Final Project Idea: Being Human

I wanted to combine both illustration and a 3D sculpture together for my final piece and make it such that it was interactive with the audience.

The idea for this project is to create a pyramid shaped sculpture that can stand on it's own when left on a surface but can also be picked up and hung from above. When lifted up, the pyramid breaks up into different fragments that alters the viewer's perception of time.

Simplified sketch of how it will look like:

Actual illustration:
Eyes crying
Mess up the order of eyes tearing up on the surface and in the inside it would be various states of mind (E.g happiness, fear, contentment, anger)
Juxtaposition of the linear act of crying with the complexity of emotions one experiences at that time(non-linear/non-sequential).

Inspiration images:

The key concept of the illustration is to show the complexity of emotions that we experience over time. On the surface, a person could be shedding tears but beneath all that the emotion could be much more complicated and complex. We could feel angst, contentment, acceptance and maybe even happiness all at the same time. A person doesn't just feel sad and a person doesn't cry because he or she is sad. A person could be crying out of frustration, crying out of happiness, crying out of anger.

Memento

This was the second time that I was watching Memento and i felt that I picked up more from the movie that I did before. More of it started to make sense as I was able to pay attention to the details that allowed me to create a full picture of what went on.

A labyrinth was created in the mind of the main character because of his memory problem. In this case the labyrinth was in the sense that he would be stuck in the same situation unable to remember past a certain point. He remembers things from the past but cannot remember the current situation and is unable to make new memories. He is entrapped in a  labyrinth that keeps him locked into the past unable to progress forward. The polaroids and tattoos are treated by him as form of keys to unlock himself and set him free from this mental torture. However at the end of the movie it seems as though he was creating a labyrinth for himself because ironically this maze of events gave him a purpose to live. It helped him cope with his own wife's death.

The use of black and white in film VS colour in different parts allows the viewer to have some sort of order in terms of the sequencing of the film. The scenes in black and white are in fact the very first scenes in the movie and are cut up and played throughout the movie perhaps to represent a form of entrapment in the past and to show that it actually does not matter who he is tracking down because he starts off with the same problem but changes different facts to mess with his own memory so that he can have a purpose to live. It shows how his daily life is like and the routine that he goes through. He is trapped in this cycle deliberately because he sees it as a form of conditioning and training of his body. Leonard constantly repeats how he needs a system to function. ("You really need a system if you're trying to make it work") and this system as a form of labyrinth that he traps himself in not because of choice but because it is his way of survival.

It was easier for me to pay attention to smaller details because I had a rough idea of what the film was about having watched it earlier so I started noticing things like the tattoos he had and when he got them to put together a timeline of the events that happened. For example the tattoo that he had on his left thigh was not there when he was having the phone call in the black and white scene but at the end of the movie he was seen getting that tattooed because it was a new clue in which he created for himself to keep the puzzle unsolved. The scars on his face also gave an indication of which incidents came first. The repetition of scenes created a sense of de ja vu for the viewer and perhaps also mimics the way in which Leonard perceives things in a fragmented manner. It allowed for the viewer to experience life the way Leonard did, getting flashbacks but unable to piece everything together.

The narration was from the point of Leonard throughout the movie and it is of him recalling all the details even about the case of Sammy Jenkins. This is especially ironic since he keeps repeating the fact that memories are not to be trusted and that he only goes by facts. There are hints of him being similar to Sammy Jenkins such as how he talked about the tests Sammy went through and that conditioning didn't work on sammy because he couldn't act on instinct but then when he was talking to Natalie he admitted himself that he does not act on instinct either. He was unable to tell reality from his imagination because he wanted it to be so. It is ultimately revealed in the movie that Sammy Jenkins is Leonard and this is confirmed in the scene of Sammy in the mental hospital when there was a quick flash of lenny replacing sammy in the wheelchair at around 90 minutes into the film. Thus the viewer is left to wonder if this whole mystery of events was in fact all self implicated.

