https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MMfgRg53SU

Sometimes when I her a phone ring I think I am still asleep and my alarm is trying to wake me up. It can take a few very long seconds to figure out if I’m dreaming. This film definitely triggered these feelings in the early scenes. This running idea of nonsense and the idea of disconnection and even the feeling of delayed connection from the phones reiterated this feeling of a close, but fails reality with me. If feels like the characters are talking into a void. Its traditional cinematic structure with the alien, disconnected storyline has a very eery juxtaposition effect.

News Anchors Research: ((find name of the clip))

I felt like they were using the many voice to hide their identity, the ‘they’ were revealing a secret they couldn’t put their faces to. The uncomfortable pauses and anxiety triggering changes in pace and pitching even changing the voices themselves making it feel like a warning signal. This is reenforced by their use of the news anchors. The ones with knowledge. The ones we trust to give us correct information. I think it lasted so long that the trail of thought and meaning was kind of long in this long winding sentence. As if the meaning was deteriorating. I wanted to keep this in mind when approaching my own work. (Don’t chop too much disconnected footage together if you are trying to convey a clear message- which I am in the Re-Edit project). The separation of the words also allows each one to be a potential trigger factor for the viewer. Triggering our fears (about death and the body) and of 5min 30sec the list of seemingly random items being put together in an uncomfortable manner. Are they saying how manipulation (the process this video was created by) and context can effect 'you'? (repeated throughout)

Meryl Streep conversation 1/3:

(find name of artist)

Obviously the conversation with herself over the years poses gender question and queries the roles woman have within the workplace and house hold through the years. Also the attitude of each character. There is a similar coldness in each of the roles who have negative feelings toward marriage and commitment. Why does the media portray women who chose to this this life style this way? Also the very fact that they had enough footage to make a 7min long video  of her discussing this matter through so many different films ver the years says enough in itself. Why as a woman does this topic have to come up in almost every single one of her roles? Do men have to repeatedly discuss marriage/ children in the same way? No. This is the role women are given by the media. 'Women belong in the kitchen'. 

• Repetition of ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t understand’. Almost like ‘they’ or the computer using them to speak through, hasn’t quite harnessed full understanding of us. Can’t quite process the complexities of human life/ emotions yet.
• Is using AI a form of cheating? Or is it just using every-thing at our disposal? But that principle of using whatever you have to make yourself better doesn’t stand when it comes to taking performance enhancing drugs when it comes to physical activities. Imagine if we had an Olympics where everyone was allowed to take whatever they wanted and we could see these crazy super-humans. That would be kind of amazing. 
• Because the technology is in its infancy, the script had enough story to work with/ act out, but was largely nonsensical. But this child is growing/ developing/ spreading. It can already create. The line is crossed. How far can it go?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc

'... to develop forms of 'augmented cognition' that will enhance many kinds of human- machine interaction.' -Page 3.

• Triggered my feelings about how our own creations will beat us to the top of the evolutionary food chain. 

'Daylight all night long.' -Page 4. 

• Makes me think: this is just a much larger, more in-your-face representation of how corporations carve our reality. And as the book says, these changes and shifts in our natural raw patterns as basically glorified animals lead to '...detrimental physiological consequences...'. 
• It's funny because it makes me think of the frog in the pot. It doesn't notice the water temperature is slowly increasing until it's being cooked. 
• When you look up at the night sky in London, can you see the stars? On a clear night, maybe one or two. What about when you go up on untouched mountains? There are thousands and their beauty is overwhelming. Our access to beauty is already being violated. The question is, can you feel the water bubbling yet?

'It is only recently that the elaboration, the modelling of one's personal and social identity, has been organised to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks and other systems.' -Page 9.

