Chris Bennett

Projects

Site still under construction. Thanks for your patience!

Here you can have a look at some of the project-based work I've been doing. I am only half-way through college and, as such, allow myself the freedom to pick an area that interests me and run with it. I'll begin by explaining a few of my influences and show some of the things that make me tick, along with information on the research that goes into what I produce.

This page is currently under construction and appologies for there not being much here. I update my site on a weekly basis, so please come back and see whats new!

Our first University project was quite cool and quite unexpected. Although I did pick Visual Studies so I guess anything was possible. Our first project began by being assigned a partner from the class (someone we didn't know) and discussing a little about each other - generally getting to know the other person. The project was then revealed to be a "portrait" of the other person. This could either be interpreted as a literal portrait, or something completely abstract - so long as the work uses the partner as a starting point.

I love experimenting with different ways of working, so doing something like drawing or painting a literal portrait didn't jump my guns. Instead, I learned a little about my partner and she told me she loves natural forms, screen printing said forms (leaves etc). My initial idea of exploring natural forms really appealed to me as its a subject area which fascinates me from multiple points of view.

Here are some initial photographs I took relating to natural forms. I wanted to be kinda spur-of-the-moment so went outside with my Macro lens looking for interesting wildlife/foliage shots - anything that appealed (to me?) visually. Enjoy :)

Our second University project was also pretty cool. We could pick one of four words: Fear, Flight, Frantic or Flat and then base our project on the chosen word. I picked FLIGHT as I was pretty interested in flying around and generally being a bit of an idiot for 10 weeks.

For this project it was important that I worked away from my usual style (strict, formal, precise) and let myself flow more freely, allowing a sense of fun and play come into my work.

For this project it was important that I worked away from my usual style (strict, formal, precise) and let myself flow more freely, allowing a sense of fun and play come into my work. A kind of ironic look at flight and how things can't fly seemed an intresting enough concept to investigate. Along with sketchbook work I've documented most of the things I've done using a camcorder, which gives a better idea of the things I've been doing. The following vid was a test in both how the camcorder worked and a look into throwing things that couldn't fly. Here is a brief list of things that, in fact, can't fly.

Stuff That Can't Fly

MUSIC INSPIRED BY FLIGHT

I wanted to use music and sound again in this project, but applied better than the last project. I composed these two pieces by using the elegance and grace of flight (particularly bird flight) as an inspiration. There are some clips from videos further down this page from the BBC LIFE documentary which was probably my biggest inspiration.

STANLEY Interpretive Dance Collaboration

As part of my investigations into the grace and elegance of flight (particularly bird flight) I composed some music to convey the spirit and emotion of how I felt about the subject. I then took it a stage further and worked with a University dance group called STANLEY to do some interpretive dance, responding to the music and footage of the birds (which was projected onto a wall, but you can't see this in the vid).

It worked very well I think, I organised it a few weeks in advance and made sure everything was good to go for the day, including booking a camcorder. I decided to take part myself, as I have been attending STANLEY for a couple of weeks now in an effort to get more involved in my course and with classmates. THe people who took part enjoyed having the chance to do some dance improvisation and commented that they don't often get chance to just do whatever they like in response to something. As a piece of art (is it art?) it didn't quite work so well in a short-term capacity. A way of improving it would be to edit the random bird footage into a film of some kind and apply music more specifically. By improvising everything I reached a high level of creative freedom from everyone involved, but the downside is that is lacked coherant structure - something that a well-choreographed routine would provide. I'd definately consider working in a similar way in the future and I really enjoyed the collaboration!

Jump Drawings

One specific aspect of flight, which is also it's most fundamental, is that of not being on the ground. I have always been fairly interested in creative and experimental markmaking and one of my tutors, Chris Hann, suggested it would be good to follow this theme in more detail. I decided to do some drawings, but with one key element for successful drawing missing: the ground! I took it upon myself to attach pieces of card to walls but just out of reach so that I had to literally leap into the air to draw on it. By drawing in this way not only to do restrict yourself to the possible outcomes (in terms of technique, form, shapes available etc) but you supply a very energetic input. Drawing in this way takes a huge amount of effort and I was really tired after making just 3. I loved doing these, I've been into abstract expressionism for a very long time and this was a great chance to make something similar. One key difference between the two is that mine is forced into abstraction via the kinetic process, whereas the artists of the 20th Century (Klein, Rothko, Gottlieb, Pollock et al) carefully considered their work - in effect, they weren't jumping around when they did it!

