WORK INTEGRATED LEARNING (WIL) REFLECTION FORM

Student name: Amalie Roberts

Course: ART_BP201_2410_VIS_StudioA_7

Lecturer: Xanthe Dobbie + Ian Haig

Project: Materiality Video Project

Date: 10/04/2024

Brief Objective Description of work and Six keywords:

A video (01:12 minutes) featuring heavy glitching, eclectic visual effects and audio, and breakage of the fourth wall, that speaks to the ways in which humans have, and continue to, interact with technology.

Reference artists: Nam June Paik, Jeff Wayne, Rob Sheridan, Toby Fox

Reference exhibitions, screenings and/or texts: Nam June Paik Tate Modern Exhibition, Jeff Wayne’s The War of The Worlds, Breaking the Fourth Wall in Video Games: A New Terminology and Methodology

GROUP TUTORIAL SESSION

WHAT were your intentions? HOW did you realize them? WHY were you investigating them?

My intention was to investigate how technology has immersed and continues to immerse and capture the unwavering attention and belief of people across time, while simultaneously attempting to remove the viewer from this trance. Initially inspired by Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of The Worlds, I wanted to delve into the amount of people that believed the story to be true and relate it to the spread of misinformation in modern times.

Nam June Paik and Rob Sheridan were key inspirations due to their glitch aesthetics, and I implemented this through the use of glitching to remind viewers that they are watching a video, combined with video subtitles that initially follow the dialogue of the audio, however, begin to speak directly to the audience, telling them to “Wake Up” and “Stop Watching”.

This breaking of the 4th wall is further inspired by the work of Toby Fox, a video game developer and musician known for his creation of the game “Undertale”. Undertale is programmed to recognise how many times the player has restarted the game, their game history, and as such tailors character interactions to it. In one of the major fights of the game, the program purposefully glitches and shuts down, forcefully removing the player from the experience. My breakage of the 4th wall is meant to imitate this in some capacity, while simultaneously contrasting it, by highlighting that the viewer’s decision to be removed from the experience must be done out of their own free will. I have chosen to speak to the viewers directly with this piece, to remind them of the materiality of the video medium- making it clear that they are interacting with a screen, and if they so choose, can stop watching at any point.

Beyond these aspects, random interspersing of screen recorded footage is overlayed among the imagery, speaking to the way that we interact with technology and media in the current age; endlessly scrolling and looking at screens for all sources of entertainment. While difficult to discern while watching, some of the heavily distorted imagery is derived from the film “Akira”, a 1991 animated feature film that deals with the involvement of superhuman entities within a vibrant, futuristic Neo-Tokyo. My first experience with this film was in Imax, a fully immersive and overwhelming experience that separated me from reality. As such, I was inclined to incorporate the film, heavily distorted, to signify how often film and television aim to distract viewers from the materiality of the medium, attempting to create as encompassing of an experience as possible.

While there is no clear narrative to the video, there is footage of a tape being inserted at the beginning, and removed at the end in some ways, this implies that the rest of the video is contained on the tape and speaks to the ways that technology has been interacted with in the past. Perhaps not through video, but through audio and sound, much like the way that The War of The Words had such an influence on people when it was initially broadcast.

I have chosen to create this abstract experience as a means of conveying how media throughout history is a constant cycle of information that is inevitably a fundamental part of human lives and existence.

The audio of the video primarily moves alongside the movement of the video- muffled audio of The War of The Worlds at the beginning, sporadic interspersing of music from Undertale, piercing, grating sounds that align with the glitched visuals, audio from the VHS tape footage incorporated, and a piano piece that blends into the background and is matched to the overlayed footage of a piano being played.  

What did the feedback reveal about your work?

Outline themes, motifs or ideas the feedback suggested for further development.

The audience generally found the video to be reflective of modern, technology-centric themes, while adhering to old-fashioned aesthetics. In specific relation to The War of The Worlds, Adolf Hitler was brought up due to his connection to the story- it influenced him to make use misinformation to influence large amounts of people. There was also discussion of how the video reflects technology’s hold upon people in modern society- how it influences us.

There was emphasis towards the potential of screen recordings, using the technique to further push the boundaries of self-reflection and portrayal of reality. It was generally agreed that telling the audience to “stop watching” was an effective, engaging technique that could be further explored to delve into the relationship between an audience and the media that they are interacting with.

Attention was brought to the comfort of the internet scroll, due to a short screen recording of scrolling through Pinterest. While it wasn’t unanimously agreed that the internet scroll was portrayed as comforting in my video, it was a concept that stood out as holding potential for exploration.

Overall, my video was considered to be a good starting point for the themes and ideas it expressed and could be refined in a multitude of directions.