charlievitamB

My friend sent me this because she knew I was doing Soho. I wouldn’t start my research towards Soho’s gentrification if I haven’t seen that, and how I realised I can link my postcode project to the work I like by other artist might be totally different. I had an idea of a utopia world before that, it’s quite cliche and I’m so lucky I have other ideas because of this magazine page.

I was going through a magazine the other day, and this came to me. Pop culture. With all those products and prices. Is that the pop culture? Shopping and shopping all the time? And that’s why I would do this video, everything is becoming commercialised, all about money, all about fame, people and places are losing their personalities, losing their uniqueness, which is not cool at all.

I picked up some printed work that people don’t want in the library, and distorted some old pictures of Soho using photo copier, then created this. It seems angry, well, not just because I made it in 20 minutes, but also because I really am. Angry. I know that people are always talking about how good old time passes and the world we’re living in is getting worse, it’s cliche, but I kind of feel the same. The internet makes our life much easier but it also ruins a lot of things. I can’t help thinking that things are not pure anymore. Not just Soho, way beyond Soho, it’s just a perfect sample of this unfortunate.

This is a scene from the final video, the part the girl changes her image to become a pop star and acts in stupid shampoo commercials. Well I didn’t mean to make this fake ad look THAT stupid but my Photoshop skill is just, too bad. But surprisingly it kind of creates the ridiculer contrast from her previous image, so I kept this.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I can show the gentrification of a place through making a film, and my friend said casually one day that I can turn the place to a person. That reminds me of the film Agora I watched recently, which shows how Roman Empire fell by telling the story of how a women scholar was first honoured then killed as a witch. And I was so touched after watching that, not only feel sad for the character, but also how an era ended. Which means the method of projecting a place, a period of time to a person works well, so I created the story of the two girls.

Choosing Soho as my postcode was not by plan. One day after finishing my visit to Leicester Square, (can’t remember why I went there though) I decided to walk around instead of going straight home. So I went down the road and, guess what! I found the street where Oasis shot their album cover! I might mention in the previous blog, I love Britpop, and Oasis is the first band I listened to. That really means a big deal for me. And as I walk around, I saw some really cool vinyl shops, and a giant musical instrument shop, in which there’re nothing I can afford but still, very cool. Also the famous Carnaby Street is now decorated with neon lights of lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody, again I mention in the previous blog, I really love Queen, and I cried when watching the film.

“This is it.” I told myself, feeling there’s a fire in my chest.

In the following week, actually few weeks, I went to Soho for about 5 times, to take pictures, to eat, to visit galleries, to get to know more about this place.

I took very quick photos, which I think is very helpful to gather as much information as possible. And I created series of pictures of the same block, they look quite cool, a bit like a storyboard of what’s happening at this place.

However, after a little research online, I found that Soho used to be an even cooler place, with all those bands like Beatles and AC/DC, Pink Floyd playing lives and recording, there were loads of record shops, cool stuffs going on all the time. But now, even though I can still find a lot of elements of music, it’s already been washed off a lot. Remembering the record shops I was in, they are so small, being squeezed by Paperchase and other trendy shops and cafe. And my teacher Lucy told me that’s called gentrification.

A lot of posts online are talking about this problem, saying that Soho, a place once for alternative, is now becoming more and more commercialised, like everywhere else. Which is so sad, but that might be a good perspective to look at.

Sticking on the idea of gentrification is also because of I was doing a research of mental control being inspired by one of the works in the exhibition Strange Days. Soho is becoming like everywhere else, because all those company think a lot of people like places like that, stylish, fancy, good place to make good instagram pictures. But is that what they really want? Or they’re just following the trend. I looked into quite a few articles online and also books about it, which makes me kind of proud of myself, because I was able to link my project and other people’s work together, and look deeper into this. And later I drew inspiration from the film Agora, and decided to personify Soho to a girl who was changed herself to become famous.

Just like this ridiculer news! People dress themselves like Kim instead of being themselves, trying to be attractive?

I would say that I really make a progress on doing primary and secondary research compare to my last project. My sketch book is much fuller, and not just full of random stuffs, but the stuffs that mark the process of my discovery and thoughts. It’s not perfect though, I feel like I should get myself more involved in the place but I was a bit scared. But generally I think I’ve done not bad.

