HOLE
5
Published by University Of South Wales BA (Hons) Photography
ISBN: 978-1-909838-45-1
University Of South Wales 86-88 Adam Street Cardiff CF24 2FN
Published: June 2020
Copyright: © University Of South Wales, 2020
Design Consultant: Oliver Norcott
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retreival system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publishers. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988.
Printed by: Taylor Brothers, Bristol
Designer: Sandra Muranska
Editors: Peter Bobby Magali Nougarède Text Editors: Dylan Vining Jamie Edwards Eileen Little Ian Wiblin Jude Wall Guest Writers: Alistair Farthing Mihai Moldovanu
Alistair Farthing
Mihai Moldavanu
Born in King’s Lynn in 1994, Alistair Farthing is a Cardiff based mixed media visual artist whose practice is used as an investigation into the intricacies of a constructed social fabric as well as the objects of importance which dictate these relationships. His artistic practice often involves collaborative efforts and toes the line between the scientific and the romantic. Working predominantly in lens-based media, his work is a vehicle for the scrutiny of the medium with recurring themes of memory, time, authenticity and structures of power.
Born in 1993 in Chișinău, Mihai Moldovanu studied Photography at USW, graduating in 2017. He is primarily a visual artist with an interest in theory. He has also written short fiction and theoretical texts. His visual work ranges from more traditional photographic series to collages as well as video glitches and montages. Recently he has been making work that is influenced by Mark Fisher’s notion of “acid communism”. He is interested in achieving a “psychedelic” state in the viewer, where old ways of thinking are dissolved and new possibilities become available.
Content Hole
Punch
5
Tiana Ferguson
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Kieran Mavar
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Alistair Farthing
71
Mihai Moldavanu
18
Kadri Otsiver
72
Eve Morgan
25
Lauren King
76
Cerys Evans
28
Jodie Evans
80
Kelsey Howells
34
Rebecca Tudball
82
Rebecca Bytheway
38
Dylan Vining
86
Hannah Templer
42
David Watts
92
Alex Chorlton
45
Jamie Edwards
96
Tara Pinnock
48
Ryan Waters
98
John Evans
54
Garin Davies
103
Jack Osborne
58
Jen Haydn Pearce
111
Amy Lewis-Thomas
62
Sandra Muranska
116
Lowri Hawkins
123
Roxy Llewellyn
127
Lauren Hinchly
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Fool me once, Fool you twice Tiana Ferguson
A person, a building, or even an object that can evoke a certain feeling. I deal with my feelings becoming a newcomer to new environments that are unfamiliar. Finding places that redefine and contribute to the feeling I call home. A feeling of uncertainty and unknowing prevails; I relish the thought of finding tranquillity in this strange place. Showing—in essence—that home is wherever I am, and that it is not far behind. Fool me once, Fool you twice is a series of analogue double exposures, creating an amalgam of two memories combined into one photograph becoming a way of exploring new community identity and personal experiences. The photographs become a means of visual exploration, to make a seemingly fractured life into a whole: a story with a past, present and future. The idea that ‘Home’ is not a place, but rather a state of mind.
There Is No Dance in Frequency and Balance by Alistair Farthing
For years it has felt almost as if the landmarks of the linear progression of time, in a cultural sense at least, have been somewhat disappearing from view. With the nationwide lockdown approaching its nth week we find ourselves slipping into routines of vastly increased screen time only interrupted by our daily permitted outdoor exercise. This behaviour works as a kind of reflection of what has been happening (or not happening) culturally for the past 20 years, albeit on a much smaller scale. Every morning we wake up and we cross off another day on our lockdown calendar, much in the same way that a TV crim locked in solitary confinement tallies off the days until their release. “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.” 1 For many of us, myself included, life has become episodic; we sink into our sofas and pour over the latest figures and developments being pumped into our living rooms from around the world. Through the filter of the television screen life is almost like the latest HBO series, unexpected plot twists, heroes in the form of key workers and pensioners with villains dressed as politicians (and unelected “advisors”). Life of the other has become a spectacle while the spectators find themselves living in a soap opera with the primary function of keeping itself on air, or perhaps more accurately, we have found ourselves trapped in our own unique Groundhog Day where every day plays out as a repeat of the one that came before and all time has lost its shape. Technological dvancements no longer act as a bridge between the present and what the future could be, instead it has become an infinite repeat loop into the past. Rather than working as a key to open a door into a world of new contemporary art and culture, technology has 1 States
