We met in Q.25 in the Hunter Building in the ECA main campus, which is the DDM studio so it felt nice to have a change of scenery.

Lulu wasn’t able to make it sadly, but we kept going nonetheless.

• Fraser showed us a sketch that he made of an installation based off of what we discussed in the last meeting:
  It came down to the perception of the flow of time through life stages. It included draped fabric coming down from the ceiling dividing a room into different sections and also had physical objects to display the passing of time.
• We realised we all had separate ideas – so we need to unify them
• The question I was wondering then was; what is the common denominator in our idea? What ties is all together?
• We talked about if we wanted to have the installation divided into different, strict, stages. Yanis argues that it should be one big room because time and emotion – life –  doesn’t pass the same for everyone. It is chaotic and we should let our audience decide where they want to go, what they will feel and what they will take from it. We shouldn’t suggest a right way.
• Hasse mentioned not telling the audience what stage is where;
  This made us shift our focus a bit to stage rather than age, and how that would relate to our installation.

Through discussion a theme started forming. Water was a big thing that kept being mentioned so that got established as our vessel to communicate our message. Hasse had considered making large suspended interactive drips of water, that when interacted with, the environment of the installation would change. We really enjoyed this idea and decided to look into the tech of this to inform our outcome.

Eventually we ended with the flow of time through emotional time, and using water to represent these emotions. That brought us to:

Installation that represents moments in time through forms of water.

1. LOVE – RIPPLES – TWO PEOPLE INTERACT
2. UNCERTAIN – RAIN – UNDETERMINED
3. LOST – EVAPORATION – INTERACTIVE WALL HUMIDIFIER FOG
4. JOY – RAINBOW – PROJECTOR
5. FOCUS – FLOW – INTERACTION

We all really liked this idea, and how interactive it would be for the audience. I think we still need to fully understand what we’re saying.

RESEARCH NEEDED:

• Interactive wall
• Flow of water with magnets
• Projection Mapping

This is a random collection of things that were talked about in our meeting:

• Fraser said use different types of tech representative of time – old projector for old show
• Water holding memory feels pseudoscience but we can twist it and own it for our project
• Fraser talked about art installations – show resources shared through pics
• Talked about water
• We talked about nfc’s and interactive art
• What’s the element that changes over time? How to set ourselves apart from normal exhibition?
• Time zones -> falling asleep and waking up at the same time
  Time dilation?
• Talked about water more and the flow of time
• Agreed to go away and research more
• We’re showing them where our studio is before the meeting starts

We first went to the wrong room, once we found each other, we moved some tables around to make a good thinking environment.

Dave gave us creative challenges on the concept of time:

1. How could you visually represent sayings about time?
2. How to visually represent different moments in our own life?
3. How to visually represent the passage/experience of someone else’s time?
4. Discussion: brainstorm and develop ideas

During the challenges I made some random observations:

• 3 out of 7 used sound -> during our discussion I realised it was actually 2 out of 7
• 3 out of 7 using pen and paper +1 if you count Dave
• 7 out of 7 were silent
• 6 sheets of paper were used in total
• 5 laptops were open
• 1 tablet was being used
• 1 sound deck
• 1 hour passed during the challenges
• 2 sets of headphones were used, but 3 sets were brought

Outcomes: some of us used these to create whole concepts for the project

• Task 1:

• • Caitlin:
    Very literal interpretation of the challenge. I drew little clock figures and knives, all sorts to literally represent the sayings. One thing I drew was similar to Yanis, I had drawn one saying like a pulse. 
  • Yanis:
    Very deep and philosophical take on the sayings. He also used Chinese sayings and tried to represent those. One thing he thought about was about how water has memory; all memories can flow down into a single droplet of water and once it drops, that represents the end of life, just done in a blink. 
  • Lulu:
    She used a Chinese saying that was about how people die, but objects live on. She drew some cute illustrations of a teddy bear and a person growing up until death, with the teddy bear staying intact. We talked about this a little bit about how time can move around an object and how they perceive life much slower than the world around them. 
  • Shuzhang:
    She combined task one and two and made a soundscape (?) about how time flies. It involved sounds that reminded her of her childhood, but also had elements like time ticking in the background. 
  • Jackson:
    He also made a soundscape about the saying time flies. He talked about how childhood passes by quickly but now feels like hazy memories to him. His sound included a high-pitched ringing sound that almost felt like it was trying to snap the listener out of the memory. This prompted us to talk about how memories can be tied to music and can transport us back to the moment that we associate it with. 
  • Dave:
    He also took things literally. I don’t remember the sayings he used, but I remember he made drawings of how the flow of time felt. He showed this through dots and lines, and an hourglass. The most interesting though was a drawing of a film roll with mechanical hands grabbing a memory to show. It was an interesting visual to see and got us thinking about the endless possibilities with this topic. 