I didn’t plan my journey, and the exhibition of Colour accidentally became my first stop. The room of Colour is not big, and the works shown in it all look very simple, only colour blocks and rough paintings, also a piece of abstract sculpture, leading a simple theme: How the use of colour is expanded by modern artists. To be short, it’s the colour experiment.

The most famous work in this room might be IKB 79 by Yves Klein, a painting with nothing else but blue, showing how this artist was obsessed with this colour. But it’s not the only interesting one. I also stood in front of a piece of work of a big, not regular yellow triangle called Yellow Curve (By Ellsworth Kelly) for quite a while, for what’s said in the caption: his yellow triangle doesn’t represent anything other than what it is.

It’s a really interesting concept. In the same room, while I was doing some simple sketches of a waterfall in the forest inspired by another piece of work, which are again very simple, only six blocks in different colours, a man stopped by me.

“Good job.” He said, pointing at the art works on the work. “I’d say your work is more like art than those. It expresses more things.”

I tried to be modest but my thoughts stopped at the word Express. I don’t want to sound arrogant but his words somehow make sense. Why do people create art? To describe? To record? To tell story? All of these answers all leads to one thing: the art is made to mean something. To the audience, I can probably use the word the man said to me, the art expresses things. In that case, when I look back to the yellow triangle, which doesn’t represent anything but a yellow triangle, it doesn’t make sense at all –  can something express anything if it only represents itself?

When our ancestors drew an image of ox on the wall of the cave they lived in, they didn’t mean to really express anything either. However, the image of ox doesn’t just represent itself, it also represents that the early stage of how human see the things around them. Or if we ignore the historical factor, the image of ox, still represents the animal ox, or even simpler, the ox, the one that our ancestors saw and decided to draw down. And as the technology developed, people are able to create all those spellbinding images and sculptures out of stories and myths, which I don’t see the necessity to mention whether they represent or express anything or not. But the yellow triangle that doesn’t represent anything but itself, is just a lonely triangle hung on the empty white wall. It doesn’t have any story behind it, it’s not even able to represent other yellow triangles because its creator just wants it to represent itself.

At the same time, I can’t help asking, if a piece of work that doesn’t represent anything but itself and simple as that can be hung in one of the best modern art galleries, is there anything that can’t? Or is the concept of not representing anything but itself the reason why it’s able to be in Tate Modern? And is whether it represent anything something can be decided by the creator? ……

I’ve been to Tate Modern for a lot of times so the whole environment is too familiar for me to notice anything new. The simple white wall, quite confusing structure of building and the deep industrial style everywhere due to the fact that the architecture itself was a factory…… Only walking in it makes me feel like I’m in the new era of art already, plus all the thoughts that came to my mind after this visit, I’m really looking forward to seeing how art is going to develop in the future, with all those new concept, all those possibilities. I hope I’m ready for it.

yeahhhh I just realised that I haven’t being writing blog for a while… Bc I’ve been having really chaotic thoughts and not being very creative. Anyway I’ll just write down some places I visited, stuffs that I read and watched lately.

I went to the exhibition Strange Days twice, you can see from my last blog post that I really enjoyed it. It’s really well arranged, with clear instruction and various of works that didn’t bore me (some of them are confusing though ).

I went to Shoreditch twice as a part of my post code project, and also to visit the vintage shops and Rouch Trade record shop there. (it’s very nice, more about indie music and old Rock n Roll, not that commercial, slightly expensive tho) Also visited the White Chapel gallery, but it’s completely the opposite from store X, difficult to navigate, and the collection is not very inspiring for me.

I went to Soho for four times to do primary research, it’s kind of fun but not as fun as I thought it would be coz most parts of soho is now rather empty? Quite residential. But it’s still very surprising to find many elements about rock n roll, bands I like there.

I also visited the Reckless Record, Sister’s Ray, Honest Jon’s (Damon Albarn’s shop), Fopp and at last hmv on the Oxford street to get a Pink Floyd’s Division Bell. Because the music video of High Hopes is really impressive, making it’s hard to believe that it was created in the 1990s.

I haven’t done much reading actually, only something about my last blog post, with the theme of controlling. I’ve read something quite interesting in our school magazine Artefact, like why Korean are obsessed with white skin (still a bit about the control thing). Also a funny interview in iD magazine, with Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamet. They talked about masculinity, quite relevant to my previous post about El Angel. It’s kind of nice to see that a boys are having the similar opinions as mine.

