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| H4: Descriptions of previous/ongoing work
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| =='''TE KOOP'''==
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| (What I hoped/wanted is)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| '''inspirations'''
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| TE KOOP is inspired by....... artist+ref
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| What succeeded
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| What followed from it
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| note:
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| what is the differences between a pic, image, photo?
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| use the word Elicit (The advertisements function as bait and elicit responses)
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| =='''Project: Unboxing'''==
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| Unboxing is essentially filming yourself opening boxes, showing what is inside and uploading it to platforms like Youtube. The first unboxing video came from Yahoo Tech in 2006 and showed the unboxing of a Nokia E61 (wiki). Currently unboxing is a well established genre on Youtube and and the videos are made by people all around the world.
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| Unboxing is inspired by 'haul videos', the showing of purchased items in a shopping spree and has it origin in the tech/gadget world (art3). Usually unboxing videos show the opening of boxes and the items inside. Vloggers give their opinion about the products unboxed and explain how they work. Basically everything that is for sale, is proably unboxed on youtube (art1). Unboxing videos attracts millions of viewers all around the world. It is a lucrative business for both Vloggers and manufratuarls of products and good. Vloggers earn money by the monitored number of views. For manufracturars it is interesting because their products gets cheap exposure compared to advertisements of themselves. Manufractuars sometimes work together with certain vloggers who are popular and have a lot of goodwill among their viewers. It is then interesting for manufractuars to have their products inside the script (art3).
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| There are several reasons from different angles why unboxing is such a popular genre in current days. From a practical way viewers get a preview of items and all their belongings. It gives an honest peak and information at commercial products, they might want to buy themselves. On the emotional level unboxing videos are enjoyable to watch (art2). According to Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Center, unboxing videoa feed our primal curiosity and desire to know what is hidden inside something. Unboxing is also in essence not new, other examples of unknown sealed or wrapped objects existed thorughout time. Think of surprise gagdets in bags of chips and gumball machines (art4). For young viewers unboxing might acts as an cognitive experience and a reasurance mechanism. Children like to hear a story of and over again even if they know the outcome already. Maybe this counts also for unboxing (art4).
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| For my project Unboxing I decided to work again with the medium of commodity markets. Instead of being the seller as in TE KOOP, I decided to be the buyer. For my project Unboxing I wanted to buy a booklet full of post stamps. On commodity markets you can find numerous ads offering all kinds of stamps so it was not difficult for me to find candidate booklets. The questions I raised in this project were first if I was able to convince the seller to send the package in an unconventional way than usual and second if this package then would be accepted by the Dutch postal company PostNL.
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| Part of making the deal with the seller was that I asked the seller not to put the booklet in an envelop or box, but to put tape on the sides of the booklet that could fall open. This means that the booklet was closed by tape at the top, right side and bottom. On the cover I asked them to write down my name and address and also to put the stamps there. By doing this I change the meaning of the object booklet. Instead of being a booklet, it became a carrier/container with an object in side. A booklet of stamps was sent this way to me. When I received the booklet I made a setting where I was going to unbox the package. This was handling was shot with two cameras, one frontal and focused on my hands handling the package, the other from above with an angle. The video ends with me showing the content of the book. Aside the video I made a booklet that resembled the original booklet, yet the content was different. The stamp were replaced by the e-mail conversation I had the original seller. The video and false booklet were presented together.
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| =='''Rejected'''==
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nbc-news-channel/school-officials-defend-altered-yearbook-photos-270419523663
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| *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.
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| - self-evaluation
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| What is it? [descriptions of work (from previous) ]
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| What did you want?
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| What succeeded?
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| What followed from it?
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| Why did you do it?
