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.
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