UNIT2
My practice in the second unit is based on my practice in the first unit, and I am inclined to explore 5 contents beyond subject itself in this period of practice:
1. Digitized materials are diverse. Are there more possibilities for presentation of characters in video works?
2. How to exhibit digital works physically.
3. As computational art work, what kind of different reactions can the digital material of the work itself have with other different physical materials.
4. The form and identity of digital works in a space.
5. What is the unique identity of digital works in interdisciplinary group exhibitions?
1. Break the work routine of unit1 and explore the possibility of diverse digital materials
In the practice of unit1, I have always used my performance as a medium of expression, so I imagined if I could extract the characters from all my video works and make a character introduction collection.
When I watched the exhibition SHE KEEOS ME DAMN ALIVE, I found that the character designs in this game are not only very attractive in appearance, but the artist also endowed these characters with very interesting story settings, which were collected in the exhibition brochure.
Exhibition-SHE KEEOS ME DAMN ALIVE
Characters in exhibition brochure
I continued the thinking of this project in the first unit. I think that the multi-screen display of works is a way to break the narrative line of traditional video works and show performances from more angles.
At the same time I was influenced by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. I wanted to use digital characters to act out my narrative instead of the way I would shoot in front of a green screen.
I wanted to build an archive of all the characters I've featured in my films and make a set of digital sculptures.
Digital sculpture is the digital image of performing roles extracted from my video works. Sculpture is a non-static image displayed in portrait screen. These digital sculptures represent different female states, which are different from the instantaneous presentation of traditional sculptures, and repeatedly show the unique physical state of women over a period. This set of sculptures can be regarded as a general archive of my video characters.
Concept map of digital sculpture
2. Build a new unique creative process
1. Build character prototypes:
In this step, I will refer to some characters in the film and think about the relationship between character modeling and personality.
The evil image of The Cell, 2000
The justice image of The Cell, 2000
In the film The Cell, the different positions of the same character are determined by the shade of the character's eyeliner and the color of the clothes. Red and black are evil, and white is good. Creating a character with this intuitive shape is very clear and worth learning, but it is also too conservative.
Different character archetypes in The Cell, 2000
Different character archetypes in The Cell, 2006
Character in Jibaro, 2022
In The Cell, characters of different ages, different states, and different shapes are also used to shape different psychological states. This reminds me that I can assume that my characters can be people of different social identities.
In The Fall, the costumes of the characters are exquisite, which is an important tool for distinguishing the status of the characters. For example, the oriental princess with a face-covering fan inspired me to use some objects to give the characters a stronger expression. Also in Jibaro's film, the exaggerated shapes and expressions of the characters add excellent expression to the story.
Interesting references from other fields and other pathway peers
The making of Pinocchio
The post from Jake Patte,
BA Drawing
The work from Katya Alisia,
BA Photography
The work from Alexe Pavelescu,
BA Sculpture & CCI
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Character Design Experiments in the Digital Part
After researching and talking with our technical tutor James, I made some attempts:
1. Animate digital characters with blender.
2. Use Character Animator to capture facial expressions and digitize facial performances.
3. Make digital clothing with Marvelous.
Animate digital characters with blender
Digitize facial performances with Character Animator
Make digital clothing with Marvelous
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Character Design Experiments in the Physical Part
Although I already had the idea of making digital characters, but because physical materials and physical sculptures can stimulate my imagination more, I decided to make the characters' physical clothing while imagining the characters' stories.
The first draft of the character's background story
The first draft of the character costume design
Costume making
2. Organize all Characters:
On the one hand, I am influenced by The Fall, Jibaro and other works, and I hope to enhance the dramatic effect of the character through costumes. On the other hand, I always want to stick to the uncanny characteristics of my work, so I need to make the character design more. Close to everyday reality. To sum up, my new character costumes are very everyday, and some are more dramatic.
In this step, I still shot all the characters in front of the green screen like unit1, but this shot can be regarded as a backup material and a second draft for my narrative inspiration.
