Conceptual Statement: Video Haptics

In the reading Video Haptics and Erotics by Laura Marks talks about how the sense of touch is not confined to the surface of the skin. Rather, it is linked to the sense of sight, portrayed in visual haptics where texture gives you a feeling of touch, and how the sense of touch in this visual medium penetrates into the mind also.

In the project I did with Edrian, it shows the linkage of these senses and how it helps people make sense of their environment. It combines sight (the presence of colour), touch (where your finger is), and sound (the outputted audio) into a sense of proprioception, which is the ability to sense where you are in space and the movement of your body parts. This idea came from how blind people navigate the world. They do not have sight, but they do see differently. They find out where they are through mainly touch and hearing. Specifically in the project, your touch is guided by your sight to any colour you wish and that colour has a sound. In turn, the touch, colour and sound together tells you where you are on the screen and where you are on the colour spectrum.

The chosen audio of the bells is the part where the senses are extended into the mind. With your senses, speicific stimuli are linked to certain experiences that happened when your senses were triggered. Links to certain memories or actions. For example, some stimuli are linked to positive experiences. So when you meet the same sensation it makes you feel good. Likewise, the same happens with a negative experience. The bells remind me of having to go somewhere in primary, where we had the classic designated bell ringer. Hearing the bell made you think “This is where I am, I need to be over there and to get there I need to go on this path.” For some the sounds of bells may remind them of clock towers, giving them a sense of existence in time. Perhaps it may remind you of being awoken by an analogue alarm clock, the kind with two bells and the little hammer like object in between.The output of the bells is made by the senses of touch and sight while the sound gives you the sense of proprioception; knowing where you are and what your body is doing. In an extended sense, it gives your mind a location in your archive of memories derived from senses.

Linking back to Marks' text, our work explores the idea of visual haptics and sensuality by attempting to combine these senses to produce the effects of other senses outside of the classical five senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. In our example the result is proprioception and sensations of the mind stored in memory rather than purely physical sensuality.

Presentations and Readings

We had our presentations for our first project to do with multiple screens. Here are our individual videos:




This is the one I did. For mine I used the stuff that I filmed as the dominant stream of video with Jenna's and Josh's footage blended over the top. I put it together based on the textures, shapes and colours that certain footage had that complimented each other well. Things I would change about mine would be to cut it down a little, some of the footage I think could be trimmed down.




Here's Jenna's.




And here's Josh's.

Our overall approach was to grab each other's footage without planning beforehand what we were going to film individually. Then we go off on our own to put together around 5 minutes each to get our final thing. It worked out better than I thought it would. I thought maybe it would feel really disconnected. I won't say "won't make sense" because I personally didn't think it really needed to make sense as long as the footage blend was in some form of harmony. I think it looked and felt much better near the end of the presentation when James arranges the projections differently on the greenscreen though. The screens were made to differing sizes and grouped to the center of the screen. I think that works with how Josh's footage was different to the other two in that the pace was slower and the footage was consistent with the boiling water with fire blended on top. The other two were similar though in that both were more chaotic.




Now, about the reading: Video Haptics and Erotics

Personally, I had little idea what the examples really meant but from what I understand I think it's about the relationship between the viewer and the subject matter in an objective way. This is the difference between have a relationship with a person in the imagery as a character or relationship with the person in the imagery as an object.

The character would be fictional films where you follow a character's story. The film tells you everything, you have little control. You don't need to imagine what happen, you experience the moment. You want to connect with the character and understand them.

In comparison the object is where the viewer's imagination takes an active part in constructing meaning and experience. You view the video for what it is and you create your own context for it while viewing the matter as an object. It is more for the senses and viewing for the content rather than what it might be about. For example, I remember once I saw a YouTube video played on TV some years ago of a Middle Eastern woman dying. She was on the ground and she had people around her trying to revive her. She was still alive, and they tried to save her but blood just gushed out of her mouth and she was gone. Her life snuffed out, just like that. I didn't form any sort of emotional connection with the lady in any way, but saw the situation play out. It was simply something happening that I saw. The helplessness and desperation of the situation, I saw. It forced me to confront my own mortality. That one day I'll just stop existing. Spending all my life building myself and then ultimately destroyed in seconds. I think this is the kind of relationship between viewer and object that the text is talking about. How you're not really connected to the image as a person, but as someone who experiences the moment for what it is portrayed rather than what it might mean.

