Picture taken from Phone Camera

Mighty Ant

Short Film in Mp4 format Jointly produced by Joon Boon , Anne Heng , Saleem Hadi , Xu Yting and Adrian Chong .... enjoy

to know deeply

The sky smells nice

Beautiful

Animation : Friend's Dream

(1)Outline:
My friend is cycling up a hill . It is a hard climb , he is peddling like crazy , the rubber wheels are breaking up , bits of it falling off . half way up the hill , he saw me buying ice cream from an ice cream seller. I ask the seller how much is one scoop . the seller replied $1 , I ask for two scoops , he charge me $5 and I was furious and argue with the seller .My friend came over to resolve the situation , he order two scoops for himself and he said he is giving me a treat . After finishing the ice cream , he took out his wallet to pay for the ice cream but realize that he does not have any money.

(2) Story boarding

(3) Animation

Animation : Dream of two pigeons and a crow

(1)Outline :
One crow and two pigeons flew through the window into the living room of my friend's house . Friend ask me to shoo the birds away. I did. The crow flew back out the same direction it flew in . The two pigeons flew into , knock their heads , on the glass windows and fell dead in front of my feet.

(2)Story boarding

(3)Animate in after effects or flash.

Quotation : Animal 16/06/10

Animals make us Human by Temple Grandin
Quote pg 297
" People forget that nature can be very harsh , and death in the wild is often more painful and stressful than death in a modern plant. Out on a western ranch I saw a calf that has its hide ripped completely off on the side by coyotes. It was alive and the rancher has to shoot it to put it out of its misery. If I have a choice , going to a well-run slaughter plant would be preferable to being ripped apart alive. "

Quote pg 5
" All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. ....
....Dr Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist ... who wrote the book Affective Neuroscience ...calls the core emotion systems "blue-ribbon emotions" because they generate well organized behavior sequences that can be evoked by localized electrical stimulation of the brain. This means that when you stimulate the brain systems for core emotions, you always get the same behavior from the animal. If you simulate the anger system , the animal snarls and bites . If you simulate the fear system , the animal freezes and runs away. ..... Electrode in the "SEEKING" system make the animal start moving forward , sniffing , and exploring its environment. When you stimulate these parts of the brain in people, they report the same emotions animals show. "

Blue Ribbon Emotion
(1) SEEKING
curiosity / interest / anticipation
(2) RAGE
(3) FEAR
(4) PANIC
(5) LUST
(6) CARE
(7) PLAY

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
Quote page 91
"Another huge difference between animals and people : I don't think animals have the defence mechanisms Sigmund Freud described in humans.Projection, displacement , repression , denial . Defense mechanisms defend against anxiety , and all defense mechanisms depend on repression in some way. Using repression , you push whatever it is you are afraid of down into your unconcious mind and focus your concious mind on a stand-in. Or in the case of higher, more mature defense mechanisms, like humor, altruism or intellectualization, you use humor , empathy and thought to push away the "real" emotion, which is fear."

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
Quote page 51
"The first and oldest brain, which is physically the lowest down from inside the skull, is the reptilian brain (corresponds to that in lizards that perform basic life support function like breathing) The next brain , in the middle, is the paleomammalian brain(corresponds to that in mammals which handles emotions). The third and newest brain, highest up inside your head, is the neomammalian brain(corresponds to that in primates , especially people , which handles reason and langauge)..... the three brains are connected by nerves. but each one has its own personality and its own control system : the "top" does not contol the "bottom"....The reason we have 3 seperate brains instead of one is that evolution doesn't throw away things that work....Paul MacLean, the originator of the three brain theory, believes that evolution simiply added each newly evolved brain on top of the one that came before , without changing the older brain. He calls this the triune brain theory.

