1-month mark
This marks about a month since Lauren and I had our first orientation meeting with Howie. We haven’t had another face-to-face meeting since, and we’ve been corresponding mostly through email. It doesn’t affect the work we do as they can be done remotely, and Howie has been very responsive as well despite being busy with expecting his second child (the little one was born 2 weeks ago!). I really appreciate the fact that he sends us thoughtful responses within 1-2 days. Since our orientation meeting, I’ve tried to clear the workflow a little more by sending him a google doc of my thoughts and process. During one of our class discussions, I thought about how I need some form of structure to work with. In response, Howie explained that his process is much more organic when it comes to art practice, going with the ‘feels’ and letting things ‘marinate’. While I agree, I think that a form of ‘structure’ and discipline is needed, to allow for ‘chaos’ and creativity in other areas, which is why I’m trying to settle on the logistics and admin side of things. Not sure how that will work out, I suppose we’ll see. I suggested having a short weekly check-in, some tentative deadlines and face-to face meeting sat least once a month (we are planning to meet this weekend for October).
Art practice & Archival methods
In learning more about Howie’s art practice, another aspect I want to work on is establishing a routine. Whether this means setting a specific time range out of the day, or going to the studio to practice art. The idea of providing that time and space to “tinker and get lost, and to be outside of yourself and consciousness” in Howie’s words, bringing back the notion of Not Knowing and Making within it.
As part of my goal in this course, I also inquired about his archival methods for his artworks, both physically and digitally. He doesn’t have much of a physical archive as most of his work is with an art dealer in Shanghai. He does archive traditional media digitally through high resolution scans or photo documentation. He also mentioned museum conservation resources online that discusses ideal temperature and humidity for certain media – “Materially, look into archival, acid-free, ph, and ‘lightfastedness'”. Otherwise, he stores his work in his CPU, in Hard Drives and investing in a Pro Dropbox account. He shared with me his Dropbox account to get an idea of how his work is organized. He would sometimes share his Dropbox accounts to curators as well, interesting to see how this virtually substitutes the ‘browsing of the artist’s studio’. On the other hand, since the curator would never have visited the artist’s studio, how much does it take it out of context? Also, what kind of context would an online Dropbox gallery have? Some things to think about (and maybe ask Howie) as everything gets increasingly digitized.
Escalator edits
I have been mostly working on video editing for Howie. I had some video cuts done for Howie for the movie: ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ based on the timestamps that he provided. The idea is that initially, he would provide the timestamps but I would eventually get the hang of the types of clips and be able to find them on my own. At first, I tried adding some clips of literal tracking shots, and ended up with about 10 minutes of content from the cut. Later, I learnt that he is looking for specific tracking shots where there is a foreground parallax relations.
To give some more context, parallax refers to the perception/apparent position of an object viewed along 2 different lines of sight. Because of the way of our eyes are biologically, we always perceived objects along 2 different lines of sights. This is the general explanation of why we perceive things in ‘3D’, and perceive depth. The parallax effect is visible in movies, animation and also web design (parallax scrolling). Parallax creates illusion of depth, by varying the motion speed of the background and foreground. On another note, astronomers also use principles of parallax to measure distances to nearby stars, also know as ‘Stellar parallax.’
In cutting the clips from these old martial art films, we are exploring the foreground and background relation, perception, and flurry of motion as captured by the camera. The idea was partly inspired by his experience in filming the back of a persons head on the long escalators in Hong Kong.
Next >
The next step would be: more video cuts, looking into edits for 30 films. Howie has also expressed interest in getting some form of motion activated input to activate the videos. The video would be grouped into the direction of motion, and the general idea is moving in a certain direction will activate and correspond the direction of motion in the video clips. In process of more research. Another topic of research on the side is on prepping files for Lenticular printing. These are the printed images where you get a 3D or holographic effect.