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| == '''Nr. 39 with Rice''' ==
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| Nr.39 with Rice is a project that has its origin in/from an event from Holland Got Talent in 2013. In that (bewuste) episode Dutch jury member Gordon asked Chinese contestant Xiao Wang if he is going to sing the song 'Nr.39 with Rice'. The remark is rich in many ways. It refers to 1) Gordon himself and the way he perceives (Chinese) food (as being a number) and 2) the extensive menus Chinese restaurants often have. From another point of view Gordon's remark can be seen as a racist comment and questions the postion of Chinese people in Dutch society. The event sparked an international debate and was focused on the possible racist comment it held. Several news media covered the topic and a group of Chinese people came with a counter respons by having a website called 'nummer39metrijst' that advertised a 39% discount for the Nr.39-dish in 39 different Chinese restaurants all around the Netherlands. Among the 39 restaurants Chinese Muur in Hilversum offered a special edition for the number 39. For this occasion Nr.39 was 'Gebakken Gordon' (Fried Gordon, ref “RTV Noord-Holland” te gast bij Chinese Muur Hilversum, youtube). The website is supported by several Dutch-Chinese organisation such as Vereniging Chinese Horeca Ondernemers (VCHO), Chinese Radio & TV (CRTV) and Chinese Politieke Integratie & Participatie (CPIPF). The website, the Chinese-Dutch organisations and the 39 Chinese restaurants involved in the offer feels to me as a solid respons supporting the majority of Chinese-Dutch people in the Netherlands.
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| The original event between Gordon and Wang, the media attention it evoked and the offer in the form of a website provided me rich material to work with. In my project 'Nr.39 with Rice' the basic question I investigate is what exactly is a Nr.39 and how does it look like. The first step I did in the project was to collect menus from Chinese restaurants that were advertising/serving a dish that was listed as number 39. This is not so difficult because a menu of a Chinese restaurant usually contains more than 100 dishes. I collected a dozen of menus from Chinese restaurant, no discrimination was made between different types of restaurants and also not if the were a fusion of two different kitchens (Chinese-Indonesisch, Chinese-Surinaams, of dim sum restaurant). One menu in particular was interesting because the restaurant involved the Nr.39-dish from the menu. I don't think they deleted the dish, they deleted the number.
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| The second step in my project was taking photos of the Nr.39-dish from different Chinese restaurant and research if there is a structure in the quantified system of the menus. Most menus are divided in specific sections like starters, soup and lunch. And if you think about an Italian menu and the pizza that is listed as the first one than it is always the Margeritha pizza. To make this series I went out to eat at Chinese restaurants and ordered the Nr.39-dish. When it was presented I took a photograph with my Iphone before consuming it. The apearrances of the dish differed hugely among the restaurants showing no sign of equality(?)/comparison in the dishes. The wide variety of the dishes is not something that was total unexpected. The relatively high number of the 39 makes it also not easy to see a comparison among all. This might have been more easier with a lower number. However the diversity among the dishes is very high ranging from a small dish to a large dish, from a ver refined dish to a very condensed dish. Somehow I expected a little more structure in the menus of Chinese restaurants.
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| The third step in my project was to film myself eating a Nr.39-dish. For this video I brought a Nr.39 dish to a studio setting where I filmed with two cameras the process of me eating the food. This work is inspired by
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| - self-evaluation
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| What is it? [descriptions of work (from previous) ]
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| What did you want?
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| What succeeded?
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| What followed from it?
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| Why did you do it?
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| == '''Being Yellow''' - 2010-2013 ==
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| Being Yellow is a series of photoworks were I play with my identity and ethnicity. Born in the Netherlands out of Chinese immigrants, but raised by Dutch people, I always carried a conflict in my identity. In the series I try to comment on things that happened or occurred in my life and magnify it with the color yellow.
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| The works from Being Yellow are important for me. Not because I like them so much now, the work makes me sad and it is unnecessary to make it this way. But when I made the work I started to believe in what I can and want to make. It opened my eyes and I see Being Yellow as a starting point for the practise and projects that follows. Being Yellow figures (figureert)/comes back in my TE KOOP-project as a background object.
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| - self-evaluation
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| What is it? [descriptions of work (from previous) ]
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| What did you want?
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| What succeeded?
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| What followed from it?
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| Why did you do it?
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| == '''Tinder Aesthetics''' ==
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XPUB & Lens-Based wiki