The 1st draft

THE ENERGY OF BOREDOM ( temporary title )

WHY?

One late evening, I was sitting on my couch and basically doing nothing besides listening to some music I played and the sounds and noise from outside of my window. At that moment, I felt boredom and that led me to think more about “boredom”. What is boredom to me? Where would boredom lead me to? Is boredom only a negative feeling or emotion? What can I do with my boredom if I have loads of it? I see human’s emotions as data of my psychological body. In a way, I think boredom is a start point of many other emotions. Boredom can lead me to different approaches, it doesn’t always mean negative to me, sometimes I enjoy being bored and sometimes I force myself to be immersed into boredom although the intention might be to get out of boredom of to understand something or somebody better. Moreover, personally I am very curious what boredom of mine would look like on screen and what stories or energy would the boredom visual transfer to the viewers.

WHAT?

The energy of boredom is a video installation that shows the subtle feeling or emotion of boredom. It’s an abstract and non-narrative film visually, meanwhile analytical. In this film, boredom would be visualized by computer animation and moving images, additionally with environmental sounds recorded in different scenes and spaces. This video installation explores What does boredom mean to me? What is my boredom? What boredom is like to me if it’s visible? Furthermore, to interactive with viewers and question them, what do you feel from the film, what information do you get from it. The main elements of the work would be repeat and change, just like what I feel about boredom, doing the same thing repeatedly is boring, however, nothing is literally the same. Therefore, I would like to create changes (can be very subtle) in the repeating visuals. The energy of boredom is a soft energy to me, in that case, the visual would be rather soft than aggressive.

HOW?

In the very first step of the project, a lot of experiments would be taken. What’s important to me is to understand deeper what boredom is, thus, related readings about boredom both psychologically and artistically would be involved. Moreover, one very important and crucial process for this project is how I would translate boredom to moving image on screen. In that case, two options or possibilities are open for me and for further step, I would like to combine them for the project. 1. Create visual and images based on my very personal feeling and thoughts of boredom. Get inspired by those elements that cause my boredom. This method is quite subjective and abstract and controversial eventually. 2. This method is more analytical and mathematical. Collect those boredom elements and analyze them into mathematical data, thus, visualize the data into moving image.

As far the sound part, I would like to create “sounds of boredom” tracks while keeping the original sounds that are recorded from different environments. For me, the environmental sounds, for instance: cars, peoples’ talking, wind, birds, etc. would provide the abstract moving image more human characters, and I’m quite excited about this subtle contrast between computer generated moving image and human character. Furthermore, would lead me to another question, is this graphic feeling bored? Those experiments and explorations would be taken before Christmas, either still images, videos or short animations. After Christmas till the end of the final trimester, the final project would start and be finished with a more concrete and clearer concept.

HELP

I mainly need to figure out how to make it happen to visualize the invisible boredom and translate it to screen both technically and conceptually. In addition, I would need help of sound recording and composing.

RELATION TO PREVIOUS PRACTICE

The energy of boredom is both related to my previous works – “unattributed stimulations of objects” and “sent & read” conceptually. They all explore the subtle emotions from different stimulations either from physical world or virtual digital world. My previous papers about “live cinema” and “generative art in video art” offer me biases more technically in abstract film and visual art.

Additionally, good questions for me to discover and research furtherly: is it necessary to make the work that bores the audience? And will the work fail if it does not bore the audience?