Back in the lab again after a week of shooting, a bit of research, and other random stuff. Here's my latest refinement on the first image I worked on. Be aware that the image is at an awkward stage right now where it looks pretty great at thumbnail-size but when you view it full, it's painfully obvious that it's still a WIP.
Jim helpfully mentioned during the crit that the sky at the top of the image was strange looking for that elevation, so I've replaced it with what I think is a more convincing texture.
I've also added a human presence to the image, and eventually the buildings in the middle third of the image will start to look like an inhabited village.
I scrapped the bright hull-thing that was eating up space above, as it's dimensions were awkwardly manipulated and didn't fit with the new direction for the area that I have in mind. I'm going to make the top structures have a few more components, but also be more decayed-looking.
I have some interesting ideas that I'm tossing around for the companion texts of the image. I'm finding that it's enjoyable for me to mull over thematic ideas and possible characters while I work on the visual details of the image. It alleviates some of the boredom of attending to the nitpicking details and provides a good, concrete starting point for me to think thematically. I've never considered myself all that much of a storyteller, but I'm finding it's considerably easier to think about such things when I'm working on something visual. My mind has something solid to spin off from, otherwise I just can't see what the thematic possibilities are.
When I sleep, I have the dullest, most unmemorable and unimaginative dreams.
Need something to counteract the rampant verbosity of the last post. Here, watch this helpful introduction to the fantasy writer George R R Martin, brought to you by NMA TV:
La Jetée is the story of a man held captive by rogue scientists in an enclave below a ruined Paris, post-World War III. The man is the only prisoner able to survive the rigors of a draconian kind of time travel procedure without succumbing to insanity or death. His captors exploit his visions of the idyllic pre-war past and the far future as tools to ensure their survival in the impoverished present. Through the experiments, the man finds solace in the blissful world he finds himself sharing with a woman whose image he remembers, an image which is later revealed to be tied to his ultimate fate.
La Jetée is a story told through voiceover narration, music, and still photography. Technically La Jetée can't be called a "motion picture" or even a "film", really, as the visuals are almost all still photographs, timed in succession. But it still feels every bit like a cinematic experience. As a time-based work, it is fluid. Each image has its own specific duration that is timed perfectly to the music and narration, so that rather than having the feeling of watching a slideshow, to me the images feel more like a wave of memories. It's a strange feeling, recognizing things as memories that aren't one's own.
I was initially drawn to La Jetée because it was mentioned in an article in British Journal of Photography ("Out of Time", Dec 2010) dealing with photography that attempts to break free from it's context of time and place. It is discussed how generally a large part of a photograph's content is it's connection to the moment in time when it was taken, acting as a point of reference to the past. La Jetée however uses the language of photography, traditionally seen as a documentative medium, blended with that of fiction film to create a hypothetical point in time. The time/place reference point of the image is shifted from our world to a fictional one.
This dynamic is even referenced indirectly in the narrative itself. Leaving behind the harsh reality of post-war imprisonment, the main character temporally journeys to a "dateless world" where he and his companion "have no memories, no plans... Time builds itself painlessly around them." This idyllic world is ambiguously referenced as "pre-war", but unfolds dreamlike for both the protagonist and the viewer. To me this timeless setting is analogous to the larger setting of the film itself, in which its photographs are defined not by the time and place in which they were taken but rather how they evoke the imagined space depicted.
Of course, that is not to say that La Jetée doesn't make reference to the world in which it was created. The early 1960s was a time when apocalyptic fears were at their height, and the film successfully conjures the cold threat of nuclear devastation. But the film isn't solely about nuclear war, but rather uses such themes as influences in constructing a moving narrative that moves beyond its time and place.
La Jetée is a type of work that I aspire to create. It's a type of work that takes influence from the world in which it is created, but through recombining and refraction, becomes a depiction of a place outside of our time. It transcends the limitations of its context, yet it still resonates with pertinence regardless of the time in which it is received.
