Reflecting Locations – Page 4 – A Connecting Spaces Project

assignment 3

Dear all, at first im really sorry for my delay, there were long, rough days in the last weeks. Yersterday I arrıved in istanbul and found time in this busy city.

To refelect a location, it’s also needed to reflect the pictures we have. My picture of another place based on the pictures I see. So, can the Pictures talk with us? What can they tell us? How can they come together and fit to a language that we understand?

In the last weeks I began with a projekt. As starting point serves a selection of images from my own photo collection. The Question was also how interchangeable my pictures are, especially from foreign places. Using the Google images backsearch, it will reverse out a visual media from the original collection and throws it back into the flood of images Google is showing. A variety of “visually similar images” will be presented by Google. There are similar color components and the distribution of the image is measured, also outlines and forms are compared. I abuse this search system. Usually this is used to upload your own images on Google and then control who uses our pictures (maybe) illegally.

The amount is also indicative to images of certain content meaning it’s mirroring social aspects. The inklusion und exclusion from Pictures and image content shows also a lot. It’s interesting how close the Google images are thematically to my self made images, even though they show something entirley different.

I will show some examples

Left is a picture taken by my self in Paris and right a Google result.

My picture which shows a man with a shopping cart on western streets, is again split up by google. In western and third world. An ethnological and economical separation.

The image of a dark skinned man with shopping cart returned in the search results mainly as Indian with car or white guy with shopping cart. The shopping cart, a symbol of capitalism and the Western world. The shopping cart on the photo is ironically used to earn money.

Thematically the only picture matching was a man in Greece also selling Maroni. The background in the right picture shows that the city in which he lives is economically inferior to the city ın the left picture. We also know it is a fact that greece is going through a financial crisis right now. The initial position of the two men, however, seems just the opposite. One improvised with what he had found, the other grilled with pretty professional equipment. In Greece money once was available.

Near Notre Dame, under a bridge, by the river, homeless people have set up. The ” visually similar ” Google results show People climbing on a mountain, rock or doing river rafting.

It’s apparently good that the search for consensus works especially in terms of color. The color variations of the stone bridge on the river leads to images of rock and river. The indication of human presence in the output picture leads to the physical presence of humans in all searching results.

In the reference image, the tragedy is only visible to the ones who can understand the given circumstances. Google does a purely optical analysis and filters out the information of camping adventurers. Even still relatively comfortable. But we are not a search engine and see the tragedy in and behind the image.

Now I had to find the most similar of all the ” visually similar ” images .

I focused here on the color match .

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Together the images develop a new language . They influence each other and create a new content. First Association ,the current refugee issue. Two stuffed boats . In a raging river. Emblematic for the difficult path in a temporary shelter in the western world.

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One and the same picture? Almost. If the differences are small, they start to stick out more. Attention is paid to details , like “find the 10 differences” . So the similarity is always reflecting differences . At the same time, the similarity also involves an exclusion of differences .

Unfortunately, the metadata of the image found is not available . Thus, we don’t know when these pictures were made. It could be the same evening or years in between.

Sightseeing..

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Eiffel Tower

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Beach in Tenerife . Here the agreement is to see the mood of the image . The Google results do not show the beach of Tenerife .

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Meglisalp in Switzerland . Again, the locations of the images found do not correspond with the original picture.

a parody of tourism..

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experiences..

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Based on this Project you can get an idea of my interests in this context.

I would be happy to work with someone who sends me a lot of pictures. These would be the basis and starting point of my work form, but are not mandatory visible in the final work. I want to try to see behind the pictures someway.

3 assignment from hans

A) I would like to explore the “Visual Simulation” between Hong Kong and Zurich’s space. The reason why I choose this element because I believe that there must be something similar in each society and country. And it will observe the differences of culture, livelihood and thinking between Hong Kong and Zurich in these similarity of the use of the space or the people’s movement.

I estimate the work with involved video element and sound, since it’s always a great ways to observe.

B) I would like to use the footages from TV or other broadcast media, since I do think that the media is a great way to represent the life style of the society. Also I would like to shoot some footages by myself too, in order to have more first-person experience about the spaces in Zurich and Hong Kong .

