Recontextualising. What is it?
I asked myself that same question when I was given the task of creating 20 outcomes responding to that word. I focused on mainly on three phrases and decided to create a mini series reflecting these phrases:
Objects in the wrong place.
Bodies in the wrong place.
Objects/bodies with odd scale relationships.
Let's start at number one, what is probably your favourite companion in lockdown? Your kettle, am I right? The most British object in the kitchen. Funnily enough, this idea came to me when I was making a cuppa! A kettle is always in the kitchen, why take this kettle on a trip of my Uni routine for that day. So may kettle had a little adventure. An object out of its place.
Number two, bodies in the wrong place. I was inspired by my subvert work (which I was completing at the same time) and the work of Brooke DiDonanto. So in my bedroom I filmed myself doing random things in my room the wrong way round. For example, I sat on a chair upside down. I then watched that video over- which was highly embarrassing and will not see the light of day!- and screenshotted moments where I was doing something "wrong"/ my body was in the "wrong" place.
Number three, odd scale. A little backstory: I bought these tiny little hands on a whim one day while in Bath town (I blame TikTok) and other than messing around with them when on facetime I never really did anything with them... Until now! Basically they are tiny hands which fit on your finger- so I decided to use that to help me mess around with scale (Jonathan gave me the idea!). This was very fun to do and I could probably do it all day.
Overall, although it was a bit hard to come up the initial ideas but once I got the ball rolling it became easier. This project was very very fun! I laughed with and at myself which is always a good sign of a good day. I will definitely revisit recontextualising again if given the opportunity!
Collaborative Recontextualising
My friend and housemate Ellen had an idea for Recontextualising- project photography! We decided to collaborate on it as I have some experience on projector photography as I did it in my A-levels (you can see on the About Me page). Here are some of the results- it wasn't as successful as I thought it would be but I edited the image to make the composition more eye catching. The issue the we discovered was that the room was too light even though we had turned all the lights off- the automatic light in the hallway was shining through and there was no way of turning that off.
In previous projector photoshoots i have done I used a black background, however we did not have access to anything like that due to lockdown. To help with this issue we took the image on a very low brightness setting and then made our faces brighter in Photoshop as we could isolate that section.
I also edited the images on Lightroom and when editing the clarity I went a "tad overboard" and turned it all the way down. This was the outcome:
I quite liked this outcome- it reminds me of a winter wonderland due to the icey colours. The atmosphere in these images are more calm and relaxing where the original ones are more intense and bright. These softer images are my favourite.
After we finished the photoshoot, we left the project on and played board games and had a drink with our flatmates. When sitting on the sofa Ellen noticed that she was shining green- so we decided to take some more images. These images are more playful then the ones we took in the photoshoot. The colours are brighter and more smooth as we were closer to the projector.
While editing I made this image. I kept it in as I thought that it looks like a night vision camera- like in the ghost hunting tv shows! I was just playing around with the tint of the image.
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