To be fair, the title of the previous post was a bit of a misnomer and more of an impulsive product of my state of mind pre-crit. There are still a few technical details that I need to sort out to make the image more fully realized, some that I was aware of before the crit and some that became clear from seeing other people's reactions. A few things I'd like to put into order:
I'd like to make the background have some depth to it (e.g. clouds) to make it more than unrealistic flat white. I experimented a bit with some background textures as I was working on it but wasn't happy with anything I came up with so I left it blank, but with a bit more work I think I can come up with something more convincing.
The main pilgrimage structure is still a bit too symmetrical. I'm thinking to correct this I might actually re-shoot some of the objects I used to build the object, maybe keep one vertical half while the other would be from corrected perspectives.
Lighting and shading still needs a fair bit of work to enhance the three-dimensionality, I didn't have enough time to invest in this step near the end.
One of the strangest bits of feedback I got from the crit was that a few people, including one of the instructors, thought that the precipice that runs across the supporting pillar of the central structure was actually the point where the column touched the water, and everything below that point was the column's reflection. From this point of view the picture must have looked like shite. This is the sort of visual confusion that kind of drives me up the wall. To fix this, I plan to extend the image downward to actually show where the column rises from the water. Hopefully this will clear up one of the things that was bothering me about the image, that being that the image doesn't look grounded enough in terms of perspective, scale and distance.
Another useful bit of feedback I got from the crit is regarding the companion text. Most people agreed that it helped to expand on and define the world of the image better than having a purely visual depiction. However, some felt that the inscrutable and rather impenetrable vibe given off from the text was rather alienating and didn't help open up the image much. I can definitely see where this is coming from. In fiction, (particularly science fiction where the constructed world is vastly different from ours) the viewer/reader often needs a relatable protagonist that responds to strange new things from a suitably ignorant perspective. Think of Luke Skywalker. We can gain a much clearer idea of what it means to be a Jedi by learning it as he does than if we spent 120 minutes watching Yoda building his solitary swamp hovel and reflecting philosophically on the breeding cycle of murky aquatic predators with a habit of mistakenly gulping astromech droids. But hell, I'd watch that. It would be bizarre as hell and most likely confounding, but it would stimulate my imagination better than this...
So it seems there could be a conflict here. On the one hand, people who see what I've created need some kind of gateway perspective to make it less confoundingly impenetrable, but on the other, I like evoking the opaque and unfathomable (just look at the title of my blog). My fix for this is to have it both ways. I'll keep the "Boreal-Liminar array decrypted fragment", but I'll also include a less alienating textual perspective, perhaps from that of the "Indigenous" or another group. Opposing perspectives will hopefully help to make the work conceptually three dimensional, similar to the way I strive to make my work more three-dimensional visually. I plan to have multiple perspectives/narrative fragments to accompany each work, serving the purpose to both unpack the constructed world more and to raise intriguing questions as well, without leaving the whole picture too muddled.
For the majority of the past week I've sequestered myself within the lightless confines of the AV Lab. But that's okay because I've spent my self-imposed imprisonment working, and now have something to show for the crit. The fruit of my labour:
the text is a little fiction I cooked up to help flesh out and expand on the world of the composition a bit better. I'll make another post soon showing the steps in the process and behind-the-scenes, but for now I have to get ready for the crit.
Time in the AV Lab yesterday yielded some new developments in the second image that hopefully illustrate more clearly the intended layout of the composite:
The pseudo-clover thing hovering at the top right will be the port on the right structure for the bridge that will connect the two structures. The tanks at the bottom will be considerably reshuffled; they provide interesting forms but they're not helping much to make the image look highly elevated. Weathered stone contrasting with drab metal will be the two main materials, though I'm thinking I'll try to reverse the typical uses associated with them.
Very early stages of a new piece that I started yesterday. I'll work on this concurrently with the other one and hopefully both will be ready for the crit next week. This one should be more of a man-made environment, with a view from very high in the middle and another skyscraper visible in the right of the image.
