Invisible City Collage Concepts

Biography Project - Ray Johnson

8. Seemed like a fitting match between the collage and card with the assortment of logos and the composite portrait of Johnson.

7. Just associated the villainous republican on the postcard to capitalism I suppose.

6. I somewhat regret not using a bit more white to break up the image and make it more dynamic. But as it is, it contrasts quite well with previous collage. The postcard image was chosen because it was similarly chaotic.

5. Attempted to combine the japanese 'ensō' symbol associated with zen philosophy with Johnson's 'how to draw a bunny' creation. The postcard image somehow brought to mind rock gardens so I coupled the two together.

4. Seemed like the best was to talk about his place in pop-art. The format of the postcard helped reinforced the imagery.

3. See? Also, I like the psychedelic aesthetic as it sums up the 60s Ray inhabited pretty well (as someone of such youthful vigour I can only assume this).

2. I married the postcard image with this collage because it seemed to show a sort of hustle-bustle of activity that one would expect in the city while the replendence of its colours linked nicely with the third postcard, especially considering how closely related the visuals of the collages were between them.

1. My first postcard of my series chronicling some of the life and most of the death of artist Ray Johnson. I worked on postcards as Johnson became reknowned for his mailart. Had I more time I would have liked to have sent them to people with his 'please add to and pass on' message attached. As it is, I tried to link together the imagery of postcards with the collages (the collage approach was another choice inspired by his own artistic methodology, in addition to the use of red upon predominantly monochrome visuals) however tenuously. In this instance, I attached the term 'vacant' to college vacancies.

Society Website

http://calvin-tan.com/friends/yy/

EAT from Yy Lam on Vimeo.

Our society's animation

Primary Research

Some of the images developed from my primary research (which began with the 'species of spaces'style observations), exploring how emotion and action can be conveyed without text or overt body language, and also how perception can be manipulated through the same techniques. Uploaded for the same purpose as my secondary research.

Secondary Research

I cannot articulate my love for David Mazzucchelli's graphic novel 'Asterios Polyp'. Also proving very useful for my essay concerning visual storytelling. Uploading mostly in the hope that it will transform these images into something i can actually transfer into a word document.

Manifesto Project

The direction our group decided upon for this brief was the idea of an outsider providing our society's manifesto through observation, a concept that we utilized in recognition of the unwillingness of our characters to contact the outside world in order to preserve the precarious food chain from our video.

I contributed pages relating to the weather, the seasons and a diagram of the food chain that had informed much of our development. The forboding weather was another element intended to incite fear of visiting the island our creatures lived on while the seasons showed the link between my creature and the state of the island itself. I somewhat regret not including a similar image relating to the weather, portraying my creature incensed by the intruder's presence on the island.

Overall very fun and interesting work, with a sucessful final product. Scanning these images in i liked the blurring effect that occured around the pages, making them appear like hastily taken photographs, but it was impossible to control the effect to make it a cohesive aesthetic image to image.