User:Koen

Project 1: On The Body

'Exploring bespoke technologies as remediation, adaptions or extensions of the human body: Each third year will produce a new work inspired by one of the minor projects, but in an explicitly different medium or approach.'

Context

We spend the first week of this project helping the minors. They had their own groups with their own projects: my group had the idea to raise awareness for the 'terms and service' and careful you need to be when reading them. If you read them at all, that is. Be careful of what you agree with, it might be used against you. In the installation they secretly take a picture of you and spread it to computer screens across the room to show you how fast it can spread.

Project

My task in the first week was to make the wiki in order. I had to record important parts of the minors' research with either writing text or showing pictures. I also had to show the result of their work, pictures that were unexpectedly taken of you and shown on a giant screen in the next room.

The wiki page: http://digitalcraft.wdka.nl/wiki/Introweek2017 (the project is called 'I agree')

For my second project, I had the idea to visually show you how fast one of those pictures could spread across the world with the help of animation (my department). You would see an animation of the globe and the picture being spread across it in the form of tiny dots of light. It starts with one dot and over time more dots start to appear all across the globe until it's covered with dots.

I used a lot of pictures of the earth at night as a reference on which area's on the world have a large population. Here are a few:

The result is the following video:

https://vimeo.com/235885752

Reflection

The first week was great, even if it was pretty sudden. I had to adapt really fast to the group I was placed in and understand where they were coming from with their project. I was also happy to know that my help was appreciated in the group, as I had the task to make sure the wiki was in order.

The second project was honestly not a fun project to work on, mainly because I was making it really difficult for myself. Drawing all the dots on the globe for multiple frames drove me insane. And it doesn't really look all that good in my opinion. I needed too many dots and I couldn't give them all my attention or this project would take up too much time. There was probably an easier to make the animation, but I don't know how and by the time I started questioning my methods I was already half-way in my project.

Project 2: Sensitivity Training

This project is all about exploring the effects of external inputs on the human body.

Context

The class is divided in groups and each of them explores a different input. There is light, magnetism, voltage, heat and stretch. I have formed a group with Tutu
and we have chosen voltage. The first week we were supposed to make three very short (10 seconds) video's. Each of these video's should display a different effect that voltage has on the human body. In the second week we thought it would be fun to show how voltage is being presented and what kinds of effects it has in the world of cinema. As such, we wanted to make a compilation of all kinds of movieclips showing off what voltage can do.

Project

The three video's we made each had its own theme:

In the first video we tried to measure my body voltage using a power source, some cables and a multimeter, to show that voltage naturally runs through a human body. We connected the power source to the multimeter and the multimeter to me, but we didn't really get a measureable result. Though, as I started moving my body, with the electrode of the multimeter in my hand, the multimeter suddenly started to measure something. When I stopped moving, the measuring stopped. It really was my body that triggered it, if I only moved the electrode around nothing happens. We thought it was really interesting, so we decided to just record this instead of what we had originally planned.

In the second video I rubbed my hair with a balloon to show the effects of static electricity on human hair. It makes your hair stick to the balloon. I sped up the rubbing so that the video's length still fit in the ten second range and because it is funny.

The third and final video shows me shocking my fingers with an electric flyswatter. The goal of this is to record the reaction of my body to the shock that I get, particularly the facial reaction. I used a zoom and a slow down on the face to clarify this and also for comedic effect.