BA Fine Art: Year 2 Week 2 - 4

Alongside taking a load of film and computing workshops, such as 4K cameras, lighting, and beginning to use Processing, I've been working more on my ideas behind the rat and lemon films. Originally, I planned to have the rat sound piece as the sound track for the film of me eating lemons, however now I think the lemons should exist as a stand-alone piece. I had been questioning whether these should be performances, such as a live performance of me eating lemons instead of a film, or me reading out the email correspondence between me and my landlord instead of the recording, or even just a performance of me telling the story of killing the rat in my usual, comical manner. The point of the work I was doing recently was to make people feel disgusted by me, or to make them think I was a bad person, as I was interested in the relationship between how I see myself, how others see me and how I really am, however in my tutorial my tutor pointed out that this really isn't interesting. I think my work needs to move away from myself at this point, or at least try to use my experiences to support my concepts.

The original lemon film, shot in my room using a DSLR camera, now has the email readout as the soundtrack. This film is basically an experiment/test, as the quality is bad and I honestly think it's really boring. I'm really happy with the second version, shot in the film studio, as I properly worked the lighting and sound for the first time, and this is the first film I've made where I'm actually really happy with the quality. The performance itself reminded me of ritual practices where shaman inflicts pain upon themselves to reach altered states of consciousness, and shooting the film I was considering the third chakra, represented by the colour yellow, that relates to willpower, as I really had to force myself to eat the lemons. I think I will leave this as a stand alone piece, I don't think it needs to be a performance, I don't think it even needs to be a fully fledged film, I can just leave it as an example of actual good filmmaking on my part.

After reading David Abrams The Spell of the Sensuous, I became really excited as his ideas about shamanism, language, and the natural world really relate to my own. I am thinking about the rat and it's story in a ritualistic context, as we apologised to the rat and prayed before we killed it, we used a ceremonial object (the Cava bottle) to kill it, and we cleansed our kitchen with cleaning products and white sage after we killed it. I am going to use the recordings of the rat, ultrasonic sounds and the sound of my scream to produce a sound piece which I will work over using an invocation "I just want this fucking rat to die".

Furthermore, I am starting computing workshops, which will involve digital object manipulation, programming for video and building a twitter bot. I will incorporate all of these into my rat project, perhaps 3D rendering the photo of the dying rat. I am really aware of trying not to use other cultures as a costume or methodology, but rather finding the aspects of shamanism in my own life in my interactions with the natural world.