Lu Xinjian

http://www.cncreate.org/artist-lu-xinjian/ Posted with Post to Tumblr

Benefits Assessment Bouncers (1972)

A bridge too far

Another gif from the Explain The Unexplained brief.

Gif animation made from the artwork from the Explain The Unexplained.

Arzach flies places. By Moebius

Vinyl Cut Workshop

Here are two elements that I used a vinyl plotter to cut out for the one day workshop. They were hand drawn pen drawings that I vectorised in Adobe Illustrator and created the correct file type for the plotter.

I was really happy with the results of this one day workshop. 

Personal Made Public: Bike Share

AG1003 Visual Language

Originally when I approached this project I wanted to run off the themes that I had looked at in my previous project, but instead of looking at broken bikes, I would take a bike and create a hand styled paint scheme. The ideas came from looking at the artwork that is currently used on bikes where it normally set out in a neutral manor for mass-market appeal, where the bikes that take the option for custom artwork are hand made and cost thousands of pounds. Then I contrasted this with art commonly seen on American car and bike culture, and the artwork used on Banger Race cars, both a hand made style to save money and give that true uniqueness, and with the latter, something set up with no lasting longevity.

I decided to use sign writing paint to create a truly unique bike that would reflect me but would cost a fraction of the cost to take to a professional bodywork shop. But from here I didn’t know that the idea had enough substance, I started painting the frame but I was looking a different ways I could utilise the object of the bike and the artwork on the bike. Talking with other tutors we started to discuss using the bike its self as a piece of art, lending the bike to someone to go and take it away visiting somewhere new and creating a piece of artwork about that experience. Or even having the bike as a fully loanable bike where it could be past on to person to person and create a journey its self that could be tracked by people who had an interest in it. 

But from here this is where things start to slow down. Firstly we lost our workspace in the university and painting the bike in my small flat was beginning to become problems due to paint fumes and a lack of ventilation. Also the bike frame that I had acquired was only semi assembled so I still needed to construct the rest of it to able to create the “experiences”, but time wasn’t available to do that without a large cost. I feel earlier on I should have stopped creating something so complex when I found out that our communal workspace would go and try and create something less ambitious. Although I feel like the idea is still a good one and it will be something I will look to complete over the summer period.

Supporting video from the Ceased In Transit Zine

Collage Workshop

This was what I created during the collage workshop, I enjoyed it as its not something that I’ve really worked with before but it was really fun creating these pictures. Again I feel like what I took from this was themes, ideas and working styles that I can come back to and use with other projects.

Semiotics Day Projects

The idea came from designing a personal coat of arms. Using elements that related to me and my background like the chain for cycling, crewe on the hill to the left and Brighton on the right. This was a interesting insight into semiotics and was the building blocks for the semiotic project.

This was my first attempt into working with semiotic elements in a day project, I struggled with this to begin with, working with the semiotic elements and with the composition. But what I took from it was lessons that I would utilise in upcoming projects.

Semiotics Project No 5: Metropolis/Ceased In Transit

AG1003. Visual Language

With all the options available to choose from, working through them to choose the topic that connected the most to me took a while, but in the end I decided to choose “Option 4: Metropolis”. To begin with, this was probably my last choice, but with a week to mull over them, a friend and me headed to my tutors to talk though each one and try and find come common ground with one of the briefs. Personally, the difficulty that I had was that each brief was so different to the next and with such distinctive outcomes, I had to try and simulate though what I could do and how I could take that idea forward and relate it to myself personally. But while having a discussion with one of my peers and the tutor, I started to piece together a connection between the city and how in Brighton there are so many abandoned bikes around the city. Running with this idea I started to look into the main themes of the static motions of these machines that are locked up, but could be the key to congesting the metropolis. With this there came a darker side to each locked up machine, I started to see them as carcasses left to rot around the city, a socially acceptable and mostly overlooked spectacle as over time they started to rot and were slowly picked apart until unrecognisable.

Here, I had to decide on how I could take these ideas and form them into a finished product. I decided that I had fined a number of bikes in different stages of abandonment and record them in their state of disrepair. But where as just recording them as inanimate objects, I would look into the environment that they existed in, and like a scientist observing nature, try and record what the bike could see. My first attempt at this was to film each bike in their habitat, and then using software that would work with Google cardboard, I could take people into a virtual reality recreation of each bike in its location, bringing the situation directly to the Audience. 

Unfortunately, the app that I downloaded for my phone didn’t work and I couldn’t find a way to recreate it with the time and resources that I had, so I hand to drop that part of the project and decide on a contingency. Although not being to investigate each location scientifically, I still had footage that I had recorded from several different locations that I held onto and I decided that I needed to approach this from a different angle. Being slightly in crisis with half of my planned project not being viably able to complete, I came back to something I Had found in my research, Craig Atkinson’s Café Royal Books. Seeing how effective these photographic essays could be, I used this language to re approach the subject, taking out my 35mm film camera and photographing a number of other bikes around central Brighton. After developing the photographs, creating a number of inked illustrations, and writing a short essay on how these bikes reflected the society they existed in, I compiled them in Adobe InDesign, creating the zine. Although experiencing technical problems with the imposition of the document and centralising it for print on my end and with the printers, I managed to overcome them and create a hand bound high quality printed magazine. With some time to spare I went back and edited the footage in the style that I had presented the photographs and created a short film that ran parallel to them. With this I made sure that focused on each machine and without a soundtrack, I hoped that the audio of each location would connect with the viewer and spark emotions with the objects plight. 

I was happy with the final outcome and I have summited it to two bicycle journals that focus on cycling culture (Boneshaker Magazine and The Ride Journal) with the hope to submit to even more places.

Lifedrawing