Manchester Trip

This Friday we headed over to Manchester with a coach to visit a few galleries. It's been a pretty decent trip and the gallery was interesting. There were some artists work that we could relate to such as Idris Khan who we've looked at during lectures. Here are some of my phone photography from the day:

YSP - Creative Exchange Week

Today, we went on a trip to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and I did some photography of my experience there. It was the first time I've been so I found it interesting wandering around. I tried capturing the day whilst subconsciously thinking about the brief. Here are my images from the trip:

Sense of Place - Text & Image

In this lecture, Rob touched on text and image which is one of the theme for our brief. In this lecture, After looking at various examples of artists who associates with text or image, I liked Vivian Maier's work which is from 1955. Vivian had a style of taking her own self portrait on a mirror or reflection. These images are black and white on a old camera. I like how this idea ties in with a sense of place because it's quite abstract and you can manipulate the sense with reflections and make it abstract. Here is the image below that I was referring to. I liked how unplanned this shot looks, when this gentleman was carrying a mirror and Vivian was right on spot with the framing.

Sense of Place/System of Objects

Notes from:
Planning Methodologies

- Thumbnail
for ideas, multiple options for considered outcome

-  Storyboard
visualising the narrative

- Marquette
laying out work then finding narrative, moving work out and around

- Drawing Process
think abut drawing, archive of thinking narrative of projects


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Notes from:
System of Objects

Typology - a classification according to general type
Examples:

Berndt and Hilla Becher
- archive of gas containers, look at grids and colour

Idris Khan
- ghost like archetype, images put together

Karl Blossfeldt
- viewpoint, scale, lighting consistency, minimalist of objects

Juan Fontcuberta (Flora)
- black and white objects, imaginary world archived

Donovan Wylie
- about observation, camera on the same level




Taxonomy - a scheme of classification
Examples:

Edward Muaybridge
- horse in motion, sequence of movement

Nevbew Welt Archive
- commercial product of vectors, objects he desired

Walter Benjamin - The Arcades Project
- created a book based on imaginary collection


This morning we had a lecture based on objects. I will be taking on board all the information and hopefully this will come handy for my sketchbook. I've re-wrote my notes here and will hopefully use the keywords to inform my wandering through and in space.

Studio Maps

Following on from yesterday's lecture, we was working all day on our Power of Ten maps. We had to create these mini concertinas based on a memory. Then display them in 4 images, in a style of a map. The first image will be a close up and the idea is to zoom out of the memory and end up with a map on the last image. Compared to the previous drawing task, I feel like it's been a good eye opener and I did a better job in this task drawing even though it was a challenge trying to mostly draw from birds-eye view. Here are my drawings:

This is my first memory. I've chosen to draw the moment I had a blood test in the hospital. I started off in the doctors room and I ended up with a wider map. The drawings is pretty simple and I just wanted to ensure the narrative was clear enough but after asking my peers, they seem to understood it.

Here's my second memory. This memory was of me when I moved to West Yorkshire and I remember travelling to Leeds to get to know my surroundings. So I thought I'll illustrate me taking an image and I focused on the smaller details with the drawings. This was visually in my head near the Trinity shopping centre.

Lastly, this is my final memory of a BBQ that I had with my family. I started off extremely close up and ended up with a wide angle of all the surrounding gardens. I was pleased with my sketches in this memory. I tried to keep the focal point consistent in all my frames so I think this has worked well because it zooms in and out from the barbecue. Here are some additional images from the day:

After drawing our maps, we got into groups of 5 and discussed our memories. We then created a scroll map and linked some of memories together to create one memory interlinked. We started this bigger map with some wriggly lines that go along the middle to connote that these memories has it's ups and downs. We then all drawn circles and decided to draw our individual memories in the circle to make up this linear narrative. In the end, I was pretty happy with the results and I enjoyed working in a group and combining our individual thoughts and ideas together.

Power of Ten

In this lecture, we briefly touched on the city as a map. We was focusing on maps and we looked at various examples of maps that were historical based. Here is an example of a panoramic map that was from 1616. It was made on eye-level instead of birds eye view but it's pretty wide and you can see a long view of London.

http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/visscher.htm

Later on, we looked at Power of Ten which is a film that shows different perspectives and scales by zooming in and out of the subject. Below is a small screenshot to show how it started off with the picnic and ended up with the earth. 

So with the idea of maps and this power of ten, we were given a task to create our own narratives and present them using this scale form and map out our stories. Then as a group, we will assemble our narratives together and create a big presentable piece. Here is the video below of the 1977 Power of Ten film that we watched.

Post-It Task

A Sense of Place: Post-It Task

After we got the brief earlier today, this task came into place. This was all about 'A Sense of Place' and the idea of the task was to write some words on a post-it that we could associate to this brief. We all have our own interpretations to this theme and the term 'place' could mean all sorts. It could be a physical place, or it could be a metaphoric place. We got into groups and explored different ideas of what this brief could be about, then attached it to a wall in different sections to where they may correlate.

I've chosen the words 'signs, emotions, communication, people and wanderlust'.

Group Combined

This task has given me ideas of some keywords that I can go explore further and start my project on. I also figured out that most of us thought of similar words and we managed to link up some of the more unique words up with others.

Briefing - A Sense of Place

In this morning lecture, we got given our brief for this foundation studio practice module. We've been given a A5 concentina sketchbook that we'll be working on. Here are my notes from the lecture:

A Sense of Place

04.11.16 - Formative Submission Date

25.11.16 - Return Date

Phase 1: Five Themes

Contextual and applied research

Sketchbook Side A: Primary research (Own)

Side B: Secondary research (Existing work)

The 5 Themes:

- Exploring The City

- The city as a species of space

- The city as a system of objects

- The city as an image

- The city as a language