• Task 2:

• • Shuzhang:
    She made a sound that reminded her of her hometown and the typical sounds that she grew up hearing, and she felt were only found there. 
  • Lulu:
    She talked about shared generational objects to represent life stages. For example, she drew a small paper folding game and (I think) a certain TV show that are representative of the childhood of Chinese people of her generation. It made us think about culturally shared memories. 
  • Yanis:
    He talked about a stand-out memory from childhood involving a plane ride. He remembers the music and colours, and other sounds that were present then. He said that even though, at the time, it wasn’t a particularly interesting experience, he will still remember it to this day when he hears the familiar music/sound and that it has almost become a bitter memory. 
  • Caitlin:
    I thought about my life on the same type of day and the feeling of emotions over time. I used the first day of primary and secondary school, undergraduate and postgraduate. I found that for each event, my emotions became more complex, but the time felt shorter. I drew lines like a pulse for each emotion and then how the speed of time felt. It ended up looking like mountains

• Task 3:

• • Lulu:
    She talked about a girl with cancer who recently passed. Soon before she passed, people all over the world rallied to fulfill her ultimate wish; to appear as an animated character alongside her favourite animated characters. Lulu talked about how even though she isn’t physically with us anymore, her digital representation will live on in that space. 
  • Caitlin:
    I talked about mountains. The previous tasks inspired me to think about how objects, or in this case mountains, experience time. A place like Arthur’s Seat will have seen so much already but will “personally” experience little change, and at a much slower pace. So how there is micro and macro time, and how that can be shown visually. 
  • Dave:
    He talked about loss and fleeting images combined with music. He talked more about how music can bring up memories, for example in people with alzheimers and how it’s often the last thing they can actually tie memories to. He played some work, by an artist whose name I don’t remember, that dealt with this phenomenon. He created a song that sounded like an old record player playing in an empty ballroom. The music felt nostalgic, empty and dusty almost. It was interesting to hear as it got us thinking about the way music was used here. 
  • Yanis:
    He thought about how 1 minute passes differently for everyone. He referred back to the exercise Jules made the whole class do last week, where he asked everyone to put their hand up when we thought a minute had passed. He thought about how we all had a different perception of this same amount of time, but that machines for example will get it on the dot right, but there’s no thought behind it; it’s cold and meaningless.

• Discussion:

We talked about our ideas a bit, and tried to organise them into categories to make some sense of them. I put them on the white board that was standing next to our table. 

The overarching theme that naturally appeared was the passage of time. The categories we ended up with were memories, the length of time, flow, sensory triggers, and landscape. We then added the sub-topics to each of these e.g., life stages, music, micro vs macro, pulse, objects, cultural, etc. David asked us each to point out our favourite things on the white board. I assigned everyone a different little symbol to have a clear view (Caitlin = star, Yanis = dot, Hasse = cross, Lulu = heart, Shuzhang = flower, Jackson = triangle). The most popular options ended up being:
(CULTURAL) MEMORIES + FLOW OF TIME + MUSIC
From this we tried making some connections. One option that came up was looking at the passage of a small time frame (perhaps a minute or so) per life stage, and represent a prevalent emotion from that life stage. Take childhood for example; you’re at school, full of curiosity and excitement, how would a minute feel to them compared to someone in their 20s working. We liked this but decided to do some more research into our 3 main topics relating to our overarching theme.

To do:

• Research our overarching theme and three topics

LuLu idea: touching interactive wall

• Touch designer
• Arduino + Bare Conductive + Maxmsp
• Projector
  

-> What if objects and light were used?

-> Excited about the idea

-> Use in combination with Yanis’ idea

Yanis idea:

Before you die, you may have a brief moment to think about all the happy clips in your life. I wondered whether we could represent these memories in images from a non-human perspective, just as our memories of the past are often from the perspective of a third person perspective. Like the perspective of a pet, a camera, a toy, a plant, or a speck of dust. And the images from these perspectives are fuzzy and incomplete, but very atmospheric, like our memories. In our installation, these images and sounds flicker rapidly and chaotically on the surrounding, light and color change rapidly within the installation, and after a minute return to darkness and silence. In my imagination, it is composed of all kinds of human voices, sounds of nature, sounds of the city, sounds of daily housework, and gradually exciting music. Just some ideas and imagination)

How do we feel?
Happy to have our idea, excited that it matches up and makes us excited to make the output and go through the process. We finished the meeting chatting a bit about last semester and the sound designers’ projects (which dealt with perception), also Hasse and Shuzhang played the piano a bit. We also discussed our team roles 😀

Yanis = Visual Director

LuLu = Project Manager

Caitlin = Note Taker/Visual + Interaction

Hasse = Interaction Director 

Shuzhang = Sound Design

Jackson = Sound Design

Fraser = TBD

To do:

• Exhibition
• Inspiration visual
• Research
• Learn about technology