Note book
Semester 2
Week one (Jan 25– Jan 31)
This week’s course is the same as before, which introduces the schedule, work and tasks of this semester.
Assignment 1
- A completed digital Proposal Form
- A presentation of the digital Proposal Form
Deadline : Monday 12th April 5.00pm, Week 9
Assignment 2
- Presentation of Practice Project – completed and exhibited in the Summer Show (or not)
- Research Project – 1,000 word review
- Student Notebook – online notebook
Deadline : Monday 10th May 5.00pm
The theme of this semester is Animal, which is similar to Nature last semester. I’m excited about this topic! 🙂 We have a lot of discussion in class, to the word animal have a discussion. Animal is a noun, but it is not only the noun, it can also stand for many, can also try a lot through this word……..
Week two(Feb 1– Feb 7)
Workshop (Becoming animal)
This week’s lecture is still focused on the word animal. The whole course is divided into two parts: 1. Appreciation of the film 2. Presentation.
Becoming Animal Becoming Animal is very close to nature and animals. It’s relaxing to watch a movie, and you can even feel the director’s point of view.
Miranda says we can take notes and draw some pictures while watching the movies :)))) Here are my notes.
Comfortable music relaxes the mind and gives color to music through vision. In today’s practice, there are two parts of music that bring me visual experience, especially the video of Bees. The light feeling brings me lavender, while the high frequency sound in the music causes rapid blue flicker. In the whole video, bees occupy every position and yellow and orange colors fill the whole picture.
RESEARCH OF JELLYFISH
Jellyfish have been around for millions of years, even before dinosaurs lived on the Earth. Pulsing along on our ocean currents, these jelly-like creatures can be found in waters both cold and warm, deep and shallow and along coastlines, too. Some jellyfish are clear, but others are vibrant colors of pink, yellow, blue and purple. They can be bioluminescent, too, which means they produce their own light!
Jellyfish digest their food, which consists of fish, shrimp, crabs and tiny plants, very quickly. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to float, being weighed down by the large, undigested grub in their body.
The jellyfish itself provides a tasty meal for other ocean creatures, particularly sea turtles, who like to guzzle them up regularly. In some cultures around the world, people eat jellyfish, too. In China, they are considered a delicacy, and are also used in Chinese medicine. –National Geographic
Week 3(Feb 8– Feb 14)
Jellyfish are graceful, free and soft. I can’t imagine how to express them, how to convey them. So I tried to draw some illustrations to find out…
Pollution, too, may be fueling the jelly frenzy. Jellyfish succeed in all sorts of fouled conditions, including “dead zones,” where rivers have pumped fertilizer runoff and other materials into the ocean. The fertilizer fuels phytoplankton blooms; after the phytoplankton die, bacteria decompose them, hogging oxygen; the oxygen-depleted water then kills or forces out other marine creatures. The number of coastal dead zones has doubled every decade since the 1960s; there are now roughly 500. (Oil can kill jellyfish, but no one knows how jellyfish populations in the Gulf of Mexico will fare in the long run after the BP oil spill. –Abigail Tucker, SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2010
This video gave me some ideas.
· What is used to show the softness of jellyfish?
· How to reveal the freedom of jellyfish?
· Such graceful animals have undergone hundreds of millions of years of reproduction and become strong.
Plan A
Maybe I’ll use video, a combination of photos, videos and illustrations.
My hands are like the soft umbrellas of jellyfish, and I use illustrations to draw their free and flowing tentacles.
Plan B
Video jellyfish.
Photograph my hand imitating jellyfish in water on green cloth.
Add my jellyfish to a jellyfish video and float with them in the water
Workshop
This week’s lecture made me think a lot and got a lot of shocking figures. I felt sad and sorry for the part about Lost. Meanwhile, my thoughts also connected with the nature in last semester. Animals are also a part of this planet, and they also enjoy the same right to exist on this planet as human beings. Today’s society may no longer need to survive in the natural environment, but millions of creatures are homeless simply because of human needs. Lost Lost Lost Lost… In the future, people will lose more than just nature and insignificant animals.
First Tutorial
Miranda gave me a lot of inspiration and suggestions. After the first tutorial, I became more clear about my theme and production method.
Homework:)))
Designing animals is really fun!! I was really excited, but the glass bottle did make me a little confused ~ it was a challenge for me! Do it!!
Week 4(Feb 15– Feb 21)
It’s been an exciting week, with peers thinking and fun! Everyone’s animals are friendly and even have no natural enemies. It’s so cute!
