# 2

tate britain, tate modern

for our final week in the vis com rotation period, we were given the project "audience". our brief was to create an original and clever way of sending an unspoken message. when we were told this, my mind immediately jogged back to a site i once stumbled upon called "post secret". post secret is an online community, encouraging people from all over the world to mail in their secrets anonymously on a post card. every sunday, several are selected and then published on their internet page.

we were asked to think about who our sender is and who are receiver is, and to consider that the message must be gradual, starting with a hint and ending in absolute clarity. my first ideas ranged from an irritated pimple begging its skin to be washed, toilet paper begging not to be used!, a mosquito who hates the person blood its sucking, and trees that are annoyed with the people and dogs who pee on it! i decided to stick with the last idea, and explored how exactly i would convey this message. i started immediately with a more hands on approach by taking some leaves off trees and cutting messages into them.

for my final presentation on fridays crit i chose to display all of my leaves (over 20) that i had hand cut and to hang them from the ceiling using invisible string. i really liked the way that they fell down and twisted, so that people could look at them from both sides, however looking back... i realised that it wouldve been better if i had cut the words the other way around!

 

this week i also visited the eadweard muybridge exhibition at tate britain, and exposed: voyeurism, sureveillance and the camera at tate modern.

eadweard muybridge was a photographer who captured movements within fractions of a section and lined them up to make moving pictures. he is most famous for his commissioned experiment where he captured images of race horses proving that horse is still in motion whilst its legs are off the ground. this can not be seen with the naked eye. even though these series of animals and humans moving were well done, i was more interesting in his photographs which were taken from slightly different angles, and placed next to one another. only with the special glasses that the tate provided could you see a 3D image form from the two almost identical images.

exposed examined photography as an invasive act, and aimed to challenge common ideas of privacy and propriety. this voyeurism within all of the photographs reminded me of how a photographer seems to "stalk" their chosen subject before they take the picture, which is similar to the ways that we've been getting to know our receiver for our bottled message project. the exhibition was divided into 5 categories: the unseen photographer, celebrity and the public gaze (embarassing and private moments), voyeurism and desire (sexual or erotic/ the role of the intruder), witnessing violence, and surveillance. some of these photos were quite grim and shocking at times (couples making love, stalking people at swimming baths, drug dealers, death by unnatural causes) but it was extremely engaging and made the viewer really think and question who these people truely were. harry calahan's atlanta (1984) was my favourite photograph from the exhibition.

after our crit we were given a new project to work on for assessment. we were encouraged to go and see the muybridge exhibition (which i did) and to take 5 of our own photographs (in his style, different stages of movement) providing a short, simple narrative phase with either an object or figure. then, by using 3 different methods of reproducing our photographs, we were asked to do 15 drawings from the 5 photos, based on the films by max fleischer and jeff scher who used rotoscoping as a method of reproduction. we could then make a 1-2 second animation: