that I am still going to make as much effort as possible in order to ensure that my work is of highest possible quality. I am going to experiment with what I already have and try to make the most use out of my material.
Thankfully I have a full access to Adobe Photoshop that will be very helpful if I was to make any edits. After looking at my existing work, with the suggestion from my tutor I realised that it would be great if I had more abstract shots of the architecture and the nature. If I was able to, I would go out and take some photos like that. However, given the current situation I decided that I will try to use crops of my existing photos to make them more abstract and maybe surrealistic.
A contact sheet from my first film roll
In this post I am going to explain how I used the cut-up technique for my project. The technique of creating Dadaist poems is a process when you pick out random words from your cut ups and put them together to create a poem that doesn’t necessarily have a great grammatical structure. However, I decided to just rearrange the original text in order to give it a new meaning, like in the original cut up technique.
I laid out all the cut out words in front of me on a clear surface in a chaotic order. I tried to look at them with a blank mind and just mindlessly pick out the words that struck my attention for some reason thus forming some sort of associations.
I then put the words that I picked next to each other and I could see that almost every time I did it, the words related to each other in one or the other way. For example, as you can see on the picture below, I picked out “sadness”, “cold”, “uncertainty”, “control”, “anticipation” etc. I can relate this process to the “free association”. Free association is a practice in psychoanalytic therapy. In this practice, a therapist asks a person in therapy to freely share thoughts, words, and anything else that comes to mind. The thoughts need not be coherent
In traditional free association, a person in therapy is encouraged to verbalize or write all thoughts that come to mind. Free association is not a linear thought pattern. Rather, a person might produce an incoherent stream of words. They may also jump randomly from one memory or emotion to another. The idea is that free association reveals associations and connections that might otherwise go uncovered. People in therapy may then reveal repressed memories and emotions.
My approach was to try and apply the free association technique to my cut up words in order to let my subconscious guide me when picking out random words from a pile. I then took these words as a basis for my poem and tried to form structured sentences around them. Unlike with the other poems I wasn’t even trying to make my first poem rhyme.
I believe that the text that came out of this was based solely on what was going on on my subconscious at that time. I made it at the time when the virus was just emerging in the UK and first steps were taken to try to tackle it. Almost everyone was feeling worried, scared and a little lost.
With Dadaist poems being more of a surrealist technique, my approach to cut up acts more as a way of accessing the subconscious. I believe that it relates better to the theme of my project.
When making a poem I continued to pull out words from the pile which connected to each other in one or the other way. Then I have attempted to make a poem which actually rhymes by consciously picking up specific words for the endings of the sentances. It didn’t corrupt the notion of free association because they were still formed around the subconsciously chosen words.
These two poems don’t particularly have a strong semantic load. They were also made in a chaotic manner and thus they represent my thoughts. The rhymes just came out of nowhere and it was such a free flowing process, I guess because I got the hang of it.
The aim of my project is to uncover the subconscious, what lies underneath our everyday lives. I am going to explore how humans interact with the structures of the city that they have created. I am using a surrealist technique called triptography, where you create a triple exposure on film shooting over the same film for three times. I believe that this technique will help me to achieve a surrealist effect that will resemble the subconscious – changing thoughts, memories that overlay each other just like the film that has been exposed multiple times. Another surrealist technique that I am going to use is the cut-ups, originally created by William Burroughs, is where you cut up the text into separate words and then rearrange it to create a new meaning. In this way, as Burroughs suggests, it is possible to metaphorically cut through the structure of our everyday lives. William states that we have created patterns and boundaries for ourselves, even stating that language represents a form of structure. He suggests that cut up technique is a way of breaking through and escaping the structure of language.
After looking at several surrealist techniques, I have decided that I am going to use cut-up for my project. I have been making dream journals where I have recorded my dreams in quite a chaotic manner with no certain structure, just like how they appear. Then, I cut every word out and put them together in a different order using a cut-up technique in order to create a new meaning.
The cut-up technique (or découpé in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
In the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged.
This is an example of a Dadaist poem:
When rearranging the words I realised that you tend to produce a text which resonates with what’s on your mind at a given time. Here is an example of the cut-up that I made. It was produced at the time when the virus was emerging in the UK. The text that came out of it reflected some worrying thoughts that were on my mind. That way, I can say that I have accessed my subconscious and made it visible.
In today’s session we have assessed our own project’s progress so far as well as the project of one of our course mates. Here is what I have written about my project:
The project identifies critical and aesthetic research questions broadly; however, it doesn’t go in depth in analyzing those theories. More evaluation is required around the key theoretical concepts. There is an evidence of sufficient research, although a more thorough research is needed into the chosen topic. There is also an evidence of research into the related forms and design of the possible outcome of the project presented on the workbook blog. Some relevant examples of other similar work in the field is also presented, however it requires more evaluation. A relatively high level of formal and technical control of specialist medium is demonstrated. However, the medium is not presenting particularly innovative ideas and needs more experimentation. There needs to be a link between the internal and the external context of the work in order to explain the basis for the chosen images. Technical work is of good quality and it successfully reflects the theoretical context behind the project. However, the amount of work done needs to be doubled in order to have sufficient material to choose from for the final outcome of the project. There is an evidence of successful time-management and a clear documentation of process of work development shown in the workbook blog. The project has a realistic and realizable plan given the timeframe. The aesthetic and theoretical aims are well reflected within the project output. However, a clearer framework for the output of the project needs to be identified. More planning needs to be done for the photoshoots in order to show how the images are being captured in the unconscious ways. A reasoning is needed as to why the specific images were taken. It would be useful to look at more work of other practitioners in the field of surrealist photography in order to get a sense of where the project lies within these practices.
Jane's Advanced Media Production Project