Personal Project Ideas (Powerpoint Slides) ~~ Jesse L Baird

In my personal project, I am focusing on the idea that we as humans have an inmate urge to possess the things that matter to us, but we are incapable of doing this with locations because they are too big to be possessed. So, we try to capture the essence of what a place means to us in a variety of way. In my personal project, I will try to capture Rock Canyon in as many ways as I can. Following are some examples of the types of approaches I will take.

The four pictures to the left are four Polaroids that I took while traveling from Idaho back to Utah last summer. They are the four pictures I had to capture the entire experience of driving. I coupled two images of the road together, as well as two images of fake animals I encountered on my way back. The other pictures are further examples of Polaroids of places that I found online (Although, I do have an extensive collection of Polaroids that I have taken myself).

I really like Polaroids because I like being constrained to a certain (limited) number of exposures that I can take. I have few memories from my childhood, and as a result the memories that I do have are incredibly precious to me. That is the idea I am focusing on with these Polaroids. I will limit myself to a number (says three, or five--with Monument Valley requiring more) and I will have to capture the space as best I can with those exposures. 

These are images that were developed from film that had been left out and exposed to the elements (Specifically water damage). I will attempt to do a similar thing in Rock Canyon. Using a disposable camera I will take pictures of rock canyon, and then I will leave the roll of film out and exposed to the elements of Rock Canyon. That way, when I develop them we will be able to see both the literal place (in the images) and the more unseen elements of the places, manifested on film.

This images shows birds on a wire, that someone then transformed into a musical staff. Transforming the landscape into another medium, like this, could be an interesting way to capture a space such as Rock Canyon.

Inspired by Stan Brakhage's Stellar and Mothlight, I will take close-up, burst photos of the textures of a places, and then show them sequentially in a video (with each image lasting about four frames). I might couple this image with a soundscape, or leave them silent. I'll attempt to echo Brakhage's works and create a piece (or pieces) that will be able to really capture the feeling (literally, the way a place physically feels) of a place, as well as attempting to capture the essence of what the place means to me. Posted elsewhere on the blog is an example of this project in action, with Rock Canyon.

Combining different views of the same place, I am going to construct a mosaic for each place we go. A sort of quilt, made from different shots of the sky taken at different places within a certain location, as well as different angles and at different times.

Another idea I had was to take bacteria samples from different sources within a location (Specifically focusing on the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water) and seeing what they're cultures would look like. I'm making the unseen seen, and showing (hopefully) just how different these places that are near each other really are (both from location to location, and from bacterial sources within a single location. Hopefully the cultures turn out interesting, and that I am able to adequately create what I hope to.