changed how these cultures are reproduced, assimilated and consumed. The late Mark Fisher summarised this strange impedance of culture by technology by claiming “What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/distributed by highspeed internet” 2. This swelling of the production, assimilation and consumption of culture is tightly linked with the hijacking of cyberspace by what is labelled ‘capitalist cyberspace’. As technological advancements made computers more accessible to the wider population, online communities began to grow with visions of a digital utopia, there were dreams that “…cyberspace could be a place where you would be liberated from the old, corrupt hierarchies of politics and power and explore new ways of being.” 3 This was however, hindered by the colonisation of cyberspace and the advent of ‘capitalist cyberspace’ which began to populate the newly democratised mechanism that was the internet. One of the functions of this ever growing and pervasive form of cyberspace is simply to hold attention, the content is often secondary to its ability to completely absorb the user, almost like fast food for the mind. This function exists because attention has become a commodity in itself. YouTube generates revenue based on a videos number of views, brands offer vast amounts of money for Instagrammers to promote products to their swathes of followers and people are now employed for the sole reason of continually generating clickbait for online media outlets. We have lost the linear progression of culture, instead adopting a cyclical system of nostalgia. How do we move forward from this? With capitalism becoming as ubiquitous and pervasive as it is today, everyday life has been accelerated while culture has slowed to an almost complete stop. If artists are tasked with being political agents of change and recent advancements in
Groundhog Day, Motion picture, (1993), Columbia Pictures, Los Angeles, California, United
2 pmilat, (May 2014), Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future, Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ&t=1s 3 16
Hypernormalisation, Documentary film, (2016), Adam Curtis, BBC
technology have created a world which rehashes past cultures under the guise of ‘contemporary’ (almost in the same way that Apple reinvents the phone every year) instead of using the past as a stepping stone to something original (this is what the progression of art depends on), then how is it possible for anything new to be made? It is, as is claimed in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, as if “the future was better protected than the past”.4 We have now however been offered a reprieve from this acceleration of daily life in the strangest of forms, a global pandemic. Suddenly there is an abundance of the very rare commodity of time on our hands as a result of nationwide redundancies combined with the governmentimposed lockdown. This time, coupled with isolation could provide the perfect petri dish for introspective and experimental creativity. Not only do we have more time to read, share ideas and perfect our favourite art forms, but the virus itself has highlighted the fatal flaws of a system which actively impedes artistic endeavour either directly through funding cuts to the creative arts and indirectly though the systemic acquisition of attention. The current administration, armed with graphic slides and data sheets of falling rates of infection are scrambling to maintain the illusion of triumph over the virus. Despite having one of the greatest recorded death tolls globally, our politicians thump tabletops and podiums and address the nation with a rhetoric of success. “This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement”. 5 Covid-19 has revealed to us the shortcomings of the system in which large portions of the global population live, and as this population becomes increasingly aware of these shortcomings, the more likely there is to be a demand for
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something different, something new. Without trying to sound too optimistic, this could lead to the reclamation of the lost future of culture, or a new future altogether. In 2001 all 13 members of the Canadian musical ensemble Set Fire to Flames along with 8 sound engineers locked themselves in a single apartment filled with instruments and recording equipment. After a week of no contact with the outside world and very little sleep, the group emerged from the make-shift studio with a new album sounding largely unlike anything else of that era. Deliberately placing yourself into isolation for a week in order to create a heightened air of despondency to use as a creative driver for the recording of an album is a pretty extreme measure. The parameters for this exercise, however, seem almost trivial when we consider the restrictions imposed on artists of the current climate. The artists within this publication have spent the last three years defining their practice and positioning themselves as professionals. The adversity faced by these students in their final year of studies is unparalleled, with Hole Punch serving as a testament of their resourcefulness and ability to work reactively and reflectively in extraordinary circumstances. Covid-19 has created an imbalance throughout the entire globe, suddenly there is a quiet optimism that this instability could lead to something which deviates from the norm, after all, there is no dance in frequency and balance.
La Jetée, Short film, (1962), Argos Films, France
5 Capitalist Realism : is there no alternative?, Mark Fisher, Zero Books, (2009), United Kingdom, 9781846943171
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Ta aed on tema nägu (Her Garden has Her Face) Kadri Otsiver Food is more than the fuel of the body; it’s deeply embedded within politics, culture, the economy, and ecology. This made me seek people who grasp this complexity and whose everyday actions derive from this knowledge. Triinu left the city and started a permaculture practice in a rural area of Estonia. Her garden, the biggest in the country, serves as proof that the dominant monoculture food production model has an alternative that reaches even beyond organic. The permaculture community believes that small scale community-based agriculture is the future of food, and at a time when parts of the UK’s soils are decades away from “the fundamental eradication of soil fertility”, as warned by the then environment secretary Michael Gove, her garden is more than small scale experimentation - it is a glimpse of the future.
