Final Project Evaluation

Group work: I feel as though I myself have worked well within in the group. There have been people who have not pulled their weight the whole way throught the project, and I felt Steph, Claire and I carried the rest of the group on occasions. By the end of the project however everyone did pull together and we managed to create some really exciting work.

Own Project Development: I was a bit slow getting into the project but I think that is because it was 10 weeks long so the sense of panick wasn't there from the begining. Once I had got started I found a topic I was able to stick to easily and carry on into made and drawn material. The crochet, atex and cotton wool samples I created evolved and moved on to a point until I realised we just needed bulk rather than beauty for the final filming and I was taking too much time over each one. The slow hand processes I used reflected the 'slow is beautiful' idea and I felt really connected to that idea for the future through actually doing it.

Contextual research: As a group the artist research was really interesting and pushed the ideas from the beginning, however each person still had very different ideas of where the project was going and the research reflected that and sent us in far too many different directions. Once we had found the Andrew Huang video and been to visit microbiology to collect our own photos, I didn't feel the need to research into the art world any further for inspiration as our work would have started to look like theris and too may more ideas would have arisen which we wouldn't have had time to deal with.

Final Film!

Final Film! This piece of music was chosen because we tried out a lot of sound effects and nothing seemed to flow or sound quite right, especially on movie maker. This song has elements of small sound effects which fit in well, and the overall makeup of the song (which Kes added to the group blog) fits in with the changing of speed of our video. It builds up as the mould builds up on the body. The song 'Children' by Robert Miles is also looking forward to the future and what the future will bring us. I feel this movie relates to the initial brief because we are acting as 'help agents' for prople to see what the problems are, and it is linked so closely to 'slow is beautiful'.

The group editing together

                                             A group photo of us all at the end of a long day!!!

Tuesday: editing the film, 4 hours on from this photo we were still editing...and the next morning!! A really big effort, which has paid off because we managed to finish everything!

Stop motion: part of the final film

Stop motion of what we were filming from above. It's jumpy because we couldn't keep the camera in the same place and we didn't take a photo each time a sample was added, but it still shows the way the samples grow and gives an idea of how the film is.

Stop motion fits in so well with our idea of 'slow is beautiful' and how a slow peocess can be an incredibly beautiful one. Stop motion films are so time consuming to make, but they are so worth while. You feel a part of every stop  frame, because you took them individually and moved the sample every time. It's a  deeper connection to your movie than something that is filmed on a video camera.

First day of filming final film

 These were our samples before we started filmin. So proud of all the samples we were able to produce!

       Jess H standing in the whits suit ready to film the samples climbing over her.  She didn't get out of the suit for 4 hours, of standing in the same position!! Very proud, not sure I could have done that. We should have paid someone else to do, also we should have had someone smaller because of Jess being so tall it took longer to fill her with the samples.

 Emilia, Steph and Jess who put the samples on the Jess with me whilst Claire took the photos. There was amazing light coming through Steph's lounge windows.

 Emilia and Jess B placing the samples onto Jess H. It was time-consuming to attach bevause we had to pin each sample individually onto the suit. Some samples were also really heavy and the pins didn;t hold them particularly well.

Mixing the samples

We needed to make smaller samples so that the video would run more smoothly. This led me to make more samples that were quick and small crocheted circles with no extra embellishment to bulk up the amount, instead of taking a long time creating a texture detail to them.

Samples working together along the floor. I really love all the different styles and sizes clashing together. It looks beautiful, and the greens tie them together. Emilia, Claire and I put this together when we were waiting for the others to arrive. The group works well when there are a few of us at a time, but of course more work gets done when there are more of us.

Sterile suit

Trying out the suit with steph and experimenting with the tubes. It may be harder than we thought to get the tubes to look effective but we will experiment more with them.

1st group stop motion in the suit

 1st video using the suit. Really like it because it adds a paranoid, and sterilised atmosphere like we experienced in the microbiology department.

1st group stop motion

                            

All of our samples collectively used in a stop motion. This would have been more effective with everyone's samples because only Jess Brown, Steph, Claire and Jo could make it. Still inspired us to do more similar though.

Drawings from footprint filming

 We dripped watercolour paint onto the drawing, this was really effective because all the splashes started to represent mould. Also the addition of colour onto the page lifted a very black and white day!

 A mood board made up of each person's photos and samples.

All of the footprint images could easily be transferred into prints onto fabric, linking the idea of how mould could start to influence fashion.

Stop motion ink

This video was done in the group work, they were really fun to achieve and it was great to work in the group. We have the idea of using food colouring and tubing to suggest disease spreading through the body.

