Assessment for the first unit: Introduction, planning, research
The incipit (September_07)
When I subscribed this MA things seemed to be easy and straight forward. But not always things are what they look like. I was confident that after finishing a BA with a discreet result and a good dissertation my abilities were enough to start an MA in perfect control… but probably I was a bit too confident…
The First project (October_07)
My first idea and proposal for the Master was relate excursively with the visual arts, especially the VJ practice. During the past summer I had been impressed so much by visual shows during concerts. The visuals used in the concerts were wonderful. The nature of the images used were absolutely various, their were involving Visual art, Animation, real footage, Illustration. Because I am familiar with all this media, ideas started to floating in my head.
When I started my research my ideas were clear: create an innovative interface to enable VJs to be free of movement around the stage, rather that be relegated behind a desk.
I started reading the bibles of digital art, visual art, and VJ (like the D-FUSE book) and the things were going quite well, I was quite confident that I was pointing in the right direction. I found that most useful was the primary research that I conducted into the field of VJ. I went into clubs during October where I knew that were having some VJs show on and asked to speak with them, or just straight go and ask them some questions. I had the luck to end up speaking with few artists in venues, especially in the Synergy Project (http://www.thesynergyproject.org/) and other Art-space called the ‘Shunt’. Especially the Chat I had with this guy called Steve revealed things that I was not able to see before. The field that I was looking at was not what I was considering be. My idea was good but the field that I was looking at was huge, complicated and really, really technical. But the hundreds of meters of cables connecting their devices were not making any sense to me. In my imagination the VJ world was involving lot of animation, drawing and scanning bits and pieces. But it was not entirely like that.
Depression and confusion (end of October_07)
I spent at least a couple of weeks in a mental confusion thinking at what was the right choice to do. I Was not convinced anymore, not thinking that was the right think to do for my career. I tried to force myself to keep in the same direction, but my body and my brain were not responding at all. Few times I found myself reading chapters without be able to make any sense of what just red, or even worse, staring at the wall for hours.
I was in panic, I didn’t know what to do. After speaking with a close fired of mine, I came to the conclusion that the best things to do was probably doing a step backward and maybe considering to change the proposal for the piece of research. Soon I went to speak with my tutor Andrew and he advice me on what was the best solution to take.
The plan sounded simple: deconstruct my practice, my interest and my old project and reconstruct on top of that. Making sure this time that it would be the right choice.
Action!! (First weeks Nember_07)
The same day of my tutorial I went straight to the library and started sketching my thoughts and research into my beliefs. I began to braking down the problem into pieces and the same for my practice and my passion. First reason that appear was the fact that I wanted to turn my career more into the art side of digital media, away from the boundaries of digital design. I also began raking apart the subject areas of my interests. The VJ idea came along because I thought about combining together my different skills with different media all together, but in a more creative and free way. Especially free form the four walls of a graphic design studio. I underlined the more important ones: Illustration, drawing, video and my passion of music/dance as ‘core’ part of my previous project (fig:1 & 2). The Digital media stayed on top as a constant factor of my art practice. After hours of sketching ideas, drawing I realise my constant concern for the ‘concept part’ of all these practices. The generation of ‘ideas’ it is always the part that I preferred of all my jobs and that working in ‘concept design’ for movies and videogames was one of my aim for the future.(Fig:1)
The incipit (September_07)
When I subscribed this MA things seemed to be easy and straight forward. But not always things are what they look like. I was confident that after finishing a BA with a discreet result and a good dissertation my abilities were enough to start an MA in perfect control… but probably I was a bit too confident…
The First project (October_07)
My first idea and proposal for the Master was relate excursively with the visual arts, especially the VJ practice. During the past summer I had been impressed so much by visual shows during concerts. The visuals used in the concerts were wonderful. The nature of the images used were absolutely various, their were involving Visual art, Animation, real footage, Illustration. Because I am familiar with all this media, ideas started to floating in my head.
When I started my research my ideas were clear: create an innovative interface to enable VJs to be free of movement around the stage, rather that be relegated behind a desk.
I started reading the bibles of digital art, visual art, and VJ (like the D-FUSE book) and the things were going quite well, I was quite confident that I was pointing in the right direction. I found that most useful was the primary research that I conducted into the field of VJ. I went into clubs during October where I knew that were having some VJs show on and asked to speak with them, or just straight go and ask them some questions. I had the luck to end up speaking with few artists in venues, especially in the Synergy Project (http://www.thesynergyproject.org/) and other Art-space called the ‘Shunt’. Especially the Chat I had with this guy called Steve revealed things that I was not able to see before. The field that I was looking at was not what I was considering be. My idea was good but the field that I was looking at was huge, complicated and really, really technical. But the hundreds of meters of cables connecting their devices were not making any sense to me. In my imagination the VJ world was involving lot of animation, drawing and scanning bits and pieces. But it was not entirely like that.
Depression and confusion (end of October_07)
I spent at least a couple of weeks in a mental confusion thinking at what was the right choice to do. I Was not convinced anymore, not thinking that was the right think to do for my career. I tried to force myself to keep in the same direction, but my body and my brain were not responding at all. Few times I found myself reading chapters without be able to make any sense of what just red, or even worse, staring at the wall for hours.
