User:10000BL/H4-Descriptions of work
H4: Descriptions of previous/ongoing work
TE KOOP
TE KOOP (For Sale) is an online project in which I investigate the meaning of promotional images, means of looking at images and the communication between me and potential buyers on sites like Craigslist.org and Marktplaats.nl. In this project I take photos of carefully arranged spaces where at first sight the subject of the photo is a bike or a piece of furniture (e.g. a sofa or a desk). I choose bikes and pieces of furniture because the hold a certain size and second they are common objects for sale on commodity markets. The details in the photos are of importance and these details range from little hints to my past, previous works I made or are chosen because they fit the colors of the other items in the image. The composition is finalized by including myself for the photo in the set in such a way that it might be difficult for viewers to notice. The final photo together with a short description of the object are then turned into advertisements. Intentionally I prohibited potential buyers from placing bids. I also did not include my phone number or my address in the advertisement. Instead, the only way potential buyers could reach me was by sending an e-mail.
The advertisements serve as a bait for potential buyers. I speak of bait because the intention of the advertisements is not to actually sell the objects I, instead the advertisements are online to investigate how people respond and communicate on commodity markets. The advertisements look like any other advertisement on a commodity market. That means, it contains an image of the object I offer and a short, minimal description of the product.
For TE KOOP I made fake accounts on commodity markets in different countries around the world. Specifically I stated in the accounts that I was living in cities like New York, London and Berlin. The countries I infiltrated were choses because I mastered the language of the respective country. When this was not the case translators were helping me to reply the potential buyers. To reply is important because it is my intention to stall and to keep the conversation going on. I do this by answering just the question a potential buyer asks. For example, when asked about the dimensions I just give the dimensions, nothing else. By doing this the potential buyer needs to ask at least one more question that of availability or if he or she can come by to collect the object. The minimal information I give back might also serve as a sign that this advertisement might not be as real as it looks. Sometimes I asked the potential buyer a question too, to spice up or twist the conversation. I might for example ask about a potential buyer's girlfriend when he himself mentions a girlfriend in his initial question. The conversation usually ends when the potential buyer aks to come by and collect the object. My answer to this question is that I promised the object to another potential buyer or that it is already sold. No potential buyer was then mad or disappointed on me, the could only blame themselves not be more aggressive (spot on) in the conversation we had. In any case I tried avoid situations where the potential buyer could get angry on me.
A positive consequence of the infiltration of different countries is that it gives an insight how people use and communicate on commodity markets. The amount and length of messages, the use of language and object preferences were some of the things that came out t be different for each country. This is something I did not foresee when I started the project.
The advertisements 'raised' hundreds of responses. Mostly the responses are about the object I offered. This counts for 95% of the responses. In 5% of the cases people noticed that the advertisement is not what it seems to be. Rarely people noticed me from the start, it mostly happened that people became suspicious after numerous e-mails send back and forth with no progression in obtaining the desired object. TE KOOP is a project that is about the (lack of use of) senses. Online the only senses you can use and must trust are your eyes. That means when it comes to advertisements online I expected people to look very good if they can trust the advertisement by its appearance. The project proved that this is most of the time not the case.
(What I hoped/wanted is)
TE KOOP exist of two parts. One is making the actual photo and second the performance part online. When making the photo I had to keep in mind how potential buyers would perceive the photo when turned into an advertisement and to which extend my physical appearance is visible or not. Too visible would for example fail the specific advertisement. This is off course difficult to conclude, because what is exactly a failure? Is that no responses at all or the fact that the object won't sell? The latter is not applicable in my project, because I never sold the object listed. In my project it was all about the responses and the more the better. Because of that I was very conservative in the position I took in the photos of the objects. In 95% of the responses it was all about the object. Of those 95% I don't know how many actually saw me, but ignored that in the conversations. In 5% of the responses people saw me from the beginning or after a while during our conversation, but I don't know how many people saw me, but never responded with a message.
The different advertisements raised different amounts of responses. First, this might had to do with product preferences in general, racing bikes were more popular overall then for example a sofa. Second, differences also emerged because of the popularity of commodity markets in the countries I infiltrated. For several years commodity markets are in The Netherlands an established medium, yet for China this is somehow different. Third, an advertisement of a bike raised less responses when bikes in the respective country are less in use over another country. And final, economic status of the inhabitants of a country might have been influenced the amount of responses/the project. When I was performing online in 2013 significant more responses came from Spain on advertisements of sofas. In 2013 it was crisis in Spain.
inspirations
TE KOOP is inspired by....... artist+ref
What succeeded
What followed from it
note:
what is the differences between a pic, image, photo?
use the word Elicit (The advertisements function as bait and elicit responses)
Unboxing
Unboxing is a project that shows similarities with TE KOOP. In Unboxing I use again the medium of commodity markets. The differences with TE KOOP
Rejected
In 2011 (or 2010) I went to a reunion of my former elementary school Veeest. School Veeest was moving to a new location and the reunion was part of the farewell process. The school set up an exhibition of old school photos that they collected throughout the years. Clearly they didn't had everybodies picture, but it gave a good insight in the history of the school.