Ta aed on tema nägu (Her Garden has Her Face) invites the viewer into a carefully constructed and holistic space, however illogical or messy it might seem at first glance. The project’s visual language has been greatly shaped by the notion of time. I observed and studied the garden, which was circumscribed by the mechanical nature of my analog camera. The resulting imagery tells us something about permaculture’s doctrine, and the individual behind it.
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13th March 2012 Lauren King
This project is a personal documentary of my family’s past and how addiction changed our lives forever. I remember the day in March 2012 that our life altered. What I believed to be the worst thing that could possibly happen in my life, turned out to also be the best thing that has ever happened. It has been said ‘everything happens for a reason’ and this short moving image piece is an authentic documentary showing how true this statement is. Through recording both audio and visuals, in the style of an interview with different members of my close family, alongside researching into the statistics behind addiction and reminiscing over past memories, I have formed a personal moving image piece to tell this story of events.
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Wide Skies Holding Tight Jodie Evans
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Climbing has recently become a popular indoor sport, with many people using indoor gyms, but there is also the wider world of climbing in the outdoors. Climbers have found boulders in beautiful locations and have transformed them into stages where they will use all their strength and experience to master the unique climb. It’s similar to watching a choreographed dance with nature but this dance expresses power; their individual shadows dancing with them as they hold tightly to the rocks, surrounded by wide skies and rolling hills. We witness the climber connect with nature, making a plain rock face a part of their sport. In the way they are able to negotiate these rock faces they have truly made these mountains their natural habitat. The climbers battle alone in this sublime landscape with fresh air in their lungs as their minds clear of everything except the immediacy of the climb and that connection to the surface of the earth. They may be in control of how they move, but they can’t control the wide, indomitable landscape. These climbers have the power and the confidence to hold onto the rock face but they are powerless to change it.
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Beautiful Tears Rebecca Tudball
The decision to make this project came from my love of portraiture, my passion to create a change in the way that mental health is perceived and to support organisations in their mission to highlight depression or social issues that may contribute to the mental wellbeing of an individual. Depression is a disease of the mind. It cannot be seen on the outside, unlike a physical injury, therefore unless depression is highlighted or discussed, the issue will often go unnoticed or ignored. I decided with my imagery to combine the glamourous filtered images that we see every day on social media platforms, the perfect world that has been created, that has formed an unrealistic expectation on people to look flawless every time they post an image of themselves; and then take that perfect image and distort it in some way, to highlight the effect this unrealistic expectation is having on the mental wellbeing of women today.
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My Digital Self and I Dylan Vining
We all have a right to control our data. Understanding how our data is used is paramount. So much emphasis these days is placed on being your real self – but does your digital self correspond to this perceived reality? There is a presumption that our digital self (our phone) is us. Data companies such as Google presume this too. We have become so attached to our phone, using it to communicate with others, make purchases and conduct meetings. The phone, as a device, acts as a digital crutch but all of its positive personal benefits are undone when data collected from it becomes corrupted. Data companies have exploited this convergence by using our digital data for a variety of purposes, from tracking our location to knowing and understanding our spending habits. But as easy as it is for us to ‘give’ the right information, it is also easy for us to manipulate the information collected about us.
My Digital Self and I explores the idea that my digital self is not an accurate representation of my physical self – that our digital and physical selves are separate. We have a right for people to see us, physically, just how we want to be seen. We should have the same opportunity to justify our digital selves. Attempting to visualise the invisible lines of data that travel with us and around us is the first step to understanding how they define us.
