Little India Performances

I have been asked recently what I am up to with my artwork and work and so forth. I will try to give more of a clear idea of what is going on. In November, I was awarded a start up grant called “Heroes and Idols in Contemporary Singapore” with a collaborative partner, Joan Kelly. As the 'Principal Investigator', I am in charge of directing the global/urban studio practice. I decided to call the first project within the urban space, "Synchronicity". Along with production assistants, I am recording and choreographing a stop motion pixilation using performers. The performers must learn to synchronize their movements in order for the animation to work properly. Little India has been chosen for the first shoot to create a stark contrast between the performers orderly, repetitive controlled movements and the surrounding crowd of migrant workers. It has also been chosen due to a personal belief that the migrant worker is a hero within Singaporean society. Without them, it seems this country would not have developed as fast as it has.

This project is also based on a combination of two similar terms with differing meanings. "Synchronization" is needed within the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. And also, Carl Jung coined the word "Synchronicity" to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of causal events." Jung felt it described his concepts of archetypes and a certain model of a person, personality, or behavior as well as the collective unconscious.

Triplets

A quick pixelation done the first day of shooting and made to look like super-8 footage.

A Very Hot Day

'Twas quite the hot day out there on the slope of the school today, so after losing 5 pounds of water weight, we decided to shoot inside for while. We had a good team of people today. Thought this shot was a good representation of the sensibility I'd like the future shoots to get to. I cut the roof off and added clouds as an experiment and diluted some of the floor to add painterly quality. Thank you Hazel, Yoke Heng, Yancheng, Heng, Zhijia, Jin Xin, and Zihun for your patience and hard work in the beating sun. From now on, we shoot in the eve. :)

Tomorrow's plan is to hit the streets of Little India and also watch a performative artwork about the raising of a wall which is an action to symbolize the need to raise the status of the foreign workers in Singapore.

"Synchronicity"

Project Synchronicity has had a few days of shooting and so far about 10 people are interested in helping either model, document, edit, or shoot. Here's a picture from the first day trial run which had 3 people posing: Jin Xin, Zhang Ning, and Ren Yancheng. All are from EEE, the Engineering Department at Nanyang Technological University. Thanks guys!


This project is in connection with a start up grant titled, "Heroes and Idols in Contempoary Singapore" received by Asst. Professor Joan Marie Kelly and Asst. Professor Eileen Anastasia Reynolds.