Me and my partner were having trouble deciding on one concept to explore further in Project II. One big mistake I think we did as a pair was spending too much time trying to think up a good concept to then start our work from, instead of simply picking any of the areas of interest we explored during the Circle line tube trip and making work based off of it.
I realized that a good project doesn’t necessarily derive from one strong initial concept or an intelligent execution idea that sets it off, but rather, can merely explore one simple concept as far as it can, this way eventually extracting from it interesting points of view.
During the first weeks of the Navigator project I had an overbearing feeling of unease and anxiousness, I couldn’t think of one idea or theme that I deemed ideal, so instead I just kept having different half-thought ideas and not really going anywhere with any of them. I think that may have affected my partner too, because both of us seemed to have taken more time than we should just thinking and researching instead of developing as well.
During that period I read the communications key readings for the project and would write stuff from time to time on my sketchbook, both to help get my ideas in place and to brainstorm different ideas and concepts. Here are some of my writings, mostly all different in nature, some more brainstorm-y, some trying to organize ideas, and some more or less free writing, dealing with a range of different themes I had in mind:
Eventually I realized that the best course of action would be to simply start experimenting visually, trying to create images based on the concepts I had been thinking of so far and on my general experiences with the project research I had been doing, and see where that would take me.
For the next step in the Project II research we were prompted to pick a line from the London underground to ride with our partners and basically use it as a vehicle to explore the city and a catalyst for the development of our work.
Me and my partner picked the Circle line, mostly because it was fairly close to both our apartments and would make it easier for us to meet. We spent the whole day riding the tube and walking around the city, I don’t quite remember all of the stations we got off on but some of the most memorable ones for me were in Shepherd’s Bush Market, Royal Oak, Paddington, Westminster and Tower Hill.
I thought Royal Oak was particularly interesting because it isn’t as touristy as the other ones. In fact, I had never really heard of it before. The cityscapes were very different from the ones we saw around the other stations, as it was very industrial looking and spacious, full of raw concrete and overarching highways. We walked from there to the Paddington station, and I thought the way there was fascinating.
The one thing that I found most interesting in the journey was coming to an abandoned-looking phone cabin that looked quite filthy, covered in graffiti and with broken windows. Upon inspecting it, we found a bunch of incense sticks that had been lodged both in the crevice behind the telephone and in the change slot. We lit one and went our way.
That had me wondering about who put them there and why. Was it for religious our ritualistic means? Was it someone who just had more incense sticks than they knew what to do with? I have no idea, but I know that interacting so intimately (grabbing, burning, smelling) with something someone left behind felt kind of moving to me in a way.
For the rest of our trip we mostly just took pictures of things that caught our attention. My partner took lots of interesting pictures of forms cast from shadows and of the big digital clocks in the subway stations, and he was very good at documenting the whole thing too, which was something I usually wouldn’t think of, gathering pictures of both the clocks displaying the time we were at each station and of the logos with the names of each station as well.
Some of the themes that had my interest and can be noticed in the pictures I took throughout the trip were:
Advertising, especially when it looks odd, out of place, or too forceful. I find the narrative that advertising creates when interacting with the city to be often quite disconcerting, so that was definitely a theme of interest.
Different ways in which people imprint their identity or leave marks in the city. For that one I tried looking at both the ways the “common people” (often unknown) leave marks such as graffiti and street art, and even incidental marks like paint or oil drips or skid marks on the streets, and the ways in which public people, often very privilege, have left marks historically, such as statues, monuments, street names, etc.
I tried researching some of the street and station names that piqued my interest and one that I found particularly interesting was the origin of the Paddington area, believed to be named after an old Anglo-Saxon land owner named Padda. The fact that an entire very famous area is named after some probable land owner from times past that we know nothing about amazes me. I wonder if he had any merit for that other than simply being rich and owning land.
One other theme I also considered, albeit less than the others, was thinking the city, especially its architecture, as a set of imposed rules and linear systems designed specifically to allow or disallow certain interactions. Still thinking about my musings in the barbican about personal space and human interactions, I started questioning whether specific architectural design choices could be either beneficial or oppressive.
I also took some pictures of construction works, as they seem to be ever present in London, and imagery that seemed very modern yet very old at the same timed.
While I do think the trip gave me some interesting insights, I was a bit apprehensive and anxious throughout the whole experience, finding it difficult to come up with ideas for projects or solutions that dealt with the concepts I thought. For some reason I was having a hard time focusing on specific things, my thoughts were all over the place.