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Method1: 2D to 3D algorithm technology
Look back at the small chapter of Character Design Experiments in the Digital Part that I tried to digitally model characters and digitally model clothing. I think that direct manual modeling is rigid on the one hand, and on the other hand, this approach has no continuity with my previous practice. I want to keep the character of my work in the process of digitizing the character.
So I hope to reproduce the image I shot into a 3D model that is basically the same as the character I created by some technical means.
3. Digitize Characters:
I tried an algorithm that can convert 2D pictures into 3D models. This was my first attempt at digitizing my characters and performances. Since this algorithm directly adds a dimension of information, the solid model has many wrong sides, and there are fewer successful cases of transformation. Another problem is that this transformation cannot give the model material, so the material of this model is doodled by me. This results in a heavily distorted rendering, which is also an interesting style, but not quite what I expected.
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Method2: 3D Scanner
I quickly found a solution, using the Polycam - LiDAR 3D Scanner tool to reproduce my live-action image, and the result of the scan had the brokenness of the characters in Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's work, while retaining the personal performance characteristics of my work. The scanned characters seem to be real, and there is a distance from the real, which creates an uncanny valley effect and achieves the effect I envisioned.
4. Empowering Digital Characters to Perform Actions:
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What action
IThe first step in doing this is to collect more meaningful actions and behaviors. As is my usual creative habit, I like to exaggerate everyday actions and transfer them into performances.
In the process of imagining the background of the character's story, the performance is practiced and recorded, as the dynamic material of the later digital sculpture.
Video recording of performance practice
Inspired by the work of Pina Bausch and Thierry de Mey, I felt that abstract movement combined with rhythmic rhythm can create a sense of extreme and elegant absurdity, and the repeated movement can also emphasize the meaning of the action.
Yvonne Rainer's concept of "The Mind is a Muscle" led me to see in her work the helplessness of freedom and loneliness, dullness and sensitivity coexisting. Thierry de Mey's work Fase infiltrated this kind of dullness and uncanny into every dance step. The basically consistent steps of the two dancers caused the viewer's discomfort, but the occasional inconsistency of the steps broke the viewer's consistent thinking. This experience inspired me to make the work CanCan.
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The Method of Empowering Digital Characters to Actions 1:
Inspired by the work of Thierry de Mey, I felt the fascination and grotesqueness of the two characters performing the exact same repetitive actions. I decided to choose a meaningful dance for my two digital characters to imitate and repeat each other.
This form of action production, choose Mixamo this website is more suitable.
Initial practice effect
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The Method of Empowering Digital Characters to Actions 2:
Use motion capture equipment to collect data and attach data values to digital models to generate animations. This method can make my digital character completely replace my personal performance, which is more flexible, but it is more difficult to collect data, and it is still in practice. The next project is to completely replace my live performance with digital characters.
Current Practice Results
3. Adjust the practice results
1. CanCan:
This work is my first attempt at a series of digital sculptures.
This set of sculptures can be regarded as a general archive of my video characters. In this work, I extracted two images from the archive and gave them a movement of cancan dance. In the background, two contemporary immigrant women discuss the opportunity to stay in a foreign country. The work connects the politicized plight of women from the 19th century to the present through the collision of voice and character.
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Depiction of the can-can by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895
The background sound of this work is a dialogue between two Chinese women talking in Chinese about how to get a British green card, which talks about the political dilemma of the female immigrant group in the context of the post-epidemic rectification environment.
Can-can is popular in the 20th century, in which women lift their legs to show their thighs to please men. In this way I hope to connect the social plight of women at different times.
The thought of cancan was inspired by this VR work Le Bal de Paris that was exhibited at Barbican. This work made me feel the glitz of the upper class in the 20th century. The bunny girls dancing can-can dance at the dance are the default vr characters, and they have never been important roles that need live performances. They danced dumbly and vigorously. In my eyes, this is an interpretation of the current situation of women's society at that time.
