My first understanding over power would come about from my family and their understanding. Firstly, my family is into science and maths, unfortunately I don’t share their passion but it but I do enjoy learning about it. Being in this scientific family, when I think about things especially power, I think of power as a physical force. Below is the definition given by wikipedia and i again confirmed it with an encyclopaedia:
In physics, power (symbol: P) is the rate at which work is performed or energy is transmitted, or the amount of energy required or expended for a given unit of time. As a rate of change of work done or the energy of a subsystem, power is:
where P is power, W is work and t is time.
Once I had looked at this i wanted to create something that has raw power, as I didn’t want to go for all the conventional constraints around power. I decided to look into using power, in a way, as a spectacle and see how these can intertwine. I thought about the most powerful events or spectacle in our known universe. This being black holes and stars, and initially I wanted to start with something like this, maybe create an imagine or a video. Unfortunately I realised that I only had 2 weeks in order to complete my task and therefore needed to understand my limitations. So invevitably i scrapped that idea, and instead of going for the most powerful event in the universe, I went instead for the world. Instantly I thought of the nuclear weopon. The most powerful man made device we have ever seen and most likley will ever see. I started to do some research and found some quite amazing videos on youtube.
This is one of the first bombs that I heard of, called the Tsar. It was a Russian nuclear bomb with ten times the power of every bomb that went off in World War Two. Along with this bomb I managed to find out where the American’s test a large number of their nuclear bombs, in the Navarda desert. The google image on show shows the scale in which the American’s tested their bombs with the largest and most powerful to the top of the photo.
When I completed my research on the topic I found that actually it might be better for more as spectacle than the power theme. Therefore I opted to change my idea and instead of going for something spectacular, I have gone for something a bit more involved with the British people.
My Final artifact will be more of a political nature than my previous artifacts. Again I’m going to be using photoshop and images to create the theme. Initially I wanted to create an idea of fear when your walking home from the pub or a night club and you can sometimes get freaked out by noises and sounds that you hear. I went out to do some test shoots and see what I came up with usinig a Z1. I went to a local allyway and just walked down from end to end. Initially I was going to just use a normal shutter speed to make it look as if you were just walking down normally. But I then realised that it would look more authentic if the footage was slightly blured. I thought that the scenery could then spell out a word or look like something such as a face or a symbol. It might look normal from one position but change positions and you can see the word or symbol. I tried to experiment with this but was unable to actually come up with something substantial so I left it on the back burner and pursued another idea. Using the footage i’d captured, I could manipulate images using photoshop and inject them every 5 or so seconds as a flash back of a previous memory (obviously they would come up and leave in a split second, just long enough to see what it was about). Giving the power of fear an actual face as it were. Giving the audience something to be fearful of. I tried to work with this idea but again nothing came of it, so I decided to take my political approach which I had initially thought of.
I thought that most politicians have skelingtons in their closets, or atleast some sort of black hole following them around. Then it hit me, alot of politicians talk utter crap and maybe I could utilise this. I therefore decided to experiement with some of the images I could find on the internet. I looked at overseas politicians because president bush can me manipulated easily and I thought I’d have a go myself.
I get a lot of influence from music and one band in particular, Rage Against the Machine. The video below is my first RATM song and video I ever heard while I was on a plane flying to America. This band is one of the most revolutionary, politically opinionated and probably have the most arrests as a band than any other to have ever hit the music scene.
