15. Authentic vs Fake.

This post is to help me get my head together. An evaluation of my first-week aims and fulfilments.

Bits I’ve already done:

• “Survivor (F)” by Suzanne Treister.
• DSLR workshop. Handy for figuring out future equipment and potential ways to work other mediums into my work (e.g. rigs working in relation to illustrations or photographs).
• Projection Mapping. Useful for visualising a final format. Still very digital despite working with the idea of an installation.
• Gathered some writing.
• Gathered some music I’d like to work with (asides from general audio noises that I wrote about in the same post)

• Collected imagery. I have 68 scans of the night’s sky that I got from Southampton’s Astronomy Department. I’ve also tried to capture footage of ink droplets falling into the water by placing green plasticine behind the glass. Glass ends up with a reflection on it so I need to use dulled, non-shiny plastic.

 

Protein’s Youth Report.

From this, I’m going to take quotes or paraphrase points that I like that could use to influence my work. The Youth Report is a load of data that a creative marketing company called “Protein” have collected. They pride themselves in digging deeper into data so this report should be very insightful about my generation.

• “Searching out for the authentic and fetishising the fake” – could be a means to an end in terms of creating contrast.
• We’re after “personal progression” whilst “subverting reality/tearing down social constructs”. The social construct I’m touching on is marriage, the personal progression is entirely my own although I am trying to consider my audience’s place in this experience and I’m trying to undermine reality by creating a piece of work that allows an unrealistic ideal of love to thrive.
• There are aspects of love that are fake and there are aspects of love that aren’t. Which aspects do I need to fetishise and how do I make love appear as authentic?
• Authenticity – times I have felt in love? Recordings of this. My own bloody diary. “Anxious but open” as it says in the image below. My work is for me and by me too. Happy days.
• To fetishize something is to have an irrational or excessive commitment to something. I can also play with the word a bit there too. “Utopian Worlds” also gives me a boost, that I’m going in the right direction by appropriating imagery from ancient cities.

• “Progression not perfectionism”. Embracing failures as successes.

• “They’re going through a period of self-realisation that the world they live in was created neither by them nor for them. Feeling disenfranchised, they’re grasping onto any means by which they can feel control. Whether that’s through the development of their body, mind, voice or identity, they’re ensuring it’s done in a way that’s authentic to themselves and their community of peers”.

• Indhira Rojas, founder of Anxy says, “I found myself wanting to have a space where we could stop pretending and be comfortable sharing our internal dialogues, struggles, and narratives – our inner worlds.”

• “Given the political climate and the bombardment of headlines that comes with it, I could see how people might embrace sobriety because they’re becoming more aware that there isn’t a way to escape what’s going on around us” – Tracy Boachie, 25.

• Tactile nature of print. Seeking out publications with subjective opinions in so that they can compare it to their own feelings instead of trusting supposedly objective media representations of reality. Can I bring print into this? Print statements on either side of a card – one side could be the facts from Fisher’s TED talk, the other side could be poetry or a song lyric.

• “Youth are adapting to telecommunication by forming their own shorthand lexicon: a milieu of recognisable icons, memes, emojis, hashtags, and slang”.

• “Fake optimism”. Maintaining a facade of happiness or unfaltering humor to situations that are entirely inappropriate in order to eradicate shame or keep private opinions private.

• “Past generations use social platforms to build and represent their ideal identity whereas this group use digital mediums to explore each fragment of their personality as it disconnects from their physical self”.

• “An ever-growing scepticism around ‘ambassadors’ means consumers are engaging with purely fictional characters that are, ironically, deemed more authentic”. Just as I see the images of the characters below dressed up as though they’re on a catwalk, I’m actually more interested in the clothes. With models, they often have a blank stare, they’re attractive of course but you know that the person walking down that runway doesn’t look like that all day everyday. The crazy ways they style their hair, the weird makeup, they look amazing but you know that once they leave that stage, they’ll go home and sleep just like everyone else. With these characters, they exist purely for the show so they allow me to focus on what the brand is actually trying to show to me.

• “Brands can no longer create products independently, and irrespective of consumer input, they need to involve them in concepting conversations”. This quote, in particular, has me thinking about IKEA. I’ve mentioned in a previous post on here (way back in the first year) that IKEA is selling a way of life in their showrooms. They’re not selling a house, they’re selling you the idea of a home. Well, how on earth does that branding fit with my generation? We’re the least likely to ever own our own property the thought of decking out our kitchen and doing up our bathroom is absurd. Authenticity – recognising that it’s unrealistic to want this. Fake – living in it anyway.

