The blog in chronological order
31 October 2008
Just few words of introduction
My name is Paz Spinelli. I’m Italian and in 2006 I moved from a small town in Tuscany to London. I consider myself quite creative; I’m a visual media enthusiast, I’m keen on photography, I love to work on illustrations, I once was crazy for painting and drawing, media that still use from time to time even though my skills, once excellent, are nowdays a little rusty. I stumbled on CG in 1990 when I’ve met the glorious Apple Macintosh IIcx during an art course at the School of Visual Art in New York and fell -desperately- in love with the digital. I also have prolific mind, which is great of course unless (like me) you spread yourself too wide and end up at the mercy of your own projects, building around-the-clock huge piles of drafts/sketches/ideas/notes with the risk of been buried under a paper avalanche, if the wind blows through the window… So that’s what this blog is for, to help me concentrate, to keep me busy in a -hopefully- fruitful way and also to clean a bit my desk drawer. And to save me from virtual congelation, of course. Once the projects will begin to have a sensible form (or will be completed) they’ll be catalogued in fair copy in the Xperimental pages of my site which I invite you to visit if you want to have a bird’s eye view of my production.
“Walk on the grass”, gatefold album cover project (2006)
5 November 2008
New Atlantis: the story so far
New Atlantis is a project that originates from three contemporaneous works of mine called “Machines”, “Utopia” and “Cities”. In 2003, working with Bryce, I began to play around with some stone textures. I was basically inspired by the floating rocks by René Magritte, my favourite artist.
Anyway that was the starting point and my interpretation of these masterpieces was a very modest attempt only partially achieved, representing… Well, I’d say, a quite odd floating stone-egg !
Machines was a work originated from a simple study about shapes and forms but it became a three-dimensional oriented project when I started to build a scenery that could contain them.
At the same time I was working on another small project called Utopia. Once again, to improve my skills in 3D design, I was trying to build some stylized virtual cities. These metropolis were intended as idyllic place for an hypothetical future race of human beings even if, contrary to the traditional vision about utopian societies, my metropolis were huge and ultramodern in consequence of the exponential growth of the world population.
The cities of Utopia were just an exercise in the beginning, but then, as my landscapes evolved, I was cough up in a story that was growing in my mind
The story
Hundreds of years in the future (maybe thousands) the human race has evolved in a peaceful, enlightened society. In this ideal world, war is just a far memory of the past and peace is guaranteed not by dropping bombs, but by building schools. Utopia is finally a reality. Nature lives and prospers in synchrony with the urban growth and the modern cities are beautiful, almost ethereal in their architectonic magnificence: seductive arches, shining metal structures, hi-tech buildings.
During this “state of the art” era, something awakes in the depth of the Earth. Right from its “bones”, enormous spheres of rock emerge. They are living beings, animated by immaculate consciences. They were on the Earth before life itself was created but with the development of the civilization, they decided to return to the bowels of the earth, buried themselves to escape men’s notice. Coming back to the surface, some of the spheres evolves in a new race of living beings. They’re not made of stone anymore, but appears as glowing spheres of light.
As the time goes bye, they keep changing in shapes and material: they want to communicate with men therefore, inspired by the human architecture, they become living structures made of shining steel. At this point of the story, I start wandering about the possible end of this relationship between Machines and men. Were they really destined to live happily ever after? Well, I have to admit that this idea was fascinating… But then I began to think that in the real world such utopian society was sooner or later doomed to failure because it seems that the human race can’t live without suffering. Maybe this has something to do with the need to overcome our own limits, I don’t know. However, my illustrations became more and more dark and at the end I realized that what I was representing was the death of a civilization.
So, as you’ll see, after few bright pictures, comes the gloomy age of decline, when buildings collapse on their own foundation and skies are darkened by pollution and the evolved Machines die and turn once again to stone. And in the very end, when no living souls are left behind and the earth has become an empty and quiet desert, nature takes over ruins and rubble. And where once was civilization, only wilderness remains.