Jump Drawing Collaboration

The next step in making these "jump drawings" was to bring a friend and do it together. By working with others you get to interact with another mind and your creative output increases dramatically. Not only that, but my friend, Matt, had great ideas in how we could approach the work. He suggested we try jumping up at the roof (rather than high walls) and then we further refined this by combining the two and jumping from chairs (at dangerous heights...) and making a mark on the paper as we fell back to the ground. This was great fun and produced some lively pieces of work.

Trying To Fly

One of the key aspects of the project had to be a sense of fun and play. I really wanted to have a good time on this one. I had inspiration from two tutors here, Chriss Hann, and SHawn Camp. Both were great and encouraged me to be playful with ideas. I figured that because I was doing a project on flight it might be a good idea to try and actually fly. So...here is me and my friend Sam trying to fly. Needless to say, it didn't work! It was great fun though.

Bird Footage

As part of my investigations into the grace and elegance of flight (particularly bird flight) I wanted to capture and observe the movement of the birds themselves. I watched the whole series of David Attenborough's Life of Birds initially to learn more about these graceful mammals. I've included some of my favourite clips, along with my own footage of local birds flying around. Their graceful flight seems very similar to dancing - or is it that our dancing seems very graceful to their flight? This footage was what sparked the idea to collaborate with the STANLEY dance group and also to create music based around this singular theme of elegance and grace.

Check out that astonishing footage! It makes me want to become a nature photographer/filmmaker! Look out for the Lammergeir footage around 6Min into the clip. It is astonishing how easily such a large bird can stay airborne and its physiology is a testament to the mindless brilliance of evolution.

The local birds were hard to film as they were flying around close to the ground and moving very quickly! I had to use a small, handheld camera to capture their movement.

I found this amazing digital art project by an artist called Kevin Webster. It uses digital software (such as Maya) to create stunning and dynamic animations of simulated bird movement, filling the gaps of passage in with vibrant colour - making it easier to see the pattern of motion. I think this is really amazing and I'd love to see it installed at a local exhibition. This is an example of what more advanced programming skills could do for me, which is something I will need to develop in the future.

As part of my videos on learning to fly, I tried to take off by running as fast as I could and flapping my arms. This is my point of view, recorded by strapping the camera to my chest with copious amounts of rope and duct tape. Again, not so successful!

The following pictures are from the "jump drawings" collection, including a selection of close up photographs to show the surface detail.

The main success of the project has been the engagement with the work. During the first 6 out of 10 weeks I wasn't really interested and was even considering changing to another subject here at NUCA, but slowly I began to warm to Visual Studies and the last couple of weeks of the project was amazing. I'm amped up and ready to go for the new project and I thought it would be nice to include a quick shot of my new studio space - at last I'm working in and around the VS Studio! Haha!

New studio space:

These drawings were made by attaching some chalk to some string and hanging it from an overhead bar. The chalk could then be swung around and the pendulum effect created the spirals and dashes. The idea here was to allow the freedom of motion in the string and chalk, with my only input being initial momentum of the swing.

Here is a quick close up of the surface of the drawing. I'm really pleased with how they turned out. I could have used more colours and done a more thorough examination of the technique and how it can be controlled, guided and developed further.

As I was going to do a narration over the top of the video (like in 14th Arrondissement) I needed to be able to record myself. I used to Sound workshop at Uni to do some quick tests and then borrowed a microphone so that I could record at home. I used a fairly standard mic but it crackled and hissed quite a lot so I had to borrow a pair of tights from my friend Claudia and speak through those to minimise excess background noise. It worked pretty well but I still needed to clip the unwanted high and low noises manually. The recording was made and mixed in Cubase 4 along with the audio track. I wanted a fairly upbeat yet mellow piece to go with the film and narration so I chose a smooth jazz number called Despertar by the Aisha Duo. It worked well with both the film and the narrated track, so I'm quite please with how it turned out.

The video itself was edited together in FinalCut Pro on a mac and was then dropped into AfterEffects where I added a quick title sequence and the mixed-down audio track which I made earlier in Cubase.

Part of the submission is this website! I wanted to better show my work rather than talking through a sketchbook (which is pretty boring these days). Considering all the film development I had done it worked much better to present this website with the work on and also allows people all over the world to access it and see how I worked through to my final idea for this project.

The following two pictures are just samples of the code, as I created this website myself and added all the new code manually to create this submission piece.