• I completely agree with whats being said and the intention behind this statement. However I paused at the work '...reorganised...'. 
• I think that it does give the sense of change I want but I think it lacks impact. 
• We didn't just shuffle little to fit changing markets, there was a whole digital evolution happening invisibly around us without our knowledge. Our habits were so visually obviously changing when the industrial revolution happened, but this one didn't just change the way we move, it changed our minds, it changed the way we think as a race. Like if we were a shawl of fish, gently shifted through the currents, and someone has put some kind of drug in our water telling us 'you want to swim this way', and we willingly, unknowingly, comply.
• Of course for the outside observer it appears that we re just swimming along, going about our day. With no knowledge that we are collectively under the influence. 

'The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.' -page 11.

• Nothing 'real' can be taken. Something being strong enough in itself to the point where it can't be manipulated is a form of ultimate beauty in my eyes.
• A key central theme I find reoccurs in my work is anti-manipulation towards individuals. Either through my anti-religions views, my strong views on data violation, and, linking to this, my anti-social media writings that emerged from my examination of the modern 'self' in my extension project.
• I think all of my work becomes an examination of the self and rejects the surrounding opposing facts to self growth ad exploration. Anything holding back individual evolution towards a personally perceived perfection very much frustrates me.
• Maybe this stems from from my own previous lack of control and choice in a forced sexual incident in my past, because I also often find accidental sexual connotations coming into my work, and a sense of vulnerability. 

'...dissolving of most of the borders between private and professional time...' -Page 15. 

• I think the key word in this for me Is 'dissolving', it made me think about the DATAFIED project. Would it be a good idea to merge my many video outcomes and concepts into one collaborative final piece? Join then together and dissolve the illusion of reality into a 'behind the scenes' sort of view. Would a good final outcome be to: have the monochrome video of the string spaghetti being fed to the children played, then repeated, starting of as if it was on a loop then the screen turns, reality dips into the data void, and as this shift takes place, the green screen of the spaghetti flickers in, to give the notion of EATING UP tis beautifully painted 'reality' we live in. 

I love her thought provoke work in general and thought that the title ‘Feed Me’ looked like an interesting one to watch in relation to my own current work. 

She produces the video at the start in a sort of advertisement format which I found interesting because it makes me think of the title as both a summary of the video’s content, but also an instruction said by the viewer. Feed my materialism. Feed my consumeristic needs. 

In think the relates to my own work in that a have the physical act of eating. But what I really mean is, the viewer is saying: feed me information. Feed me your marketing. Manipulate me. 

I like how this concept of us feeding these bad patterns is given to the dolls, which simulate our children/ the next generation. Feeding them our bad habits.

I think I’m going to extend this concept into my own work and ova someone feed this tangled spaghetti data map to their doll ‘children’.

His ’angry birds’ piece has a similar nature to my own, e.g. tracking natural movement. This made me think about the deformity of the human hand caused by our holding stance of the phones and how our mental damages are invisible therefore are often shrugged off, but this physical evidence of change holds a different weight to it due to its physical manifestation. This happens in more places, e.g. changes to our posture etc. It also made me consider the scale of my own work, the vastness and repetition gave such emphasis on these tiny movements taking up such a large part of our lives.

In his work Red Lines with Landscapes at The Usher Gallery, I like how he uses the wires as part of the display of the piece. It makes me think of connectivity and power. The two central themes of data. Which one is its purpose? Is it just a play for power wrapped up in a beautiful package and advertised as connectivity? 

Meg was mentioned to me by David, her work with green screens was what inspired me to think of using them in my own work. I like how she creates this blank space/ void to manipulate how she pleases and to write her own narrative and create her own reality. 

When I went to visit this exhibit was an interactive screen (which I wasn’t allowed to photograph) which read the emotions of the person looking at it. You viewed your reflection with a surrounding mood analysis. The machine can see my mouth move and tell me I’m smiling so I’m happy but what about my eyes? The sweat on my forehead? The twitching of my little finger? The sound of a phone call triggers small levels of anxiety in the average person. Even the fact that we can gather this information is scary. Were they tracking your hormone levels? The steadiness of your hand? Your heart beat? Are they listening into your conversations? How long you took to answer the call in correlation to the contents you have been digitally interacting with that day which allows them to predict your mood?  It’s scary.