Progress yesterday was slow and ultimately minimal, though I'm glad to have gotten a dwelling started at least. Hoping to build up the space to be livelier, as well as keeping the architectural forms interesting and varied.
Here's the latest installment in an image I might call Above the Pit:
I'm kind of working toward showing at least two groups within this image: the large structures at the top being evidence of a technologically advanced civilization that has since vanished, leaving behind its monumental works, and along the cliff face in the middle I will show an active population utilizing more humble designs. The signs adorning the large structures at the top will be altered but remain present in some form; I like the idea of having fragments of a lexicon of signs still present on the hull. Here's an earlier stage of the composition, just a little further ahead from the initial preview:
I've widened the circumference of the pit a good deal, partly because I didn't find that great of a reason to have the edge of the pit being wet, and also to enhance the space available to do things deeper in the pit.
I'm pretty happy with the pace of progress so far. Pretty soon I'll have this image finished up and I'll move on to doing another.
They were built up, topped with structure, styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and aesthetics into a compound architecture. Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. The streets between the buildings were tight. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas, and what might have been mansions. Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats' constant motion.
Miéville is a masterfully descriptive writer, and here he really evokes the sublime in architecture evolved through accumulation and repurposing. I haven't read The Scar in a few years and that was only once so I didn't recognize the quote immediately, but I was shocked to realize how much of an influence the world of this book (as well as everything else I've read by him) has obviously had on my main conceptual interests. I suppose I'm trying to do with images what he does with imagery in text: create imagined settings that possess their own histories, colliding or adapting into a strange new point in time.
Much of the interview has to do with his more recent novel The City and The City, which I haven't yet read, so I reluctanltly skimmed over some parts because I didn't want anything to be given away. I did however read his comment on allegory in fiction which I found quite interesting. I do agree with him that using allegory in art implies that there is a single, direct reading of the work, and that limits the imaginative potential of the work for the reader/viewer. The way I see it is like this: if you have a world that has been created by the artist specifically to comment on events and realities in our world indirectly, you have little incentive to delve into the intricacies of the imagined setting that don't relate to the main allegory. Allegory is certainly very important in rhetoric, but from a fictive perspective any worldbuilding present in the work merely serves to redirect the reader's gaze to that which it refers to; it's the vehicle that takes you to real-world issues without stopping to ponder the possibilities of the imagined scenery passing by.
I'm much more interested in being able to see something in fiction and visual art and imagine what else it might entail and refer to within the constructed setting itself. A work that respects the reader/viewer's desire to explore the imagined world is much more open to possibilities of interpretation and ultimately longer lived, I think. That doesn't imply the work should be escapist fantasy, either. The key is to be able to get lost in the countries of the imagination and to bring back knowledge gained from that journey to our world.
After much delay I was finally able to get down to to the AV lab and get some work done, thanks going to Callum and Karl Kauffman for helping with my USB stick issues. Here is a new proto-photo-composite I put together this afternoon:
The white half-blob at the bottom will be a quarry-like wall leading down into hidden depths. Further up there will be more obvious human development, with architectural developments of various origins in uneasy coexistence. The industrial beached-whale at the top will be transformed into something other than a ship. I don't want to explain much more at this point, but I do have specific ideas for how to carry on the composition.
I'm not sure how many of these compositions I'll manage to complete for the crit, but I hope to have three at the very least. One problem I need to work on is to stop obsessing over irrelevant technical details and redirect my energies toward experimenting with different thematic ideas more. That doesn't mean that my work will end up technically sloppy, but at I'm realizing that at some point it's better to be working through the thematic and compositional concerns rather than chasing the carrot of seamless technical perfection. I suppose my tendency to excessively polish my work stems from the fact that I work in a medium not usually known for visual refinement, to say the least.
Anyways I'm quite glad to finally be able to work in the internetless, whining dungeon that is the AV Lab. More photoshoppery to follow!