School photos are portrait pictures that are made yearly. In the United States of America they are know as yearbook photos. The day the photographer comes to take your picture is usually announced in advance and causes 'stress' both positive, for example dressing up and making sure you are ready for the picture and negative, by feeling uncomfortable of somebody taking your picture. The photographer usually also takes classroom pictures and pictures together with your siblings. This yearly ritual gives an interesting document of somebodies early development. The intention of school photos is to show happy, smiling children.
I personally never liked the day the photographer came to take my picture, yet when I saw my pictures in the exhibition it was kind of pleasant. I asked the janitor if it was possible to digitise my own pictures for my personal archive. He allowed me to digitise my pictures and gave the whole collection compressed in three archive folders (boxes?) to me after the exhibition was finished. When I opened the boxes I immediately discovered pictures I didn't saw at the exhibition. The pictures that were excluded were all marked with a pen. A closer inspection revealed that the children on those pictures had actually two pictures in the collection. A marked one and a picture without the mark. My assumption is that the marked picture was made before the unmarked picture and that the photographer on the spot decided to take another picture. When the marked-unmarked picture are placed next to each other you can imagine why the photographer made the decision to take a second picture. In some cases the marked pictures show technical failures/mistakes by the photographer, in other cases the child blinked his or her eyes or showed other facial inconsistencies/deviations that are not appreciated in school photos. We can debate about the weather or not these pictures are bad or wrong and should have been rejected, but lets agree with the decision of the photographer. What is then most remarkable about the collection of marked-unmarked relationship is that in many cases it is hard to tell what the photographers intention was to take a second picture. From the perspective of a photographer we can defend that the photographer's intuition here plays a role; the decisive moment, the desired result, was not captured the first time. Yet to retake a picture especially when it comes to portrait pictures, where there is an artifical environment created, is to 'kill' a certain spontaniality that a person gives. You lose joy and see less passion in the unmarked picture. They lost there innocence and are forced to behave or present themselves in world that is dictated by the preferences of adults.
The collection of school photos found in the archive of school Veeest comes from a time that photography was still and only analog. Because of that photographers could only see the result of the pictures after they developed the film. Compared to digital photography this has some implications like the number of photos that can be taken compared to the base cost. Contactsheets were made to get a quick glimpse of the result. Different types of marks were made to help and indicate the selection of the perfect picture. So the marks on the school pictures seem plausibel, yet what puzzles me is why they are saved and not kept into the private collection of the photographer?
The collection of marked-unmarked photos I found give a good insight in what/the way school photography use to exist. I don't know how many more marked pictures did exist in the collection of school Veeest, but I think it is very likely every school around the world must have had pictures that were rejected for the same reasons as in the collection of school Veest. With the introduction of digital photography that in the 1990's (ref wiki) which by 2000 moslty replaced analog photography as the main medium, the existence of pictures that are marked by a pen went extinct. Currently when we take pictures we immediatly can recall the pictures on a LCD-screen build in the camera. We can decide upon that to shoot the picture again and delete the previous one. Another feature that digital cameras introduced was the unlimited amount of pictures that in theory could be taken. For analog cameras hold that the amount of picture taking was restricted by the film inside (24 or 36 slides). The digital camera is only restricted by the size of the memory card, but since the introduction of digital cameras and their memory cards the capacity was always higher and had more flexiblity than when using film. Another advantage of digital cameras was that it was no longer neccesary to develop the pictures before being able to see them. The only thing that was requierred was a connection from your camera to a computer.
The collection revealed 101 pairs of marked and unmarked pictures and 8 pairs of group pictures of siblings. This total amount accounted for les than 10% of the collection School Veeest had, but gave an good insight of how a photographer used (or missused) images of children. It shows use the flaws the photographer had in his technique, but for most it shows us how a child is not accepted as being a child. My intention with the collection is to make a book. In 2015 I made the first draft of the book with the worktitle Rejected. The size of the book is A5 (148x210mm). In the book you see the both the marked picture (the rejected one) and the accepted picture without the mark. The two picture are in one eyesight visible when you open the book. Together the form a spread. The accepted picture is shown according the size of a school photo (50x35mm), the rejected picture is a little smaller than A5 148x210mm).
- write about why alterations of photos is not accepted and why this is the case (allowed) in/when asking people to pose in front of your camera.
- self-evaluation
What is it? [descriptions of work (from previous) ]
What did you want?
What succeeded?
What followed from it?
Why did you do it?