"Day and night the same - blank. Precisely like death."

For the last project I did, the brief I chose was the Don't Panic poster with the theme of 'Resistance'. I decided to look at resistance and time. The area of this I chose was memory. I had been inspired by a tv show I saw on BBC4 called 'Time' presented by Dr Michio Kaku. One segment of it was about a pianist called Clive Wearing, who for 25 years he has been suffering from anterograde amnesia. This is when new memories cannot be formed any more. Like in the film Memento, 50 First Dates, also what Archer had in the episode Twilight from season 3 of Star Trek Enterprise. Clive's is the worst case known, he can only remember things for about 30 seconds or less before forgetting again. Every time he sees his wife it's like its for the first time in years, it's really sad. Here's a clip of it:


For my poster i'd decided to draw Clive in profile then have a representation of his thoughts going through his head in a strip. As well as that I had the idea of having a sieve behind him (memory like a sieve), I thought it would represent him forgetting and look quite cool and sieves are a bit strange for on a poster. My first thought was a film strip for his memories, I added a quote his said on top:

"I've never seen anyone at all.
I've never heard a word until now.
I've never had a dream even,
Day and night the same - blank.
Precisely like death.
No thoughts at all.
Brain has been inactive."

The film strip wasn't quite working out. I then came up with a great alternative! Musical note lines..i'm not a musical person at all, can't remember what they are called but you know the things, 5 horizontal lines the notes sit on. It was perfect! It fit in much better with the style of the poster which was simple line drawings. I studied what the different parts meant of the sheet music and decided to just use the horizontal lines, treble bass and the end thin and thick vertical lines to show the end of the 'song' or memory in this case. I then had the cool idea to repeat the end lines 2 more times along the horizontal lines to represent that memory being forgotten and totally at its end. I placed the quotes in a way which looked like strike through because Clive sometimes writes in a diary but forgets after he has written a line then crosses it out as he doesn't believe he has wrote it. It's all there in my poster.


I'm really pleased with it. It shows his brain resisting new memories and himself trying to resist forgetting. His memory is resisting normal time, to him it is as if he has been unconscious for years and in a way he has time travelled to the future, resisting the normal passage of time. This was the personal project, and it was personal because I too took on the theme of resistance and resisted my usual urges to crowd pages and make them really colourful, this time I tried being more minimal and simple.

Snow-woman

I got back to Manchester yesterday and there was still loadsa snow in our backgarden so we went out and had a play. I stayed out longer though, 2 hours in fact, and built a snowoman :D








I was pleased how it turned out. In my head I had decided I wanted to make an Aenar just so I could put antenna on it but when i built the snow column tall enough and added shoulders and boobs it soon transformed and i decided to leave it sans head. It looks pretty freaky!
I recommend building a snowman for exercise, back and forth grabbing snow from all over the garden for 2 hours, i've bound to have burnt loadsa calories, awesome!

A Short History of my Christmas Holiday

Bird feet and cat paw prints in the snow!

22nd December 2009: With flash.

With flash again..

Without flash.. 1am, the sky was peach and illuminated, it looked so eerie and cool! I think we are on Mars, thats the colour the sky is there! It was like day time! It went dark after about half an hour though when it stopped snowing.

My cat Simba is bonkers. I had my suitcase in that same place and he sat on it, then my backpack too! I think he likes that location near me on the computer :)

I have a very intelligent cat:


New Years Eve, I wasn't out partying, I stayed in..well not quite..I went out in the back garden at about 8.30 in my dressing gown with my telescope and gazed at the moon. It was so bright and full, and the sky was so clear. It was freezing, I couldn't feel my fingers! I tried to hold the camera still and take a photo, this was the best outta the bunch, better than my usual attempts of photos of the moon anyway:

Today. I bought this plastic squirrel in a set with a mini plastic racoon from home bargains years ago, I wanted to screw them to the mantel piece in the living room but my parents wouldn't let me, pffft! My Dad put them in the garden instead, and so here is poor Mr.Squirrel covered in snow :(

I thought it would look nice to hang christmas tree baubles on snowy branches outside and add some colour to the ubiquitous white:

