User:File on a/interview
Thy interviews Fileona
What are you making? Fileona is currently using her DIY focal camera which she built herself to take her profile images on Facebook since 2013 She wants to explore the cycle of how all images are compressed when they are uploaded on a social media platform. No matter what medium she used to take the image, they will always be compressed back to 8MB size. This devaluation process reflects on a large amount of images being produced at the moment and how tech companies are trying to organise our personal data in unified forms.
Fileoa's self-build camera is an analogue one with a microscopic lens. With this lens, she will be able to take the pixels information of red, green, blue channels of every image. Nowadays it's often a one-way process of digitalising the images and posting it online. By capturing the pixel information of images by the analog camera, she wants to reverse that process to make us realise how the images are presented to us the same way on screen.
And by capturing a compressed image online by microscope analogue camera, will we perceive it more serious? As for now we only have a few seconds to grab the viewer's attention on social media.
As Fiona's previous works are mainly street photography and she addresses the subject of her interests in an improvisational sense. Meanwhile, with this project, she approaches photography in a more conceptual way of thinking. She revisits her past selves, which are profile photos owns by both her and the social media platforms as pixel information
Fileona interviews Thy
Why are you(Thy) making it? Thy is currently working on a moving-image and sound-based project. She is currently living in Rotterdam, a place different from her home city of Ho Chi Minh, and this allows her to engage with new ways of seeing. Building on this frame of mind, Thy is documenting Rotterdam’s environment. She delves into the surrounding architecture of the city without considering its structure or shape. Instead, Thy focusses on the routines etched into the environment. She links these routines with the isolation and alienation of humans from their surroundings due to constant information stimulations. Yet at the same time, the environment of the city is built for the human to be alive and lively, “a playground” according to Thy. Capturing these surroundings through close up and sound recordings, Thy seeks to emphasise how the city and its integrated structures (electronic billboards, metro trains, elevators, etc) are the setting for surreal and alienateduman routines (taking the metro, shopping, going to work, etc). She chose the close-up as a medium to “look closer.” The final result is to be a video and sound installation. She intends to engage her audience into guessing where they are, perhaps critically renewing their engagement with their surroundings.
Does this relate to other things Thy has done? Thy’s previous work is associated with private and intimate subjects, like her mother and grandmother. Yet she used the close-up as a framework seeing and documenting these subjects. As such, this project involves a similar methodology of working and seeing. Looking closer, seeing things closely, and re-seeing things closely, still remain important to Thy.
How is it different from other things Thy has done? Previously, Thy was more interested in the personal self. She was interested in her personal history, her past and her personal perspective on humans. Now, the project is more about her perspective on the environment and surroundings. As such her subject matter has shifted from the living to the non-living
What significant choices has Thy made recently? Recently, Thy has been expanding her medium beyond still photography. She is looking into doing more multi-disciplinary work like moving images and sound. As with this current project, she feels that she can explore different mediums to say and show her perspective more clearly.