Sunday, 15 May 2011

FINAL PROJECT: Praxinoscope Theater






                                                        




Saiq’a Chowdhury
Final Project
For Ernesto Klar

In my final project for Core Space Studio, I tried to explore the concepts adhering to our relationship with space and how it allows to interact with it.
            I believe art can communicate directly to people about very important matters in the world in a way that really penetrates into a person. I had been constantly thinking about how we, the people of the world, are in a constant battle with one another and our environment. We fight and wage wars and destroy lives and the world around us. Recent events (e.g the Japanese tsunami and radiation leakage) had nudged this notion of thought even more and I find myself feeling rather helpless as I am unable to do something that can potentially bring about a positive change. My mind had been drowned by the constant bickering of politicians, of the massive changes in weather that’s been taking place due to our long term misbehavior towards nature and the rising injustice that we let ourselves go through. With all these thoughts in my head, I sought to make something that would clearly communicate the distressing truth about how we are the ones harming ourselves and how little we pay attention to that.
            Initially, I wanted to make an interactive installation that would allow a person to step into a platform of reality that is constructed to provoke certain thoughts and behaviors. In this particular case, I wanted to be able to record how a person may react if he or she is put into the position of hurting the innocent. At the time, I was reflecting on ideas warped around how human destruction almost always results in the destruction of those lives that deserved to have lived longer and the best example for that, in my opinion, was children. I had wanted to set up a platform where rows of unknown children will be holding up bull’s-eyes to receive a bullet shot by an observer. The observer is free to choose which child, each representing either a brother, sister, son or daughter.
            However, this idea became more and more complex – not only conceptually (questions such as “Who are these children?” and “What is the context of this shooting?” and “How do we judge who deserves to live or not?”came up) but also practically (how would we record the feelings and internal thoughts of a person while performing the shooting and weather or not these feelings will be real as the whole shooting itself is a staged one). Faced with these complications, I started to take another approach and tried to give identity to these children; put them in a real world scenario.
            The second step to the conceptualization of my piece led to me investigating the various wars people have waged against one another and I thought of choosing one that moved me the most and recreate that scenario and place the children within that environment. However, this process too became much too complicated – and a little bit too ambitious with the time I had in order to complete the project.
            It was time that I seriously started to think outside the box. One of my biggest challenges throughout the process had been the conceptualization of my piece. I found myself jumping back and forth between concepts and ideas, not being able to put my finger exactly on what it was that I wanted to say. This was when I took a break from it. Let it rest. Then I got back to it a few days later. And this time, I started writing and ended up producing a rather macabre poem (I will attach this at the end of my statement).
            In the process of writing, I realized that I had started to play around with satire and narrative. I wanted to make myself understood very explicitly and I had been having trouble doing exactly that. With this realization, I started illustrating the concepts I had brought up in my writing and thus began the process of simplifying my concept, while exploring various narrative styles. I thought I’d make a model of the environment I kept picturing of the world and film a video based on that environment, but soon, the project made yet another big jump.
            Eventually, I discovered the praxinoscope and my idea took an exciting leap from there. I loved the way it looked and worked and I was absolutely intrigued by it. I really wanted to make it. It seemed perfect. It was interactive, simple and direct. All I needed to do was to figure out how it worked and simplify my concept to its core so that I could fit it into the twelve-paneled animation strip that I was going to prepare for the praxinoscope. At the end, my ideas regarding how we, humans, destroy ourselves and our environment was expressed in a simple animation where a man is seen to chop down a tree that lands and destroys his own house. The praxinoscope was then put inside a box with a “screen” which is supposed to act like a mini theater. It crops out the animation from the whole piece and allows the viewer to watch it, as if it’s a real screen. The box i.e. the theater, is decorated in festive colours that are common in Bangladeshi Rickshaw Art (also used for making film posters) and I see it being carried around in carnivals and fairs where people, especially kids, can take a look and have a little fun with some old-time animation toy…and hopefully learn something or start thinking a certain way.
            In the future, I would like to improve this piece. At the moment, my “theater” is not exactly functional. The measurements for the praxinoscope and the theater must be adjusted in order for them to work together effectively. I would also like to create more strips of simple narratives, telling longer stories.


Saturday, 19 March 2011

Team Project: Invasion of Private Space

We often don't realize it, but we usually have a space around us that we call "private space". It's in close proximity to our bodies and we tend to dislike anyone entering it without permission. This can be best portrayed by using the example of staring into somebody's eyes. While eye contact is normal and even encouraged during interaction between people, it is usually considered to be rude if you do it to a stranger on the bus for example. Whenever this happens, we tend to become nervous and we may try to avoid the gaze by looking away but no matter what we do, it is unnerving. One says "The eyes are the window to the soul" -- so what if we take 3 people and connect their eyes? What if each eye sees somebody else's eye and there is no way to avoid it? What if you literally stared at 2 people's eyes at the same time while they do the same to you. What will you do?
Will you frantically try to avoid them, will you start comparing the two eyes? Who's calmer? Who's eyes are more pleasing to look at? Who can you relate to more? 

This project tries to answer these very personal questions. It's an exploration of personal space,  an invasion of the "inner space"
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Tuesday, 8 March 2011

Invisible Cities

A storyboard inspired by Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"

I was inspired by the language and mood of the book and the intense surrealism that lingered with every place and journey described there. And I believe the same kind of surrealism exists in real life. Calvino's book brings together the world of fiction and truth and shows how integrated they are. And walking down the streets of a busy city, these are some of the thoughts that have come up...
Interpret as you may :)





Project 1 Exploring "space": A "Times Square" View of NYC

 



When we were asked to come up with an idea to creatively express the concepts and human experiences of space, I ventured out into the city to look for inspiration. I soon noticed just how much useless information are available all over the city. Information that dosen't necessarily help anyone in any way. So, out of plain impulse, I started collecting these materials of "free information" wherever I could get hold of some. At this point, I had no idea what I was going to do with these papers. All I knew that I wanted to derive and make something out of them. Later, as I looked through all the material I had collected, I thought of making a collage of the city bringing together its artificiality, as expressed by all these useless pieces of information that mostly comprised of "great deals" "limited offers" and "low prices".  However as I went through the papers, I discovered some nice words that got me thinking how the city also has so many wonderful things. I thought there was a great paradox building up here, especially because I found most of these papers around the subway (where these ads promoting the artificial are mostly seen) and it's also where all sorts of art music and poets linger around filling the city with a lot of colour and creativity. I realized the artifice overshadows a lot of the things which are truly beautiful and original in the city. In the process, I ended up picking out words, and found myself making more of a typographic collage of the city - of the most cliched image of the city (i.e. an image that is as seen and commercial as the ads on display --- the skyline!). The aim was to show how the artifice overshadows the real colours of this glorious city.
    In my next step, I created a total digital version of my collage. No more paper, only the 'illusion' of paper and I colour coded it to show how under the artifice, there were other things hidden. As mentioned earlier, this project was a direct interpretation of what Times Square seemed to be to me and in the third step, I tried to portray how mass commercialization just blurs out all that we could've otherwise noticed about a place.

I'd like to work more on this project and make a series of images based on the concepts of space, human experience and commercialization.