CPS - week 1- Observation

By Bycharlotte

Theme

Observation

Context

When using digital technologies, many types of dysfunction can occur, ranging from hardware malfunctions to software errors to human ineptitude. Many new media artworks employ various strategies of dysfunctionality in order to explore issues of power within societies and culture, examples of these would be all the glitch art that has been produced for a long time now. This concept has also been used in design, Ferrucio Laveiani’s designs for Fratelli Boffi stretches and bends the boundaries of interior design with "glitchy" furniture for a product series called Good Vibrations.

Link to Fratelli Boffi

http://www.laviani.com/good-vibrations

Method

For this activity, I began by taking photos of a deformed metal chair, that I found near the old jail at RMIT. I used my phone to take panorama photos while shaking the phone vigorously, then transferred these poorly taken panoramas into photoshop and edited the background and adjusted the contrast and the lighting.

Link to the work in progress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzP0_ogAfrc

Response

Inspired by Laveiani’s furniture design I embraced the concept of the error or glitch as a form and picked a chair as the subject to respond to. It was also pointed out in the presentation that observation is not limited to the act of sensing, it is the product of individual thought and expression, so I decided to go beyond just documenting and instead express what I have observed. My subject portrays a common everyday object in unexpected forms. I have exaggerated and reinforced the element of dysfunction and deformation that the chair had in the first place where I found it. I did that by capturing shaky panorama photos of the chair to exaggerate its form and multiply different parts of it, making the photo look glitchy. The purpose of further destructing the form of the chair was because the dysfunction and the imperfection of this object drew me in in the first place and this was the primary reason for me to observe it for an awful lot of time.

Hence, I wanted to reinforce the element of deformation in an attempt to define the essence of the chair by disrupting the viewers’ expectation and presenting a familiar but modified version of the banal subject.  The chair legs are multiplied and melded … is a chair a chair, even if it doesn’t conform to the standard form?  Is a chair a chair if you can’t sit on it? I took the imperfection or dysfunction of the chair as an integral element of the project. The existence of the chair, as the subject of observation, is conveyed even more so, by removing other distracting elements in the background by photoshop, making the chair the centre of a happening where it is no longer an object to be sat on but rather a something to observe.