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To The Point David Watts
There is not much press on angling considering it is the largest participant sport in the world... As I sit in tranquil surroundings, at the edge of the flat calm water, I am a hunter with a trap – a hook – lying in wait. I wait for the unwitting fish to take the bait and for the fight that follows. All this for the pleasure of netting my quarry and the taking of the trophy photograph, before all returns to calm. For most of us angling is all about the hunt, the most important part of which is finding the perfect spot to lay our traps. If their placing is wrong, or if the hook isn’t sharp enough, the fish will get away. Believe it or not, each and every hook is designed with the safety of the fish in mind. Protecting these ancient creatures is our top priority – yet we anglers understand that our pastime is completely barbaric. In my photographs, these little instruments of torture become exquisite objects, tiny spearheads elevated into fantastic works of expressive art. Watching the glass-like water, the experience, for me, becomes almost spiritual. Watching... just waiting for that one unlucky fish to drift towards that perfect spot – and for the sudden chaos to begin. These images portray a similar turbulent calm. We know the damage and turmoil these tiny pointed and barbed traps cause but there is peace and tranquillity in these images. The light falling across the hook’s steel shank is the same as that which shimmers over the water only broken by a ripple in the wind. 42
Relationship to Art Jamie Edwards
We celebrate gallery spaces and the exhibits that are held within them, and rightly so. What is art worth if people don’t see it, connect with it, and enjoy it? In this set of images, the focus is not on the artwork or gallery spaces, not even on the individuals who view the work, but is instead on our relationship to art. The removal of the space and sense of distance between the viewer and the art viewed creates a attened image within which visual relationships are exposed. Thus, these images in turn illustrate the way we do connect to the artwork we view. Through such emphasis, we are able to focus not on the person or the art but on what ties them together. This facility for connection is after all the most important element within the arts. Without it, an artwork can have no value and, more importantly, no power. Within this wider concern, smaller questions are asked, moving from image to image. Some photographs communicate strongly defined visual relationships, some reverse the gaze back onto the viewer—and some ask questions about the prying role of the photographer.
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Home
Ryan Waters
When an individual starts the process of building a home they surround themselves with objects of personal expression—the space around them becomes an extension of self. But at some point, as is in our nature, we pair off and our lives gradually become intertwined with another and becomes an amalgamation of personal and joint expression. The objects are no longer an extension of self, they are an extension of the couple. Creating a home together is truly an act of deep intimacy. Using ceramics as a medium, Home celebrates this intimacy and the journey couples embark on together. From family heirlooms to contemporary tableware, Home explores the objects that are brought together within the domestic space in a juxtaposed fusion of desires and aesthetics. The work is influenced by contemporary Scandinavian design and adheres to the movements’ three fundamental guidelines: focus, minimalism and simplicity. Using unadorned lighting techniques each image is created to amplify the uniqueness and elegance of its subject whilst giving a gentle nod to the domestic spaces that have been meticulously curated and come to symbolise the merging of two individuals. 48
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Plastic Suffocation
Garin Davies
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Plastic Suffocation is a two-part series conveying the simple message that plastics are irresponsibly used as a means of packaging. Other forms of packaging are available yet are too expensive to provide an alternative. Commercial companies, driven by profit, wrap or package their goods in the cheapest way possible. They choose to ignore concerns, despite the cost to the environment. The long-established use of plastics has increased demand and reduced prices. Other, more eco-friendly materials, are available, however, the demand for these materials is low and prices are high. Governments could introduce taxes on plastic and provide tax breaks for ecologically responsible alternatives. Such measures would help switch demand to biodegradable materials, guaranteeing their use as a viable alternative to plastic. We need to put an end to the global suffocation caused by plastic waste. Until responsible environmental policies are implemented – on a global level – nothing will change. In this series of photographs, a collection of heads wrapped with carrier bags graphically portrays this message. Respiratory systems are blocked, sight is obscured and biological identity stripped. The occasional presence of packaged items adds to the plastic content evident in each image, further visualising the over-use of this polluting material.
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Jeff Magazine (A selection of images from issue 1) Jen Haydn Pearce Jeff Magazine is a platform for creatives—whether just beginning or in the midst of their journey. Covering the broad range of creative industries, Jeff Magazine gives expression to what can be achieved. The magazine constructs an open discussion about the nature of creativity and what, realistically, a career in the creative industries can offer. Jeff Magazine showcases the work and stories of young up-and-coming creatives and examines what the reward or promise of success means to these contributors. A shared environment is created within the pages of the magazine offering inspiration and encouragement to its audience.
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Made To Display Sandra Muranska
Made to Display is a project that explores the different features of mannequins, in order to capture their stylised and heavily designed quality; highlighting the effort that goes into creating them as well as raising important questions about the image of women these industry staples project. While there are many considerations that go into the design of mannequins, from functionality to specific brand or store identity, are they simply promoting a negative body image for profit? Made to Display interrogates the sexualisation of mannequins which compares a thin corporate manufactured physique against the vast variety of women’s bodies. These images draw back the curtain on the unreachable goal that the retail industry places onto women. Perhaps it’s time to re-think female body representation in retail altogether. 62
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The Zulu Tribe Kieran Mavar This project allowed me to develop a more cultural and historical body of work while collaborating with the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The museum had been developing a project dedicated to the Zulu tribe. They held an event with the current King of the tribe visiting Wales. Through research I saw that depictions and descriptions of the celebrated Zulu battle of 1879 had much more to do with race and culture than the simple superiority of British weapons, the history taught in most schools. I wanted to construct a photo shoot that reversed roles of the African Zulu tribe and the White British empire, to emphasize this skewed historical understanding, and was surprised and disconcerted over how easy it is to obtain cheap replicas of British Military uniforms as popular fancy dress.
