On Monday, we were introduced to create animation in dragonframe, which I had never tried. It’s especially cool to create a “video” that couldn’t be realized by real videos. But it also takes ages to tell a story by stop frame animation.
On Tuesday, we had two sessions about performance. The first session was held by Lee and another tutor whose name I forgot… It was surprising. We did some exercise in a dark room. The first one was like meditation. It helped us feel the body in the space, feel the gravity on the body and separate the body in a sense. Then we tried to form a circle while walking and started to use our body as a shape in the circle. It’s like interaction with the space by body. Later, we used anything we could find in the room, chairs, tables, clothes and a stand to interact with the space as well as each other. People started to use their body and sound to interact. As the sound and movements got intense, I started to sweat and a bit stressed. I put my jacket on my head and put my hands on my ears to try to block the energy and tension but I sweated more. I wanted to break the energy. I kicked the stand, a part of the objects we built, to fall. It surprised me how this random performance affected me. I wasn’t even trying to get involved. At last, we were introduced to some simple exercise about art practice. Cards of random tasks sounded fun. They could maybe generate ideas when we had no inspiration of what to do. In the second session, we did some performance with Clare. First, we did the performance of The Artist is Sitting. It’s a bit scary for me to make long eye contact with a person I’m not familiar with. For me it’s a decision of being open to the person myself and being ready to go into the person’s world. Then, I made the performance of dripping water to a bottle. I didn’t stop till I dripped all the water. It took quite long… Yash even made a drawing of me… I thought of when to stop. Then I thought performance always took forever and performers didn’t care what viewers thought. So I decided to keep doing it unless Clare stopped me. It wasn’t easy because it’s hard to try to get drips and aim at the bottle at the same time. At last, Jess and I did the performance of drawing a line and following it. Jess came up with an idea of drawing between mirrors so that it would look infinite. I suggested to appear in the mirror with body. When you just looked at one mirror, it would be like I went into the mirror as I turned around to draw away from the mirror.
On Wednesday, I tried to build the installation but didn’t finish it.
Today, we had an introduction to InDesign. Besides what I knew, these’re what I found very useful:
- Master pages
- Character styles
- Paragraph styles
- Check spelling
In the afternoon, Olivia and I had a group tutorial with Nathan. Nathan had some disagreements on my idea:
- Not all people are on auto-pilot.
- Even though people are on auto-pilot, there’re many stories.
- People know it when they’re on auto-pilot and they choose it.
- Repeating is valuable in some ways.
Nathan also shared “Freedom and Necessity” in the book “An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis” By John Hospers with Olivia.
Then I had an individual tutorial with Kyung Hwa. She thought black paper was too solid and suggested using vinyl, multiple layers or transparent materials. And a small space would tell my idea better. Instead of 4 projectors, I could have one projector spinning. She also shared Samuel Beckett and her performance work with me.
I’m feeling really stressed and frustrated as there’re only two weeks left and I still have nothing.
Eva Wang 