Especially when moving from one location to another, or multiple within a few weeks, space and our surroundings become an important aspect of our lives. You can find out a lot about a person based on the way they inhabit a space and various items they gather and collect. This can depend on the clothes that have been chucked over the bedroom floor, the dishes that are drying in the kitchen or different prints that are hung up on the walls. These everyday objects are ways of defining us and our behavioural habits, which is something I’d like to delve into during this project and maybe even find out more about myself.

I find myself intrigued about the things we choose to bring into our place, how we arrange various rooms and how we decorate our homes. I’d like to capture the reality of living in a space by showing true ways of living. This will vary between organised and disorganised imagery, as some will be planned whereas others were taken in the moment. Our work, personal space, and personal life is all intertwined in some way, whether it’s blatantly obvious or discreetly hidden within each character. I am looking to capture these arrangements that show personal meanings and associations.

When we were first briefed about this project I had no idea where to start. To be completely honest I didn’t think I had a strong enough personality to create my own personal manifesto. I don’t have a deeper meaning as to why I want to be an artist. I enjoy involving world issues, such as protests, into my work but I don’t purely create art with the hope of changing the world in some way.

I decided to become an artist because I followed my passion. I enjoy creating, its something I’ve always found myself drawn to do. I enjoy designing things that others may find visually pleasing. And maybe I don’t need to specify my identity as an artist any more than that. It was during a similar time that I came across the biography of Pablo Picasso, in which Arianna Huffington shares what he once said to her, “It’s not what an artist does that counts, but what he is.”

Usually, I tend to create artwork that others may find appealing, for example, something they might like to hang in their home etc. I feel like I have found my own comfort zone with mediums I tend to use and the work I create. Often it’s difficult to step outside of comfort zones we create for ourselves, especially when we don’t realise they are there. The one thing I don’t include in my art is my personal life. I tend to make art focusing on other facts, either because I find my life in itself isn’t worth documenting or people would simply not be interested in viewing the work. This is something I’m going to have to alter when creating my personal manifesto.

Instead of focusing on my life as a whole, I’ve decided to explore my space and surroundings, as they have become a really important part of my life recently. I’ve had to move out of the first accommodation that I moved into when I started university. Trying to rent a flat in the centre of London has been one of the hardest, stressful and most frustrating times so far, as I’ve had to move back home while still working in London, as well as trying to find new accommodation. Not feeling like you have a certain place to call home, or a place to go back to in which you feel completely comfortable in is draining, to say the least. It’s also made me consider how personal space is perceived. Whether it is simply the area that surrounds our body or whether it could be something more precise like our home. But personal space could also be considered as our bodily relationship to something in particular.

Guerrilla Girls ‘The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist’, 1988

A group of unidentified female artists from America go by the name Guerrilla Girls, who aim to uncover the under-representation that women face in the art world by targeting and addressing art dealers and galleries. Their manifesto is presented in the same way as the rest of their artwork, designed into slogan signs. This poster is part of 30 others that were released by the group in a portfolio named “Guerrilla Girls Talk Back.”

The Stuckists, 1999

This manifesto was formed in 1999 by a group called ’The Stuckists’, who claimed to be “Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist.” This belief/act was established to encourage and support figurative painting as an opinion in relation to the growth of conceptual art. The Stuckists also successfully manage to hold a demonstration every year in London outside Tate Britain during the time a winner of the Turner Prize is declared. 

The Stuckists – Manifesto

‘Personal Space’, Hive Emerging Gallery 2014

‘Personal Space’ was comprised of works created by nine practising artists. In the exhibition they contemplated how landscape and space may influence human beings, along with exploring how human beings can frame and change their surrounding landscapes. The space was constructed in a way to let the viewers roam through each artists personal inscapes, as well as their visualised utopias and dystopias. By examining rural and urban environments throughout the past, future and present, the work was able to let the viewer discover and question time and space.

