photo album

While thinking of ways to make my idea more easily understandable, I came across a photo album chronicling to early days of my parents' relationship. I then decided that a photo album would be a good way of contextualising a narrative series of images , doctored in the same way as I intended for my hippocampus idea, only now would be a tale of more sustained memory loss under conditions like Alzheimer's or dementia.

I took a series of family photo style images though only a few were successful so I used some older photos to show a younger subject.

After a series of failed attempts at photoshopping photo album style portraits, I decided to physically alter old photo album photos of my father and me as a baby. I wanted to illustrate blocks of memory being lost so literally cut out blocks of the image and had them filtering away . I tested a few different ways of altering the image further, with bubbling by holding a lighter underneath etc . I settled on scraping away parts of the face with a blade .

I added words from the point of view of the per) suffering from memory loss ,questioning who the occupants of the photo are. To further understanding of the context of the photos.

I think my project is somewhat lacking in something , it didn't quite articulate the ideas as eeffectively as. i hoped.

To improve it I should have spent more time in the photography stage making the images look more polished, I had s small window to stage a photo with my real time dad and the staging of the photo of a much younger couple( hiding the face to hide the fact its not a younger dad).  I would have liked to have implimented the cutting out in a slicker manner also.

time art

In this piece I'm moving about in time so that my time art piece looks like it was done by a child?

Colour shift

the colour shift of the "stars" is linked to the observed shift in the colour spectrum of stars as they move about the universe, relative to the observer.

The stars display a doppler effect when they move, Red Shift- stars are moving away, Blue - stars are moving closer.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_shift

Sounds

Sounds used will include-

Room tone- Recorded in the Hackney exhibiton space on campus

Walla/Rhubarb - low Db, high bass- to simulate the sound travelling through the boxes as one is in the exhibition space.

Footsteps- on wooden exhibition floor- Recorded on Hackney floor, large room so a lot of reverb, record close to the walls to ensure reverb is picked up and also to simulate walking through the box maze.

Footsteps in the snow -Boots in the road ice salt box -crunching + heavy boot step sound-heavy bass to make it distinct
                                  -  squeaking of snow steps- cornstarch wrapped in a towel being twisted.

Winds- Wailing, high speed winds, turn the mic adjacent to the wind to minimize distortion ( not entirely effective due to the capricious nature of the wind

Whisper- layered whispers (canon)- mess about with stereo side, treble , bass, reverb etc to give the impression of the origin of the whispers coming from all around the point of auditon.

Breathing- laboured breaths / chattering teeth/ chattering breaths? - simulate breathing in a cold enviroment.

Sound Synopsis?

The sound scape will be engineered to create an immersive experience that puts the listener into the shoes of an exhibition goer. The visitor will be walking through the exhibit and taken in by the lack of colour, coldness and emptiness is transported, in their imagination, to a snowy mountain top where they trudge their way into a cave/tomb where they are accosted by the oppressive whispering of the dead, before snapping back to reality and the exhibit.

basically a lara croft game?

Further Sound Ideas

The idea of packing away her mothers belongings coupled with the strong themes of death that run throughout Whitread's works makes me think of the dead in a tomb. this is synonymous with the Raiders of the Lost Ark where objects are filed away in a warehouse. The idea of a tomb is further compounded by my initial feelings of the exhibit evoking the feeling of walking through an old library space.

except messier/less fancy

The colour and feel of the piece makes me think of snow and cold weather, this idea is shared with one reviewer who said "it feels more like an icy maze" (Andrew Dickson, The Gaurdian, 25 Oct 2005)

Combining these ideas i will create a snowy/mountaintop tomb soundscape in an imaginary way.

Rachel Whiteread research

Rachel Whiteread, the first women to be awarded the Turner Prize , is a contemporary artist who mainly works with sculpture. Many of her works take the form of casts.

Her best know works include House (1993) , Ghost (1990) and Embankment (2005-2006), however House is probably her best know as it was the work she was awarded the turner prize for.

House was an expansion on her previous work Ghost and caused a lot of controversy in the local council when they reached the decision to demolish it on the same day Whiteread recieved the Turner. (a somewhat ironic decision)

Her works have often been regarded as being evocative of Death and Absence as most of her works are of things that are not there.

Embankment (2005-2006)

Embankment was a exhibition held in the tate modern, it consisted of 14000-odd translucent white polyethylene boxes , which were casts of the inside of different cardboard boxes. the boxes were stacked in a variety of ways, some in ordered rectangular stacks close to the floor and others in mountainous peaks that stretched up above the rest.

 Whiteread has cited both the end scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark ( 1981, Dir. Spielberg ) and Citizen Kane ( 1941, Dir. Welles) as visual inspirations. The death of her mother and the subsequent packing of all her belongings into cardboard boxes was a large influence as well.