My animal
The animal I designed is also a jellyfish. They live near subtropical oceans, such as the Mariana Trench. Hence the name trench jellyfish. They are a group of amphibious mammals that resemble jellyfish. It can change the oil pollution in the ocean, it has a lot of mucus on its body, and this mucus may be toxic to some fish, but this mucus can purify the oil, break it down into fresh water, and mix it with the ocean.
In the sea
They are born in the rocky walls of the Mariana Trench (nearly 1,000 meters deep) and live in groups, but these groups are leaderless and friendly and peaceful. They like to go with the flow and be at ease. Their bodies are transparent, and they sometimes fluoresce, but whether or not they fluoresce depends entirely on their mood.This friendly trench jellyfish feeds mainly on silver shrimp, small fish and seaweed and has few natural predators, except octopuses, whose stomach juices can produce venom.
On the land
When they are about 10 to 15 years old, they start to swim upstream between October and December. The drop in water pressure causes a chemical change in the venom on their skin, forming a hard shell, like a shell. The main task on land is to mate, in the same way that most mammals do. Males die about a month after mating, and females live on land for about a month during pregnancy, nocturnal, and feeding on insects, shells, and small crabs. Until the time to give birth will return to the trench near, after giving birth to the mother died. The baby jellyfish continue to form colonies in the waters where their parents once lived…
experimentation
I took some pictures of my hands imitating jellyfish, and I wanted them to show the stretch and freedom of jellyfish as much as possible.
This process makes my hands feel very relaxed, like doing hand gymnastics. Loosen and tight make the blood flow in my hands change differently. I enjoy this kind of exercise very much.
Later, I added some tentacles to my hand according to the program A discussed in tutorial, but it was not easy, the visual effect was not very prominent, and it was difficult for the audience to think of jellyfish, which was very boring.
So I tried to adjust the color, hoping to find a different answer…..
Here are some of the state experiments I did.
Week 5(Feb 22– Feb 28)
Although I did not attend the workshop this week, I am happy that I finally returned to Aberystwyth after a gap of nearly a year. It also gives ideas for group work, although it is not the most perfect
My idea ·Trace
- The preparatory work
Choose your own animal.（It can be something you design or something you like.）
Research your chosen animal, learn about it, and practice its behavior.
Your behavior can be at any time of the animal, at birth, during mating, when attacked, while sleeping, etc. Or you can show them all.
Prepare some colors, which can be acrylic paint, gouache, liquid foundation, lipstick, etc.
Prepare a room covered with white paper before the workshop begins.
- Workshop
Before entering the room, dab your favorite color on your feet, body and any body parts you might touch, such as your lip prints while eating. (Now that you’re the animal, pay attention to the number of feet you have.)
After entering the room you can begin your animal time, leaving your tracks, footprints, signs of your past visit and so on.
The workshop can play some natural sounds, animal calls, we are together with them.
Record the process with a camera.
experimentation
I was deeply immersed in black and white and speckles, and it was fascinating and interesting. The spots may be regular, uniform in size and color, as in the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. It can also be irregular, but it gives the same visual effect, like leopard print.
I’m also trying to take advantage of this wave point and add this element to my videos. Black and white can also be vaguely seen my hand, flexible movement, like the deep light in the sea, there are free jellyfish, they are also colorful.
Week 6(Mar 1– Mar 7)
Second Tutorial
I’m very proud that my work can go on, it’s going well. After the second tutorial, Miranda confirmed all my previous schemes!! They give a very strong visual effect. Of course, this is not the end, I have to continue to work, improve, try to merge the three programs, restructuring. I’m looking forward to what’s next. It’s really exciting…
Research
Finger Gloves — Rebecca Horn
Rebeca’s finger gloves give people a sense of awkwardness. Her excessively long fingers hinder her movement. I think she is using her body to interpret the incongruity of exaggerated things. This is really interesting, it looks like she is picking something up, but in fact she may be touching it. Due to the uncoordinated fingers, the visual perception of the viewer is very strange.
<My Teacher Octopus>
This is a documentary that Miranda recommended to me, which once again showed me the freedom and wonder of the sea, and also showed me a very different relationship between people and wild animals.
The director Forster used the documentary to record a curious octopus he found and the interesting interaction between him and it. I was surprised that Forster won the trust of the octopus, the wonderful relationship between them, the soul connection across the species. They keep each other company, rain or shine, until the end of the octopus’s life.