In this work, I learned from Thierry de Mey's work Fase, and created an uncanny effect by two characters dancing Can-Can at the same time. And by constantly emphasizing and repeating the dialogue to break the completely consistent pace of the two characters, this glitched emphasis also highlights the status quo of women full of obstacles.
1. Tango in a flooded castle:
This digital video work created in the context of the post-epidemic era and the war between Russia and Ukraine. The purpose of the work is to strengthen the character's powerlessness and numbness in the narrative loop by magnifying the absurd effect of the environment. The sense of stagnation and the valley of terror effect carry out the whole incoherent scene with no sense of time, together with the deindividualized performance to construct a surreal contradictory space.
This work continues my previous creative process to a certain extent. The difference is that this time, influenced by the wars in Russia and Ukraine, I decided to present my understanding of the war from a female perspective, which is different from the previous creations that were limited to female topics. In this practice, I hope that by reducing the proportion of the characters in the scene, the characters' manipulation of the story can be weakened, so as to achieve a sense of helplessness in the overall work. Therefore, the performance of the characters in this work is no longer the focus.
Another difference is that I gave up narrative in this work. I created a sense of nothingness through 5 related and fragmented looping scenes, which was intended to eliminate the concept of time in the work.
I hope that the audience will feel helpless in the work, and the five looping clips also hope that the audience can join this depression, no solution, and timeless space at any time.
4. Test my artwork with peers & The feedback
I have shown my images on social platforms and online film festivals, but never offline, so I rarely get direct feedback from others.
On International Women's Day, I was fortunate enough to participate in the exhibition Ain't I a Womxn: Feminism for Everybody, this time I showed the work made by unit1 Cars without dick. I was not satisfied with the screen displayed, which also provided an opportunity for my later presentation to think about the presentation method. I realize that a large screen is not necessarily a good presentation.
I was relieved that there were a lot of people filming my work.
1. Exhibition Ain't I a Womxn: Feminism for Everybody
On International Women's Day
I also participated in an interview on Rounded Radio-International women’s day, sharing the view of the difference of Public’s attitudes towards feminist between West country and China, and also listened to the views of other feminists. This made me realize that feminism should penetrate into all aspects of life, and the interpretation of feminist ideas in my works is not limited to purely female topics, which also paved the way for me to create works that look at war and immigration from a female perspective. I started to focus on more social issues than just digging into feminism.
interview on Rounded Radio-International women’s day
2. Pop-up Exhibition in uni
Inspired by the first exhibition, I decided to present my work in some interesting media in our university's cross-pathway exhibition in March. While adding points to the video works, it can also better connect the works of other pathway students.
During this period, I happened to be doing my first foray into digital sculpture. So I thought, I can have three characters in different dimensions in my work at the same time.
1.The clothes on the chair are the physical 3D me, but this is in the past tense, and only the clothes are left.
2.The monitor on the table shows the filmed story, the 2D time-based me.
3.The monitor on the ground shows the The 3D me in the digital world, this me in a timeless state of eternity.
My display of these three states is also my rethinking of female identity. At the same time, the expressions of different media and materials echo the works of students from different pathways.
This is my first attempt to break the limitations of the 2D screen and try more new materials to show my work. Among them, experiments with physical materials such as cloth, clothing, tables, plants, etc., as well as textured media materials such as old TV sets, have allowed me to see more possibilities for my work. Also saw a beautiful picture of the symbiosis of computer art and other art forms.
The feedback for this exhibition has been very good and I am quite satisfied. I also learned how to burn discs and how to use old TV sets and media players. The only downside is that I forgot to record the work on video, which reminds me to do a good job of recording in the next exhibition.
3. Exhibition [anti]static in a pub
The participation in this live exhibition is different from the International Women's Day event and the pop-up show in March. The challenge this time is how to coordinate the works in the face of a wider range of artists of different professions.