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I AM KILLING MY HOME by Mihai Moldovanu
He gets up, walks to the desk and reaches for his stuffed pharmaceuticals plastic bag. Skybynum, or Sky, takes a 300 mg SSRI and a few Melatonin pills for a night of good sleep. Three hundred milligrams of slow-releasing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors flood his neural receptors; in the corner of the room, by the window, on his rectangular piece of foam, he starts feeling something like happiness. Skybynum:did you ever play survival? Morz98:is that the mode where the exclusion zone doesn’t get any bigger? Skybynum:yeah,that’s the one. Skybynum: so basically I was playing out there with three other guys from my team,I was hunting bastards down, doing my homework,right? and these three dudes were hiding in a small hunting hut in the middle of a random field the entire time. Can you believe that? Skybynum:I was playing like that for about an hour,I was well pissed,I got inside the hut where these guys were hiding, there was barely enough space for two people in there, closed the door behind me, and threw a grenade on the floor … you should have seen their faces! Skybynum:they were fighting so hard to squeeze through that door dude! Morz98:ahahah this is smeshno!
Skybynum has never been to Morz’s house, to be more precise, he has never been in the same time zone as her, but if he were to visit her, hypothetically, Sky would see Morz living in an apartment submerged in a constant whisper of
screens, as if watched over by machines of loving grace. Skybynum doesn’t know much about Morz, or Olivia as her legal document states, what he does know is that in her early adulthood Olivia broke into different fracking sites and managed to destroy twenty-two “units of heavy machinery”, as the courts put it. Her dad thought she was studying law in London, but she was holed up in the Snowdonian mountains together with twenty or so people organising guerrilla attacks on different fracking sites across Mid Wales. It turned out Morz’s father was a stakeholder in that mining corporation, and of course, they pardoned her, Morz’s friends weren’t so lucky though. Sky tells this story to his online friends, but when Skybynum is honest with himself, he’s not sure if Morz is telling the truth or not. Morz98: you know the guillotine memes everyone’s been posting around the net? Skybynum:right Morz98:people are saying that’s why rich ppl are liquidating their stocks. Skybynum:I mean it’s possible, but it also could be that folks are afraid of another recession. Morz:I know a dude who knows a dude, you know how this goes, he told me that Quants, the eggheads behind the Black Boxes on what it is still nostalgically referred to as Wall Street, are writing algorithms that scan for guillotine memes on some ‘deviant’ websites, the box then decides either to liquidate a part of the equity portfolio, and reinvest it back into gold or not, the most stable investment.
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We grew up in a community where what little we had we looked after.
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But That’s Not How I See It Eve Morgan This project is an exploration into my family background and the relationship I have with the South Wales Valleys. I have grown up over the past twenty-one years with a strong connection to a place in which I have never lived. For me, the Rhondda is home. Three generations before me have been born within these tight-knit communities. Local industries provided their employment before the unfortunate closure of the mines and factories. My parents were the first to go off to university and begin a life outside the valleys, meaning that I was brought up in a very different environment. Through photographing both sides of the family over a number of months, alongside work with archive material and various interviews, I have begun to form the beginnings of a much larger conversation, centred on this strange but intriguing landscape. Although I find myself almost like a foreigner in this place, I feel more at home there than anywhere else in the world. My work is a cathartic investigation into the notion of home; its connection to specific place, the history embedded within it and the way in which we find ourselves moulding to our communities and environments.
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The house is the heart of the family, everything comes back to it.
Being the first generation to go off to university was a big thing – it was a way to break the mould.
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Concealment Cerys Evans
This series of images explores the use of makeup and how we use it in such a materialistic way to construct a sense of ourselves. Applying something to our face – it’s almost like rolling paint across a wall! The makeup we apply creates a surface of different colours and textures – but we know these are layers that we can remove.
Concealment considers the idea of construction in abstract or metaphorical terms. We can think of the environment outside and how it changes depending on the weather. A building will shelter us from rain and high winds, keeping us safe and warm within its spaces. Materials such as concrete, breeze blocks, glass and metal are used to construct an environment within which we place ourselves. These structures are more than buildings, they are a protective skin. In a similar way, makeup is also a skin, a second skin, a layer coating the surface of our real skin, protecting us against the elements and the judgement of the outside world. We apply makeup in a physical way, building it, materially, around us. Reflecting this materiality, my images suggest an earthiness and a naturalness which may sometimes be more constructed than real.