Group work photos from footprint video

 Before

 After

The footprints left behind looked as though they had been drawn with all the detail of the bottom of the foot. They were beautiful and inspired our work and ideas for further film.

Putting the paper used onto the wall. This excercise created lots of drawings done together as a group and was a good way for us to bond as a group.

Monday 23rd Group Meeting

Picking up the cam-corder so that we can use it for the filming on Thursday. Julie stressed how we were not working so closely as a grup as we should be ding so we are going to meet up on Thursday and Friday to film, draw and make together and photograph, film and draw our results. I think this will be really useful for us to bond more as a group and to really produce a large body of work that we can then go away over the weekend and work on seperately.  We had two new ideas aswell... The idea of adding a clinical and sterile aspect of the microbiology department by using a lot more white, then adding in colour through embellisments and the leaking of paints; and the idea of surgical tubes and sending black ink through them to show disease flowing through the body and then adding holes to the tubes to have the inks dripping onto the body aswell. From these we could add the made samples growing from the leaks.

Over all it was a successful tutorial, apart from missing one person. But I felt we are coming up with ideas more, so if we work more as a group we can do this more often and get really strong ideas.

Visiting Microbiology

Before the tutorial on Monday we went to see a PHD student Gavin Bingley in the Microbiology department to discuss whether we could grow our own moulds so that we could use our own images to draw from and get inspiration from.

This is an image of us in Gavin's room collecting our Agar plates.
We then took these and left them in different places for an hour so collect germs and bacteria, then we took them back to be incubated so as to grow mould we could work from ourselves.

I loved doing this. It was so interesting going to a department I hadn't been to before. It was so clinical and clean and white and we had to sterilise our hands and wear lab coats. I love that we have collaborated with a different department and have actually sought out the help we needed ourselves.

Group Meeting

We'd arranged to meet on the Friday morning to talk about our plans over the easter break. Sadly only Steph, Claire, Jess Brown and myself were able to make it, but it has encouraged me to move my own ideas forward and get started on my own personal mini project. We also discussed about the mini project of going over to the science department and using their microscopes with cameras to recieve our own images or microscopic mould growth. This will be really exciting, and i feel for me will my push my own project on really well.

Inspirationa videos from Group Meeting

 The main interest in this film is the first part with the fabric growing over the two women, however watching on, the colours used later on are beautiful, and the sand scenes would be amazing to have a go at.

Group Meeting

Everyone turned up and it was really good to see everyone and get all their views on what they want the project to be. Julie mentioned how to use the blog in a really productive way, to reflect on what went wrong and the problems which were able to be solved. We also need a wider research of art and design context to fully appreciate what is going on in the whole art world.

At all times we as humans carry 2 pounds of bacteria on our bodies. This sounds disgusting, but also shows how intricately our lives are intwined with mould and bacteria already. It would be interesting to look at conceptual ideas of how disease and mould spread and move as inspiration rather than the actual structure of the mould itself. I want to look at the beauty of it aswell as how to shock people.

The ideas we came up for concerning videos of mould and disease spreading were to do with footprints spreading as more people walk over the same paint, and using a uv pen so the 'germs' are only seen using a certain light.

Ideas For Growth and Mould

One of the ideas from the group meeting was to look at the future of communication and whether there will be any face to face conversations or whether it will end up being digital. I remembered I'd seen an article on a slime mould which could communicate through bio-chemicals, and this could be an amazing way of linking the future of technology with the idea of nature and mould. There have also been studies of it being used in technology such as robots and can even solve puzzles.
The texture is really interesting too because the slime effect is translucent and reminds me of skin. This could be the way in which fashion moves and changes because it is like a second skin, growing over the body. A natural technology which won't hurt the environment or react with human skin.

Latex would work really well to create this texture. Also the trapping of things inside to create pattern.
Communication could easily be transmitted through the slimy surface of the slime mould to other people. It could be the future of what powers computers and how trends are spread.

12th March Mind mapping session

Looking at the idea of slow is beautiful in more detail. But how slow do we want that to be? Is it something we are going to be able to do as part of these ten weeks, or is going to have to be staged and predicted in a digital format?
There was a big emphasis in this session on being aware of what is happening in your area at the moment, and the depth inwhich we are wanting to go into in terms of presentation and concept.

9th March MOSI trip: archive rooms

Being a museum of science and industry, the objects in the archives tend to be industrial science objects. These can range from large scale machinery to small scale swatches of fabric. There are also such things as marketing and trade literature which show the way that art movements changed even the most mundane advertising, and shipping tickets. I don't know how useful this is going to be in the project, but it is still interesting. I like the idea of taking inspiration from the past. What I did learn form the advertising material was that it was always intrinsically linked to the time it was produced, the colours that were fashionable and the ethos and culture that was surrounding them.