The Last Assignment

For the last assignment, I came up with the concept of struggles – struggling with who you really are. Us, normal ordinary people with interests, sexuality, dressings that are slightly different, but yet we cannot express ourselves the way we want it, due to this tight rope called social norms. I wanted to show more of people staring (eg throw a crossdresser in the middle of the crowd and let the crowd turn to stare. it would have been extremely interesting and funny to capture the looks on the crowd’s faces (which is not set up) but that won’t be conceptual, thus it was dropped.)

So here’s my first draft

The Lover

The guy in the middle (rahm) is in a heterosexual relationship with a girl, but he was reaching out for another guy’s hand.

(Kern commented that the guy on the left looks like he’s just a passerby whom accidentally walked into the picture and rahm randomly grabbed him haha.)

The Marked

Tattoos are usually associated with “secret societies” or not-a-good-person kind of mark (well, in the conventional, traditional sense) The tattoo “ore” on the guy’s arm is the vulgar, arrogant form of saying “I”. My idea is that in the process of erasing the tattoo, the guy is erasing his own identity and pride.

The Rebel

The Girl

This two pictures are about the dressing. It is inevitable that people will start staring at you if you dress in full geared lolita, or punkish rock style. Thus the girl is tied up and can only dressed in certain elements and still yet, tied up by social norms so she cannot really be herself.

The Woman

(I really am very very apologetic and thankful to kern! thanks for being so sporting. and anyway, the eyebrows makeup etc are shaved and done up digitally. I didn’t pluck his eyebrows haha.)

So this is a woman innately, but he/she has to act like a man because similarly, the ropes of social norms are bounding him/her.

The Artist

(this failed but anyway, the new concept is almost the same)

He wants to be an artist, but yet he has to put academic first, and thus he cannot draw as he likes. (the usual talk about how art can never survive in Singapore etc).

I’m changing this concept to dancing instead.

The comments were the the ropes are too loose. So I retook the whole series!

Ethics – Blog Exercise

I’m not too sure if this is relevant, but this reminds me of a time when this famous Kuching blogger, Kennysia, witnessed a horrible car accident. He recieved alot of flake for posting pictures of the accident, being accused of trying to increase his blog hits.

In a situation like this, is it ethical to post pictures that involves death and (quite) horrifying images? By the way, he had placed a disclaimer stating that the members of the family of the victims agreed to let him post the pictures on his blog. As a viewer, we already had the choice to look at the pictures, or close the window. Many people chose to look at the pictures and read the blog post, and commented that he was being insensitive for posting such pictures.

I feel that he didn’t do anything wrong. For one, he did stick to The Golden Mean (haha) – he found the middle ground in blogging that post – but not in the process of taking the pictures of course. But  I guess it’s still questionable, about why he took pictures when he was there helping. It must be some kind of journalist/blogger instinct to do such stuffs (okay I blog and I feel compelled to take pictures anytime anywhere).

Anyway, back to the blog exercise.

It was awhile ago that I saw this video and was utterly amazed. I can’t believe that photoshop can actually do such things. But after “playing around” with it for awhile I’m truly convinced. It really can do anything that you want, ie if you’re good at it! So what are the ways that readers can judge the credibility of the image in this era which photo manipulation is so common? (Sidetrack: I’m sure we photo-manipulate our pictures from time to time- the pimple here, the weird looking mark on your face.. etc. It’s almost like a form of make up. But it will be highly horrfying if it’s too different from your original face.)

Since I started off with a video about weight and beauty, I shall talk about the issue of how digitally manipulated photos reinforces our very warped perception of beauty.

An example will be those weight loss ads that we see around all the time. I think somehow, it should be known to people that most of the advertisments are thoroughly photoshopped. That is, either the “before” pictures were uglified so much, or the “after” – as in the effects of the treatment, was brushed up too much (as we can see from the video, it isn’t really that hard afterall).

What we, as readers can do for these genre of photographs regarding body and beauty is to be more critical – sometimes we get so excited over seeing the “effects” of the treatment that we totally forgot that advertisements are advertisements – they don’t tell the truth all the time.

For other genres, for example, edited photographs from Times that were shown in lecture, I feel that we should try to judge for ourselves and maybe, do some research if we feel that it looks abit fishy.