At this moment, I still can’t decide who I would like to co-operate, since it is good to have chemical reaction with any people who have different cultural background with myself. And it is sure that all the Zurich friends will inspire my work a lot, in to a more dramatic work.

C) What we see/ common sound/ Different in the simulation

cages / 3. assignment

Reflecting locations and their cages. Where can we find cages in these two cities/ societies? Where are the similarities and differences from one an other? Maybe my partner and I should focus on a specific cage, which is still not defined. We could also start rebuilding an imaginary cage, where Hong Kong and Zurich merge into one without comparing them.

The subject that I found the most interesting is that if we are present or absent in the cage and if we are on the way to enter or exit it.

The topic is very open and I would love to work it out together with my partner. The way to get to the topic would be through brainstorming and making a concept together. The project could be a mixture of video, photography and text.

This is just a spontaneous draft of mine. It is related to the main topic, but not necessarily to the subtopic my partner I will be working on. I can’t decide that on my own.

Cages:

I can’t breathe, even though the air is perfectly clean.

I feel poor, even though money is reachable and here.

For one reason I see people not as people anymore, more like robots,

wake up, eat breakfast, shit, work, social media, eat lunch, work, eat dinner, watch TV, social media, read a book, might fuck if they are lucky enough and then go to sleep and do it all over again.

The overly polite attitude is our weapon, even though we often think differently, but it’s easier to be polite then to say fuck you in your face.

Meeting up with other people must be scheduled three weeks in advance, otherwise we can’t. Our schedule becomes our best friend, because it says what we have to do and when we have to do it. We always know what’s gonna happen next and surprises are very rare, with life itself as just an image of how we think life works.

Spontaneity is dead and we don’t even care.

We don’t even care if we’re living in a cage, because it’s a comfortable one. Every move we make is already turned into automatism. When we look around, we see everyone does the same, so we adapt, we become to an image of how a person in society works. We’re mostly not ourselves, we just like hiding behind the barrels of our cages.

Assignment 3 – Joanna

Since we live in a global village, media help us extend our skin. I can“feel“ what other feel. Hear, see, maybe taste and smell if we are using the same products in an post-industrial world.My interest is to let fiction and non-fiction flow together and build a bridge/connection to Hong-Kong this way.What is common? What is very different maybe – and how diffuse the cultures one another?That’s why, I would like to bind Fotos and little Movies from Hongkong scattered in the six episodes of Walker.

The best for my Project would be, that s/he is interested in making little movies (I do it just with smartphone). So we could reflect our actions/plot in another environment. Open the Box, to let non-fiction and fiction flow together and even this two cities, how they extended our „skin“, our senses already.

So my main-question is the distraction because of media (like: medial“pastoring“) and the influences from east and west, which are melting together (even in literature for example).Do we“re-act“ the same? (Even habits) Do we have the same desires and ideas in using media.

So, here is the next Episode of Walker, hope someone will reflect 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPzRlSbu-ZI

Assignment 3 – Karen

A) I was inspiring by Jelena’s post. She said my living city is seems like a Lego district. It was so surprised for me. Therefore, I just wanted to do a synchronizing work with my partner to look how similar our country. Both of us can rebuild our similar country as the same time in form of installation. And I would like to rebuild my city pattern in those symbolic Lego face.

B) It is possible that my partner and I can use any images show how similar our cities are. My partner can also contribute in another medium form to create a work. It will help us to collect images in Hong Kong/ Zurich as inspirations to work with. It is nice that my partner is well-known in 3D geometrical form and video shooting. It may get help to rebuild our cities in the installation and other media form. Hope we can incorporate to develop a group work later.

C) I am interested to transform our cities in a narrative or story-telling way on wall in a clockwise direction.

assignment 3 winnie

A) i was always thinking about patterns and textures that belong to a specific place. for example, hong kong is sometimes regarded a concrete jungle… we have patterns such as red-white-blue bags…

an idea would be like messing up both locations with their own specific textures -> redrawing hong kong / zurich by scratching texture from theh other location on the paper.

the physical touch in reality towards something that entirely non-exist …

B) i hope we could try to have images that are not taken by us with a camera, even if we have photographs, it would be nice if we uses images that we collected from somewhere in hong kong/zurich as inspirations or may even incorporate them to develop a work. a group work.