After visiting the Museum of London, we went to the Barbican Center. We were instructed to wander the centre freely as flaneurs, again, in ways that we might not have done otherwise. Not necessarily walking with a clear objective in mind, but rather walking and looking, experiencing, and interacting with our surroundings, guiding ourselves by our senses instead of practical constraints of everyday life (This wasn’t all necessarily specified in the prompt, but is rather how I interpreted it).
At first me and my partner tried undertaking this exercise together, but eventually separated to go our own ways. In the start I felt kind of restrained by having to wander with a partner, as I didn’t know him too well yet, and we seemed to interpret the exercise differently, or rather have different ideas of how we wanted to go about it. I thought walking with him at first kind of limited the act of talking and thinking freely that I had visualized, as we had to be a bit more objective when together, instead of just walking randomly wherever our senses took us.
After separating, I felt more free and contemplative of my surroundings, albeit after a couple hours it did feel kind of lonely roaming the huge wide spaces of the Barbican by myself, seeing people I knew wandering alone or in pairs from time to time.
Once again, I tried engaging with the space I was in in new ways that felt at least a bit new to me. I started by simply taking pictures of scenery that caught my attention:
I also tried to interact with my surroundings playfully in ways I wouldn’t otherwise, trying to create unusual relations between my body and the architecture:
I drew psychogeographic maps of my walk as I did in the Museum of London, but felt that doing so in the open while looking at the city was a lot more overwhelming than doing so inside the confined galleries and looking at specific objects in pedestals in the museum. Ironically, when trying to do so, the city seems to have a lot more to look at.
Having no guidelines of where to go or what to look at, my drawings ended up being a lot messier and busier this time around. Maybe this says something about how we interact with the city or what the city has to show/tell us? Or maybe I just couldn’t get myself to reproduce the performance I executed in the museum. I’m not sure, maybe a bit of both, but I did find the exercise and the questions it raised quite interesting.
At one point I sat down in a bench near the edge of the building I was on top of, overlooking a cityscape between the buildings it faced. I tried drawing the scene in different ways: simply looking at it and trying to reproduce it on paper, drawing it without looking at the paper, or doodling random objects and forms I saw into different compositions.
While I do enjoy drawing on my day to day, I never really try drawing from objects I look at, or drawing in an even mildly realistic style, so I thought the drawing in which I tried to do that was particularly bad. Even so, it was an interesting exercise, as I began considering the angles and forms of the city in ways I never really do, and it gave me a more heightened appreciation for all the care and method that goes into creating realistic drawings, especially at the times that I realized I didn’t plan ahead too well and the dimensions of the spaces and angles I was seeing ended up interacting differently in the paper as they did in real life.
The loneliness of the wandering by myself and the people-watching made me start contemplating, too, themes such as personal space and human interaction within the architecture of the city. By the end of the exercise, before meeting up with the rest of the class, the Barbican Centre felt a bit too spacious and cold.
On the second day of Project II we had trips to both the Museum of London and the Barbican Centre. Their aim was to inspire our work and give sequence to the brainstorming about the prompt we had gotten, which placed great emphasis on experiencing and engaging with the city, supported by some key readings dealing especially with the concept of psychogeography.
For our trip to the Museum of London we were encouraged to find different, unusual ways that we could interact and experience the museum, specifically taking into consideration the concept of time while doing so. I took notes and recordings of the museum in ways that I wouldn’t usually do, being mindful especially about the space and my behaviour in it and trying to associate those to how they engage with time within the museum.
The first form of experiencing the museum I devised was drawing abstract spatial/mental maps of the galleries as I walked and looked through them. I loosely followed the lines of my footsteps with my pencil, displacing it as I walked along the museum, changing the direction of its stroke for actual physical changes in direction I was taking in the museum, and tried capturing the forms of objects I stopped to look at and often directions I would look as well, never looking at the paper. In doing so, I meant to trace a psychogeographical map of the way I walked along and experienced the museum. I thought the drawings I got from different sections of the museum were interesting:
One curious aspect of this exercise that I enjoyed was how my walk and my drawing ended up influencing each other mutually. While I based my drawing on my walk, the limitations of the paper’s edges and my somewhat (emphasis on the “somewhat”) strict arbitrary rules forced me to adjust my walk to it at points, making me wander the museum in ways that wouldn’t make sense otherwise.
