Project 2 Reflection

Reflecting on the process of making Project 2, I discovered I had taken a difficult journey, perhaps needlessly, but learned an enormous amount while doing so. For Project 1, I was fixated on news media as my subject of artistic material and created a web-based project, which drove me toward creating something new away from computer screens and back to a more analog artistic process--specifically the idea of working with drawing and painting on paper. And the subject that I found myself interested in for Project 2 was a specific person rather than a system, network, or philosophy. I thought this would be therapeutic in a way, to allow me to study one human subject under a microscope and dig deep at a slower pace, instead of feeling like I had to keep up with something moving at a much faster speed or situate myself within a complex body of academic and theoretical research. I conceptualized the project around a character, and started by writing a character sketch--trying to pin down details of who he was, basic facts, his personality type, to situate my research. I wanted to create a fiction, but also feel like the character was very real and relatable.

I spent a lot of time focusing on his workplace at first, on the piece being a critique of these marketing companies, ad agencies, so-called data intelligence firms. I spent hours looking through examples of firms that are currently operating in this industry, accumulating and analyzing lots of materials from their web pages. I paid specific attention to the language they used: industry terms, blog posts by members of the company, PR releases, job descriptions they posted, and images of employees and staff. I went a step further and went to industry websites that were focused on the latest technologies that these companies are employing, and that provide business reporting on various funding, investments, acquisitions, and prominent position changes and industry players.

Having worked in a corporate environment before, I have some personal experiences to draw on that I wanted to try to bring out in the work. I also did some covert documentation of my experiences in these environments, and went through my hard drive to find photographic examples of characters that I could use as reference for Bennie. Part of my initial proposal that I felt strongly about was two create two short videos of Bennie--one from his perspective and one from an outsider’s perspective. I wanted both to be critical of Bennie in different ways.

I next felt the impulse to go out and “capture” Bennie in the wild--observing a version of him as he goes throughout his day--entering the office, eating lunch, at the bar after work. However, in following through with my idea to physically go out to midtown manhattan with a camera, I noticed a lot of fear and hesitation. Did I really want to go seeking out these type of people? My instinct is to avoid them. So, it took me a long time to get into the right mindstate to actually start to engage in this process. However, once I did so, I rediscovered the joy of shooting photo and video on street-level, allowing the world to pass through the lens and finding unexpected and interesting things that reveal themselves. The process allowed me to remember to take a more detached, investigative, anthropological, and ultimately light-hearted approach to this aspect of my practice.

Throughout this, I was still not fully engaging with my initial impulse to draw and paint Bennie as the core of the project. I kept finding myself going back to digital imagery of Bennie, or using video as my driving motivation when working on the project. I conceptualized and storyboarded a “morning in the life” of Bennie, and sought to shoot this as if it was Bennie’s point of view. I enjoyed this process of thinking through the details of his morning such as what he would wear, what he would put on for entertainment during his routine. I ended together a short piece after having gone through a “shot list” of all of my ideas, and put together a quick edit using Adobe Premier. I noticed there were even more details that I wanted to spend more time working out and shooting, but didn’t leave myself enough time due to the need to complete all the other project elements. I managed to complete a second cut, but felt it was still not as I would have liked it to be.

The drawing and painting, as well, felt rushed, especially considering I have less formal experience using analog tools, and don’t feel nearly as confident in my abilities. I have found drawing and painting to be types of artistic practices that I really want to give myself the ability to spend more time developing, but trying to do it within the context of this project was not setting myself up for enough growth in this area. When I showed initial sketches, I received the feedback of not really showing the environment of Bennie. This gave me the idea to create a collage based off of all the different environments he would be in. I did image research on Facebook, printed a number of these images, and used that material as I begin to create a collage on paper. Again, I ran up against the problem of not having enough time to spend on it, as I also had to make a digital image to include in the final piece. And at a certain point, I noticed something else I was doing--I was continuing to look at the news excessively during this project. I had the epiphany then to merge images of Bennie inside of political events that were happening at the time. I tried a couple of iterations of doing this, working in Photoshop with various layers and effects to create a digital canvas, but with little initial success. This part of the process drove me to want to spend a lot more time with Photoshop over the break to learn how to utilize some of its tools so that I can more effectively create my vision.

Ultimately, I really didn’t give myself enough time to sit with any individual material to work a piece to it’s fullest potential. I think I didn’t go far enough in tapping into my deeper feelings toward the character or bringing out further facets of his personality. I often felt out of touch with my ideas and driving motivation throughout the process of creating the project, and feel like I have yet to appropriately define or pin down Bennie through any of my artistic materials. I believe, as I said in the crit, that I stretched myself too thin, forcing myself to complete all the various elements of the initial proposal in time for the due date. Instead of being able to spend the proper amount of time on any one piece, I rushed each one, which resulted in none of them being completed in a way that I would have been satisfied with. There was also the challenge of balancing this project alongside the different projects from each of my other classes.

Next, it came to figuring out how to install the piece, which ended up taking into consideration many things that I previously did not think about. In my installation sketch, I imagined everything being hung on a wall, within a corner of a room, including the two videos playing on thin, iPad-like monitors across from one another. I located the corner of the white alcove on the DIAP space as the place in which everything would go. However, soon after I realized that I didn’t have access to iPads, didn’t know how I was going to put anything onto a wall. I tried using two projectors to project the two videos on the adjacent corners, but I didn’t like the way it looked with the ribbed wall panels. I relocated to the space near my desk--and realized that the installation of the work would be much more effective there. I hooked up a projector to display the video of Bennie’s inner experience in the black box, making it an interior, private space, while all the other media elements were on the outside. In the physical set-up I immediately saw limitations, opportunities, new problems that arose, and new questions to start asking. I don’t inherently work with the end-goal in mind, but this process will certainly affect how I approach future projects that are using multiple media and require an installation.

I took good feedback from the crit, specifically in how I will continue to work with this material for future projects in my practice. I think it’s important to focus on one thing in-depth at a time, and also think of scale. In the context of the installation, the slickness of the video pieces definitely outweighed or overshadowed all of the other physical media. I resonated with the idea of blowing up the drawing, painting, and collage into much larger sizes in order to make more of a conversation happen between the elements. Also, I think it is useful to consider making the story into an audio version to be listened to over headphones, or even displayed graphically somehow. A challenge was in making the story be more cohesive with the rest of the objects. I can also see myself solely focusing on the story and going back to a creative writing practice as my focus. As I move into my second semester, I really want to go back to the starting point of my research for this project, and make critical, refined work using Bennie as a tool to shine a light on the data marketing tech companies, the implications of these companies’ practices, and the ethics, morals, and social environments of the type of people who work for them.