Tag Archives: Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Weronika Pawlak

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Safe Space

“Safe Space” is a combination of analogue portraits and images of landscapes created by the AI  algorithm gauGAN. The algorithm generates images based on drawings which I made listening to the young people describing spaces that make them feel safe and relaxed. 


The work was created as an attempt to understand human’s longing for a safe space that is often imagined as an ideal space, free from self-doubts and fears. After the past year, I had a lot of thoughts about escaping the situation in which we all found ourselves. Making “Safe Space” I was thinking about how we, as humans, deal with the necessity of feeling safe. My interlocutors often admit that sometimes a safe space means a very specific place for them, for instance, a secluded place, surrounded by trees and flowers. Sometimes they could find a safe space in daily life, within the city. The imagined places seem to be at the same attainable and unrealistic. The unrealistic human desire connects with an uncanny AI representation of the landscapes, which is a way to materialize and personalise these spaces. 


The landscapes generated by gauGan are combined with analogue portraits. The composition of a picture refers to classical XIX century paintings, which often showed a person with a landscape as a background. A melancholic, romantic atmosphere of longing for something combines with an unrealistic image created by the algorithm. Since the stereotypical thinking about AI is that it can create something in a better way than humans, I found the outcome, full of glitches and unrealistic shapes, quite comic. Because of its imperfection, it reminds me somehow of a human’s way of feeling.

THE PROCESS – PART I

I asked people to describe a landscape that could work as their „safe space”. Listening to their audio recordings, I drew a series of landscapes using an AI algorithm GauGAN.

THE PROCESS – PART II
The series of analogue photographs combine people and their AI landscapes. 

About Weronika

Weronika Pawlak is a visual artist and musician, born in Warsaw, Poland. Currently working on finishing MA in Photography: The Image
& Electronic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works with photography, video, installation and music. She often explores
some of the themes related to the relation between humans and nature, the post-capitalist world and escapism.

 

Hay Tung Yan

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Leaves

Nature is always an inseparable part of the Earth. It has been called the Mother Nature for a
long time in history. Leaf is one of the precious gifts given by the Mother Nature. They never
miss a year to carry on the cycle of death and rebirth, as every single life living in the planet
Earth do. How can we capture the beauty of trillions of leaves in a very limited time?
My creative works focus on using faux liquid emulsion technique to capture different

 forms of the leaves. I have made these image by transferring a slim film which hold the printing 

of leaves into water colour paper.

 

The body of work was inspired by the concept of fading and decay as a destiny of our life.
We always try hard to keep something we must have lost but is meaningful in our control.
Once the leaves fall down from the trees or plants, they gradually become dry and dull.
Water and nutrition leave them, vivid green colour no longer exist.
This would be the most fascinating moment of the leaves.

About Hay Tung Yan

Hay Tung Yan is a Hong Kong artist based in London, England. After finishing her
photography degree in Hong Kong, she started her master degree in Goldsmiths, University
of London. As an artist, she works in photography, media production and music.

Xu Qin

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

fiction love

About the project

Calvino’s three novels are combined into a collection “Our Ancestors“. This project is inspired by one of Italo Calvino’s novels, The Baron in the Trees. Although the project wants to discuss the present and possible near future, but every second in the past are history.

 

The inspiration for the project comes from this novel, which is a fairy tale, a teenager who could not bear the worldly relationships and social interactions, left society and chose to live in the trees. And his love is separated by space, he is on the tree, and she is under the tree. (Cosimo and Violante)

 

If before this, I only occasionally read some people share their love or sex stories online, I think in the past and a half year, social distancing and all kinds of isolation have brought new changes to the intimate relationship between people with the help of the Internet.

 

Sometimes, I have a feeling that may be an illusion. Many people in the world are defined as single in the traditional sense. But it seems difficult for me to describe it more clearly. In my view, they have Un-real or online lovers. In terms of their own experience, they are actually in love or marriage. My feeling that may be an illusion makes me believe this would be a more common thing, and the intimate relationship of some people will be somewhat different from now. Like we say now that your lover is Pete? Or the Obi-Wan online?

About Xu Qin

Xu Qin is a Chinese artist who focuses on the narrative exploration of various current themes, and also is interested in the development and display of visual works. His works mainly cover his personal interests in the past, present and future, and he usually uses different media such as film, photography, installation and painting. He has recently started a new project, contemporary and concrete work on a certain intimacy mentioned in a novel by Itano Calvino. The concept from the novel is a mixture of personal observations of the present and explorations of the near future. This project is currently developing mainly in the form of photography.