I’ve watched quite a lot of stuffs, The Children Act staring Emma Tompson, Agora (which I really like. I kinda want to write something about it, but it involved religion affair so I’ll have to consider about it.), Death in Vines and all kinds of TV shows like Bodyguard, Maniac, The Good Doctor and so on.

stay tuned XD

 

The reason why I visited the exhibition is not only that this gallery is at the area where I chose to work on for the postcode project, but also the theme of it really interested me. Nowadays people have strong dependence on the Internet, I remembered when the O2 service broke down one morning, I was literally freaked out, updating my phone and all the social media pages nervously all the time even though there’s no one that I need to contact urgently. I guess I’m one step from what’s said in the title of the exhibition: All I Know Is What’s On The Internet.

And what surprised me are the works about the ban of foreign websites by the Chinese artist Miao Ying.

“The work“LAN Love Poem.gif ” is a series of GIF animation which are made from snapshots of censored websites in China. (such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram) combined with online signatures by Chinese Internet citizens ubiquitous across the Chinese Internet were collected by the artist, translated into “Chinglish”, Displaying certain wisdom and a taking joy in romanticized melancholy, the poems ultimately are representative of the romantic Stockholm syndrome relationship the artist has with the Chinese internet. Each Poem is made with “Taobao 3d animated style”(a Chinese internet style), along with 8bit internet landscapes in the background. ”

I don’t know whether people from outside of China will understand this work though, for they have never experienced how it’s like to pay for the VPN every month and suddenly the VPN breaks down because the developer is caught by the authority, or how it’s like to secretly buy a foreign Apple ID online just to download Instagram. But as a kid who grew up in the country where there’s an Internet “Wall”, I was amused by the way she express all the thoughts in her work while feeling pretty sad.

Other interesting stuffs are exhibited here too, like a robot that can tap and swipe on the phone screen automatically, and interviews of weird CGI people…

The name of the exhibition sounds quite ironic, and a lot of people are worried about the influence that the Internet brings to us, but just like what happened when the television was introduced to people, we’re not going to be destroyed, but somehow develop a new way of living.

 

 

I visited the exhibition Strange Days: Memories of the future in a super cold and windy morning. 21 fantastic (also a bit weird) short films from different artists were shown in the exhibition, and the gallery itself was decorated and arranged in a very mysterious way, which gave me an excellent and special experience.

But this post is more about one of the works: The Looks by Wu Tsang.

The Looks was shown in a room which requires us to enter without shoes. The room was covered by soft white blanket and divided into two parts by two projection walls. The first part of the film, in which a girl was woken up by a robotic voice and started to get ready for a show, was projected on the first wall, and with a big heavy loud sound, the show was projected on to the second wall. The whole film is set in a futuristic background, the girl was covered by glitter and had something like a flash light in her mouth when she was giving the show, and wherever she goes, people stare at her and focus cameras on her. The artist Wu Tsang described the girl as a “Digital avatars that control humans through a panoptical social media platform”, and with the work he calls into question the potential of technology, and imagined a future with both social control and “pockets of ecstatic freedom”.

Well, that’s not futuristic for me at all. I’ve seen thousands of people arguing online defending their idols, I’ve seen a post of a pop star on Weibo (Chinese social media) being reposted millions of times. I’ve seen people spending money on something they can’t really afford, just because their idols are using the same product, and I’ve seen people trying to kill themselves because their idols started dating someone… Which really looks like they are being controlled by some secret power, and have this worship towards their idols, their avatars. However, for those who are worshipped, we can’t really know if they want everyone to love them like crazy. Let’s come back to the short film The Looks, one thing that interested me is that the girl on the stage, covered by glitter, didn’t seem happy. She didn’t seem to be satisfied with everyone’s attention. On the contrary, she seemed unnatural, even painful. It seems like she doesn’t want all of this.

I once read that in South Korea and Japan (maybe in China as well), members of pop groups are not allowed to have romantic relationships (some said not allowed to have it in public, which means they can only have a secret boyfriend of girlfriend), and almost everything in their lives, their schedules, their outfits, hair colour… are managed by the entertainment companies, just to create the “perfect image” for fans. So, in another way, it’s not the Avatars who are controlling people, it’s the people who are controlling them. Once everyone starts focusing on you, you can’t just do what you want, say what you like, taking the risk that people would be disappointed to you. And day after day, you’re becoming their puppet.