When I look at the structures made in my dancing video (creating the back drops for the datafied final piece), they make me think of the single lines as single people. Each one randomly placed, but bound to eventually interact with certain others. It makes me see these movements as a visual of our relationships, we meet in random scenarios predetermined by seemingly unimportant decisions. (Like how fast you walk down a road, if you catch that bus or red light, what time you decide to meet your friends). This made me think of Olivia de Recat's work with lines. Using simple visuals to represent such complex human relationships/ interactions. The way she is able to emote such a reaction in the viewer with such simple imagery. I think its incredible. My imagery is often quite complex because I use cumulative methods to create my outcomes (bringing lots of aspects of my initial reactions and developing them in tandem to eventually join in the conclusive work. (I don't intensionally work this way, I have just noticed a pattern). Maybe I should work with more simple imagery and let it speak for itself? This might be a more effective method when it comes to the 'Green spaces' project because not all viewers will be artists. The audience might relate more to imagery they can understand rather then imagery thats so deep into the abstract?

His simplicity of the written word almost seems child like in the manor of the imperfect bush work and fluidity of the language (or lack there of). It makes me think about when I was once told by someone that the most beautiful poems could be produced by the mind of a child because it hasn’t developed ‘healthy’ habits, obeying the rules and regulations of the English language. To write beautiful poetry one must throw the rule book out of the window and walk around the garden of the mind picking the words from the ground to gather together in a beautifully coordinated vase. With no version of perfect. No version of what it SHOULD be. Just of what it is. So go out picking and display your arrangement proudly in your mother’s kitchen window.

I think this feeling of impacting perfections and mistakes (with the way he leaves crosses out words as part of his work) being as much part of the work as the other marks made after all didn’t the artist cast each movement with his own hands, so it’s each movement equal in value to the next? Why is one action more weighted with value than another?

I think this particular quote speaks to me about a core aspect of art: originality. And makes me think about the idea of perspective. Thinking about something practical like modern technology, before the internet, could you have imagined such a thing? imagine trying to wrap your head around the idea of something that is able to bring your voice to the ears of your loved ones through a hand held device from across the world. Or even something as simple as photography. The concept of capturing and saving a single moment in time for later visual pleasure. Saving a real image pf someone who has passed, no longer just an interpretation full of imperfect and human error. However looking back at these mind bending inventions, each appeared as a natural progression, from one to the next. Nothing shocking about it. Just the norm. ‘Not a single surprise’. It is our job as artists to seamlessly craft this ‘profound harmony’ from one original idea to the next, making each seem as natural as the breath you’ll take following this one.

I think beauty should not be examined in a quantitative way. By its nature, beauty is probably the most subjective thing in existence, therefore its nature is to be unquantifiable. However when it comes to a seemingly simple task of pricing art we are breaking all of these principles, which is why this is a system of exchange that I find endlessly challenging with this particular subject matter.

Parks are a man made idealism of nature, of which we can coexist with nature upon our own terms in an ironically unnatural way. if you pretend to have an illness, for example a cold, you fake the symptoms, therefore the symptoms are not real. However if you simulate an illness you actually give yourself those symptoms. A headache or a stuffy nose. Therefore can you consider that illness real? Can you treat a simulated illness with real medicine? Should you? The lines between reality and fiction blur, because you loose your sense of relativity. If we pick and chose what samples of a natural environment suit our specific needs, the grass, the trees, but not beautiful plants that have an equal right to be within an eco system (and that would naturally reside within this simulated space) are selectively taken out of this context because they don’t suit our specific needs (e.g. poisonous plants or fast spreading weeds). Therefore is this simulated natural space real in context to nature? 