The last scene in the movie was in fact the first scene that took place chronologically as the polaroid comes back into colour and matches up with the very first scene that we saw at the start of the movie. Teddy's polaroid had nothing written on it and in fact it showed us how Leonard wanted to regard Teddy as the killer by writing down facts about him knowing that he would forget where he had gotten these facts from and treat them like a mystery to be solved. In the very end of the movie there was flashback of him and his wife on their bed with his wife stroking his chest and he had a tattoo saying "I've done it" tattooed over his heart. This confirms that Teddy's explanation at the end was the truth on how Leonard had already gotten his revenge and that he is trapped in this cycle of finding the "killer" because he needed a purpose to live for after his wife's death.

Labyrinths

"Circular Ruins" touches on the notion of immortality through the art of cloning with dreaming by using magical rites. The labyrinth occurs in the form of the continuity of life and living through mental cloning of another person. This labyrinth is created through the story line itself as well as the writing techniques used by Borges. The writer uses the free flow stream of consciousness technique of writing to create a sense of timelessness. There is no concept of time introduced except for the  few references such as "ninth or tenth night", "one afternoon" and "two or three hours" and even so these references are not specific creating a sense of ambiguity suggesting time is not of importance. Without the concept of time, the story takes place and the story of creating a clone becomes one that is cyclical as evident in the ending when the wizard himself realises that he himself is a clone made from someone else's imagination. 

The use of dreams as a form of labyrinths is interesting because in the imagined world there is no right or wrong, what is known in reality can completely be reversed. It is intriguing when Borges brings in the concept of how dreams can become dialectical and actually be seen as a logical discussions of ideas. This redefinition of dreams as reality gets the reader questioning which parts of the story is a dream and which part is reality. Borges also makes constant references to sleep as though sleep is the only form of escape. He introduces the concept of lucid dreaming one that is used by the wizard to perhaps suggest that the mind can only be free from the constriction of reality when it is unconscious.He reverses the expectations of reality by placing the importance on dreaming and how life revolves around this act. (Seen from "realised that he had not dreamed. All that night and the next day, the unbearable lucidity of insomnia harried him,"and "He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming")

Borges deals with the concept of idealism, the manifestation of thoughts in the "real world", meaningful dreams, and immortality. The story can also be seen as a symbolism of writers as creators who influence one another and whose existence and originality would be impossible without their predecessors.

"Each individual is doomed to experience for the first time that which all his ancestors have gone through and all his progeny will go through: birth and death; love and loneliness; the quest for knowledge and disappointment; the circular ruin."





"The Library of Babel" deals with the interesting concept of the universe as a library; a place associated with reading into reading into the past to study the history as well as reflecting and pondering upon past happenings. The descriptions of the library ("Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty- two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.") touches on the idea of repetition and the idea of the circle of life with pattern and routine of days. 

He constantly refers to the library as being infinite as a reference to how life goes on irregardless of the person who is living it, life as an unstoppable force always changing and always growing. One action or another leads to another hexagonal room and people are lost in transition constantly moving and evolving like the endlessness of the hexagonal structure of the library. 

"The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable." There is a intriguing reference to the library as a sphere because there are no corners, and no sides to it. No start and no end to it. No entrance and no exit to it. Hexagons are the unit that makes it up because they can be easily tessellated and the many sides represent the complexity of life and also that these are phases that are all joined and related to each other in one way or another. The mental image of a tessellating hexagon surfaces in my mind creating a sense of stretched eternity. 

The concept of the library as being too much and simply infinite highlights the limit to human's power to know about the universe and the concept of the librarian as Him brings in the concept of religion and having a higher power. The labyrinth occurs in the form of never being able to fully comprehend everything in this library, a labyrinth of knowledge. The library becomes a temptation, even an obsession, because it contains these gems of enlightenment while also burying them in deception.  The infinite storehouse of information is a hindrance and a distraction, because it lures one away from writing one's own book. This traps the reader in a labyrinth of roles of being both the reader and the writer.