Mind's Eye by Lorenzo Roberts

A painting of the 'Mind's Eye' which I think best represents our project.

Research

I added these last bits of research of Tony Oursler's work to emphasise on how important his work was on the influence of our project and projection. I think his work is more relevant to our project than any other artists work I have researched in my blog.

Tony Oursler

Distorted images of body parts.

Tony Oursler

With Hidden Noise: Sculpture, Video and Ventriloquism
Underwater(Blue/Green)

Tony Oursler

Incubator, 2003

Tony Oursler

Junk, 2003
Fiberglass sculpture and DVD projection.

Evaluation

I have to start off by saying that at the start of this brief I really wasn't looking forward to making a 6 minute video, the whole idea of it terrified me. The blog didn't appeal to me at all either as I don't really like working in front of a computer for long periods of time because my attention span isn't long enough. I found it really hard to start the blog because when we started I had no idea what I wanted to make a video on and struggled to find artists whose work I found interesting.
Once Carol, Ally and I decided to work together, after realising we had the same kind ideas, made it easier to define what research went into my blog. At the beginning I thought that working together might make it a little bit crowded and that there would be differences in opinions or it may give someone the chance to just sit back without contributing much, however as we were all very dedicated and passionate about what we were doing. We found that there weren't any of these problems, we all put in our ideas and we were lucky that the raw footage that we all collected separately just seemed to fit together. Bringing different ideas meant that our video could have many dimensions to it, we could take our video in many different directions from our wide range of clips. Regular updates onto my blog of our progress helped us to recognise what was working and to define what we needed to change the next day.

Overall I think that working in 3 worked out the better for us even though people may think that it was easier working in it a three it still took us around 4 weeks to get it completely finished and once we'd finished the sound and image editing we got on to concentrating on the projection part of the project. Carol created our sphere to project onto as we needed to use her exercise ball as mould for the shape we wanted to create. The week leading up to our presentation we worked out all the heights, distances and measurements we needed to know for our presentation to look right.

On the day of the presentation we briefly explained our ideas and the way in which we made our video without giving away any interpretations of our own about what we think of the video this was so that everyone could develop their own thoughts and ideas about it. As we made our video with a narrative our images were coherent and flowed, this meant that it would keep peoples attention and they could develop their own ideas about the plot. I think this is very important as throughout the day whilst watching other peoples work I could feel my own attention slipping and being distracted from watching, I think that some people thought that they could get away without doing much work and hoping that it would just work out on the day for them. I think some people were proved wrong with some cringing and uncomfortable moments throughout the day.

I can honestly say that I have enjoyed working together on the video and I am very proud of what we have achieved even though it took a lot of work, effort and time.

Samantha McKee

The Preserves of the Mind's Larder, 2005
"For some years now, McKee has focused on a subject central to all of us: how the brain works, what makes it work better, and what arrests some of its functions. In all three parts, but most strongly in The wall of thoughts, she embedded the terrorizing power of decaying neurons."

Bill Viola

Hatsu-Yume(First Dream) 1981, Single-channel videotape, colour, stereo sound. 56 minutes.
Hatsu-Yume is a view of the worl shaped by a dream in Japan. It is a 56 minute video woven around Viola's observations of and reactions to Japanese culture adn landscape.
"Ever thought you heard voices in the back or your mind, or come across uncertain memories deep inside your consciousness?"


DVD Blurb
"...equating light and dark with life and death. As in a dream, we frequently can't tell if these worldless streams of image and sound are unfolding in real time, slow motion or time lapse. Hatsu-Yume is the work of a visionary poet of image and sound."

I think this has a similar concept to the video that we made. I think that whilst people are watching our video they will be all asking that same things that are,.. is it real, imaginery or a representation of someones state of mind? There is now definate native of explanation to the video it is open to interpretation with no correct answer; it is what it is and what it wants to be. The three of us all have very different interpretations and ideas about what our videos is about. I am sure that Carol and Ally, as I won't, express the ways in which we each interpret the video. This is so not to influence the way in which 'you' watching the video will then come to think of it, it is left for 'you' to interpret the video the way in which 'you' want to.

Ricci Albenda

Action at a Distance(2000), fiberglass, paint and drywall.
Ricci Albenda creates sensuous sculptural forms, subtly "scooped out" of the gallery wall. The artist sees these works as "portraits to another dimension", but 'dimension' is a word of multiple meanings.



I thought that these were quite interesting shapes, they are very organic shapes like the spherical shape we created for our projection. It might have been interesting if we could have created a shaped where half a spherial shape was emerged from the wall. This would have given us a fish eye effect with the part of the image that would be projected on the flat on the wall appearing further away and the part of the image appearing on the 3D spherical part of the wall appearing as if you were looking through a magnifying glass.

Projection/Presentation

Today was the day that we presented our video. As there was three of us, for the speaking part of the presentation we needed to sit down and discuss roughly what each of us was going to say. We decided that I would speak first as I was the most nervous and uncomfortable about talking. Firstly I did the introduction to our presentation and spoke about our initial ideas, thoughts and research we had on our video. I also spoke about how we put our ideas together and collected our raw footage.
Ally discussed the way in which we brought our ideas together about the 'Mind's Eye' and how artist research influenced our progress in the development of our video.
Carol then went on to discuss our ideas about projecting onto the spherical/ball shape and the practical side of the project as the projection idea was initially thought of by Carol.
We ended our presentation by discussing the way we fit the sound into our video.
I think our presentation was very successful and I felt very proud about showing our video to everyone as I feel a lot of work has gone into making it.

Projection

This is a video of our projection working after we set it up today. You can't really see the image on the ball very much because the lights were on and when the lights were off the camera wouldn't pick up much because it was too dark. However when the lights were off it looked really impressive. I am both excited and nerves about the presentation tomorrow, I think it's going to look really good.

Images of Our Video Projected

The mask from the beginning of our video projected onto the ball.

Projection of the woman about to jump off the cliff.

Pulsating nerves inside the brain.

Inside the mind. Projection wrapped around the ball.

Setting up the Projection

This is a photo of Carol and Ally measuring the height of the projection stand.



This is a close up photo of Ally whilst we were measuring the height that the projection stand needs to be for our projection tomorrow.


Another photo of the card we are using to filter our projection.

This is a photo of the piece of card which we are using to help filter the light from the projector so that the sphere is perfectly covered by the image with no image projected behind our sphere.




This is a photo of our full projection.

Set up

Well the ball is now ready, it has been mod rocked and now has the fishing wire attached ready for hanging. On Tuesday afternoon we will be able to sort out the angles of the projector and the ball once we have burned the video to DVD in the morning.

Mona Hatoum

Rubber Mat, 1996, Silicone rubber.

Another brain like image.

Mona Hatoum

Untitled(Brain), 1999, Silicone rubber and aluminium shelf.

Mona Hatoum

Corps Etranger - Foreign Body(1994)
'Foreign Body' is a video featuring the use of two routinely used medical imaging processes: endoscopy in which fibre optics scan the upper part of the digestive system, and coloscopy for the colon and intestines. There is a sense of overwhelminng intimacy which is further heightened by a soundtrack of her own breathing and heart beat that accompanies the video through the soft black acoustic fabric lining.


"She invites the veiwer to a close up view of her own body - from the dry landscape that is her skin to the timeless, primitive, and unchanged glistening cavernous world beneath."

Fish Eye

This is a photo taken in a fish eye lens effect this is how I think the images in our video may look with the centre of the images appearing larger than the edges of the images.

Spherical Projection.

This is a photo of a spherical projection which I found whilst looking at google images.