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What ‘Lies’ On The Surface Kelsey Howells What ‘Lies’ On The Surface is an exploration between the relationship of self and identity. Humans survive by adapting themselves to their surroundings, similar to a chameleon. As an emotional reaction to a change in the environment a chameleon will change colour, not to blend in, but to feel comfortable. Comparably, we present a different version of ourselves to each person we encounter in certain settings. To convey this, the photographs that make up this series include characters that the artist has both encountered, been inspired by and created. Each character is placed into a setting familiar to their own, to tell a story of self and identity. To summarise, What ‘Lies’ On The Surface is an experimentation of self-expression, deception and how identity is perceived by others based on presentation.
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Living Deafness Rebecca Bytheway
Living Deafness is a photographic series that aims to educate people regarding some of the challenges and issues faced by the Deaf community when trying to live in modern society and lead a satisfying and happy life. This series portrays the life of a deaf person living in a hearing world. Growing up with a profoundly deaf mother, I have experienced first-hand some of the challenges she has had to overcome. To assist communication, as well as learning to lip read, she has also been taught to use verbal sounds. This required her to make sounds that she has never heard, mastering this only through touch and vibration. These images may allow hearing people to gain a deeper appreciation of the effect of deafness on the lives of those people living with it.
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An Invitation Hannah Templer
According to recent divorce statistics in England & Wales, 42% of marriages end in divorce. A wedding day is the epitome of all things ‘perfect’ – a life changing event one looks forward to from a young age. However, what if this is just a façade, merely a put-on show as ‘the happiest day of your life’.
An Invitation, through the construction of its narrative with all its clues and subtleties, invites you to consider the true context of a wedding. Many ideas emerge, within the pages of this photobook, through the particular juxtaposition of its content. The main themes explored include pain, age and wider relationships – with all specificity dissolved. The woman appearing in the photographs remains unidentified until the very end of the story. The future is thus foreshadowed—whilst allowing each viewer to connect individually with the range of ideas incorporated into the narrative. Light humour, significant within the book’s conclusion, counters the tension created elsewhere within the various dramatic structures in the work. 86
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Towards Transhuman Alex Chorlton
These photographs explore the relationship between humans and technology and the effect that our increasingly heavy technological dependence is having on our lives. They depict humans so intertwined with their devices that they are evolving into androids or cyborgs. Towards Transhuman aims to make visible the negative side-effects of society’s over-indulgence in, and abuse of, everyday technology. The easiness of being constantly connected can bring people together – but it can also push us apart.
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Feminine Masculinity Tara Pinnock
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My work explores the concept of ‘feminine masculinity’, in an age where ideas of sexual identity and self have become ephemeral and fragmentary. Synthesising gender expression and fashion, I ask the viewer to recognise which elements are masculine and which are feminine, in order to provoke an emotional response. I have been inspired by the photographic representations of androgyny by Collier Schorr, and the whacky role-reversed images of David La Chapelle.
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The New Lost Generation John Evans
Pandemic recession evokes fears of a new lost generation
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Politics over recent years has left young people feeling worried and anxious about their futures. Coming of age at a time of such uncertainty and growing polarisation has caused many young people to feel disillusioned. They do not feel equally heard, and they struggle to identify with the choices being made on their behalf.
Lost Generation is a body of work that conveys a message about the lack of voice and representation from the younger generation in today’s political climate. We have a generation that wants a fairer society, but instead of being supported and valued, young people have been disproportionately hit by austerity and their voices have often been ignored by the government, locking them out of vital decisions.
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Young Britons fear for their post-brexit futures
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More and more young people suffering with self-identity issues
Young people are more likely to feel disenfranchised
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Sky fastens his VR headset; he scrolls through his library looking for something to watch before he goes to sleep. For a while now he’s been into VR videos that “zap your brain into the zone”, as he says. A sentence hovers in the middle of a dark space: Enlightenment is totalitarian; as soon as he gets accustomed to its spectral presence the room is filled with the discord of colours and loud sounds. Skybynum thinks about detaching his headset but he settles on immersing himself in whatever possibly traumatic experience he’s signed himself up for. “Damn it! must be one of those Adornians” Sky says to himself while sitting in a catatonic state in the edge of his foam bed. Skybynum prays to god that he doesn’t get a DPPD (digital persisting perception disorder) like Morz. One day Morz unplugged from her VR set and started seeing something similar to digital noise, her symptoms would increase with the level of the darkness, just like a video camera. Skybynum: how’s your visual snow anyway? Morz98: I don’t notice it; it would be weird to have it go away honestly
Adjustable heavy-duty titanium modules attach to the base of Morz’s work/game rig; you don’t have to leave the gaming cockpit while you work, or code as she prefers to say. Her hydraulically assisted rig has a built-in mini-fridge that relies on a complex symphony of gimbal motors that keep the drinks from becoming too fizzy while the rig moves. These are two of her favourite things she owns. Morz98: coding has never been easier, the days of pre-visualised lines of code are gone, everything is being represented by images, sounds, everything is like a game dude. Morz98: A contemporary coder can go on working full 15 hours shifts, productivity has almost doubled.
