Unit 2
‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd” Final work, displayed as a video projection on fabric at the Bargehouse Gallery:
About the work presentation and install in Bargehouse:
A technician helped me to hang the final drape of the work. I found the preliminary hanging of the voile sheet to be uneven, as if this were a mistake; with a sloping centre which presented more of a bedsheet-like appearance. While I had intended the first composition of the hanging to loosely resemble stage curtains or waves, I much prefer the second and final draping pictured above, as this appears more like the magical sail of a ship, or a rising spectre, illuminated in the dark attic space of the Bargehouse gallery.
A thought for future improvement concerning the presentation of the work would be to experiment further with the shaping of the fabric; resisting the rectangular sheet-like effect it presents. While it was necessary in this case to have the bottom of the sheet rectangular in order to capture the transcript and subtitles of the work, the spectre connotations of the work are undermined by the rectangular sheet. I desired subtitles as I was aware that other works in the room could potentially have sound and I wanted the transcript within my work to be especially clear, as it acts as the core of the piece. I included different fonts (including an Arial font) to represent the different voices in the work: my own voice, the voice of Prospero and Ariel within The Tempest and the voice of Chat GPT. I felt this was effective, alongside the contrast of my own voice with Google Translate’s edited, generated voice in helping viewers understand what different voices were involved in the work.
While I don’t regret including a transcript and subtitles, I didn’t truly have to be concerned with sound issues, as I was fortunate enough to have my work positioned in it’s own large space, where the sound might resonate without interfering with the works surrounding it. In the future, it would be interesting to explore how different materials appear under the light of the projector beyond this work and the studio experiments below. I did think the translucency, lightness and holographic effects of the final piece were successful, as I loved the way the light bled through the thin material, casting the audience in the glow of the projector. I attempted to turn the light of the projector down and while I hope the light did not distract viewers, it did help viewers to stand in certain areas when regarding the work where the light would not hit their eyes directly. This presented the spirit in the work with a kind of power, though it is also something to be concerned with in the future when considering the positions of viewers when watching the work and the accessibility of the work.
First preliminary hanging of drape:
MA Unit 2 Project Bargehouse Proposal
My original proposal, shown above, considered hanging the sheet of fabric between two pillars, with the projector on a shelf. In considering the practicalities of positioning the projector, the projector was moved onto an adjustable stand, instead, and acted as a back-projection, with the image swapped so that it would be the right way round from the front of the sheet on the opposite side of the sheet from the projector. Though we were told nothing could be hung from the ceiling, the attic space of Bargehouse had some cables hanging from the ceiling, from which the sheet could be hung. I liked the suspension of it in the air as a nearly-weightless entity, much like how Ariel is represented in many Shakespeare adaptations. I also liked how it faced one of the entrances to the room at an angle, addressing viewers as a luminous object when they entered the dark space.
Screenshots from ‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd” Video
Draft Rendition of ‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd’:
About ‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd DRAFT’ :
The video above is the draft of ‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd’, which I presented as part of a studio crit as a signal of my progress within Unit 2 and in preparation for Bargehouse. This video has notably less uses of Stable Diffusion AI generation of frames. I had only just learned the process and so was still exploring how I might incorporate it into my video. Additionally, this video doesn’t have the transcript that the final video does. I think having the transcript present in the piece significantly improves the material as a whole, since the AI-generated text and the Shakespeare context plays such a large role in the piece. This video can help demonstrate my process in creating my footage, through editing myself on Premiere Pro, changing effects, hues and inserting footage of animals and sea creatures, before I inserted further Stable Diffusion Animations. The contrast between the Sea Nymph scene and the Harpy scene can be explicitly seen through the hues of the frames; the Sea Nymph scene being edited in blue and the Harpy scene being edited in red, something that stayed the same in the final version of the work. There are also many uses of reflections within this work, something which I wanted to explore to indicate the element of water, as well as the duality of a user and the used, the feminine and the masculine, the human and the inhuman, brought together into one completed collage.
Studio Tests:
To explore how I might consider presenting my work at the Bargehouse gallery on Southbank, I experimented in the studio both with projecting my draft video onto a wall and onto scrim fabric that was available in the space. I was able to see the effect of the projection more clearly on the wall, as the fabric had something of a fuzzy effect on the image.
While I had hoped the scrim would offer a cloudy texture, I decided it was too fibrous for my purposes, and that a thinner fabric would help capture better details and create more of a ghostly, holographic effect, which I believe my final work in the Bargehouse did, very successfully.
Please see the next page to see my AI video generation process via Stable Diffusion! (Page 5 below)