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
Quote page 121
"Dr Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at NYU who wrote I of the Vortex : From Neurons to Self , says the brain evolved because creatures needed a brain to help them move around without knocking into things. He gives the sea squirt as the ultimate example of what having a brain is all about. The sae squirt is a primitive organism with about three hundred brain cells that starts out looking like a tadpole, then ends up looking a little bit like a turnip. For the first day of its life it swims around until it finds a permanent spot to latch on to. Once it finds its spot, it doesn't move again for the rest of its life.
Here is the interesting part : while it is swimming it has a primitive nervious system, but once it becomes attached to an object it eats up its own brain. It also eats its own tail muscles. Basically the sea squirt begins life as a kind of tadpole , with a tadpole like brain, then turns into an oyster-class creature. Since the sea squirt isn't going to move ever again, it does not need a brain. "

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
Quote page 305
"Fossil records show that whenever a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller. The horse brain shrank by 16% ; the pig brain shrank as much as 34% and the dog brain shrank 10 to 30% . This probably happened because once humans started to take care of these animals , they no longer needed the various brain functions in order to survive. In all domestic animals the forebrain, which hols the frontal lobes ... in humans the mid brain, which handles emotions and sensory data , and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell .... Dog brains and human brains speccialized : humans took over the planing and organizing tasks , dogs took over the sensory tasks...coevolve..."

Ghost Words

Words are ghosts. They point to real objects but are themselves ethereal , with the purpose to cause an image derive from our memory of real objects.

In the artworks
you need not imagine , need not dig up memory as I have short-circuited the word to its meaning. The tormented ghosts can cast themselves out of their ink bodies and rest in peace in their proper material meanings.

Reluctant Rocks series

Rock compose of a diversity of naturally arranged minerals. Man purify rock into metals such as copper , drawn into wires , to conduct electricity , powering up our towns and cities. A rock before was a background , a part of nature landscape now becomes useful to Man, thus now having a value and is now connected into the complex man made system of World Economics.


(9)THE ROCK IS RELUCTANT TO BE PURIFIED I

Parmeran Poskad 2010

Prepareing for June Exhibition : Dog(3)

This is better than Dog(2) . Better composed.

Lesson Learned
(1)Apply the correct strokes the first time , reworking the modeling paste makes it powdery.
(2) Refer to Chinese Painting Book as Visual Referance.
(3) Only strokes outline form of the dog , not too thick , leave most of body as empty spaces.

Quotation : Body and Body aches

Diary Chuck Palahniuk pg 40
... Misty's breast looking like a couple dead carp .....

pg 121
Her headache, its the feeling of a hammer tap, tap , tapping a long nail into the back of your head, a conceptual art piece, tapping harder and harder in one spot until you forget everything else in the world.

2010 Postcard Show Reluctant Seaweed

When I say "seaweed" does living-weeds-in-the-sea comes to mind or Japanese process-food comes to mind. I would think it would be the latter so much so as we forget the existance of the former.

The grey color background the color of mechanical mechinary , the mass-production process of heating , compressing , cutting , and packing of the seaweed.


(7) SEAWEEDS ARE RELUCTANT TO BE MADE INTO SEAWEEDS I


(8) SEAWEEDS ARE RELUCTANT TO BE MADE INTO SEAWEEDS II

Image - Language

Desire is like mass which has no direction unlike weight which is directed earthwards.

Langauge

One particular desire , cut out from the desire-mass is the "Desire-to-know". It can be directed in langauge as a form of a Question syntax. starting with "Why" , "What" , "How" , "When" , "What" eg. "What is this? " is valid grammatical sentence , a box to contain the "Desire-to-know" being. After it is boxed , it has weight. "Why" box has a different direction than a "What" box.

An Answer destroys or cancel out the Question.

Visual Image

Now how to create the tensions of "Desire to Know" into an image , without the use of text.

(1) Abstracting the question-syntax eg "What is this?" into sign "?" and the answer syntax "this is a hammer" into the punkt sign "."

(2) Modifying the sign "?" and "." to include directional arrows. "?" arrows are directed outwards to escape from the image while the "." are closing in from the four corners inwards to police the "?"