The second question of whether what I would tell a reader who complained to me about a picture of a car wreck that was particularly upsetting if i were a reader representative is pretty much answered in the first part of this entry. However, the medium is different. A blog is not a newspaper – which is supposed to be more credible. I would probably tell him/her that the picture is the true reflection of what happened. Unless a wider audience feels the same way, I would reconsider and think through next time it happens. The picture must also not be too gory to the effect of scaring, rather than telling facts. Further more, permission of the family should be sought if the picture is potentially disturbing, or it will show some parts of the body of the deceased.

Singapore Biennale 2008

Was really excited when we decided to go for Singapore Biennale on a Friday. It was a really great experience and opened my eyes to different artforms from all over the world.

Sadly though, I only managed to go to the South Beach Development and City Hall’s (so basically I missed out all the slippers and containers installment!!!). Here are some of the shots taken that day. In the second part of the entry I’d start on the blog assignment and talk about the artwork that I felt was good and one that I felt wasn’t really.

City Hall
Tropicana

Maggots

Raw Canvas

Xteriors

I seriously seriously loved this. Cracks me up everytime I see it.

Bachelor – The Dual Body


Blackfield

Irrelevant, but this little girl was so cute! She was dancing and twirling in her own world outside the Supreme Court that day when we were standing outside.

South Beach Development

This place is totally cool – Ms Chiang said if she were to have an exhibition it’d be her kind of place. I can understand why after being there! It’s rundown, old, tattered, very textured and the building itself seems to have so much to say.

Anyway, here are some of the shots there.

Fei Zao


One Hundred Years of Solitude

Creepy Area


Hair Salon

Okay there were alot others which I’ve not really processed and uploaded. But anyway, here’s the start of the blog exercise (Sorry about the overflooding of pics).

For me, I feel that art is very fluid, dynamic. I think that ideas and the spirit of the artist are the things that are more permanent. However, of course, nothing is permanent. For art installations, I love those that disintegrates itself or changes over the whole timespan of the exhibition.

So I kind of liked the September Sweetness decaying work, even though most found it disgusting and slightly senseless (well the smell kind of stinks though). I thought it was rather amazing, the work which the artist put through, and let it decay/get eaten/melted in the hot sun. the way the Biennale guide explained it, “..will deteriote as the days of the Biennale progress. In some places it will melt and spill into syrup. In others, it will crack and fall in chunks; elsewhere, armies of ants will slowly dismantly the edifice granule by granule. Heavy rain brought about during monsoon season could destroy the piece quickly. The hoice of sugar as material locates the work in a soceity that percolates in bitterness, a sweetening agent that appears to make things palatable..” (I found his flickr set!Click)

Anyway, back to the topic, I’m torn between two installations for “good” pieces I like.

I love the work Tropicana, by E Chen. The sculptures were made of woollen yarn.

(the scooter, bushes, flowers, ivy growing on walls and around the lamp etc)

I guess with a mother who crochets and me trying to learn how to knit makes me more interested in such works. However, one part of the artwork which caught my interest was the tips of the yarn were hooked to the ceiling.

Initially, I thought it was for extra support so that the artwork won’t fall (or something). But after reading the guide (and incredulously thinking to myself why would the artist hold up his work with the yarn connected to the sculptures (when obviously it’d just cause the artwork to disintegrate and become, well, a lump of yarn if you attempt to support the whole weight on it), I realised that it’s acutally pulled by a motor inside the ceiling which was very slowly winding up the yarn. Basically, the installation would have been gone after the exhibition. It coincides with my ideas of how nothing is permanent.

Another reason to why I like it is because it broke the convention of how sculptures should be – solid, angled, fixed and more.. “cold”. This work is very alive, soft, flexible and appealing.

The other “good” artwork that I like is the Blackfield by Ben-David, Zadok. I found the use of colour (one side black and the other side coloured), intricate details of each piece of metallic plants to how each is “planted” on the sand in the installation area brilliantly amazing. All the coloured side are facing one direction (thus the black side will be facing another direction).

The coloured side of the installation is very cheerful and happy, and the other side is stark black. According to the guide, the black side is like a scorched landscape against the sand. Maybe the artist meant it to show how we’re kind of destroying the colourful, joyful landscape with global warming and what-nots and destroying it? I’m not really sure about that, but it was beautiful nevertheless.