When looking for garment inspiration, I knew I wanted something I consider personally beautiful. I went to my favourite brand for love and lemons to try and express this beauty, as I wanted the garment/ body shots to be a display of narcissistic overpowering beauty. I love the movements of the hanging materials and how the dynamic movements almost extend that of the body, exaggerating and extending its natural kinetisism. I used this in my own garments and used hanging materials to give the sense of extensionand dynamics of the human body and of the idea of the imagery grouting/ spreading. I also love the aesthetic of the asymmetry. I think it gives it a beautiful sense of imperfection and gives a beautiful unexpectedness. 

I saw the words ‘Man is not a bird’ written on a wall on my way home and it stuck in my mind so wrote this poem in response before bed:

Man is not a bird. 

Never existing ahead of the hour,

eyes stronger then their light. 

Our predictions as cloudy as your prescriptions. 

I too am hungry but have grown too weak to hunt my own prey. 

I may never see it’s footprints. 

Or anything mildly humanoid. 

I use my wings to block out the light. 

My corneas too weak for this red-ish hue. 

Man is not a bird  

He may not guide this ocean, 

coexist with it nor enjoy its beauty.  

His feathers merely drown in the weight of his naivety. 

Man is not a bird. 

For she will never be free.

The way the size of the verses deteriorates as they go on is echoed in their content. The repetition of the first line ‘man is not a bird’ with the varying pronouns (‘I’, ‘he’, ‘she’) shows the inclusivity of ‘man’, not just male but the human race as a whole. When writing the first verse I was thinking about the powerful eyesight of an eagle. The way their evolution has allowed them to remove themselves from the situation, flying high above the ground and yet finding the smallest movements of a mouse to swoop down and capture. I referred to ‘light’ because I see this removal as a positive thing in context to the survival of the whole eco system, unlike other animals (humans), but also referred to ‘light’ as an alternative way of describing sight. What is seeing? It is just processing information in the forms of visible lights waves within the electromagnetic spectrum. And yet this one function sculpts and guides the way we and so many other species have learnt to live. 

So I guess this poem lead me to think about the way we as humans communicate. Art is often seen as a visual tool of communication but what about the other senses? How would a blind person feel about your art? Would they get the same feelings, the same emotional interaction with the artist as any other viewer? Maybe from the sound, but what about tactile qualities or a smell filling the room of an installed piece.  

So I started looking for devices that transformed one communicative method into another, for example sound into imagery, imagery into sound and touch into sound. I found an amazing device called 'play tronica midi touch me' that basically humans the human body (as a conductor) into an instrument that you can play with your hand.

The device I found made me think of the audio possibilities when considering pieces like William Cobbing’s ‘The Kiss 2’. Within the way the two subjects paw at each other in this simple anonymity, there’s this desperation for connectivity. They are connected yet physically blocked by this morphing structure. With this device or could transfer these movements into into sound waves to audibly represent connection. What other sounds could I produce? The sound of a hug (between old friends, between family?), what about the sound of sex. Take away the humanity and individuality of the situation , what does a physical connection’s electrical impulses directly sound like? The device should be arriving in time for my Part 3 work so I look forward to including it in that. 

I learnt on my trip to the 24/7 exhibition that Big Brother was the step that revolutionised the stigma that is surveillance. The show was experimental, as in they didn’t know how people would respond to this. I find it quite sad that we found it entertaining to sit and watch other people’s lives before us. Isn’t this a violation of their personal lives, their private thoughts or privacy as a whole? It’s funny because it’s almost like we transfer our attention onto someone else’s life, and by watching theirs we can actually trick ourselves, trick our brains, into thinking that we are busy. Our brains chemically are triggered, activated. We are cheating reality and convincing our biological make ups, manipulating their honest functionality with our technology. If we removed the object in which we are consumed by, we are just sitting, hours on end. Would our minds or bodies have the patience for this process without our trickery? No. Simply put, they (we) wouldn’t. I think this idea relates back to this duality I currently have in my work. The outside vs the inside. The still, bored, mundanely ticking away outer shell; your ‘self’. And the imagination, or the ‘inner self’, the soul. A place out boundless possibility, a place where the laws of physics and reason are thrown out of the metaphorical window. I want to use this kind of ‘window into the sole’ concept in my work: maybe even maintaining the rim of the television screen. I’ve been working using two layers of footage using a green/ blue screen effect to compile them. The first layer being the tactile and physically ‘real’ and the second being the abstract (from the video world). I think a logical next step would be to maintain this tv screen idea and place it on the forehead of the thinker, with secondary imagery appearing on the ‘tv screen’. I think it would carry forward this idea that we are becoming our own surveillance by combining the technological and biological beings.