I think that this relationship with the object is the tactile sense that the text is getting at. The tactile part is that you want to be there in that frame, you want to know what's going on. It's a bit different with movies when the material says that it's close to you, you don't have to do anything to understand it, just watch. The tactile one feels further away, a window to another place that's neither inviting you to go inside nor rejecting your presence. The tactility here is where your mind is separated from your physical body. You are surrendering your mind, letting it wander and imagine as it floats through the imagery.

In summary, haptic is where you really think and feel about what's in the imagery as it is rather than what it means.

Vincent Ward Exhibition

Saw the Vincent Ward exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery with the class. There were three rooms of his work. They're all screen installations that are projected on semi-coarse cloth and the ceiling.

I'll call it the small room, foyer, and big room.

In the small room there are four cloth screens in a box formation so it feels like a nice enclosed space leaving the corners open for people to walk in. I saw three different video sequences being projected on these cloths. The first one was of a horse and a fat man in the foreground. The fat man appears to be struggling to get up while the horse curiously and cautiously walks over to the man. In this sequence I liked the suspense of waiting for something to happen and I really like the blues of the film that contrast with the yellow of the streetlight. However, that didn't really make me feel anything in terms of an installation. I thought of that more as a film that's merely projected on some cloth.

The next two sequences that played, I felt, were more successful as screen installations. The first of these two was of a dove in flight. It flies in and out of the light and as it disappears from view it would reappear on another screen. It's hard to follow it around and it feels like the dove literally flew to a different screen. It worked with the audio coming from different directions to achieve this particular effect of the dove flying to different screens.


The next one was also with a bird, so it was similar. I thought it was less successful though because the film wasn't very smooth and the background had bright, saturated colours. I think this takes away the flow and makes it seem really disconnected.



To be completely honest I didn't really enjoy the one he did in the foyer. It didn't inspire or capture my imagination in any way. I think it may be because this one was made with more stills than moving images. In fact, it was so weak it didn't make much of an impression on me. Therefore I don't even remember whether or not it had any moving images in it at all. The only thing I liked about it was how it was projected on the ceiling and it was in the middle of a circle. In this sense, the placement of the projection was really beautiful. People don't look up very often and I find it more interesting when things are on the ceiling because you don't really notice them that much.

In the big room there were multiple projections on multiple cloth screens. It was of women underwater in plastic bags with live fish inside.


The symbolism in it was quite obvious I think. You could say that the plastic bag and the lady is like a foetus in an amniotic sack while the surrounding water is amniotic fluid, or maybe primordial abyss. It also makes me think of how you leave your new fish in a plastic bag for a while in your fish tank so that they acclimatise to the new environment.

The multiple screens and the way the projections' lights can still be seen through the other side, but diffused by the cloth, is interesting. It reminds me of how the light looks in the ocean. Maybe the cloth is like kelp in the ocean. I don't know if the spill of a projection on to another screen is intentional, if yes I can see that the artist is trying to make it feel like that ocean. I imagine that's how the ocean's light is like, always shimmering and moving, but diffused by the water. The audio reinforces the feeling of being in the ocean, but I agree with James that the random piano music is really out of place.

Some people thought too much was going on all at once in terms of projections, heaps of screens and audio combined. Personally, I thought it was quite atmospheric and portrays the ocean really well. I went snorkeling one time, so I didn't get to go very deep as I'm not very confident swimming in the ocean. The water was full and cloudy with non-venomous jellyfish, small salps, eel larvae, and little shrimp things that light up green and blue. Deeper beneath were beautiful fishes and farther were a few stingrays gliding along the bottom. In the ocean, a lot goes on even in that small piece of ocean I went to and it does get chaotic. So I thought it showed that chaotic feel of the ocean quite well. The ocean always looks like it's alive. You won't find the ocean looking as smooth as glass; it always moves and ripples.