I started reading a new book on the train from Manchester to back home. The book is "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. I'd been meaning to read it for a few years, I came across it in the charity shop a few months ago and ever since it's been in my book pile waiting for me to finish "In Search Of The Edge Of Time" by John Gribbin which took forever! I do like to read but it always seems to take me forever coz I read in bed and i'm always too tired so usually I manage about 5 pages then put it down and try and go to sleep. I've been trying to make more of an effort with this book and yesterday I came across some people who get through about 94 and 120 books per year! I really have to pick up the pace! So i've been trying even harder and read during the day instead of watching TV, and got through about 60 pages in the past 2 days, better than 10 in 2 days! I'm a third through the book now, it's really good. Next up after this book is "The Physics of Star Trek" which i'd wanted to read and finally found in a charity shop a few days ago for £1.99 :). Anyway back to the current book, I learn stuff every day from it, the other day I learnt what a Micron is, one thousandth of a millimetre (or equivalently one millionth of a metre or one thousand nanometres). There are lots of cool names for things, here's a paragraph I read last night:

"As physicists build bigger and more ambitious machines, they began to find or postulate particles or particle families seemingly without number: muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higg bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons."

There are interesting and funny facts and stories about crazy scientists and such like this

"John Dalton was an exceptionally bright student - so very bright, indeed, that at the improbably youthful age of twelve he was put in charge of the local Quaker school. This perhaps says as much about the school as about Dalton's precocity, but perhaps not: we knew from his diaries that at about this time he was reading Newton's Principia - in the original Latin - and other works of a similarly challenging nature. At fifteen, still school mastering he took a job in the near by town of Kendal and a decade after that he moved to Manchester."

And we have a building at MMU named after him! Now I know all about who it was named after. There are a lot of scientists who ended up in Manchester from all over it seems, from reading this book. And this next guy is from the same place as me:

"Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumed that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retreived the head and rushed out again."

This is funny/weird:

"Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of colour seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar."

He didn't find gold but instead found phosphorus.

I recommend the book anyway.

Posters of the Avant Garde Book

I found a cool book in the library the other week called 'Jan Tschichold: Posters of the Avant Garde', it's FULL of posters, it's great! I love art books full of pictures :p! They are also very cool posters :) which is even better. I love this style, great structure, and simple yet lots going on too. Here are some of my faves from the book -

Jan Tschichold:

Max Burcharz - Tanz Festspiele (dance festival):

Jan Tschichold:

Theo Van Doesburg & Kurt Schwitters (I'd liked this image for ages):

I quickly took some photos of pages to remember them for inspiration, there were too many to scan in, so they aren't great quality but you get the idea, here are some more from the book that I liked:

'School Trip' to Liverpool Tate Art Gallery

A week or 2 ago, a few of us from D&AD went on a 'school trip' to Liverpool to visit the Tate Art Gallery.
More photos of us lot in Liverpool


Yayoi Kusama - The Passing Winter, 2005. It was interesting to see another installation by her as i'd previously seen her 'Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees' (previous post). We weren't allowed to take photos in the Tate but I found images by someone else - Marshall Astor. It looked kinda weird and cool but not that impressive...


*UNTIL* I peered inside the box!! AMAZING! The box had mirrors on the inside as well and it just reflects everything and when you look into it you see your face multiple times and from different angles, it's so weird and awesome. It's like being in an infinate 'inbetween' kinda liminal space, with many directions and routes to take, doorways to alternate universes? I was just stood staring into it for ages and ages!


Something else it reminded me of was the part in The Beatles Film - The Yellow Submarine, which shows Mr Nowhere Man located in..'nowhere' I guess.


Another piece which I saw there and found interesting was Salvador Dali - Lobster Telephone, 1936.


I stumbled upon a piece and instantly recognised the artist it was by - Daniel Spoerri, it was called Prose Poems. I discovered this artists work last year and was interested in it. His work felt familiar to me because I have photographed tables from above at chance compositions. I like that everyday kinda thing which we take for granted, but it is usually ephemeral and then lost and replaced everyday, so it's interesting to capture it in an image. "Spoerri fixed or 'snared' objects found in chance positions on table tops or in drawers. These were hung vertically on a wall, like conventional pictures, and were intended to create visual discomfort in the viewer. In this work, the remains of a meal are preserved on a wooden board that the artist used as a table while living in a small room in a Paris hotel."


I really liked some photographs by Helen Chadwick, I can't really find many online only one, but it was a series of photographs of her 'Ego Geometria Sum' holding objects with her image on the objects, Heres one photo, and then i found some images of just the objects, I think they have an eerie and surreal quality about them, really nice though.