The “bad” artwork I didn’t get, totally, was The Yellow Mountain, Tse, Su-Mei.

(I didn’t take a picture of that. Think was too shocked.)

Upon entering the really dark room, we were greeted by a very eerie, mournful music and this yellow ball rose up in the midst of the chinese painting. So basically we stood there for very long to see what’s going on. But nothing came out! We left the room feeling very baffled.

..However! I did a little search because I cannot believe that it is THAT meaningless – this is the Biennale after all! And this is what I found.

“my other favourite, “the yellow mountain” by Tse, Su- Mei. She has another work at the south beach development which i quite like too. I “googled” her and found some of her other pieces which resonated with my thinking. anyway, this is a video which shows a shan shui hua and a moving orange circle. the circle rises like the sun initially but then it gradually moves around the “painting” to cease being a sun. The description for this work says that it is the artist trying to poke fun at chinese paintings. Because when we hear that it is a chinese painting, we immediately have pre-conceived ideas of how it should appear, in fact my friend refused to enter the room to look at it. Luckily my curiosity got better of me and in the end we both liked it. The humour was in the orange circle that we all assumed is the sun, but ended up to be like pac-man when it devoured a huge chunk of the mountain. I liked the music that came with the video, it was a good match, which is not surprising since the artist was born into a family of musicians. i’m glad i saw this. “

http://beberock.livejournal.com/8772.html

..okay. I guess we really totally missed the pacman part. It would have been funny I guess.

Assignment 5 – Depicting Mood.

This assignment requires us to take pictures that depicts moods. Here are some of the pictures I’ve taken (at Chinese Garden and the one below is outside my house.)

Loneliness

I was walking home after shooting at Chinese Garden on a particularly rainy day. The water droplets/mist formed a very nice effect with the street lights shining down.

Chaos

Koi pond with the fish fighting for food. Thus chaos!

Serenity

Path – Gloom

I like this picture because.. it looks very un-Singapore.

Abandoned

Someone thought that I climbed on the roof to take this. ._. no I didn’t by the way.

This is abit irrelevant, but isn’t it funny! Seriously don’t know what it was doing twitching it head here and there at such weird angles. It’s times like this I really appreciate the dslr in my hand – I can capture so many moments that a normal camera cannot under such lightings and speed of the bird’s twitching!

The Way Up – Progression

It’s 7 storeys up the pagoda, and it’s a very typical picture from the Chinese Garden. But I like it for the fact that it kind of shows us what we’d be up to on the way up – dizzy, tired, but the view on top is spectacular.

Chaotic Trees

I retook some of the pictures after the presentation because I FORGOT THAT WE SHOULD NOT USE ANIMALS. But well, I really like the fish picture so I’m using it for motion blur =D

Blog Exercise – Analysing a picture

young mother

Originally uploaded by sam_samantha

For this blog exercise, we are to select an image and analyse the picture on how might be read by target audience.

I chose to search for social documentary pictures and I found this picture, titled Young Mother. What struck me initially was the intensity of the woman’s gaze.

To start off, I’d talk about some elements of the picture, namely, light quality, focus and colour.

For the light quality, one thing that I noticed is that the lighting is quite harsh. The faces of the mother and child are really bright. THe light source seem to come from the sun, shining directly on the faces, thus the background is pitch dark.

The picture has a very sharp focus. Through this, I feel that the photographer was trying accentuate the mood she’s trying to bring out.

Using black and white for the picture, the very gloomy, harsh environment is highlighted. To me, I felt that the woman’s gaze is extremely.. strong. Even though it’s quite obvious that she’s living in pretty dire conditions, her eyes showed that she’s a very strong-willed, headstrong woman. The smile grim, yet contented. If it were a coloured photograph, the contrast of the dire conditions and her smile and gaze would not be so emphasized and dramatic as it is now.

As much as I love coloured photographs, I have to admit that certain effects are certainly hard to achieve with coloured pictures.

Assignment 4 – Urban Fantasy/Urban Phenomenom

This is a particularly headache-inducing assignment.

My urban fantasy is.. no more rain, no more storms.

So here is what I came up with the for the first tutorial,

Okay I have no idea why it turns out to be so greenishly blue.

It’s made up of parts like..

That’s mommy with the free ocbc red umbrella and a jug of water.

After the critic session I realised how flimsy my theme is. Thus! I changed my concept to urban phenomenon.

