Hello Steemers!

Whatsup!

My name is Samboleap Tol and I am currently studying Fine Arts at Sint Lucas School of Art and Design in Antwerp, Belgium and in September I will be commencing an semester's exchange at Central Saint Martin's in London, UK.

In the next coming posts I am going to share with you some of my artworks I have made in the last two years. It's quite untraditional to post 'works of art' on any blog platform - it's usually confined to visual portfolio's in either PDF form or websites that are distributed between actors within the art scene - and it's even more untraditional to explain the process around it.

But I thought, F it, why not? I want to share my art and art process with you because it governs my life. I am enchanted by it - I design my life around it and it gives me spiritual purpose. I would like to give you an insight on how it started for me, what my process was like and how I felt and thought about it. I hope it might inspire other people to consider art school or including creating art as a part of their life, or give clarity about at least one person's process in art school doing Fine Arts.

The first artwork I'd like to share with you is:

Seeing Hands

Seeing Hands, 2017, installation with video (3:05), beamer projection, smoke machine, plexi glass, 100 x 100 cm

How it started
I made this work under the tutelage of Ellen Augustynen, Marc Cassiers (my atelier teachers) and guestlecturer Karolien Chromiak. Karolien initiated a workshop around beamer and glitch-art, with beamer art being something I had been experimenting with a year before.

I started playing around with an Optima HD beamer at school. I dragged a piece of glass I had lying around in my studio in front of the beamer to see if any image would surface on the glass, and it would slightly, if it were dusty. I had been to an exhibition of some video art by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Brussels a year before where he used this rear projection method on sandblasted plexiglass.

This is an example of rear projection on sandblasted plexiglass from Youtube

The problem was that sandblasting is rather an industrial method so it's quite inaccessible for people who don't work in that particular industry to get anything sandblasted for a reasonable price. I thought about what other things could 'diffuse' light and thought: smoke! Of course!

Light diffusion looks like this.

So: something needs to intercept the direct light so it will reveal a projection, otherwise the light will just go through and shine rather then project. I actually started thinking about light and diffusion myself a few years ago when I started to understand the fundamentals of cinematography in film. Also photographers and phyicists think about these things.

I bought a cheap smoke machine and with the interception of the smoke the visual started to become more interesting - it had hints of threedimensionalism and holograms. I have always been fascinated by holograms as to me themetically is associated with ghosts and spirits.

I still had been using random visuals and wanted to shoot some content. Here's an image of what it looked like when I was using some random visual:
This is a photo with a random projection combined with a plexiglass and smoke

Uninspired with anything I could project, I started to dance in my room. My room is currently my atelier and I had some black screen up on the wall.

As I coincidently was wearing a dark red sweater and started dancing in my room, it seemed like the camera would only capture the lighted objects, which were my hands. My Khmerness immediately came out and did some freestyle apsara-ish type moves!

A screenshot of when I was dancing by myself in my room

This was one side of my room/atelier in Antwerp

I like how apsara is a gestural dance and in some of my work I focus on systems of language. Yet my gestures were very, let's say, uncontrolled - so the gestures became very random. I had a deep think on how to give it more direction.

My Eureka! moment
I thought: of course, YIPOON! I contacted the talented Khmer Belgian dancer and sister from another mister Yipoon Chiem. She blends Khmer apsara dance with breakdance and has been doing it for years now. You can see some footage here. She came over to Antwerp from Brussels and within 15 mins we shot enough usable footage.

A still of Yipoon's hands in my studio

Great, I thought. During the Open Days of my school I presented my work in a rather open space to see what it meant. In an open space you really have the idea of a standalone hologram.

Yet when it is in an enclosed space the rays difussed by the smoke are clearer. The downside is that you have the image reflected on the walls that enclose it.

The final work was presented this way:

Unfortunately it's hard to see what it's like on video. Isn't it ironic how I capture 3D on 2D and project it to give it the illusion of 3D to then try and capture it on 2D video again? Lol, only video artists will understand the irony.

The feedback
The critique is how it is presented and the quality of the image and materials. The image is shot on my low budget mid range DSLR which is hardly wired for video making. Also, ideally I would've had created a situation where it was standalone yet enclosed for the smoke (which is impossible, but you can never please art teachers!).

Otherwise, kids seem to love it (smoke! yay!) and it's quite an eye catcher. It's been linked to scenegraphy of dance performances, linked to systems of language, language / dance. To me it's associated with a brique a braque form of animism and holograms.

That's it! Thanks for reading!