I collected a lot of feedback from the public for this exhibition. Most people who like the work are the color of the work, the absurdity of the story, and the part of the performance. Most people can also immediately guess the subject I want to express, which is very comforting to me.
But I am not satisfied with this presentation:
1. I am not satisfied with the position of the display screen, the display screen is too high for the audience to watch. It also taught me that if I'm presenting off campus, I need to keep in touch with the curatorial team and let them know about my presentation requirements.
2. The player that comes with the TV has a poor looping effect, which reminds me that any display that needs to be looped in the future must be equipped with a media player.
4. Preparing for the May Exhibition
Before the exhibition in March, I did some projection tests and found that if my works are presented by projection, I am not very satisfied with the color. But in that pub show, the dim environment combined with colored lighting made me think about the role of light in the work when it is displayed. So I started to pay attention to the lights when I saw the exhibition and do some test with light.In the end, I found that for my work, if I want to use projection, it is still the most suitable for a dim environment.
Mapping test
Although the exhibition in March allowed me to see more display possibilities that break the dimension, I still hope to draw the audience's attention back to the content of my film, after all, this is the focus of my expression. So I started to pay attention to the way the video works are displayed, and here are the references I collected while watching exhibitions.
Sideways Looking, Peng Zuqiang, 2022 in Cell Project Space
A group show, 2022 in IMT Gallery
The big screen has always been my dream, but sometimes it's hard to achieve.
I noticed that in the exhibition Sideways Looking, the screen hanging in the middle of the space is translucent, which makes the projected image clearly visible from both sides of the screen.
So I started to think, what kind of material can achieve this effect. I quickly found the answer.
Tracing paper！
Effect test: high color rendering! Both sides are super clear!
I also wanted to have a big screen, so I bought white sheets for testing, and the effect was also very good, but it was difficult to cut.
So for the exhibition in May, I still chose a large size monitor.
5. Computational Art Pop-up Show
Because I have fully researched the display materials before this exhibition, I am more confident in preparation.
Preparing for the exhibition
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Work1: CanCan
This work is my first attempt at a series of digital sculptures.
This set of sculptures can be regarded as a general archive of my video characters. In this work, I extracted two images from the archive and gave them a movement of cancan dance. In the background, two contemporary immigrant women discuss the opportunity to stay in a foreign country. The work connects the politicized plight of women from the 19th century to the present through the collision of voice and character.
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Work2: Tango in a flooded castle:
This digital video work created in the context of the post-epidemic era and the war between Russia and Ukraine. The purpose of the work is to strengthen the character's powerlessness and numbness in the narrative loop by magnifying the absurd effect of the environment. The sense of stagnation and the valley of terror effect carry out the whole incoherent scene with no sense of time, together with the deindividualized performance to construct a surreal contradictory space.
This exhibition is quite satisfactory. On the one hand, it is the first time to show my new digital sculptures; on the other hand, it is also my attempt on new materials. The discovery of transparent screens has greatly inspired me, and I will use this display method more in the future. This method not only makes my 2D works present a 3D effect, which is more in line with the expectations of digital sculpture, but also makes the works appear light and flexible in the space, making it easier for the audience to focus on the works themselves without being disturbed and limited by the frame of the display screen.
Regarding feedback:
1. Many people said that the expression of CanCan's work is more relaxed and interesting. But for me, other influences and my digital sculptures cannot be analyzed separately. The digital sculpture series is a character material library for my video works, and video works are a space for digital characters to respond to social events and express my views.
2. The interpretation of many viewers enriches my work, some people read out anger in CanCan, thinking that the characters are kicking those texts. Some people saw themselves depressed during the quarantine period in Tango in a flooded castle, thinking that these characters were actively destroying the world. I am grateful for these interpretations, and these insights have allowed me to re-understand my work.
Inspiration for the next exhibition:
1. The sound part of this exhibition has not been handled properly. Everyone in the venue is interacting with each other. Next time I will choose to rent directional speakers.
2. Find a larger model of Tracing paper for a larger screen.