(3) These "?" and "." are superimposed onto an image such as a photograph.

Quotation : Man

The Guide by R.K Narayan page 85

His mother used to say " If there is one good man anywhere, the rain would descend for his sake and benefited the world " quoting from a Tamil poem.

Mr Sampath - The printer of Malgudi by R.K. Narayan
pg 10
Man has no significance except as a wage earner, as an economic unit, as a receptacle of responsibilities

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk pg 33
Your wife , your daughter , you mother. The three women in your life

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
pg 257
Economist typically separate our daily activities into three categories : Market Work(which produce income), home production(unpaid chores) and pure leisure.
pg16
Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.
pg17
An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.But most incentives don't come about organically. Someone--- an economist or a politician or a parent --- has to invent them.
...... There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social and moral.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
Quote pg 139
"The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:
(1) If people are inately different, opression and discrimination would be justified
(2) If people are inately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.
(3) If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.
(4) If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose "

River Hong Bao Calligraphy Demonstration

15-Feb-2010 , 7pm to 10pm

2010 Postcard show Reluctant Mimosa Series

The mimosa plant leaves close up when touched. They refused to open up even when submerged in boiling water.

These works imposes on the mimosa plant the human idea of "open" , "openess" and "freedom".


(5) THE MIMOSA ARE RELUCTANT TO OPEN UP I
(6) THE MIMOSA ARE RELUCTANT TO OPEN UP II

Emulsion with Starch Glue

This formula seems to be promising. Overnight drying , there is no visible cracks. The bigger lump is still soft on the inside, not fully dry yet.

2010 Postcard show Reluctant Mosquito Series

Unfortunately , the mosquito dead body is very fragile , after a few days the legs begins to fall off.

To do this artwork , the many mosquitos need to be caught and pasted within a day , lamination done the day after.


Plan (10)The Mosquitos are reluctant to form the word "Dengue". use marker " " to indicate movement marks.

Printing

Direct
(1) apply generous watercolor wash on paper
(2) takeaway drinks plastic bag with straw press on paper.
(3) with ice cubes
(4) Inflated deflated
(5) transparency
(6) Add strays to connect between tubes.
(7) bubbles

signify
air pocket , lung , breathing room

Quotation : Charactorization

Death Kit by Susan Sontag pg2

Diddy, not really alive , Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. Like insecure tenants, never knowing exactly the extent of their property or when the lease will expire. Like unskilled cartographers drawing and redrawing erroneous maps of an exotic continent .

Eventually , for such a person , everything is bound to run down. The walls sag. Empty spaces budge between objects. The surfaces of object sweat , thin out begin to buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams. Deploying things and navigating through space becomes labourous. Too much effort to ample from kitchen to living room, serving drinks, turning on the hi-fi, pretending to be cheerful. But Diddy difficulities cannot be resolved by bigger effort. Stepped-up effort won't repair his ingenious sense of incapacity, which proceeds from a hallucinated erasure of the present as it becomes past.

Quotes : Mind and Memory

Death Kit by Susan Sontag(312pages)

Quote pg 35
Diddy is beginning , just beginning , to doubt his memory. But that always happens, doesnt it ? All past events, both real and imginary, are consigned to the trusteeship of the imagination.Wheather the killing of the workman was fantasy or fact, Diddy has no access to it (now) except through his imagination. The past must be re-imagined; memories arn't like furnature, something solid you can own.


Seduction of the Minotaur by Anais Nin (pg159)

Quote pg 120
And now the words spoken by Doctor Hernandez were clear to her, their meaning reached her. "We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selceting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karmas, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved."

The Loop by Jacques Roubaud

Quote pg 25
In the perpetual present of memories-- site of the Augustinian trinity "present of the past, present of the present, present of the future"

Post card show 2010 Reluctant Ants Series

In brief the artwork is about we as human beings defining ants as the way we think ants are. Ants-beings themselves are undefinable, unclassifiable and unpredictable and are unwilling or reluctant to fit into our human concepts of them.