C) from left to right:
scratch wall / door frame / a drop of paint dried on the wall / bamboo seat mat

Assignemnt 3 Morena

Thinking about REFLECTING LOCATIONS I ask myself about the meaning of PRESENTATION, REPRESENTATION, REINTERPRETATION. How do I „create“, explore, feel the sense of place. What it means to build an Archive of typicalness. That very fast come in my mind and ARCHIVE OF ABSURDITY. Am I a colonization traveler? Am I an explorer in my own city? Am I part of the sistem? Is all connect? Or am I a stranger?

I ask myself where is the connecting spaces? If not in plural, but the connecting spaces is a space. INTERNET. A place that connect the both cities but has no borders.

Maybe the City is a viewer, an imput, the internet the place, the other City the output..

Furthermore, I am thinking on souvenir. On Archival. How do you archive a city?

What are the tipical, what are the stories to tell.

I could imagine to develope City sculptures. Like artefacts. Like souvenirs, like storyteller.

Interaction. I am open. To create something new? Is about any location? Or is about Zh and HK?

I am fascinated by the 3d Programs in internet like 123D Catch. Create objects, a 3D object, that exist on internet, and everyone can print all over the world.

Those “sculptures” don’t really need to be only physical.. it could be sound, smells, lights…

Assignment 3 Allison

I imagine the images to be an unstable flicker or a fleeting reflection that merges two very different locations and turn it into somewhere new. Speaking of reflections, here are a little more of Hong Kong I want to share with you, these are taken recently by photographing window reflections:)

I want to create ambiguous visions of a new space that is not very obvious to tell which part is in Zurich and which part is in Hong Kong, maybe both or maybe none. Also I’m very interested in exploring the concept of “time”, in the frame of specific spaces.

I think it will be great if my partner and I can track the visual clues, meaning some particular details of the cities that we decide to explore together, and maybe collect lights or sounds from both sides. I would also like to develop a common project if she is interested in photography/video art/sound installation, we can also experiment with visual and audio together.

And lastly, I wrote something recently that has me thinking about how we can (or cannot) deal with the idea of time/memory.

Time is captured in a cage.

It doesn’t stop, but it can’t fly anymore.

It ticks forwards and then backwards, the moment reserves.

It doesn’t go to the future, but it can’t be changed anymore.

It moves faster and then slower, and we see blurs.

Time is captured in a cage, and it is out of focus.

2nd Assignment Morena Buser

GRAY

While working in the color darkroom, I started to think about Zurich, my relationship with this city and what could I present to you.

There, the assignment was how to do from a color negative a black and white print.

Well, to the ones who don’t know, a color enlarger has 3 filters: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Each filter goes from 0 until 199.

If you turn all the filters off your print will be black. It means that you will have no color. If you turn all the filters on in the maximum, the print will be white. The colors are so dense, that it doesn’t let light goes though the filters.

So, for a GRAY, you will have to find the balance with all those three filters.

And here started my fascination about the Gray.

To find a balance.

I started to do a little research about Gray. And what I found is very similar my feelings about Zurich.

Gray is darker than white

Gray is lighter than black

Neutral, Pure

Shy and boring

Unflashy, indifference and modesty

Gray is the color of conformity.

Not having any personality of its own, it adapts to any other color. It will look either dark or light, depending upon the color next to it.

Gray is a color without a color.

Stability

Zurich is my gray. My gray zone.

Second assignment

Sorry for my delay, since my previous smartphone was not working, so I’ve just bought a new one.

This is the professional music recording and rehearsal room in Hong Kong. The photos is taken when I have a rehearsal with a famous local singer (Though I’ve never listen her songs).

This is the band room that I’ve rented in an industrial building. Local musicians usually rent a room in industrial buildings to make their own studio. This band room belongs to my band – Prune Deer.

This is the G Floor of the industrial building, which is a car park.

My band room is in Kwun Tong, which is a industrial area.
it’s Kwun Tong night view,

Instead of just playing music, I also work for the commercial sound mix and commercial background music. This are the two Video studio at I usually work in.