Well, I’m not challenging the idea of this short film, after all it’s the artist who wants it to show the control a character has over people with the help of media and technology, and that kind of control does exist and is playing a not ignorable part in our life. But it’s kind of interesting to see it from another perspective. And here comes the question: Do we still have the control of ourselves?

 

 

Some thoughts and research. (They are the extension of the diary so I didn’t put the quotes in the text.)

Whether we have free will or not is a very old philosophical question. Some says we can make our own choices, while the others think all the choices we make are influenced by outside world, so we don’t actually have free will. I don’t really want to choose a side, but looking back to my life, what I eat for breakfast, which way I choose to go to uni, what book I read… many, or I can even say most of the choices I make are not because I want to, but because there’s not enough time, or it costs more if I don’t do it that way, or someone told me it’s better to do it that way… In that case, do I still have the control of my life?

Thinking of ourselves as being in control of how we act is part of what enables us to see living as something so valuable. In so far as we can direct and control how we ourselves act, our lives can be genuinely our own achievement or failure. Our lives can be our own, not merely to be enjoyed or endured, but for ourselves to direct and make.

Or so we think. But are we really in charge of our actions? Is how we act truly up to us as things such as the past, the nature of the universe, even many of our own beliefs and feelings, are not? The problem of whether we are ever in control of how we act, and what this control involves, is what philosophers call the free will problem.

 

 

The phrase Eleutheia (freedom) was first only used in political discussion, then used to pick out an individual person’s control over their own action when philosophers started to consider about whether how we act was really up to us. In nowadays’ world, we (most of us) have the freedom to support different political opinions. But we’re only legally free, after all those campaign and advertising, are we still capable of controlling our own minds and making our own choice?

 

The Greek philosopher Aristotle discussed actions and our control over them in one of the oldest and most important discussions of morality by a philosopher-the Nicomachean Ethics. But in the Ethics though Aristotle talked of us as having control of how we act – he stated that our actions are eph hemin, or, literally, ‘up to us’- he did not actually use eleutheria, the Greek word for freedom, to describe this action control. Eleutheria was still a term used only in political discussion as a name for political freedom or liberty.It was in the period after Aristotle that Greek philosophers began using eleutheria in a new and entirely non-political sense, to pick out the idea of being in control of how we act. And ever since then philosophers discussing the up-to-us-ness of our actions have followed the later Greeks: the same term freedom, which is used to pick out political liberty, has also been used to pick out an individual person’s control over their own actions.If what you do really is within your control, then you can be said to be free to act otherwise than as you actually are doing. You are, as philosophers put it, a free agent.

 

Tomas Pink

2004

Free Will – A very short introduction

Published in the United States

Published by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

 

 

 

 

 

Is our Identity controlling us? I would like to buy dress and make up because I choose to be beautiful, I act calm and quiet because I don’t like being dramatic, I take care of young ones because I like looking after others. Or is it I would love to buy dress and make up because I’m a girl, I act calm and quiet because I’m Asian (I don’t know if I’m the only one who thinks that), I take care of young ones because I’m the oldest kid in the family, and it’s my responsibility to do that, so that become something I do unconsciously…? Are we still able to do anything we want once we’re identified as a certain kind of people?

 

On the one hand, the celebration of the group’s uniqueness, which is the basis of its political solidarity, can be translated into essentialist claims For example, some elements of the women’s movement have argued for separatism from men based on women’s identity and unique qualities which men per se cannot possess. There are, of course different ways of understanding and defining that “uniqueness’. It may involve appeals to biologically given features of identity; for example, the claim that women’s biological role as mothers makes them inherently more caring and peaceful.

Or it can be based on appeals to history and kinship: for example, where

women seek to establish an exclusive women’s history or ‘herstory'(Daly,

1979)which men have repressed, and to reclaim a unique women’s culture

through a claim to something about the position of women which has

remained fixed and unchanged by that history and which applies equally to

all women as a kind of transhistorical truth (Jeffreys, 1985)

 

Kathryn Woodward

1997

Identity And Difference

The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA

Published by The Open University, SAGE Publications

 

 

Television and all kinds of media are everywhere. With all the advertisements playing all the time, can we still make our own decision without being influenced?

 

Developed in America, the theory started with the finding that heavy viewers and light viewers tend to have different attitudes towards and perceptions of very many matters.The theory supposed that televisions influence had brought about such differences.