What intrigued me about this project was that the installations in ‘Personal Space’ capture an envision of utopia and dystopia. Utopia is described in the dictionary as ‘an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect’, while dystopia is a setting that is ‘typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.’ So although the artworks didn’t consist of each individuals physical personal space, it was a creation of what their ideal scene would be. I am undecided on which I find more revealing about a person; someone’s home / living space, or their idea of utopia.

Tracey Emin, ‘My Bed’

‘My Bed’ is an installation that was created in 1998 by Tracy Emin and displayed at the Tate Gallery. It was composed of her own bed as well as bedroom items, which looked as though it was left in a rejected condition. Tracy was influenced by her own sexual, yet overbearing and depressing phase during her life in which she had endured multiple days in this bed while only consuming alcohol. Although she admitted to having gathered a disgraceful and revolting chaos in her bedroom she also claimed that this space had saved her life.

Emin received a lot of attention from the media about her work, both positive and negative. There were critics who insisted anyone could create an installation of an unmade bed and therefore called it a farce, whereas others could see the truth, personality and intimacy in her work stating that “The artist shows us her own bed in all its embarrassing glory,” (Christie’s catalogue)

The biggest commotion was believed to be due to the stained bedsheets resulting from casual sex, among with used and unused condoms, lingerie with menstrual blood stains, empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts and other everyday objects. I admire Tracey for being so open and honest about that time in her life, especially as it was displayed over 20 years ago, in which contemporary art isn’t as recognised as it is nowadays. Instead of painting a nude woman leaning on a bed, which we are so used to seeing from past centuries, Emin has created a work of art in which the model is no longer to be seen and what has been left is not a woman depicted as an object but rather a woman who is exposing her inner self, identity and emotions through objects.

My Bed 1998 Tracey Emin born 1963 Lent by The Duerckheim Collection 2015 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/L03662

What is a manifesto?

A manifesto can be described as a way of communication someone’s intentions, aims and motives of an artist or even artistic movement. Generally speaking, manifestos also reference broader issues, like the political system. Common subjects include freedom of expression, the longing for revolution and the unspoken or sometimes evidently presented superiority of the authors and writers. Manifestos allow a way of expressing, sharing and documenting the beliefs and intentions of the artist or art group. 

On the website “The Art of Manliness”, it specifies that “A manifesto functions as both a statement of principles and a bold, sometimes rebellious, call to action. By causing people to evaluate the gap between those principles and their current reality, the manifesto challenges assumptions, fosters commitment, and provokes change.”

In Arianna Huffington’s biography of Pablo Picasso she defines how he manages to balance both his life and work by saying: “The more I discovered about his life and the more I delved into his art, the more the two converged. ‘It’s not what an artist does that counts, but what he is,’ Picasso said. But his art was so thoroughly autobiographical that what he did was what he was.”

Realising that an artists life should ideally blend seamlessly with their work helped me understand the key to being an artist. The goal is that people are unable to figure out where an artist’s life ends and the paintings begin. It’s all simply combined to form one and the same thing. 

Link to my final animation

Once we had a better understanding of what AR is, we also had a guided studio that was based on AR and was focused on improving our confidence in augmented reality technology. We went through demonstrations of how to use Artivive and the process of creating an augmented reality piece of work. This allowed us to build our confidence in making our own AR ready for the exhibition on the 24th of May. 

I’ve attached a few links of student’s work that was created in our workshop, which I screen recorded in order to use the Artivive app.

Link to Vitor Ferreira’s work

Link to Katie Town’s work

Link to Lee Stephenson’s work

Below are two links to view my own AR.

Eveline Kinzkofer

Eveline Kinzkofer 2

This was a theoretical lecture focused on AR in which we received guided insight into what AR is, where it can be used, where its come from and how it can be applied by us. We learned about how to create an augmented reality experience by bringing together our own artworks, still and moving, which we will eventually exhibit.

AR, generally speaking, is a combination of real and virtual worlds. ‘Augmenting’ stands for ‘adding to’, and in this instance, technology adds to reality with additional layers of digital information.