Victor Grippo - Energy of a Potato - 1972. This was quite weird and cool. You could see the potato discoloured where the probes had gone into it's skin and then where the potato had 'bled' and dripped onto the plinth. It was a real potato. poor thing. Cruelty against potatoes. I'm not guilty of killing potatos... nah i never eat chips or crisps.. honest .... not!


This was also cool.. by Gilbert & George - Happy, 1980.


It was nice to see some very well known pieces there too which i'd seen before but not in real life, like Jeff Koons - Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985, Marcel Duchamp - Fountain (replica), Antony Gormley - Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage, 1981, Mona Hatoum - Wheelchair, 1988, Bob and Roberta Smith - Make Art Not War, 1997, as well as some Cindy Sherman photographs 'Bus Riders', 1976.

I really enjoyed the Tate, I saw lots of things which I didn't expect to see there and found things to help with my Silence project :)

London Visit - Polka Dot trees in the breeze!

I've been meaning to do a post about this for ages but never got around to it... anyway I visited London at the end of August and here are a few pics I took walking along the South Bank to the Tate Modern.
I think i'd be quite happy if i was reincarnated as a carousel horse. Carousels are awesome, they are so colourful and exciting! I'm too much of a wimp for rollercoasters so going on a carousel is about as adventurous as I get in terms of rides! So much fun! But on this occasion I didn't have a go, too much of a rip off :/


Yayoi Kusama - Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees, 2009. I found this installation quite interesting, I later read more about the artist, she was born in 1929 and "all of her work shares an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation".

Some weird hedge furnature installation kinda thing.

More furnature! But this time in the form of a sand sculpture :)


Tate Modern, I had never been before and I'd always thought the outside of the building looked so cool, it was formally Bankside power station. I really enjoyed approaching the building and seeing it up close and taking photos. Even though it looks quite different, it somehow reminds me of gigantic Egyptian pyramids and that type of thing. Inside the space is sooooo vast, it's amazing and kinda scary! Nowadays most space is cram packed, but on the lower levels of the Tate Modern there is a massive space, it has a very industrial feel, I felt like I was in a cargo bay on a spaceship or something! We got lost and by this time we didn't have much time to look around at the actual art work, only one floor, but it was cool enough just to see the building, I really enjoyed it.




Here's a few more photos I took there: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grinchy/sets/72157622631637969/

'Le Scaphandre et le Papillon' Film Review

Today in our Kino4 screen club we watched 'Le Scaphandre et le Papillon' (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) from 2007, directed by Julian Schnabel, who is also an artist. Interesting title, interesting and sad story. It is based on the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle Magazine, and also a journalist and author.

The film is from Bauby's perspective and starts by him waking up from a three week long coma, and trying to reply to the doctors but realizing they can't hear him.. he has had a massive stroke at only the age of 42. He is suffering from a rare condition called 'Locked-In Syndrome', he is aware but cannot respond or move, he is almost completely paralyzed, all he can move is his left eye. The condition has been described as "the closest thing to being buried alive".

The way this film is shot makes you feel as though you are Bauby and empathise with him even more than if it was shot in a regular way. It makes you confront the issue of strokes and other similar things which a lot of people try to forget about and ignore even if it happens to someone close to them become a shell of themselves, because it's so horrible and you don't like to see someone familiar yet...not.
Because he can't really move his head sometimes you can't see the actors in the scene's head, only their middle if they are stood up etc, just as he would if they weren't in his line of sight. There is a horrible scene where they sew up his right eye so it doesn't get infected because it isn't working properly and you see the needle coming and going through the skin and the light glowing through the skin and then stitches then darkness. It really is horrible, he is shouting and pleading for them not to do it but of course they can't hear him. It would be so frustrating.

At first he is angry at his whole situation, as most people would probably be. The speech therapist thinks she can help him and tries to help him communicate through blinking. One blink for yes, and two for no. They then expand on this and she recites the alphabet in order of frequency the letters come up in the French language, as she goes through them she watches his eye, when there is a letter he wants he blinks as she says it, then they go through it again and again until he has communicated a whole word/sentence. It's pretty amazing. At first though he doesn't want to and all he has to say is "I want to die". After this though he starts to come to terms with his condition and says

Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.