My initial idea was to have a gigantic bucket of water splash down from above, with a tiny umbrella (so the buildings are not protected). However, the concept is still too thin.

Here are some of the variations that I’ve came up with.

My newer idea is that humans are doing so much to try to prevent things that are unpleasant to us from happening (represented by storm & rain), for example, the heat that are caused from greenhouse effect – so we switch on airconditioners and fans to counter it.

But in the process of doing so, we’re actually worsening the effect (and the cycle goes on). Thus the umbrella is overturned, preventing the storms caused by us humans (from the bottom of building) from reaching the blue-er skies up there.

Surrealism

I was studying for psychology test when the chapter on Perception & Sensation. The “case study” was about this surrealist called Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter. She’s a polio survivor, who usually painted abstract and shocking images that reflected her inner thoughts and turbulent life. Here are some of the works that I found particularly interesting.

Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas)

The Frida on the left of the painting is the traditional, Mexican Frida which is hurt (shown by the severed artery held by the right hand and a hurt and torn heart). She is holding the hand of the more modern-dressed Frida sitting on her left.

The traditional Frida represents a very tattered and her shattered heart is exposed for all to see. It reflected how she wanted to fit in the ideal wife’s role for her husband (but instead, he cheated countless of times (including a year-long affair with her sister) and a number of events continued on, like how she started to cheat too and they divorced and got back together) and in the end she was left tattered and broken. However, the strong Frida is holding her hand and giving her life. That can be viewed as her being enlightened for the fact that she needs to be strong, and that the soceital norms do not really work at times.

What i like about her is how raw her paintings are. Instead of beautifying her artwork, she showed (intentionally or not I’m not too sure) in a nutshell, how ugly life is for her, her pain and inner thoughts.Maybe this is how surrealists are – laying it out open for all to see, showing their inner thoughts in a way that are not real and yet making sense in a way once you get to know the artist behind it.

Assignment 3

I had lots of fun doing this assignment. This is the first time I took nightshots, played with wide angle lens, trodding around everywhere with a (not so light) SLR on an extremely hot day. But it was really worth it!

Some of the perspective shots I’ve taken

Raffles City:

Haji Lane:

Sinking low with the wide angle lens!

After taking this shot a car drove from behind me. haha.

Zoomshots:

Daytime

This shot came out better than expected. Rahm was sitting opposite me at SMU and I decided to try. Coincidentally the sunlight was coming from behind him, and he was wearing a pinkish red shirt. And! My shaky hands syndrome was cured for awhile by putting my elbow on my knee tickling myself. hah.

Night shot

Stars shooting from esplanade

Assignment 2B

CNM department in action!

We’re supposed to take portrait shots of our CNM  lessons in action. The pictures taken were not really that great though =\

The lesson we took the shots in was writing for public relations. There are not much interactions, but here are some of the (more) interesting shots I’ve taken.

okay great we just found out that tutors can actually see what we’re doing when we’re sitting at the back of the classroom!!

I like this picture because of the composition. However, Ms Chiang said that too mnuch of the information is lost. The text on monitor can’t be seen, and the two people are blocking whatever they are looking at.

Patterned monitors

We took a number of “hand” shots, and this is one which I took. I found it interesting because even though we’re using new media, students still take notes the traditional way (pen and paper)!

This is quite a meaningless shot but.. I found the expression quite funny.

Assignment 2A

For this assignment, we’re supposed to take pictures with different apertures and shutter speeds.

Our group decided to use colourful objects to take the pictures, thus we bought peanut m&ms, dewberry coockies (!!! happy food!), and rahm’s (new) orange laptop cover as the place to put all the food to take the shots. ^^

Depth of Field: the distance between the closest and farthest object that are in acceptable focus. (to me it seems like the size of eyes)

Shallow Depth of Field (larger aperture-smaller f)

Deep Depth of Field (smaller aperture – bigger f)

Shutter Speed: amount of time that shutter is open (“eyelids”)

I think this it the one which I took (I think!). The others caught rahm at various contorted positions which I don’t think he’ll want me to put up. The ones which Shifa took are much much nicer.

Really looks like he’s flying! And the sunset was beautiful. Shifa sank really low to take these shots.

All my panning shots (slow shutter speed) failed pretty badly. Shall attempt and experiment again!