I was in panic, I didn’t know what to do. After speaking with a close fired of mine, I came to the conclusion that the best things to do was probably doing a step backward and maybe considering to change the proposal for the piece of research. Soon I went to speak with my tutor Andrew and he advice me on what was the best solution to take.
The plan sounded simple: deconstruct my practice, my interest and my old project and reconstruct on top of that. Making sure this time that it would be the right choice.
Action!! (First weeks Nember_07)
The same day of my tutorial I went straight to the library and started sketching my thoughts and research into my beliefs. I began to braking down the problem into pieces and the same for my practice and my passion. First reason that appear was the fact that I wanted to turn my career more into the art side of digital media, away from the boundaries of digital design. I also began raking apart the subject areas of my interests. The VJ idea came along because I thought about combining together my different skills with different media all together, but in a more creative and free way. Especially free form the four walls of a graphic design studio. I underlined the more important ones: Illustration, drawing, video and my passion of music/dance as ‘core’ part of my previous project (fig:1 & 2). The Digital media stayed on top as a constant factor of my art practice. After hours of sketching ideas, drawing I realise my constant concern for the ‘concept part’ of all these practices. The generation of ‘ideas’ it is always the part that I preferred of all my jobs and that working in ‘concept design’ for movies and videogames was one of my aim for the future.(Fig:1)
Planning (November_07)
My relationship with technology is other think that it always appear to be important for my working practice. I have a love-hate for all the technologies, computer based programs and digital media. Cyberspace, cyber-society and post-humanism came out to be the core subject of what naturally I am concern about. This is relate about my anxiety about the future of our society, and where our society is going to be in the next future. I found really useful a book called ‘Clicking In’, a collections of essays edited by L.H. Leeson. This book offered me a broad view of the digital age. I found lots of different views and opinions about our society and about the cyberspace, like for example in the D. Bell book ‘An Introduction to Cybercultures’. (fig: 3)
My relationship with technology is other think that it always appear to be important for my working practice. I have a love-hate for all the technologies, computer based programs and digital media. Cyberspace, cyber-society and post-humanism came out to be the core subject of what naturally I am concern about. This is relate about my anxiety about the future of our society, and where our society is going to be in the next future. I found really useful a book called ‘Clicking In’, a collections of essays edited by L.H. Leeson. This book offered me a broad view of the digital age. I found lots of different views and opinions about our society and about the cyberspace, like for example in the D. Bell book ‘An Introduction to Cybercultures’. (fig: 3)
So few new points came out on my sketchbook: the concept of ‘Reality and VR’, the future, the future of Cybersociety, Concept art, concept design, and the body (derivation form my dance practice). Lied out all this parts I started thinking the way that I should combine all this things together. I actually realized that I was suddenly having a good new starting point because all this bits were matching together quite well already. From every of this points I started derivate ideas and concepts. After sessions of brainstorming, reading and looking at other people work (especially, sci-fi artists), I came out with a sort of logical path for my studies.The Future of the Project (December_07)
The late tendency of the detachment form the ‘body’ and the ‘Real’ is the most important into Cybercultures. We are loosing the sense of ‘face-to-face’ communication giving more and more importance to the computer interaction. With my skills of digital illustration, video I want to use the digital media to criticise the abuse of the digital tool and the loss of the ‘real’.(fig:6)
Use the media to criticise the media itself, like Dadaism did.
I want to offer a sort of ‘visions’ of the future into an installation where I could make the people think about our society and the problem of it, our future, and our mistakes. It helped me lot magazine and books like ‘Mondo 2000’, Imagine FX, and other portals of concept design (like conceptdesing.org). But rather that using just the media of digital painting, like most of concept designer, sci-fi artist do, my aim is using more that one media. Express my fear and my vision of the dystopia that could be our future if we are not careful about how we use the technological tool. Where one day instead of be us to use the machines as tool we might be in the position of being use by the machines as tools.(fig:6)
The late tendency of the detachment form the ‘body’ and the ‘Real’ is the most important into Cybercultures. We are loosing the sense of ‘face-to-face’ communication giving more and more importance to the computer interaction. With my skills of digital illustration, video I want to use the digital media to criticise the abuse of the digital tool and the loss of the ‘real’.(fig:6)
Use the media to criticise the media itself, like Dadaism did.
I want to offer a sort of ‘visions’ of the future into an installation where I could make the people think about our society and the problem of it, our future, and our mistakes. It helped me lot magazine and books like ‘Mondo 2000’, Imagine FX, and other portals of concept design (like conceptdesing.org). But rather that using just the media of digital painting, like most of concept designer, sci-fi artist do, my aim is using more that one media. Express my fear and my vision of the dystopia that could be our future if we are not careful about how we use the technological tool. Where one day instead of be us to use the machines as tool we might be in the position of being use by the machines as tools.(fig:6)
For the moment I am still looking for artist that combine multimedia to express visions of the future in a dystrophic way. I still looking at sci-fi artist, reading Cybercultures books and going though cyber-punk prediction of our future. I am looking forward now to going further on my research, discovering myself and my practice and creating art as the result of this path.