The first drawing mas made while walking the pre-historic section of the museum, the second was the Roman empire, the third was the 50/60s, if I recall correctly. These represent to me the ways in which the general look of western society changed through forms and vision (even if having an obvious direct impact from my own personal experience and filters), the first one having smoother, more organic shapes, the second introducing straighter lines, edges and repetition, and the third the busy influence of the prominent typography and visual mess of city life. These drawings ended up strongly influencing the directions I explored in my work.
At one point I made rough drawings of forms that caught my attention in the museum for a while as well, but didn’t get too deep into it as I didn’t think the exercise was helping me much.
A different experiment I conduced was recording my footsteps through the museum. I wanted to find if there was some rhythmic quality to process of repeatedly walking and stopping to look. I recorded by letting my earphones with built-in microphone dangle close to my feet as I walked the museum, but unfortunately the sound of the two plastic earphones bouncing against each other as I walked mostly obfuscated the sound of the footsteps and surroundings.
The last form of recording I explored while in there was trying to guide myself through the rooms of the museum by only looking through my cell phone camera while it was fully zoomed in. I thought that exercise was quite interesting too as I think it dialogues in a way to how the digital generation engages with space:
Trying to dodge the passerby and not get in anyone’s way while navigating rooms that seemed like mazes when only looking through a zoomed-in screen was very disorienting, but I enjoyed the way it made me interact with the objects in the museum, having to run my camera across the images and objects around me searching for context, directions, or points of interest. Seemed like I was dissecting (or literally closely inspecting) the objects around me in a way, but not in the way I usually look at artefacts in a museum, but rather, more inquisitively and curiously, as if searching the objects for spatial directions.
While I did enjoy my experiments in the museum and managed to get some nice insights from them, by the time I left I felt that I focused too much on creating novel experiments in the space and too little on simply absorbing the information in it the way it’s intended to. I didn’t really simply look at or read the supporting texts much, and somehow it feels like I missed most of the exhibit. I might go visit again someday.
For the launch of Project II, all of us had to pick pairs from our own pathways that would work with us to develop a collaborative project. I paired up with my friend Sheng.
Among other interesting things we got to see in our launch session, the one that stuck to me the most was the exercise we were ask to do: Following an example from an artist (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) that was shown to us, we had to make a video somewhere in or near the campus filming “our vision” while narrating it and giving directions, instructions, or thoughts that would both illustrate what we saw or interacted with and help our partner engage with the video.
We would then send the video to our partners, and vice versa, and they would have to go to the place we filmed and try pointing their cellphone at the spots being filmed in our video while listening to our instructions, this way trying to emulate seeing the world from the partner’s eyes even if only for two minutes.
For some reason I thought it was kind of embarrassing filming the video and had to restart it about twice. I just realized upon watching it again that at one point I say the word “from” about a thousand times in succession in one sentence, too, which is a bit funny.
I thought my partner’s video was very interesting. He shot it in the RCA cafeteria area where the short courses had been regularly taking place at the time, which is an area that I (and him too, from what he says in the video) hadn’t interacted with or been in much so far. The way he narrated his video and interacted with objects around him felt very intimate and sensible, which I thought was very appropriate for the prompt and made “seeing through his eyes” a lot more interesting.
That made me realize how detachedly and coldly I had filmed my own video, not really exploring my thoughts or my involvement with my surroundings much farther than simply giving my partner instructions about where to point the cellphone and look. It made me come to the conclusion that even if a task feels particularly difficult or embarrassing I should still make an effort to engage with it on a personal level instead of acting distant or disinterested from it.
In my personal experience, trying to avoid embarrassment by refusing to honestly participate is almost always counterproductive, and even if that was just a tiny example of that behaviour (and I don’t even think that was necessarily completely the case), I do feel like this is something that I tend to do and need to work on. I Definitely didn’t expect that exercise to be so interesting to me or give me that much to think about. 😛
After having printed and bound the sticker set with metallic rings Shiqi gave me, it was time to shoot them in the capture studio. Luckily, my group members had booked it, so we took the day to shoot all of our individual works and finish assembling the group zine.
I didn’t like the pictures of my individual work very much, so I’m probably still going to take them again later for my portfolio.
As for the zine, my group had decided that the final piece would be assembled similarly to a delivery package. The different individual responses wouldn’t be bound together, but instead, individually wrapped in white packaging paper, closed off with stickers with each of the individual emojis we had picked to represent our work, and then wrapped together with the white paper. It would be presented as a white package with just our written manifesto attached.
