Project and development (submission brief)

For my project, I started out with the idea of just surrealism where I would explore the whole of it, where my work would be mostly made up of mixed media such as combining photography with video, however after being told that my project wasn’t focused enough, my project underwent a variety of different themes such as ‘perceptions of reality’ where I planned to explore different interpretations of the world around us, for example what does a person who hallucinates see.  However, the current and hopefully final idea is ‘Visions of the future’, where I will use a retro 80’s inspired aesthetic, as well as ideas from that time on how the future was shown off in media such as films and games. So far, I have created a few videos and images ranging from an absurdist advert about taking a holiday in space to an image of an underwater city.

I have looked at a variety of surreal artists which have and will influence my future work such as ‘Dryden Godwin’ and ‘Richard Burbridge’, who have a focus on manipulating images with techniques such as sewing and scratching into images, which is something that I will be exploring along with shooting with 35mm film for manipulation in the darkroom For my future work, I also plan to explore the sense of scale in order to create images that play with how we perceive certain object such as buildings.  I will be doing this to give diversity to my work and theme of mixed media as well as to further the retro look.

For research I have looked at Sigmund Freud and his theory on the Id, Ego and Superego due to my more surreal theme as many surreal artists get ideas from their dreams in which I kept a dream diary for a few weeks writing down any dream that I remembered. As my work is more video based the use of a green screen has become important so I looked into the history of the green screen to find out how it was used as well as early versions of it.

I have presented my work on a blog due to my work having a focus on video where it would be hard to show of the video with something like a sketchbook, posting my work to a blog also allows me to easily review work I have done and edit it.