Theme
Play and Stillness
Context
Inspired by one image Matthew Riley shared with me, I tried to play with stillness using a few objects for this week.
Imagine, if there is a different dimension that is responsible for all the tangible things in the world. Although these objects are man-made, we perceive them as 'dead' because they do not have 'life'? After all, we merely shaping matter into forms and defining them as 'things'. We easily form emotional relationships to these lifeless objects overtime.
Is that because we have attached 'memories' to them? What if they had intelligence that human minds just can not perceive?
Method
Give life to objects.
Response
I played this game Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019) recently and I was intrigued by a lot of ideas that the game explores and a quote "objects of power". I believe the idea of a powerful entity from a different dimension is communicated really well in this game. The player cleanses these objects of power to acquire special skills.
I utilised some 3d props I made for my studio one project to play with this concept of stillness. At first, I thought of stillness as the absence of movement in objects. Hence, I considered all of the objects that are still, do not have any purpose of their existence besides what they are made for.
The previous week, I was tinkering with particles in Unity. I thought maybe I can dig deeper into this tool this week. I imported 3d objects I modelled in 3ds Max, found a way to render these objects as particles.
Reflection
I have been struggling a lot with this week's theme to come up with something new because my studio practice also investigates stillness in a spatial narrative sense. But I was looking at this image Matt shared and instantly thought of stillness because it was about some debris orbiting in the space and floating lifelessly.
As Matt once told me when we were discussing my studio project, during an earthquake, if we are stuck in that moment, how would it look if furniture and other objects would be just floating around? I realised that this effect seemed to suit well with my studio inquiry 'stuck in the past'.