He starts accepting visitors and installs a phone with a speaker. He gets in touch with his book publisher (with the help of his speech therapist)and confirms he is still going to get it finished and asks for an assistant to who he can communicate his memoirs to. It is a very lengthy process which i'm sure would seem like an impossible task, but he manages it, and 10 days after his book was published Bauby died. Communicating his memoirs everyday gave him something to do and stopped him going crazy, and before that he didn't really have the will to live, so when he had managed to tell his story and see his 'dream realised' in a way maybe he hadn't got quite as much will to live. It's strange how people sometimes seem to be able to hold on until just after an important event until they slip away, I guess it's just human will power, it's amazing though.

This film made me wanna jump around and appreciate mobility, patience, expression and communication. I thought it was a really good and interesting film even if it was quite confronting and emotional.

Onomatopoeia bubble painting response

Here is my response for Onomatopoeia:

I decided to play with bubbles like in primary school to create the image. You are meant to use paint powder but I didn't have any so I just squirted lots of paint into a bottle and added some warm water and shook it up then poured it into anything big enough...I ended up using a big frying pan, a wok, and a mixing bowl! Then I added some washing up liquid to make the bubbles stay for longer and a bit more water.

Kaylie came in the kitchen and wondered what on earth I was 'cooking' as seen as i was stood by the cooker stirring BLUE liquid with a spatula in a frying pan. She though I was making a bomb or something! I'm not a mad scientist haha!
Then all you need to do is get a straw and blow into it in the liquid..just don't drink it by accident! Or put the wrong end of the straw in your mouth.. eugh I did that.

Once you blow the bubbles, quickly grab paper and lay it on top but don't touch the liquid only the bubbles, they will pop and leave a print on the paper, then let it dry :)

I made loads, this is only about half, I tried overlapping 2 colours as well. I did try yellow too but it didn't work very well.

When blowing bubbles my face got a bit splashed.. I had red paint dots on my nose and cheeks and blue ones on my chin hehe! It was a lot of fun though :)

'Strange days and some flowers' exhibition

Today Sarah visited Lancaster and we checked out some exhibitions.
The newly refirbished Storey Gallery had the exhibition 'Strange Days and Some Flowers'.

Around the installations and paintings, there was another installation by Graham Hudson, made from 'steel tubes and clip structure' aka scaffolding! It was pretty cool actually. As we walked around, the composition kept changing, with all the different squares and rectangles it reminded me of Piet Mondrians paintings. It also gave nice backgrounds for the other installations.


There were some really nice pictures by Dan Baldwin. I liked how bright and chaotic they were and the use of mixed media. This one was my favourite.
Dan Baldwin - Love in the garden, 2008.


Dan Baldwin - We End Up Meat, 2008. This had a knife stuck to it.


Dan Baldwin - We All Start With Pure Heart, 2008.


Dan Baldwin - Halloween, 2008. close up of it.


Don Brown - Yoko XVII, 2006. This looked like a sheet over a statue but the sheet shape was the statue, it was like a scary ghost! but cool.


Don Brown - Yoko XXI, 2008. This looked really nice white with shadows, and against the white background too.


Jock Mooney - Discontinued, 2009. This was another of my favourites in this exhibition, it was even cooler close up, with all the detail of all the figurines, so bright and random!


John Stark - The Apiary, 2008. This painting was beautiful close up, especially the clouds.


Laura Ford - Boystory 1, 2001. There were a few of these, they were a bit scary, this was my fave of them though.


Next we went to The Book Room, which is a little independant book shop with art on the walls. The current exhibition was "Manchester 89 - 92", by Richard Davis. "A collection of portraits taken in that city during the years between 1989 - 1992 & involves Musicians, Comedians, Poets & Writers. The following are all featured in this exhibition: Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Lemn Sissay, John Thomson, Caroline Aherne, Linda Smith, New Order, John Hegley, Frank Sidebottom, Jon Ronson, Dave Gorman, John Cooper Clarke."

It was hard to take photos in there because it was dark and also the photos had glass infront. They were mainly in black and white, but some were brightly coloured. This one came out ok:


The shop also had a really cool ceiling covered with book pages, it looked so cool:


I had a nice day and really enjoyed the 'Strange Days and Some Flowers' exhibition, there are some exhibitions i visit and think hmm yeah it was ok and there were some good bits but i really enjoyed this whole exhibition. Also it had a cool title. just like this blog entry does now :)