 

Mallory Wober, Barrie Gunter

1988

Television and Social Control

Gower Publishing Company Limited, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hants GU11 3HR, England

Published by Gower Publishing Company Limited

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s very obvious that surveillance system is used as a control of people. The best example is the Telescreen in George Orwell’s novel 1984. But it’s not only exist in the novel, but also playing an important part in the real life.

 

Surveillance – the garnering of personal data for detailed analysis – now occurs routinely, locally and globally, as an unavoidable feature of everyday life in contemporary societies.

 

Edited by David Lyon

2003

Surveillance As Social Sorting – Privacy, risk and digital discrimination

Routledge, 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Published by Routledge

 

 

 

How does the surveillance control us? Here’s a very good example:

 

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a 2009 CNBC interview about concern over his company’s retention of user data, he infamously replied: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

 

Glenn Greenwald

2014

No Place To Hide

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Penguin Group

 

Under the surveillance, you have to take the risk of “being seen” no matter what you’re doing. But even if everything we do is legal, is not harmful to anyone, there still are things that we don’t want others to see. And the surveillance clearly doesn’t care about that, which somehow means it’s controlling us by only letting us do things that can be seen.

 

 

 

 

 

Everybody, I just watched Bohemian Rhapsody !!!!

Tbh, the film itself is just like a common biography film, starts from how Queen   was formed and ends at the point when the band!@#$%^&*(I don’t want to spoil it. So take a lucky guess or just go watch the film.) They split up and get back together again, Freddie has his dark time but gets himself back again… It’s kind of cliché, but I have to admit that I almost cried my eyes out when seeing the scenes in which the band plays in Live Aid…

I have heard about this band long time ago, not to mention that We will rock you is very popular around students because it’s such a good song that everybody can take part in even if you don’t really know the lyrics. However, I had never bothered to get to know about this band because I didn’t like old bands(such an idiot is it), even after the song Bohemian Rhapsody became more popular among young people as the background music of the Suicide Squad trailer, I still feel nothing about learning more of this band and I only listened to the Panic! At the disco version(I was a super big arrogant dumbass who only listen to young pop stars).

And one day, my friend recommended me to listen to the song Don’t look back in anger.  So I got to know about and started listening to old Rock n Roll bands like  Oasis, also Blur (don’t ask), and Muse, Pink Floyd, David Bowie… And finally Queen after listening to Under Pressure. I remembered thinking how amazing the voice of Freddie Mercury is when listening to their songs, and I have watched some live performances on YouTube, which gave me the image of the band(it’s basically the dramatic performing style of Freddie lol).

The Live Aid is probably the first video of Queen I watched, Freddie was in jeans and vest, leading the audience singing Ay-oh, with his dramatic gestures and body move,  looking so confident of what he’s doing. But soon after giving the performance, he got to know that he’s got AIDS, and he’s going to die in not a long time. Reading that story written down on the website gave me no special feeling, but after spending more then one hour with Freddie on the screen, it felt totally different. I suddenly remembered the video of Under Pressure I watched on YouTube, in which only David Bowie was on the stage. One comment says, I was wondering where Freddie is, then I saw it’s 1995.

He’s gone then. He can never do those dramatic things on the stage, and we’ll never be able to listen to his amazing voice in real.

And I cried so hard thinking about that.

Thinking back, I might not just cried for him, but also because I feel like I’m losing all these, all these people and music, the generation is ageing, their marks are vanishing, and their music will probably become something nobody but only a few old people listen to (think about how we treat opera today)one day. David Bowie is gone, Oasis and PF broke up, Blur is something close to breaking up, and even some of them are still holding on, they’re grandpa and nana now. I watched the video of blur playing Young and Lovely one day, Damon, with his face full of wrinkles, was singing to the young boys and girls: you can get what you want, you’re so young and lovely. Which broke my heart so hard. It’s nobody’s fault that people age, get sick and die, and what’s once the best and popular will go out of style sooner or later.

And all we can do is trying our best not to forget them so quickly I guess.

 

I love El Angel so much that I decided to write another blog about it.

After watching it, I read a reviews by a blogger I followed online. One thing he mentioned really interests me is that the protagonist of the film was shot in the way that often use to shoot women, you might know it as Male Gaze. For example, we can often see the close-up to lips, the body curve, wave of the hair of a girl, but they are seldom used on male characters. That’s because even until today, most of the directors are male, and many of them tend to shoot female characters from their perspective, seeing them as a sexual object instead of a independent being with personality. (I’m not saying that these female characters have no personality at all, but the way they’ve been seen and shot.)

