Olivia Habermel
Brief This module enables you to develop the integrated design methodologies required to work in a dynamic, professional, creative and commercial environment. This project demands that you channel your intellectual and creative skills, through exploration and self-directed progression that demonstrates your ability and independence, as well as in-depth knowledge and understanding of aesthetic, environmental, marketing and technical requirements of design for the creative industries. Emphasis is placed upon the ability to achieve high-level flexible thinking approaches in the pursuit of creative solutions. Expectations are further challenged for the design outcomes and artefacts to achieve group coherence for exhibition purposes.
Key Words Bang Shatter Clash Jolt Break Up Conflict Bump Smash Crunch Scrap Plow Crash Strike Splinter Hit Beat Happy Technology Future Travel Sun Internet Photo Smile Social Family Friends Pets
Happiness My big happiness is the Sun. The sun makes everything better. The sun affects my mood hugely - this is called Seasonal Affective Disorder - something very hard to live with. Sometimes it can make a cloudy day seem like the end of the world. I love to explore and travel, I want to travel the world and experience all of the different cultures - I think this is an important part of life as it shows you how beautiful this world is and teaches you to appreciate what you have. Photography is another thing that captures happiness and keeps it forever. Happiness is important - It keeps you sane and gives you the strength to keep on going. Last but not least, my family, especially my grandma. My grandma means the world to me. She taught me how to cook and how to appreciate good food from all around the world.
The Internet The Internet is something almost unavoidable in this day and age. Technology has completely taken over our social lives meaning we have lost quite a lot fo our physical social interaction. I remember the days before I had a mobile phone, I used to go around to all of my friends houses and knock on their doors to see if they wanted to come out and play or go to the cinema or the park - then everyone got telephones so you would call around - now we just instantly message all of our friends at once in a group chat with little thought or effort. I like to switch my phone off sometimes especially when I am doing my work - just to get away from the hustle and bustle of social media. The internet is great too, we have so much information at our fingertips, but sometimes i wonder if we have a little bit too much for our own good, making us paranoid.
My Future I want my future to consist of travelling to every part of the globe, photographing as i go and educating myself and others. Experiencing life in every different way, rough and glamourous. Every experience is an invaluable opportunity to learn. I want to move around, working in different countries, never quite settled and owning just enough to get me by but not enough to be tied down.
Aims Undertake creative and ambitious research beyond the parameters of each theme Develop a brief that transcends commerce and commodity acquisition Examine the conceptual and aesthetic potential of digital convergence and the future self Innovate, explore and expand technical and personal parameters. Create a contemporary portfolio piece for personal promotion and a curated exhibition. Show your ingenuity – be unique make it memorable Consider, explore and mash-up the three themes; Happiness/ the Internet/ Your Future Self; Sagmeister urges us not to convey happiness but to ‘evoke happiness’. Coupland misses his pre-internet brain – should we embrace this ‘inevitability’? The future – the virtual or reality – will we fake it, or keep it real? Ten years from now...what will you be doing?
STEFAN SAGMEISTER // THE HAP
PPY SHOW
Sagmeister, who has documented his struggles with alcohol and drugs, weight gain, and depression, first conceptualized The Happy Show in an attempt to define and control his own happiness during a client-free sabbatical—a year-long break he takes every seven years to creatively recharge. The final display is the result of 10 years of research into his own personal happiness. Confronted with stories about wellness, mindfulness, and sexuality, viewers will be immersed in an experience akin to walking into Sagmeister’s mind. The Happy Show is comprised of an array of engaging infographics, video projections, and interactive installations, including a stationary bike that powers a wall of neon, a giant inflatable monkey, and a series of gumball machines that displays visitors’ collective level of happiness. Audiences will also enjoy a preview of Sagmeister’s soonto-be-released documentary, The Happy Film, which depicts his attempts to increase his happiness through meditation, cognitive therapy, and moodaltering pharmaceuticals.
This is a brief mock up of the kind of montages i would like to create using old family photographs, letters, postcards, film and tickets. I would like to get hold of peoples original photos and hand written letters and postcards to create a kind of story without knowing anything more about them. I also want the public to come up with a sort of story line that they have imagined from each montage and write them in a comment book.
A HISTORY OF CAM
In 130 years, technology has come so far and we can now do some amazing things with photography. Though this is a positive and negative thing. Photography has got so precise that there is no character left in it like there was with film photography. This is why some artists are now reverting back to old film cameras to create their photographic art. Film photography has a grainy look to it and always has specs of dust on the lens. All of these imperfections add to the aesthetic.
MERAS Photographic cameras’ roots go deep.
Everything
started
with
camera
the
obscura,
and continued with Daguerreotypes, 35mm
cameras,
digital cameras and camera phones.