• “They’re increasingly disinterested in nostalgic messaging and the aesthetic associated with that narrative. The concept of authenticity is increasingly deemed inauthentic”. If I’m going to play with something overly idealistic, it needs to be a pastiche. I can’t bring back 60s Futurism and expect everyone to go along with it. I have to borrow something from it or appropriate something from it.

I definitely thought that document would be interesting but I had no idea how useful it would be too. Consider that my cultural/social research for this unit, an in-depth look at myself as well as my peers. This document summarises and even justifies my motivation for what I’ve put into my study plan.

 

Pentagram Word and Lyrics Installation.

The installation features snippets of different song lyrics, displayed in black and white on various window panels in a London office. The overall effect suggests a gravity to the lyrics, as though the original performance we a caricature of the real emotion that the writer was trying to capture.

I want to experiment with this kind of presentation with my snippets of “lovesick” lyrics to gauge the effect.

The Senses.

As well as sight, sound and smell are two of the more immediate senses since touch and taste require some form of physical movement to perceive them (e.g. chewing or running your hands across something). I’m going to focus my efforts on adding smell and sound to my video work so that I can engage my audience at a more neural level. Following that TED talk of Helen Fisher explaining that love is something at the very core of our brains, beyond any kind of emotional or cognitive processing, my engagement with my audience should be in keeping with this. Any attempt to rationalise love as a sensation you can choose to engage with goes against Fisher’s study of what she concludes love to be from her research.

For smell, I have ordered 17 samples from a company that makes fragrances that people put in candles. I could potentially make candles for this which would be rather exciting, failing that, I could just use tealight oil burners or create a room spray. The ones I’ve ordered are as follows:

• Patisserie. Often, dates revolve around going for dinner and 9 times out of 10 that ends up being pizza. A patisserie fragrance was the closest I could get to that idea of freshly baked dough. Perhaps a smell of sweet pastry will imply something French as a fail-safe, Paris being the city of love and all.
• White fantasy. Narcotic nights. Gold fragrance. Found the names amusing because what the hell does a “narcotic night” smell like?
• White musk. From what google’s told me, it’s a flowery mix that isn’t overpoweringly sweet. I have images of combining this with the more nature-based scents below so there’s a hint of sweetness to it. Jasmine is also an aphrodisiac for men.
• Wet Garden and Green Moss & Ferns. English rain and Daisies.
• Sandalwood. A smell often used in men’s deodorants and fragrances because it’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac for women.
• Sea Breeze and Ocean Blue. “Hi I’m Dave and I like long walks on the beach” or so they say.
• Honey fragrance. Just a personal favourite that I’m drawn to every time I end up in Lush.
• Cornish Ice Cream and Burnt Sugar. Ice cream has become a borderline addiction at this point. The idea for buying the burnt sugar flavour was about getting something that smells good but not sickly sweet.
• Bailey’s cream and whisky. Again. Drinking seems to go hand in hand with romance with me. Didn’t fancy buying the “Guinness” flavour either. Although now it’s dawned on me that I probably shout have.

 

Going back to porn (sorry Andy).

I’ve discussed so far that my work is often split into three different footage categories; People, place and objects. For “people”, this can mean filming myself or, as it did in my “obstructions project” in the first year, it meant stealing footage of women masturbating online and cropping out their backgrounds and rude parts to obscure its origin. Protein’s Youth Report has actually given me a good reason to go back to that technique. Since Gen Z are all about “fetishising the fake”, what better place to make the play on words, as well as touch on an uncomfortable female statistic whilst I’m there, than porn?

This article touches on the detrimental effect that porn is having on the male population and how it’s actually ruining real-life sexual experiences. There’s enough scientific research to back that up but I think I’m more delighted that I found an article on a faith website that appreciates the science behind it as a strong enough link to discourage people from it instead of just saying “BECAUSE GOD’S WATCHING”. Funnier still was finding this little gem of an article within that one. (P.s. This whole thing is amusing).

The article basically points out a stat that Pornhub released: “In 2014, ‘love was the most common word in the comments”. That might just end up on one of my font cards.