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She had saved up a lot of money over the years, some of it, reluctantly, she invested in stocks, some of it, in property. For an anti-capitalist, her capital is always very productive. She’d like to go to Florida one day. It’s 4 am and Sky is woken up by the sound of a boy racer crashing into a ped crossing near his apartment; the car accelerated as soon as it slammed into the barrier; the bass bin was making strange reverberating noises out the back of his mid-range Toyota-Ford, sounding almost apologetic.
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Us Jack Osborne
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“You can’t become what you can’t accurately see.” Professor Sarah Lewis, Harvard University This work is a protest. It flies in the face of today’s polarised politics. There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’. There is only us. The detailed contrasts between a variety of individuals highlight each persons specific self as well as revealing those elements of life we share as a community of human beings. With nineteen known ethnic groups coexisting in Cardiff, this diverse city has been the inspiration for my work. However, the intention of the project is to act as a microcosm of youth culture across the UK. The carefully considered and specific styles of shooting are applied to the making of each of these pictures with the aim of creating a sense of this wider reality. As a white man, I see representations of myself in every area of visual culture. In trying to represent individuals who are different to myself, an opportunity is created for a collaborative voice to be heard and disparate stories to be told. The placing of the work within a fashion context, as well as a political one, enables it to also speak to the notorious lack of diversity within this industry. These photographs celebrate our individuality as people with the aim of bringing us together.
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MORE STUPID AND SMART AT THE SAME TIME by Mihai Moldovanu
He surfs MeLife for a minute, then he writes to Morz: Skybynum:
Are
you
up?
He had a surprisingly vivid dream, but he couldn’t tell you in detail what he saw, something about a subterranean civilisation plotting revenge on the surface dwellers for stealing their resources. Skybynum: I don’t understand why we go on pretending that the world is organised according to classical logic or scientific logic. Skybynum: … which says: ‘A and B are not identical if they have one or more differences’. As we know everything has different qualities on a macro scale at least, god only knows what is happening on the sub-atomic level—he might not know either to be honest. Skybynum: There can’t be two exact chairs, otherwise, it’s the same chair, right? so it follows we have a bunch of separate things or chairs. The second assumption of classical logic is that everything exists in a state of separation,(a) cannot be, and (b) so all these chairs exist separate from each other. Skybynum: So based on that, for something to move through space it has to travel through a part of space, say an inch, so to travel that, it has to travel half of that and to travel half of that it needs to firstly travel half of that, you know what I mean? Morz:
Yeah,
sure.
Morz knew where this was going, and she didn’t like it at all.
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Skybynum: If we were to take this assumption to its logical end, then we would have to keep doing this, infinitely. Skybynum: Say we assume there is ‘plank’ or a minimum amount of space that is undividable, like, an individual, an undividable plank of space. How does motion occur from one plank to the next? Skybynum: Ok ok ok this is not gonna be like some academic paper or something, it just follows that for an object to travel through space it has to go through an infinite amount of finite spaces, otherwise we have to accept that the world is fundamentally fluid, undividable and unified or formed of mysterious planks of space and time that teleport. Zeno has talked about these things millennia ago.
Sky was trying really hard to stop himself from going into a spiral of associations. Skybynum: I’m just saying that maybe our world is not made of separate individual things, but instead, it’s all one thing with different parts, and this thing is just simply not divided into self-sufficient elements that stay so eternally. Skybynum: Things seem different and in some sense they are, but they are not, you know what I mean?