Colour Colour is a lot more than just something we see, it can also create feelings. Powerful feelings that, when used in art, can affect the way you see the piece. For example; the colour blue is associated with the sky and water but also has links to feelings of trust and peace. You may use this colour when representing a family unit. Your favourite colour says a lot about your personality, so , for instance, my favourite colour is purple and often blue as well. This shows i am a creative person with a big imagination as well as loyal and trustworthy. I want to use the meanings and emotions of colour in my outcomes to help support what they mean.
Energy, Passion,
Imagination,
Action, Ambition
Creative, Individual
Trust, Peace, Loyalty, Integrity
Balance, Growth, Self-Reliance
Unconditional Love, Nurture
Mind, Intellect, Optimistic, Cheerful
EUGENIA LOLI “It's important for me to "say" something with my artwork, so for the vast majority of my work there's a meaning behind them. I usually do this via presenting a "narrative" scene in my collages, like there's something bigger going on than what's merely depicted. Sometimes the scene is witty or sarcastic, some times it's horrific with a sense of danger or urgency, some times it's chill. I leave it to the viewer's imagination to fill-in the blanks of the story plot.” EUGENIA LOLI Eugenia is now my number 1 favourite artists. I found a lot of her work by searching for “Vintage Photo Collage” on Pinterest. After clicking on a few of the images i liked, i realised that most of them were by her. She creates art like i have never seen. Incorporating black and white images with colour but so skillfully that it doesnt look out of place.
After doing a lot of research on Pinterest, I have developed my idea into less of a scrapbook collage and more of a photo/ texture and image replacement collage. My next step is to collect some old family photos and a selection of textures to incorporate into my images.
I took a trip to London to see my grandma and she gave me all of her photographs that she has stored away. A couple of them date back to before she moved from Guyana to the UK aged around 18 years old. One of my favourites is when she had just begun Nursing School in London and she saw her from fall of snow. Coming from a Meditteranean country, she had never seen snow before.
Cyriak is an awesome yet modest British artist specialising in looping animation GIFs and image replacement. He has worked for E4 Stings, Impractical Jokers, IT Crowd, Bloc Party, Bonobo, Coca-Cola and many more!
His style is something absolutely mindblowing and i really want to give it a go with just the images.
These are a few amazing clips from a music video called, Cirrus by Bonobo created by Cyriak. A fantastic use of the looping technique - something i have learnt about in my Process and Production lessons.
These are a few obscure clips from a music video called, unbelievably, ‘Cows & Cows & Cows’ by Cyriak. An incredible video that not only uses looping but manipulation of the characters in the video.
Lukas Graham Lukas Graham is a new music artist gaining his fame from his hit song - 7 Years. His music video is a fabulous collage of his journey through his life and into fame, showing every step he took. This is a brilliant idea to show a journey through anything which i could bring into my Collide project using my family photos.
I have gathered a few of my favourite textures from www.freeimages. com to cut into my images.
Most of them are quite grunge and rusty as i feel they add a bit a depth to the image instead of a flat lifeless colour.
I also pasted an old telephone onto the image, replacing her head, because i saw an image similar in my research and my Grandma always used to be on the phone.
Using an image of my Grandma, i cut out around her and pasted her onto the background of a black and white photo of a river so it looks like shes a giant walking down the river like it is a road.
Using a mixture of my own images and images from www.FreeImages.com, i have created quite a few, very different image replacement pieces.
The first Image is off my grandma pasted onto a hilly landscape with a bowl of popcorn. I have also thrown in some geometric shapes matching the shapes in the landscape. This is my frist attempt at using what Eugenia Loli does with her work, i like what i have done but its not quite the result i wanted.
For the second image i have used a range of textures making up the backgrond for an image taken by my grandma of her friend Rosemary and her new car. It is a really interesting and quirky piece but not very out of the box, the things in the image arent quite as out of place as i had imagined.
This is my interpretation of my family tree. Obviously it is only a snippet of my family tree but it has everyone important to my grandma on it. I have actually used my grandmas Guyanan birth certificate as a background for the tree. It was a strange idea, not what i originally intended to use as a background but it is actually a lot more meaningful.
I also changed the colour of her brothers collar form white to red and changed the background to a field. Not my favourite piece but it did make my mum smile.
This is a very cute picture of my mum and her brother back in primary school. My mum was never a fan of her glasses so i decided to jazz them up a bit.
This is another version of my family tree with a hemp material textured background instead of my grandmas birth certificate. Although it means far less that my first attemp, the tree is bolder and stands out on the texture better than the birth certificate.
Using some of my textures, i added my photos on top of them to give them a little bit more of a scrapbook effect. Adding the film strip at the side of this photo was a really good effect.
