Everest

Back in Barcelona for a week!

As soon as I went off the plane I started feeling like in the old times here, and what a better way to celebrate I am back than taking some pictures in an Everest gig.

This guys have been "Smoking the Town" (as the name of their first album says) for nearly a year and a half and even though they couldn't count on the rough-Eddie Vedder-like singer's voice, the performance was as powerful as always.

Rorschach Test

I think the experimentation is leading me to an answer for the memory's brief!

Having a look at the results of my first experiments of the Action Developing I realized how much they reminded me of that kind of psychological test called Rorschach Test... and researching a bit about this test I found out that it could be related to memory, as the interpretations the subject is giving to the ink stains come from his/her memories.

With this in mind, this morning I took some digital pictures of a clock/necklace, inverted the colors and printed them on some wasted film I had in my room. Then, I developed the pictures in the darkroom using the same technique as on Friday, but this time trying to control the liquid to get a more or less symmetrical image.

 

Action developing

Yesterday I tried a new technique in the Darkroom... I called it Action Developing, making reference to  Jackson Pollock's Action Painting.

The technique is simple: once you have the photo-sensible paper exposed, instead of putting it in the developing machine, or in the developing liquid, you just have to splash some of the liquid using a paintbrush, a spray... and wait for the magic to take place! However, you have to be careful and fast putting the paper in the stopping liquid when you see the image appearing, otherwise it will get too dark.

Copy Room

Using the copy room for the first time, I managed to take some decent pictures of my first sketchbook (Mechanical Botanical brief) and the final results, as well as from the new brief's sketchbook.

 The new brief is about memory and how is it related to photography. I'm not sure about what I'm going to do, but for the moment I'm thinking of something related to water.

Tourism

This weekend I've been moving around London because my brother has come to visit me.

A Trampled Rose

Today we set up our first group exhibition at LCC!

A Trampled Rose. It's a series of photocopied plastic flowers printed in A0 size. It's more or less related to the Mechanical Botanical brief of the first project, so the flowers, organic elements, have been reproduced massively, which refers to a mechanical process.

This is the flower I brought! 

Maschinenmensch

The last three weeks I've been working in my first project at university! The brief was about the relationship between organic and artificial (Mechanical Botanical)... So I decided to create a series of six portraits and turn that human faces into android-robotic ones...!

There's an hypothesis called Uncanny Valley that says that "when human replicas look and act almost like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers", so I also tried to make something to cause a more or less creepy effect.

At first I did some collage to edit the human faces and then I experimented with cutting off parts of the picture and putting a light box underneath them to let the light pass trough the empty spaces.

This last pitctures are the combination of the color and the black and white portraits, one on top of the other one. I like this effect, It reminds me of a daguerrotype.

 

All-in-one

After have been looking for a printer during the last two weeks, finally today I got one! I could scan the photograms I did in the Darkroom more or less decently and here they are!

This last one is an experiment I want to develop in my future days making photograms!