Artivive

Artivive allows artists to add digital layers to their physical artwork, giving a whole new range of possibilities. It’s an innovative way for the audience to interact with people’s art and can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone or tablet, allowing users to interact with this digital layer. Creators of Artivive have envisioned to change how art is created and experienced through augmented reality.

How Artists Are Shaping the Future of Augmented Reality

Link to video

This video discusses that there’s no reason for artwork to be limited to a wall or phones etc and should be able to pop up into the real world. Through the use of augmented reality, anyone can now paint and sculpt work in a 3D space, VR pieces can be created and these can then be shown to people in real life. Bringing these artworks off the screen and into the real world generates amazing reactions from people who don’t realise the possibilities of AR. Getting people to experience these works hand on is necessary as the artists have a chance to separate people from their daily reality through spacial and interactive experiences. AR allows more creators to help define what a creative space might consist of and have the opportunity to create in a new space in ways that have not been possible before. We are able to push the boundaries of what is possible through experimentation, creativity and pushing ourselves to do something different.

Although I didn’t want to focus on anything but the actions of drinking coffee, reading, and smoking, I wanted to add a little more to the animation, so that I was extending the focal point to more than just the main subject. I didn’t have the time to draw the entire frame with the background involved but decided I could use parts of it. Despite the fact the flowers were tightly adjusted to the window sill and therefore very still, I was able to make them look as though they are moving. I enjoyed being able to experiment with animating like this and generally turn still images into a moving animation. By adding a little more detail over each layer, the flowers are suddenly growing and expanding, which makes the animation much more engaging.

When I started on my animation I was only really thinking about getting the hang of drawing over my footage. I hadn’t really considered any background colour yet. This left me with an issue once I had 24 frames with the wrong background colour. Once you start drawing on a layer, you can’t simply select the background, as it all turns into one layer. Initially, I was thinking of either redoing these layers or just leaving them out, but I didn’t have the time for it. Instead, I could fill in the areas. Unfortunately, filling in the spaces would make the lines appear thinner, or there were gaps that were too small to fill or would instead make my line disappear. After contemplating it, I did actually start liking the few white areas, even though they were different from the other frames, but gave the animation overall a little more depth and interest. 

I had also been working on some of the frames on a university computer instead of my laptop. I didn’t realise until I put some of the frames together that the lines I had drawn were much thicker compared to the ones I had created on my laptop. It must have just been a setting that was changed on the university computer, but again, I thought I had to cut these out of my whole animation because I wasn’t aware you were able to change the settings once the lines had already been drawn. Fortunately, I showed this part of the animation in one of the group critiques we had, and with the help of others was able to sort out my issue.

I decided to use the technique Rotoscoping for my animation. Although we were given the option to draw our frames by hand, I felt as though this was the perfect opportunity for myself to start drawing digitally. Until now I had not brought myself to create any work digitally, and because I don’t own an iPad or a tablet I thought drawing over some footage could help me draw on photoshop. I was almost using it as a form of guidance, but it would also help me get my proportions right and make my transitions look very smooth.

Before starting on my animation, I had filmed some footage that represents a morning routine. This involved drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading a book. I had prepared and planned out different angles / shots before going, to make sure I had enough footage to choose from when it came to animating.

After I had filmed my scenes, I had to transfer my footage onto photoshop. I did this by clicking onto Files -> import -> video frames to layers. This allowed me to import my footage as still images rather than a whole video. You are also given the option of whether to import the video from beginning to end, or whether you want to select a certain part only. Furthermore, you can decide how many frames are taken from the video. If 2 are selected, it means you will have 12 frames a second. The more frames that are picked will result in a less jumpy outcome and smoother transitions. 

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Once I have a number of layers, these can then be used as a guide for my animation. I created layers over each layer from the video. Once I selected a new layer and added my desired background colour, I could draw over my footage by lowering the opacity so that I could see underneath the layer I was drawing over. I did this with all of my layers until I had enough frames to create an animation. For a 20 second animation we were expected to have 240 frames. It takes me between 20 and 30 minutes to draw one frame.