This is a photograph of my mum as a child with her aunty and cousins and then her cousin as a baby with her uncle with some other vintage photos in the background. I liked the way i managed to get the whole family in, plus my mum, to create a small collage instead of just one full photo of everyone.
This is a montage of my uncle, my mum, my great grandfather and my grandma. A photo that could never actually be taken as my great grandfather died when my grandma was just 20 years old so my mum and uncle never got to meet him. When i showed this image to my grandma, she couldn’t help but smile and said she wished the photo could have been real.
Im not quite sure where i was going with this photo. These children are my mums cousins again at the adorable ages of 3 and 4, all bundled up for autumn. I blanked out the eyes because i believe eyes hold most of your emotion. Without the eyes, what do you see? Do you see happiness? Miserableness? Anger?
“The eyes are the window to your soul” - William Shakespeare.
“Your eyes speak the truth when everything else is a lie” - Unknown
Will swapping the eyes change the expression on their face? Or will it just look a little bit crazy.
Blanking out the eyes in my last experimentation gave me an idea to, instead of blanking out the yes, swap them for someone elses.
“The eyes are useless when they mind is blind” Unknown
“Sometimes the eyes can say more than the mouth” Unknown
This is a school photo of my mum with another one of her older school photos pasted on the mouth and my grandmas eyes over my mums glasses. If you squint at it, it still looks like my mum. This piece has to be a favourite of mine.
This was an interesting idea that i got from creating the previous montage. I have taken my grandmas eyes and my great grandfathers mouth and pasted it on my unlce. I then took my mums eyes from a much younger photo and my grandmas mouth and posted them onto my mums face. My uncle now looks a little bit more serious and puzzled but my mum still looks her cheery self. Although the images dont completely match up, i also just wanted to show that my uncle and my mum both have very distinctive genes from my grandmas side of the family.
For my final piece, i want to create a photo montage that will really move my grandma and make her smile. A piece that incorporates my grandma with her father and her children as well as her past. The things she holds most dear in life. If i can create something that makes my grandma happy then my project will be complete.
I left my grandma alone with a folder of all of the pieces of work i have done for this project and let her decide one my final pieces. I said for her to choose the pieces that meant the most to her as well as the artistic factor.
This is a cut piece of film that my grandma took when she first moved over to London. The film got developed but was never printed so i decided to just scan it in. I picked three photos to add into the film. The first, my grandma in red, after she arrived in London at age 19. The second, my grandma in orange, when she was still living in Guyana at age 17. The third, my mums cousins in green, bundled up for autumn at ages 3 and 4. I thought i would colour the photos, even though they are originally in black and white, to show how far our technology has come. We can now completely re-colour photos, not that that is what i have done here, but i have added colour that wasnt there before. The colour also represents the time and place it was taken. So, the red image of my grandma is when she had achieved her ambition of moving to London to study nursing, her determination paying off. The orange image of my grandma when she was still living in Guyana, representing her optimism for passing school and getting the grades she needed to move to the UK. The last photo in the background is of my mums cousins, who were very close to my mum and my grandma. They are in green to show their growth with my grandma, she helped bring them up and nurse them whilst looking after my mum and her brother too.
This is my last and final version of my family tree. Although i didnt use my grandmas birth certificate, i still love this piece just as much. I let my grandma make the final decision on which background to have and she said that this texture of cardboard looked the best as it is lighter in colour in the middle and gets darker toward the edges, making the tree almost look like its glowing.
This is the last piece of work my grandma picked. The photo of my mum back in primary school. She was absolutely amazed at how i could take her eyes from one photo and fit them onto my mums face on another photo without having to use any scissors or glue. She said she always saw herself in my mum but never realised just how much until now.
Now my grandma is happy, i am happy and this means my project is complete. I would go to the moon and back just to make my grandma smile and i hope this reflects in my work.
Olivia Habermel
oliviahabermelgraphics.blogspot.com University of Huddersfield
Cover Page: www.freeimages.com Happiness/Internet/Future: www.pinterest.com Moodboards: www.pinterest.com Lukas Graham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jErJimwom94 Textures: http://www.freeimages.com/ Cyriak/Hands: http://cyriak.co.uk/animation/ - https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TwuqPHF3vY0/ maxresdefault.jpg Cirrus/Bonobo: https://youtu.be/WF34N4gJAKE Cows/Cyriak: https://youtu.be/FavUpD_IjVY Sagmeister: http://museumofvancouver.ca/exhibitions/exhibit/stefan-sagmeister-happy-show - http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/work/project/the-happy-show/ History of cameras: http://photodoto.com/camera-history-timeline/ Eugenia Loli: http://cargocollective.com/eugenialoli Colour: http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/meaning-of-colors.html