Peng Tian

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Dualism

There is a dualistic relationship in many film and television works, and this kind of strong dramatic conflict has made me ponder. The work uses moving images to show a constant change of objects that oppose each other in binary opposition. Red and blue respectively represent the opposition between thought and matter. With the intervention of green and more colors, the object has changed, forming a different binary opposition relationship.
About Peng Tian

Peng Tian is an image-maker born in China, he works with still images, moving images, new media. Graduated from the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. He is currently studying MA Photography at Goldsmiths.

Qingyu Luo

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

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My work is about the connection between the inner and outer space and the self, it is an exploration of the present state of myself. I was inspired by AI recognition technology that made me curious about how people recognize themselves. This work is part of a long-term project where I am exploring the self through the space around me, the environment, objects and my body parts.

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The connection between myself and space is better felt in self-photography using digital and film cameras. For me, this time is wired, quiet and there is adequate time to observe myself. I blur my identity by marginalizing myself throughout the space, covering my face and body, turning the physical part of myself into a symbol. As a tag to constantly reinforce my identity and explore the border between self and non-self.

 

I believe that I am fluidable. In this space, I will eventually leave and my presence will disappear. I preserve my fragile existence by recording my spaces and objects.

About Qingyu

Qingyu Luo is a photographer currently studying MA photography: the image and electronic arts at goldsmiths. She does not limit herself to one medium, style, or concept. This project involves exploring the identity of the individual and the understanding of space.

Tianyuan Hu

MA Photography The image and Electronic Arts

Amorph

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Amorph, a mutated gene without determinable effect, this project explores otherness and alienation, and the disintegration of mundanities, which are drawn from my life archive and observation during the lockdown. The work attempts to question those taken-for-granted identity types and social categories, I aware that nomadism and discontinuities lurk in our daily life, thus I want to depict those unsystematic moments when linguistic structure fails and language loses its anchor, identities and perceptions haven’t been theorized into any definitive criteria.

By depicting these unsettling scenes and human figures, I’m simultaneously questioning, confronting or staging my identities and alienations. I always see myself as a self-revolting vortex, spying on a world where people are unhinged, dissolving and swirling into tunnels and gyres. 

This project meditate upon the liminal space between tangible and intangible presences, the elusive intersection between different state of beings; the ramshackle threshold; the “Becoming-X?”

Haunting between the lucid and the lunatic, I seek to map out these uncanny scenes that are spinning off-axis, tapping into an eccentric liquid reality.

About Tianyuan

Website: http://www.tianyuan.online

Wei Wang

MA Photography The image and Electronic Arts

Here I present two pieces of works which explores the concept of eros and identity in different ways. 

One is inspired by the common belief of “Guanyin” or Avalokitesvara Buddha. And in Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes has a speech regard to eros, and he mentioned male and female are in a state of a whole when they appeared. Influenced by Zen and Buddhism, this pair of images tries to reveal the male rule which lays deep in female body and the female rule which lays in male body and to reconsider how the relationship between male rule and female rule could influence individuals to perceive life and to discover self-identity in contemporary society.

Another one is a collage of plants and female body’s images. This collage tries to reveal the force of life in nature form. And through the sense or perception of human, through touch, eye and ear, the human identity seems to have a interweave of the nature’s creature. 

For the plants, it is made to be a hermaphrodite, it contains female rule and male rule together. The female rule is a force which gives birth to life and birth to new concept. For a contemporary identity’s reconstruction, an individual could find the different force or consciousness within female rule or male rule. To me, the eros is a interweave or a flow like Yin Yang of two forces, two rules.

About Wei
Wei Wang is an artist who currently work on photography as well as video making, installation and visual arts. I am also a student from MA photography: the image and electronic arts in Goldsmiths. The themes of my art practice are related to myths, ancient culture of China, reconstruction of contemporary identity and so on. 

Ke Tao

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

In this series, I combined everyday objects and my childhood memory together in order to convey a sense of memory and absence in the past. Each pair of image I created is simultaneously an extension from the past serve as a reminder of the ever-changing nature of memory and emotions—an unstable and profoundly unreliable process, as fragile as bubbles as complicated and garbled as tangles of wool.

 

About Ke Tao

Ke Tao, a photographer primarily working in the fashion industry and currently studying MA Photography at Goldsmiths. She uses photography as a means of self-expression – to identify with hidden qualities of her character, to observe the emotional expression, and to express her interpretation of the world.

 

Yuelin Yang

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Many people lost loved ones during the pandemic.

Humankind is really limited.

In great grief, I took these images, trying to ask some questions about death, about memories.

About Yuelin

As a still image maker, I am focusing on the potentials of still images as visual language or psychological symbols, to explore different perspectives of humanity from my personal view.