Inspiration

I have been a little bit stuck over the past few days as to how to present each line of the poem and have been looking for inspiration. It was when I was flicking through my ipod and came across The Kooks Junk of the Heart album cover that I found my inspiration.

I really like how it is partially really clear and partially painted and blured. I think that the painted area gives a really nice sence of movement and freedom and the more clear, photographed areas give the image some detail and areas to focus on. I think the combination of the two make the image really interesting and exciting. This is the kind of feeling that I want create in the images I create.

Further Experimentation

Now that I know that colour is an option for my final piece I have been thinking about ways to present each line of the poem. Having seen how successeful my moving photographs were, I have been experimenting with these photos and encourporating the text from the poem. I have done a dry point print of the poem and printed it onto different photographs to see how they look with the text on them. Although I like the look of the print on the photos, it isnt quite what I am looking for in my final piece and so I think I need to keep looking and experimenting.

Problem Resolved

Today I have overcome the problem that I came across yesterday. I have come up with a way to successfully project colour images onto the wall. I did this by scanning my images into the computor and using the projector that is connected to the computor. I put each image up on the screen and as big as it would go and then turned on the projector. This worked really well and so I can now consider colour when thinking about my final piece.

Problem

Since doing my short film with the media tutor I have been experimenting with what I can do with the projections and how far I can push my project using this piece of equipment.
I wanted to try colour and see if that would be a posibility for the slides I want to make. In order to try this I printed a few of the moving photos that I had taken onto acetate and put them onto the projector. Unfortunatly I have now realised that this doesnt work because the colour doesnt come throughh on the projections and so I will either have to come up with an alternative way to project colour onto the wall or make the images that i want to project into black and white. 

Creating movement

I wanted to try to create an image that showd movement in it because I feel that a really important part of the poem is the rythm and movement that it creates.
I decided that a good starting point for me to do this would be to take photos whilst on the train using a very slow shutter speed in order to capture the movement as the train speeds past different things.

I really like these pictures and intend to experiment with them and how to encourporate the poem with them as well as other ways to try and create movement in my images.

Success

Today I have spent the day with the Media Tutor, Jamie, who has been helping me to come up with ways of recreating the effect of a magic lantern projection using film.
I made this short film in order to play around with the equipment and get used to using it all.

To do this film I printed each line of the poem onto seperate pieces of acetate and one by one I used a projector to project the text onto a white wall. As I projected each line onto the wall I filmed each one for about 7 seconds and then paused it before swapping the piece of acetate for the one with the next line on. Once I had filmed all of the lines in the poem Jamie helped me to put what I had filmed onto imovie where I made each clip the same length and edited the film to make each clip push the previous clip of the screan. I then added the noise of an old fashioned projected to the backgroud to create the illusion that the clips were being moved along in the same way the old projectors did rather than a film.
I feel that this film was really successful and although it is only a test, I am very happy with it and I am going to keep this method of presenting the poem in mind for my final piece.

Rythm

I think that one of the most important aspects of this poem is its rythm and pace. You can aslmost feel the rythm of a train chugging along as you say it. After seeing the magic lanten slides in the Alice In Wonderland exhibition, I feel that the click as the slides move past and the way they slide out of view really fits in with the theme of the poem.
It is because of this that I have been doing research into magic lanterns, however I have been having difficulty in figuring out how I would include one in my exhibition as these projectors need someone to press a butten in order for the image to change. This would create a lot of difficulty because it would meen that I would need to constantly stand with my work and press the butten to change the image which is not really very practical.

Influence of Alice in Wonderland magic lantern

When I was at the Liverpool Tate Gallery, I sat for quite a while watching a magic lantern slide (1900-1925) of images form Alice in Wonderland. I was mesmerised by the noise and the way the slides moved across out of view.

These are a few of the slides which moved across the light of the projection and out of view. Although the magic lantern is a very old fashioned way to present images, I really enjoyed the jerkeyness and simplicity of it. It really did remind me looking out of a train window as the view out of it gradually moves across and out of sight.

Liverpool Tate Gallery

Visiting the Liverpool Tate Gallery has really inspired me, especially the work I saw in the Alice In Wonderland exhibition. I found the mixture of modern and historical artwark in this exhibition extremely interesting and I was fascinated by the obscuity of a lot of the work.  I could not take any photographs in this exhibition so I made lots of notes of any pieces of work that particualarly interested me.

Here is a link to a video I found on youtube about the exhibition that I have watched to refresh my memory about what I had seen and make sence of some of the notes I had made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz7k84WkVdU&feature=player_detailpage

Jason Rhoades
Touche from my Madinah: In Persuit of my Ermatage

This was the first thing that you saw as you walked into the exhibition and it was a very impressive start. It made a real impression on me as I was not only interested in the way the text was presented but the meaning behind it. It came from the idea of 'the meaning of language'. Each of the words are words which mean vagina. All together there are 1700 words although the exhibition only showed a fraction of these words. If you were to see these words in a different situation then you would not think they were a way of saying vagina, however when alltogether it changes there meaning. I think this is what he ment when he said 'When I say a word, it means  exactly what I want it to mean.


AA Bronson
Through the looking glass

I found this piece especially interesting as at first glance it just looks like 12 empty frames, however when you look very closely you can see very faint words just coming through. Each of the frames represents a different chapter from Alice in Wonderland. They are made of 66 pieces of transparent plastic stacked up on top of eachother which makes the words almost unreadable. I noted down a quote that was under this piece 'Everything changes once we pass through that mirror and into the reflected world, and yet everything remains the same, where are we now?' I believe that through this piece the artist was questioning the reality of the world we are living in and by using quotes from alice in wonderland that almost dont make sence adds to the isea that what we believe to be real could all be a lie.

Faster than fairies...

When I first read 'From a Railway Carriage' the thing that stole my attention most of all was the first line.
Faster than fairies, faster than witches.
This line really speaks to me and as I say it or read it, in my head the words are dancing across the page at a fast pace. I wanted to try to recreate the way I thought of this line in my head using typography.

 This photagraph of a page from my scetchbook, shows one of the ways I expereimented with representing this line using only text. I wanted to give the impression that the words were moving really fast across the page. I order to do this, I painted the words and then smudged the paint to create the illusion of the letters moving so fast they were almost a blur. 

Craig Ward

I have been looking into artists and typographers who use text in a creative way to represent whatever the meaning of thier work might be. One person I came across that i really liked was Craig Ward.

 I love how Craig Ward doesnt use any images in his work, only text and yet his work is incredibly visually stimulating. I am really interested in how he uses the words to illustrate thier meaning to make it so that you know what the words say withour even reading them.

From a railway carriage

From a Railway Carriage

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

By Louis Stevenson

When I came accross this poem I was really inspired by it and I think it fits in really nicely with the work I have been doing on journeys. I think it has a lot of potential to become a really interesting piece of graphics and so I intend to experiment with each line, manipulating the text to make it visually interesting. I am hoping that by using this poem as a basis for more experimentation, it will give my work the depth that it is currently lacking.  

 

Environmental Text

This week I have been experimenting with the idea of jouneys and text in the environment. I went for a walk and photographed any text that I came accross. I ended up with some quite nice photographs of lots of veriations of text such as a road sign, a telephone box and a bench plaque. I also got some quite good photographs of interesting things I came accross on the floor as I walked along.
I wanted to present these photographs in a way that suggested it was journey rather than just random photographs. The way I ended up doing this was by printing them onto assotate and then places them over maps of areas near to where I live. This meant that the maps could be seen very faintly through the photographs which gave them a really nice effect.