(1) THE ANTS ARE RELUCTANT TO FORM THE WORD ANTS.

(2) THE ANTS ARE RELUCTANT TO FORM THE NATIONAL FLAG

(3) THE ANTS ARE RELUCTANT TO MARCH IN FORMATION.

(4) THE RED ANTS ARE RELUCTANT TO FORM THE WORD RED

Maps

just a vague idea of wanting to explore maps , not of continents , not lands nor site location , not flow charts that point to virtual or intangible ideas or tasks , more of a map of objects , its internal construct , mechanical organs and human organs , mapping or layout the human internal organs( inside ) interacting with the external mechanical device organs (outside) , outlining and editing only the boundaries of interaction.

Coffee machine
One everyday example is a person drinking coffee , the coffee bean is eaten twice , first by the coffee maker which mechanical organs grind the beans into powder and liquifies it , 2nd by the person consuming it , mouth to throat , intestine , stomach ... so much like the way flies digest their food externally.

Dialysis machine
It is too surface or shallow of a connection if one connects to a machine simply by operating it , such as when one is riding a bicycle. The connection should be deeper than this , like when blood that flow in our veins transforms into electricty that flows into cables or fluid pressure that flows in tubes providing life to machines . The image is much like a patient with kidney failure , toxic blood flows out of the patient, into a machine-kidney and out comes cleansed blood which flow back into the patient.

Maybe the leaking of the blood into the machine do us some good , lowering blood pressure , a by-pass for clogg up veins . Side effects include numbing sensation in areas of low blood flow .

If blood is too sacred to share , another bodily fluid consideration is fats , to be fed into the machines , unlike blood we surely don't want it back .

Brain Sharing
Man and Dog for centuries they have evolve together , dog developed the ofactory sensors , become the external nose for Man who has a dull sense of smell , while Man instill a sense of order for the highly emotional dog.
Although their bodies and brains are separated in Man and Dog , they actually share one Mind. Man-Dog Mind.

Interior Design
It could also be a case of ID ( interior design ) , having only a Private bedroom dwelling , like an animal dwelling , where eating (dining and kitchen), shitting and bathing (toilet) , interaction (living room) are done outside , becomes part of the Public sphere .

If one occupies a room like one fills up water in a glass .... You occupies the room when you move into it , breathe and sleep in it . You occupies it more when you paint it , furnish it and decorate it. You occupies it completely when you call it home , thats when the glass is full.

Marking Spaces
Dog marks their territory by urine. Between dog to dog they understood well the line . Man has a poor sense of smell and highly dependent on vision. Paint yellow paint in the living spaces to demarcate your space , start with the floor , chair , sofa , bed space are which synomymous with territoral space. After that if the line happens to cut across things like cups , newspapers etc , the thing loses it fuctional utility and becomes the line or border. Eg if the line has been painted on the floor and on the cup on the floor , it is not a cup anymore , it is fixed and cannot be moved. Someone becames a transpasser when he/she picks up the line(formerly refered to as the cup) . The transpasser must be ready for an ugly confrontation.

Book
Another object-map example is books if one place them on the ground , contact on all sides , leaving no gaps would resemble land masses , or a place , and what if the pages of two books intersect , and books starts to pile up , folds , crumples , tears or ruptures ...

Linework for Dog(1) and Dog(2)

Linework for Dog(1)

Linework for Dog(2)

The Linework is different may be because of difference in materials:
(1) Dog1 ( canvas paper ) Dog2 ( canvas )
(2) Dog1 ( light modeling paste 200ml tube) Dog2 ( light modeling paste 946ml tub )
(3) Dog1 ( small size ) Dog2 ( large size )

Conclusion
After painting Dog(3)on canvas paper , light modeling paste tube
(1)small amount at a time rather than tube or tub is important .
(2)just outline not to fill up the body of the subject

Chinese Painting Animals Reference : Dog