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The Façade of the Inanimate Amy Lewis-Thomas
The Façade of the Inanimate is a series consisting of thirteen blownup images depicting thirteen different makeup looks I’ve created for my Instagram page. Each image reflects either aspects of my personality, how I wished I looked, or people I want to be like. The series explores the negative influence that social media, through the falseness of images in circulation there, has upon mental health. It also considers the responsibility of image makers, highlighting the problems that photography can pose to issues of representation and identity on the internet. By taking these Instagram pictures out of their technological and social media contexts and enlarging them to over ten times the size of a phone screen, the viewer is able to see the deterioration of their colour and quality. Viewed from far away the images hold up quite well, but seen close up the appearance of the skin changes to reveal pixels and digital noise. 112
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Feverfew
Lowri Hawkins My project, Feverfew, sits in the realm of documentary and auto biographical photographic practice and invites the viewer into a personal story about family relationships. My grandparents live up on the north west coast of Scotland, 389 miles from my family and I, who live in Shrewsbury. Their decision to move up there was made when they were in their fifties and they have continued to live there up into their eighties and beyond. The photographs were made in a single, yearly trip, documenting their lives and surroundings. The narrative slowly develops, giving away clues about each character and their individual story. The project deals with themes of isolation, distance and intergenerational relationships. The landscape is an important feature in this work and acts as an anchor for the project as well as a fourth character to the story.
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We stay connected through writing letters and sending floral cards, telling each other how excited we are for the next time we meet, neither knowing when that may be.
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Sky was fuming, his brain was stuck in a loop, he was unable to figure out what was his frustration about, never mind trying to get rid of this feeling. Skybynum: I’m only talking about this, because, I think Enlightenment is kind of totalitarian.
Suddenly Sky had flashbacks to the VR video he watched a few days back; he felt like a meat puppet. He becomes aware of the automatic way in which he was typing on the keyboard. “Am I doing this of my own free will?” Skybynum: Through this process of individualisation of the world, we gain control over it, we understanding it better, but we also we alienate ourselves from it. We create a false sense of separation between us and other people, us and the rest of the natural world, which inevitably leads, as history has shown, to us trying to control our environment, other humans, which leads to concentration camps, which leads to mechanised slaughter and environmental destruction, total consumption and who knows what, you get the drift. Morz: It’s easy to criticize traditional logic from your airconditioned room with high-speed internet. Without formal logic, without individualisation of the world and our concepts, you won’t have much in terms of technology or systems of thought. Morz: All is all, not very helpful for anything really, isn’t it? And one more thing Sky, the world seems pretty separate to me.
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Morz was in a bad mood, Dow Jones has been falling for the third week in a row again. It all felt like a pointless exercise in armchair philosophy, a waste of her precious time, time she could be coding, or gaming; and it’s not like she hasn’t thought about this paradox before, with people more intelligent then Sky, she thought. Morz: I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t seem like much of an upgrade from the shitty situation we’re in. This rant of yours may be valid, but what is your alternative? I mean, sure, prob everyone would live more or less peacefully, make mad art, and trip together at the end of an entire day running from mammals and collecting berries, but would you want to live in such a world?
As Morz presses enter on his keyboard one of the water pipes in Skybynum’s apartment cracks and then explodes under the pressure, flooding the apartment in seconds. He got up in a panic and slipped on the concrete floor, hitting his lower back.
Concrete Soul Roxy Llewellyn
Every city is predictable at the same time unpredictable. Things just don’t last. In the age of technology and our busy lives of constantly needing to be elsewhere, we can lose sight of the transient moments. There doesn’t seem to be the time to embrace our surroundings, the architecture, people, patterns, forms and colours of things. Engaging with interruptions enables us to see things before they are gone. Allowing the mind to wander and discovering a curious outlook reveals marginalised aspects and often discarded objects of the urban environment. There is something wonderful about seeing things as they always were before we started to notice them. Suddenly everything is fascinating, just by their presence. A little something from everywhere…
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Lauren Hinchly
Don’t be so short sighted
People struggle physically and mentally. My work is aimed at showing how a feeling of negativity can be turned into a positive and to highlight that everyone can draw inspiration to create engaging work. I hope this work can be a positive force to drive others struggling with physical or mental disabilities to embrace being themselves and take that creative journey.
Walking and looking at the ground as I have little downward vision, I squint in an effort to see something as I have no focussing ability, no peripheral vision; the line of sight outside the point of fixation does not allow me the full view of something, people assume I am being ignorant. A head tilt to the right, my brain’s way of compensating for my weaker eye—meaning photos are never straight, a characteristic I cannot physically change. My way of seeing is represented in the construction of these images of brightly coloured objects, shot with a macro lens, my metaphorical magnifier, my 13cm rule, and isolated subject matter. The reason being I view things close up unable to see something as a whole but rather a piece at a time. No single way of viewing the world is more valid than another.
Don’t be so short sighted is set to challenge pre-conceived ideas of a domestic space, a kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, conservatory, shed, and everyday items based on the narrative of being visually impaired.
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PUNCH