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Projecting outside was a very different ball game. Just like with my experiments of projecting inside onto objects, I projected onto buildings at night around Falmouth. Inspired by Jenny Holzer and Krzysztof Wodiczko I took to the streets at night to project some old and new animations to see how they interacted with the environment.
I wanted to find billboards and advertisements for my characters to react to but instead the best things I could find were religious based things. It was different to projecting onto or next to brand names which is what I did in the apartment in London. I think placing my animations onto brand names works only if the brand is of something known to be of quality or something that is extremely desirable. So, by displaying one of my faces onto something like Poundland didn’t work for me because a brand like Poundland is just a shop that is well known for selling things at £1. I’ve not heard Poundland used in any context where it’s a place people badly want to go to. It’s just a shop that people know.
The town is littered with these kind of brand names, names of shops, restaurants and local businesses. As explained, these didn’t work so well with my animations. To me they didn’t offer a good enough platform for narratives to take place. So the best things I found were the church and the Jesus sign.
Here the anger displayed by this character to me is quite profound. Especially on a large scale like this. The scale was the main reason why I came out here in the first place. I had to see what these images looked like outside of my computer screen. And just as I hoped, they were scarier, brighter and, in this case, angrier! It also looked funnier to me having this expression up against a sign saying Jesus because to me there’s a narrative saying that this character wants nothing to dispute the undeniable existence of God.
Here the Church is getting its fill of humour. I've always thought the church as a place of repressed energy and I feel my cartoons express whats underneath all the glad tidings of good will. Here my cartoons of madness add a certain energy that's scary but funny at the same time. Practically I was amazed at how powerful the little projector was. It was able to reach right up along the face of the tower meters above my head. I was very pleased with this result and it was just a shame that I couldn't get my film to go up on a scale larger than this using a more powerful projector. That would've been sick.
I have to remind myself again that the narratives that I came up with in my head for each of these projections were not the main focus. They were an added feature to the overall theme of making fun of first-world behaviours. Complaining and getting angry or anxious over petty things is damaging but it also ridiculous. The ridiculousness of it all is what I fed on to create this collection of slapstick humour. Laughing at the anger and madness is what makes me happy and satisfied.
Here are the rest of my night-time experiments:
As I wrote this particular blog, it occurred to me that I was labelling these photos as if they were being posted on social media. It then occurred to me what Krystof Wodiczko tried to go for with is work. He wanted to disturb the peace of an environment and also to serve the public by interfering with the 'already highly organised rhythms of life'. For a start these projections outside are an interference on everyday life in Falmouth because none of these images have ever appeared in Falmouth before.
Upon reflection, my work I'd say is similarly proportional to the levels of boldness to that of Wodiczko. The buildings I projected on suited the the power and range of the projector I had and I was able to make the most out of it and still get my images to make an imapact on the local environment.