The first "project" at University is a fun, little one. We have to send a postcard to the course leader (Chris Locke) once per week for the eleven weeks between now and starting on the course. I'll add the postcards as I do them, here are the first couple for now:

Colour Studies

"Collection"

This project had me looking at a collection, drawing it then creatively enveloping it. That was the simplified run-down of what I was asked to do by the brief. Thankfully, the brief was open in terms of what the collection was and how it was to enveloped. At the time I had this near fanatical fixation on colour - inspired by legends such as Mark Rothko, Norman Mclaren and Howard Hodgkins. I decided, then, to collect "colours". This gave me the creative freedom I needed and also the critical backdrop to the practicality of a realistic selection method. The initial research consisted of looking at just what "colour" is, how it is used (both by myself and other artists) and how it can be manipulated and, essentially, "collectified".

To start with, I created numerous colour studies - excercises into a spontaneous output of coloured forms. Similarly, mixed media was used, from pastel to paint and from pen to pencil.

After looking at some colour studies I experimented a little with "creative envelopments", studying the works of Christo and some smaller scale installation art. I was particularly interested in whether or not a colour can be destroyed, self-decontructed perhaps. The best way to describe it would be a Schrödinger's cat of colour; I was, in essence, trying to create an [artistic] visual representation of the Uncertainty Principle, shown (simplified) here:

I found a thought-model of one of Einstein's theorems for a similar area of quantum mechanics which read:

"Consider a box filled with light.The box has a shutter, which opens and quickly closes by a clock at a precise time, and some of the light escapes. We can set the clock so that the time that the energy escapes is known. To measure the amount of energy that leaves, Einstein proposed weighing the box just after the emission. The missing energy will lessen the weight of the box. If the box is mounted on a scale, it is naively possible to adjust the parameters so that the uncertainty principle is violated." - Einstein

Quite nifty, I thought - it was the first line that grabbed me; "a box filled with light". So, I decided to make one. I took a small box I had used to store some little wire insects I made and placed a small, self-powered LED inside it. Now, what I am getting at here is: is it still light (colour) if it cannot be seen? Does light need to enter our eyes and our brain process the electrical signals in order for us to "see" it before it becomes real? (Can you tell I'm a Matrix fan, yet?)

Moving on from this I decided to "wrap" something. The "something" does not matter, I am not objectifying anything nor taking away from any object - it is a mere thought experiment expressed visually. I had some blue acetate lying around on my desk and wrapped it up tightly in black tissue paper, which I also had lying around on my desk. The result was quite interesting and here is a photo:

Here is another idea for an envelopment (click to enlarge):

It was time to look more at some colours and I found that I really had too much choice - there were colours everywhere and I wanted to include everything in my collection. This wasn't feasible so instead I took a different approach; using colour as a thought (a meme, even) and using a self-contained deconstruction as the creative envelopment. This lead on nicely from the Uncertainty Principle I was looking at earlier and, having been told by my tutor I must get off my "fixation on colours", I decided to take away colour instead. Before I could do this I had to find something associated heavily with colour and it wasn't until I was sat eating a banana that I thought about using fruit. Fruit is an interesting subject to consider and comes in many different (but fairly simple) sizes, shapes and colours. Children often learn about colours through fruit and I thought it was a wholesome and universal objectification of "colour" in a rudimentary form. Now, what was interesting was when I thought about how to take the colour away. The first idea was to photograph it in black and white, but this seemed a little simple. Instead, I took an apple and painted it with white acrylic as a quick test.

Look at all the wonderful colours here, I really must visit Asia and take some photographs of my own...

And here's the painted apple test:

The image didn't look half as bad as I imagined it would, but instead had quite an unusual look to it. You can almost forget that it is an apple, let alone a juicy, green one. To develop this a little further I took some more fruit and painted them either black or white. I then arranged them on a white background and photographed them in black and white (using a Canon EOS 400D) and printed the shot out at A3 using a fancy Epson printer. Here is the final shot:

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A project I decided to do today after an unusual dream with coloured lightbulbs. I went down to ASDA and picked up some cheap 40watt lightbulbs. I had some acrylic paint at home already and put it to good use painting the lightbulbs different colours. I wanted to achieve a similar effect to the black/white fruit in the previous project. This aim slowly gave way to the photography idea as I realised I could actually fit these lightbulbs into my own room's main light fitting. Coloured light! Yay! Kinda like a cheap-ass disco...

Anyway, I stuck the blue painted bulb in first and took some abstract shots with both my normal and Infrared Cameras. Here's what happened:

This was one of my final projects at college. I did a lot of research on science in art and art in science and realised there is no difference. They are both the same, in essence, one just happens to be a little more precise than the other. This work involved making a giant sheet canvas (yes, I built it myself) and then shining lights on it. Fairly easy, but I wanted no part of the creation of the image on the canvas, I'm not a painter here, just an observer. The rest is upto you.