But the gaze in on a boy this time. The scene I can remember clearest is when the mother of the boy’s friend was flirting with him, she put her fingers on the boy’s lips, and we see a close-up of the lips, plump and pinky like strawberry.  The whole atmosphere suddenly became delicate, I can’t really describe how I feel then. I mean, I love this scene, but this is not sexual attraction for me at all. Which is quite weird, because the situation is perfectly in reverse compared to the Male Gaze. And I can say that most man feel flipped when seeing a close-up to a girl’s plump pinky lips.

My explanations is, this kind of shot is feminized, which means the subject is also feminized under the shot. (If that make any sense.)

(Before starting more detailed talking about this, I want to say that this is all my personal feeling. I don’t know if I’m the only girl who felt nothing seeing this scene. But anyway this is my blog so I’m gonna keep talking about why I felt NOTHING.)

What I meant feminized is that the shot is mostly used on female, so when it’s used on male character, we’ll feel like we are using the way we look at female to look at a male, and that somehow makes the image of him in our minds have more feminized features.

Which means, it’s not just the problem of male directors, the audience(me) also play a part of not treating male and female characters in the same way. Even if I’m a girl, I still expect to see red lips and body curve of a girl instead of boy. Which is sad.

I mean, people have been talking about that problem about girls for a long time. But what do we expect to see on the boys? Muscle, wide shoulder, firm jaw line?

Speaking of, I’d like to mention something interesting that happened not long ago. There’s a show called The First Lesson in China, and it’s only played once a year on 1st September, when a new school year starts. So this quite important show would usually invite some famous young people to perform or give speech. This year, a group of young singers was invited and these young boys gave a nice performance. However, the performance was criticised by many people because the boys wore heavy make up and out fits that make them look girly. “Boys should dress like boy!” “The country has no future with boys dress up like girls!” People said.

These saying sounds really humiliating for girls, because they approve that boys are better than girls, so boys shouldn’t be like girls. Actually we can hear this kind of word all the time. Don’t be like a girl! And we always think that it’s not fair for girls. I mean, of course that it’s not fair for girls, but it’s not just about girls from the beginning.

You gotta be tough, don’t you know you’re a man?

Boys don’t cry!

Don’t be like a girl!

What kind of pressure are given to boys? People cry, people break down, that’s not just a girl thing, it’s a human thing! And they are telling boys not to do it, how? And why can girls wear pink and blue, being girly shiny or dark and cool, but boys can’t wear what they want? Why can’t boys wear makeup that makes them look better?

And even if I’ve realised the different expectation on boys and girls, I’m still couldn’t get used to the gaze shot being used on a boy. Lips, body curve, hair, they’re so soft, too soft to be seen as a boy. Part of me is still saying that.

But boys can be soft, just like girls can be strong.

 

(Well, it’s not really done because I’m still writing this blog haha)

I can’t believe six weeks had past and I will be hand in the final out come shortly. In the crazy past one and a half month, I’ve done all the workshop induction, visited lots of galleries and museums with my friends or alone, borrowed books and DVD from the library, spent my whole day working on shooting and editing……regardless of how the result is, I’m actually quite impressed by myself because I managed to do all these strange new things while fitting in the new life in London.

But I’m also feeling not very confident for what I’ve achieved. I’m not talking about the result, but the process. I was never a hard-working enough student, and I like sitting there thinking instead of getting on doing something, and that’s what I did most in the project. Although I did visited a lot of places, I didn’t manage to link them to my project or draw inspiration from others’ work very well. Also, I didn’t get into workshops until the last week of this project because I was constantly changing my idea and didn’t get to plan it really well.

At the same time, I’m glad that this project revealed my problems, and I also found out how efficient I can be if I know what I’m doing(take the last week as an example). That’s the advantage that I should keep. What I do have improve is how I manage my time, like make a plan before I start, spend more time doing research etc. Also I need to learn from others’ work instead of just looking at them thinking whether I like them or not, thinking about Why I like(or not)it, and how did it manage to make me like it is also important.

Research time!!!

Decided to use this type face called Bertram to create my own scrabble V using laser cutter.

Cutting is finished!

Looking good after colouring.

Wondering how it looks before editing? Here’s the original photo!!!

V for victory!!