Since I was already going to print stickers for my individual work when we had decided that, I brought the group sticker designs with me to print them as well.
We chose to have minimal design for the packaging because we wanted it to resemble an anonymous package you’d have delivered containing sensible information, which fits with the general anti-surveillance motif of our work. We wanted it to be discreet on the outside to highlight the content inside, and we wanted none of the design from the work to be immediately visible from the outside of the zine because we wanted the reader to have the experience of picking which works they’d check based only on the emojis on the stickers.
With that we also wanted to evade the rigidity of the page-turning experience that presupposes a reading order, we wanted the reader to choose the order in which they would read each individual work based only on the minimal visual cues he could gather from them.
At first I was sceptic about the format, I’d rather have it be a classic zine that I could print a copy and bring home with me, but after we finished it I quite liked the result. One critique is that the process involved too much paper and going through it made a lot of waste, but the presentation and the concept were nice.
After finalizing the digital design for my individual project 1 work it was time to get to know the vinyl printer to make my sticker set come to life.
At first I printed 2 versions of my sticker set. It was nice getting to do some manual work, learning how to cut the stickers up properly and physically seeing what works and what doesn’t for sticker printing.
First prints of the sticker set.
It all went smoothly except for the final step when I had to punch a hole through the pages to bind them together. The hole I made was too close to the corner, which made the paper rip. I cut off the edges of the papers trying to salvage it, but now I didn’t have any good spots to make the holes correctly. The position I punched the new hole in not only looked awkward but ended up punching through some of the actual stickers as well.
First print of the sticker set with the corners cut and the second hole.
The other set of stickers I had printed worked well, but still I printed two more: one to keep as a copy for myself (as the first would be submitted to the tutors) and one to test out transparent stickers.
The transparent stickers looked pretty cool but unfortunately didn’t work for the concept, as they weren’t able to effectively cover any cameras, they just made them very slightly hazy.
After I decided that I wanted to create an anti-surveillance sticker set the work towards that was fairly smooth. I got the colors I ended up using on my first experiments, and liked them enough to just go with them.
First experimentations for the development of the sticker set.
I decided I’d make stickers in the shape of eyes to cover surveillance camera lenses as I imagined that that’d allow for an interesting ironic narrative. The design for the stickers was fairly simple so I didn’t want to just present them on top of a white page, and I figured that the fact that the stickers were eyes allowed me to create more interesting compositions that they could interact with on the page. I set out to create a character that had my stickers as eyes but the stroke around them made the character seem like he was wearing a mask. Conveniently, that worked perfectly with the concept of questioning the morality of surveillance vs. anti-surveillance, so I gave the character I was developing a balaclava:
First draft of what the sticker set would become.
After realizing I wanted to create different compositions with similar interactions between the stickers and the page around them to compose the 4-page minimum that I had to cover for the group zine, I set out to create a narrative that would allow me to explain the purpose of the stickers in the page they were in itself. I wanted my entire work to be self-explanatory and contained in the pages of the zine, I didn’t want any external links to be made necessary.
To elucidate the purpose the stickers were designed for, I composed a page depicting a camera with one of them for a lens.
Page four of the final sticker set composition.
Just for fun, I made a drawing of a background wall to make the camera seem as if it were on the corner of a room as a throwback reference to my past ideas relating to religious icon corners without making that an entirely important point of the design.
As I’ve mentioned before, I wanted the tone of the narrative presentation to be ironic in praising surveillance but yet obviously anti-surveillance by the end of it just like the manifesto’s, so I developed support text with that objective.
Page two of the final sticker set composition.
I felt that the sticker set still needed a cover page to introduce it and a stronger tie to the religious themes of surveillance that I wanted to explore, as that would make them a lot more interesting from a narrative standpoint. I decided to draw back from my sketches and use the godly creature with a pyramid head that I had developed as a cover page, and with that, name the stickers Eyes of Surveillance, an allusion to the Christian symbol that represents God’s all-seeing eye. The symbol of the Eye of Surveillance in Christian iconography is the pyramid with an eye in the middle that I had been using for the illustration of the creature on the cover page.
I decided to add trademark symbols to the title and further mentions of the name of the stickers as well. I wanted the set to appear like something you could buy in a store, as I find that that strengthened the storytelling regarding surveillance in the context of consumerist society.
First page of the final sticker set composition.
Originally I had subtitled the stickers as “the official anti-surveillance sticker set” but later decided against that because I didn’t want the stickers to make their purpose clear on the first page. I wanted the realization that they were made to cover surveillance cameras to be gradual to reinforce the narrative of having them posing as something else.
