If you're one of those who are even vaguely interested in my work or wondering what the meaning behind them is, or the influences I derived my ideas from and how I generally came to the conclusion of these pieces, then read on (only if you have plenty of time on your hands and bored enough to read).
Warning: lots of words
For my project I have decided to portray a section of a journey, chosen using random methodology. My main influences were Oliver Kugler, a contemporary illustrator who used illustration to portray his travels, the Boyle family who chose their locations using a random sampling method and the concept of psychogeography.
Oliver Kugler used illustration to document the environment and the landmarks which he passed, as if he were recording his journey in a visual diary. The Boyle family used maps and darts to choose the locations for their work; they threw darts onto a world map to select a country and then proceeded to use this same method on maps of an increasingly small scale until they could pin point a specific place, which would then be used as the location for their work. I was inspired by these ideas of random choosing and documenting journeys and so decided to use similar techniques in my own work, using a dice to choose my path.
The reason I have decided to use a dice as part of my method of random selection was because of a novel called ‘The Dice Man’ by George Cocksfoot (who goes by the pen name Luke Rhinehart) in 1971. The novel tells a story of a psychiatrist who feels unfulfilled in life and so starts making life decisions by throwing a dice, this lead to controversial issues such as murder, rape and sexual experimentation. The book was banned in several countries, presumably to stop anyone from being influenced by this idea.
Whilst doing more research in order to develop my ideas further, I came across the concept of psychogeography which is defined as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” by Guy Debord in 1955. A simpler way of explaining it would be that “it includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.” (Joseph Hart). It was this that secured my intention to base my piece upon taking a journey using a method of random selection to choose my destinations.
Since I am going to be using chance as a method for deciding upon my destinations I am likely to end up in unfamiliar areas of which I have no previous experience or memories. This means that I will perceive the locations differently from that of a person who frequently passes the same areas in everyday life. This is contrary to a French philosophy known as a Dérive (or a ‘drift‘). Simply put, a Dérive is ‘an aimless walk, probably through city streets, that follows the whim of the moment‘. To elaborate upon this, the idea is that people explore their environment (‘psychogeography’) without preconception in order to understand their location and so their existence. However, unlike my chosen method (where I will be randomly selecting locations I have never before visited), it was proposed by French philosopher and situationist Guy Debord that we should instead be revisiting and exploring the urban spaces that we pass on our everyday routes, but to try looking at them in an entirely different way.
I am intrigued by the idea of having no control over the direction of my journey as I believe this will result in an unpredictable outcome. If I were to choose during my journey, for example, even on an unconscious level, the outcome could be vastly different as I would be selecting the areas I preferred. Guy Debord believed that the reason our cities are ‘so thoroughly unpleasant’ was because they ‘ignored their emotional impact on people, or indeed tried to control people through their every day design’. By using a dice to decide my route I will be avoiding this effect, resulting in my desired outcome of depicting a random uncontrolled journey.
Having chance as the main element of my approach to this project I can relate my idea to surreal art. Surreal art is when objects with completely different backgrounds, or functions, or with no similarity, are presented together without any relation towards one another giving the impression that the objects were picked by chance. Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí tend to use dreams as an influence for creating surrealistic art, hence why his work appear ‘dream like’. An example of one such surreal compositions would be of a tiger getting devoured by a goldfish which is jumping out of a pomegranate (this piece composed by Salvador Dalí in 1944, is known as ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening‘).
My aim is to depict an imaginative interpretation based upon my perception of an area that I was not previously aware of. I want to create an expressive, and possibly an exaggerated, version of how I see the urban landscape. By using photographic textures and recreated textures on Photoshop CS3 I will amalgamate everything I see that has the visual potential to construct a piece which will express my interpretation of the environments within my photography. The appearance I am aiming for is an industrial, run down look, leaning slightly towards a dystopian landscape.
An example of an established illustrator who has produced pieces to portray a corrupt society within a dystopian environment is Viktor Antonov. He is a concept illustrator who has designed for ‘Half-Life 2’ (a revolutionary game renowned for its complex story-line and powerful environmental designs), and for the animated feature film ‘Renaissance‘, as well as the matte painting for the sci-fi series ‘Skyland‘. He holds a transportation design degree from Art Centre College of Design and has over 10 years of experience in the entertainment industry as a matte painter, conceptual designer, art director and production manager.
Like myself, Antonov uses Photoshop as a traditional 2D compositing tool and uses the minimum amount of tools to get the desired results. Naturalist and realist painters of the 19th century were a big influence in his work, he believed that ’the stories they told in their paintings were more important than the medium and flashy brushwork’. He also derived much of his inspiration from photographers such as Lewis Hine and Robert Frank who showed that in a successful photo the stuff you leave out of the picture is just as important as the things in the frame. The reason I am interested in Antonov’s work, particularly for ‘Half-Life 2’ (which Antonov says is the most ambitious and difficult project that he’d ever worked on, because the Valve team was briefed by Gabe Newell simply to create “the best game ever“), because I appreciate how he has combined fantastical atmosphere and realism in his environmental design work and his way of portraying a corrupt society within his digital architecture. I can relate this to my desired outcome, despite the fact that my work will be done using a different technique, because the basic ideas expressed in our work are similar.
The artist who influenced my style, or at least the visual aesthetics I aim for, is Russell Mills, because his work is very expressive through his use of explosive imagery and paint techniques. He uses a combination of traditional and digital art, layered upon each other to create a new aesthetically pleasing art piece, which I think looks greatly successful. It is his way of developing and combining his pieces using such diverse techniques that has encouraged me to manipulate photographic imagery and layer different visuals together in my own work to achieve a similar high standard.
Based upon my research into the styles and techniques used by the artists I have mentioned, as well as the concepts and ideas behind the work they have created, I am going to create a sequence of prints which will portray a journey (that has been lead by the roll of a dice) in a digital medium. Using Photoshop as my compositing tool, I will manipulate a selection of photographs using a diverse range of textures to express my perception of the urban environment; exaggerating the dull, industrial feel of, and encourage people to think differently about, areas which would generally have no impact upon the people who pass them by in real every day life.
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