It’s funny learning about this new information after my DATAFIED project because I was thinking about the line of addiction that connects the real and virtual selves and drives us to have this constant compulsion to feed our virtual selves with data. I found out earlier in the day that on average we check our phone every 12 minutes throughout the day. Which is insane. We use our phones for hours each day. Hours spend sitting still, consuming this mind numbing information, which consists of a hollow façade. A beautiful package to tempt us children with, while we are unaware of its hollow nature. I think whoever is writing the algorithms to make this addiction within us should be considered a murderer. Drugs show us a different reality and kill us every year because we are addicted to either this absentness, or the high. So what does social media do? It feeds us false information. Shows us photoshopped bodies and lives. Is this not a false manipulated version of our reality? Like when you are consumed within that screen everything is pretty and beautiful, and when you can compare to this with your own input the likes pour in, releasing oxytocin and serotonin. You get a high. What about when that reality is closed off from you? You long to take another look. To submerge yourself back into the beautiful airbrushed world of false perfection, to get another hit of those chemicals in your brain. I think social media is the worst drug, because the reality is that we don’t know we are addicted. It’s like the whole world has been spiked and are now susceptible to believe any information thrown their way. How do you filter out the bullshit? Especially when the best story tellers are often the best liars. I propose we take a step back and think about warfare. We have armies, man power, who have been physically attacking the bodies of the opposition for as long as humans have been around. As we evolved we gained higher intellect and started using science and medicine to manipulate enemy masses through biological and chemical warfare. I propose that those few people, the code writers, the psychopathic CEOs and the Zuckerberg’s of the world could (which means they could already currently) manipulate entire countries through psychological warfare. Through twisting the minds of the masses in democratic populations you can lead this manipulation higher up their political ladder and start gaining control of those who control the many. When you control those in power what does that make you? A higher power, almost god-like.

I thought this piece was so interesting because touch is the one sense that massively separates us. Depending on an individual’s upbringing their need and amount of affection towards touching others varys massively. But it’s funny because when we are forces to break down this barrier, and invade someone else’s physical space it makes such a huge difference. Touch and sound are our main ways of communicating, what if I could bring strangers together and translate their touches into music, as they got to know each other how would the melody shift as they became more comfortable? What about the contrast in music between strangers and family or friends, or sexual partners? What would happen if I recorded the sounds created while two people were having sex? How would this compare to masturbation? In this piece I noticed that lots of the shots were extended past where action happen (before and after). There would be these still shots of the room, the ‘stroker’ would enter, harmlessly touch the people she encountered with a touch on the shoulder or arm and would leave the room, and another still shot of the room remained. I think this is an interesting effect because the video shows the effect this person has on the space. Does the space feel different after she leave it? What has her presence impacted on this space? This piece has actual got me excited about maybe trying a performance piece. I want to look into psychological individuality and the complexities of the single mind and therefore human connection in my future work, so I will definitely find myself refereeing back to this piece.

I heard about these fish have see through heads. I thought to myself wouldn't it be amazing if you couldn't just see the anatomy within, but actual thoughts? What would that look like? Image if everyone had these little tv screens on their brains that showed you what they are thinking. usually they would be a clouded mess, but as someone day dreams and focusses in on a single story line the narrative would clear up. This would probably get couples in trouble as they dream.