I had been designing the sticker circles in 6 cm x 6 cm dimensions. I researched different CCTV cameras and figured that that’d be a good enough size to cover their lenses while fitting into the A5 paper size that my group had decided to use for the zine pages.
After talking to different people about my idea and going to the individual tutorial with Matt that I’ve mentioned before, I got the (seemingly obvious) insight I hadn’t thought of of creating smaller versions of the stickers to cover webcams and mobile phone cameras. I think that was a great idea as it lent my stickers practicality in real applications within its concept, as I didn’t really expect anyone to cover an actual CCTV camera lens with them.
Fifth page of the final sticker set composition.
After all that I was done with the digital design for the sticker set, and was ready to bring them into printing.
Following the writing of the manifesto for project 1, I decided that I wanted to work in the same ironic tone that we used in it for my individual work, so that they could work cohesively together. Since the manifesto evoked a kind of religious relationship with surveillance for me, sounding almost like a prayer, I started drawing relations between surveillance and God.
I had been reading about some of Kazimir Malevich’s work in fine arts and took interest in the way that he uses the corner of the gallery room to attribute a religious signigication to his artwork, associating that positioning to eastern orthodox Christian practices of having icon corners, which are essentially small worship spaces in the corners of rooms, in their houses. I started imagining ways in which I could relate the fact that surveillance cameras are often positioned in the corners of rooms to that symbology.
The Sick Man by Vasili Maximov (1881) featuring a depiction of an icon corner, a picture of a camera in the corner of a room, and a picture of a Malevich exhibition (1915) featuring his painting The Black Square (1913) on the corner of the room.
Throughout the whole process I had been making sketches and doodles relating to surveillance and God, which had some influence on the final outcome of my work. I tend to be very shape-oriented when thinking visually, so for this work I focused on exploring the application of the shape of the human eye to the themes I was exploring. Here are some of the doodles:
One of the ideas I had was trying to integrate the theme of surveillance into toys. I thought about creating camera toys and presenting them infused with an ironic narrative of supposedly helping children get used to the idea of everyday surveillance. I got this idea from playing around with sketching cute and creepy camera creatures and robots.
I went to the RCA library to check some books for visual inspiration. I focused particularly on designer toy books but ended up checking some comics too, which I thought were very inspiring.
I wrote up a couple different ideas for comics, one involving experimenting with the illustrator distortion effects I tried on the adobe illustrator tutorial, the other an absurdist comic praising the “invisible watcher” while denouncing the range of personal information we have to give up on modern society (I planned on using common password recovery questions e.g. “what’s your mother’s maiden name?”, “what’s your first pet’s name?” to humorously illustrate the obscure and very personal user data logged in the internet).
Other than that, I had also been searching up images relating to surveillance on the internet for both visual and conceptual reference:
Meanwhile, I had also been browsing through different different books about surveillance that my group had checked from the library, and been reading some digital articles and books as well, especially Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation, by Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon.
After presenting all my ideas to Matt on a personal tutorial I realized the one that I had that I liked the best was the idea for intervention stickers made to be put on camera lenses , that I had thought of while thinking up ideas for toys that related to surveillance, as I thought that it engaged with the physical context of my work in a very direct and provocative way. From that, I went on to experiment with designs for the stickers on adobe illustrator.
I already knew the basics of Adobe Illustrator that were being taught in the workshop as well, so instead I went to do a couple of quick compositions in the program while the workshop was taking place:
Composition in comic format made in Adobe Illustrator.
My idea for the composition was simply experimenting with the Distort & Transform effects in Illustrator, so I created a simple narrative to fit that initial idea. For the final version I ended up only using the Tweak effect to simulate video distortion.
Our tutors keep telling us to post sketches for the work we do as well. Sometimes I just go straight to digital without sketching on a paper first, though, so here are some earlier versions, images and discards for this quick composition that I saved:
Early sketches of the compositions (click to expand).
Early sketches of the composition.
After that I went on to create a different simple composition to try out on the laser cutting induction I was going to have the next day. I followed the laser cutting color guides (but I think I did some of what I was trying to do wrong) and did two versions to try out the engraving as well as the cutting. I made the lines thicker than in the original version so that they’re easily visible in this post:
I ended up not even really using them for the laser cutting tutorial, as I made them thinking we would have more time to experiment with our own designs during the induction.
Caio's Graduate Diploma 