Theme
Play and Object
Method
I try to offer the objects I found in my room a 1/0 state. The state can be on and off, before an after, open and close. I want to use these 2 states as a digital signal and convert it to something which can be understanded by people. The opening is the countdown video, presented by binary code, 11,10,01,00,which means 3,2,1,and 0. The rest of the video is presented by morse code, saying that ‘the signal is everywhere’ . The last part of the video says, ‘Thanks for watching’. The idea is to tell that living in a digital world bombarded with information, every item could contain some kind of signal or information, and sometimes its our decision to decide if we can make the information makes sense.
The process is relatively simple, I started by taking two pictures of objects and I use ‘Morse Code Translator’ to generate Morse Code for the sentence. After that, I edited them together in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Context
The ‘general’ idea comes from the video ‘How Many Potatoes Does It Take To Run DOOM?’ In the video, a guy uses tones of potatoes, an ‘edible’ object to run Doom. Another thing that comes into my mind is ’static electricity’, when two Insulator touches each other, static electricity generates. In the video ‘9 Awesome Science Tricks Using Static Electricity!’ The creator played with several objects to create magic tricks. In both examples, objects were given extra meanings and were used to created something unexpected.
A more experimental concept which relates to this project is “Object Oriented Ontology”(OOO) , which is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects (Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, 2002). In my project, things have different meanings and can be understood by how they appear to us. I use speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact. When such concept is used in screenwriting, it is called symbolism- the representation of one thing using something else, such as a setting, object or character.
In this project I uses small world play to achieve my idea. Small world-play is a way of creating (and recreating) scenes and settings, both real-life and imaginary (Alexis, 2022). In fact, my project cannot be done without putting my imagination to real-life objects.
Response
Reflection
I think the idea of ‘2 states of an object’ can be further explored. Take a bottle as an example, the 2 states of a bottle can be open/close, but the container inside also has its own state, such as full/empty. Also, there are things which cannot be divided as two states. How can we convert objects into octal, hexadecimal and analog signal?
Related Research
10 Brilliant Symbolism Examples: Symbolism in Screenwriting
https://www.onehundredtoys.com/blogs/the-100/small-world-play (Alexis, 2022)
An Object-Oriented Metamodel for Digital Signal Processing (Xavier Amatriain,2004)
About This Work
By Jerry Lee
Email Jerry Lee
Published On: 19/03/2022