At the same time, I was also shocked by the forest under the sea, the tall and thick seaweed, and the colorful coral, which also made me think of our theme of last semester and my work. Compared with the plants growing freely under the sea, the plants on the land are particularly pathetic. Both animals and plants have their own way of life and survival rules, which should not be interfered too much by human. Just like the octopus teacher, although she was bitten off a leg by a shark, Foster, who was recording with the camera at the side, did not intervene. This may be the way that Foster respects her. 🐙
experimentation （A journey in search of sound）
Collect some sounds for my video, come to the beach, the sound of the waves, the sound of the wind, the cry of the seagulls…
Week 7(Mar 8– Mar 14)
This week’s workshop is really wonderful! Everyone introduced an artist with a certain personality, I really like the illustrator introduced by Nidhi, his work are really cute, the painting style is clean and the content is a bit ironic and funny.
The Serpentine Exhibition introduced by Miranda was also quite amazing and amazed by their unusual equipment, their fir-tree view of the world and their works really gave me a different audio-visual experience!!
My research
- Yellena James
Yellena James is an American illustrator. Her works are very personal, colorful, strong and visually striking. What attracts me most about her works is the themes she chooses for her paintings. Most of her inspiration comes from nature, and the subjects she chooses for her paintings are all related to nature, such as coral reefs and jellyfish.
Notes
experimentation
I tried to make my videos longer, and I also tried to combine some of the previous experiments.
Week 8(Mar 15– Apr 11)
experimentation
Not too much thought, just keep going, just keep going, just keep going…
The experimental process
- Workshop
This week is the last workshop. I am very happy to participate in the window activity with my friends. Everyone is very involved in their roles and actively plays their animals.Following Nidhi and Richard, we feel the animals in captivity. We feel like animals that have lost their freedom. We are alone in the ‘cage’ waiting for the day of freedom and being watched by people….
Very interesting!! Thank you Nidhi and Richard!! Very different experience!!❤️
In the workshop, we not only exercised our bodies and immersed ourselves in the role of animals, but also record our feelings in the way of painting.
artist research
Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance.
Many of his videos make use of old televisions with bezels, stacked together to give a strong visual impact. For example, Good Boy Bad Boy, Nauman draws on the different levels of reading experienced by the viewer, who is presented with a series of contradictory accusations. Although the narrative of basic grammar is straightforward, the actors’ direct eye contact with the camera (and the audience) and the emotional intensity they constantly deliver imply aggression and aggression rather than educational. As with most of Nauman’s work, attraction and repulsion distract and confuse the audience.
- Bruce Nauman (neon)
He loves to use sound, film, video and neon in his groundbreaking work. His neon works give people a sense of visual shock. I don’t know why every time I see his neon work, I don’t find the colors dazzling. The colors of these contrasting neon signs are retro, but his work has a futuristic fashion feel.
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier’s neon art series Ba-O-Ba used colored neon lights paired with glass and aluminum plates to recreate the titular experience: with ‘ba-o-ba’ coming from Haitian-French slang terminology for bathing oneself in light or colour. Despite appearing as a whole, the series is intended to be seen as independent neon art sculptures — bathing the art viewer in colored light as they make their way around and through the works.”Ba-o-Ba” began in 1969 and is a visual and physical appearance of the work.
Collect neon paintings
https://pixels.com/featured/pyschedelic-zebra-jane-schnetlage.html
https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/paint-neon-color-neon-light-ultraviolet-light
https://fineartamerica.com/art/paintings/neon+color
https://pixels.com/featured/neon-color-sun-over-water-bill-mcclurg.html
https://pixels.com/featured/neon-galaxy-catherine-kinghorn.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33052117538.html
The experimental process
- neon
By learning some neon and neon color, I tried to add this element to my work, to add this retro futuristic feeling to my freelance work. I want to use this way to interpret the diversity of freedom, freedom can have its own style, just like Bruce Nauman’s works, let the sense of retro and future intersect, collision, contradiction and interesting!!
- TV
I hope the playback device can be an old TV or an art center of the eye to give the viewer a sense of physical restraint and limitation. This visual effect is in contrast to my theme, highlighting the freedom that we don’t have when we look at my work, but the jellyfish does. It’s on the TV, and its freedom and happiness are not mine…
event management team
It is a great honor to join the Event Management Team. But it is a pity that the words can not be clearly seen in the final designed programme. I am sorry about that issue!!!!!!
However, the whole process was very enjoyable. The posters and banners made by Anna had a very spring feeling. We tried to meet the title of the Spring Show and some conditions such as animals, captivity and cages. Here are some of the posters that I made even though they didn’t work, and the final programme.
posters