Please note: the complete display of the New Atlantis’ pictures is HERE >> (you’ll find it on the right side of the page).
12 November 2008
Monsters of London
Lately I’m working on some cartoonish illustrations built with the excellent open source Inkscape. The reason why I chose this specific software is because its efficient tools allow to create vectors drawing directly within the program. The results are graphically smooth and highly customizable and give me the freedom to modify the picture while working on it.
Aiming to keep himself fit, Edmund never misses the chance of doing some Parkour in between meals
The idea of Monsters of London sprout in my mind one afternoon I was sitting in a Pub. In the table next to mine there was a couple right in the middle of a painful breaking up. Painful for him, at least, a sweet chubby bloke wearing a yellow sweater; he was witnessing the disintegration of his love story with pure incredulity painted on his face. The scene was so sad, with the girl totally indifferent to the boy’s desperation and him, trying not to burst into tears right there, in front of everybody. I started to scribble on a notepad and I transformed the couple in two creatures and later, at home, I went through some of my old photos and put together my version of the scene, adding also a caption.
Led by his notorious phlegm, George welcomed Magda’s decision with moderate disappointment.
I really enjoy to translate everyday situations that draw my attention in cartoons. In my mind, these acetate monsters live among us but can’t be seen. They are from out of space, fallen on Earth for some mysterious cosmic event and learnt the art of disguise so well that only few people can actually detect them.
Looking at himself in the buildings’ windows of Leadenhall Street, all of a sudden Toto suspected he wasn’t on Xdrll anymore.
Master of disguise, Bernard had no problem to infiltrate the Saint James Park’s geese tribes looking for free meals and accommodation.
27 November 2008
Having fun with RGB
This is a classic exercise about the use of the additive colour model red-blue-green. The reason I spent some time playing around with the separation of the additive primary colours has a lot to do with my traditional photography training. All the people that, like me, learned photography using film, had in the past to come to a compromise because film (and consequent printing) was an expensive process therefore experimentation in photography was something to do in moderation. Today, with digital photography, this limit has been overcome and all creatives can enjoy the good old times experimentation with little waste of money.
RGB separation is today a very easy process; if once we were forced to screw one after the other three filters on the lens, today many graphic programs are able to do the same thing in a matter of seconds, giving us also the possibility to play around with every shade of the colour spectrum.
The pictures that follow show the setting in Photoshop I use to form the RGB layers. It’s basically the same workflow used to merge together multiple exposures: you start with three (or more) photos, underexpose them a little and then use the “screen” mode to blend them together. The difference is that before the blending, you can add an extra layer for the colour and, to simulate the filter, you have to set the blending mode of the colour on “multiply”. If you click on the pictures to enlarge them, you’ll understand better what I mean; it’s really an easy process (even though a little time consuming). The three original photos I use here are a sequence showing a bus travelling towards me.
Basic red/blue/green separation.
Cyan/magenta and yellow version
Orange/lime green and purple funky version
30 November 2008
Kissing the night air
This is a collection of photographs about London windows and what the house’s owners (or tenants) display behind the glass.
Walking around my neighbourhood in West London when I first arrived in the U.K., I was surprised to see so many things visible through the house’s windows. Maybe it’s because Victorian villas have usually very large windows and unless you live with the curtains always closed, it’s impossible to keep your home (and your private life) separate from the outside world, but I found it an interesting starting point for reflections upon other’s people life, dreams and beliefs.
The thing that really struck me, was that in many houses the objects exhibited near the windows were turned outwards with the clear intention of communicate something to the outside. This peculiar way of interact with unknown people, inspired me to not only welcome that request for attention but also to record it and amplify it through the use of the camera.
The title originates from a famous quotation from Franz Kafka (I’m not sure but I believe it comes from the letters to his secret lover, the journalist and writer Milena Jesenská) that says:
“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
Explore the photo enlarging it in a new window>>
What Kafka writes to express a pointless action (to kiss the air) as reply to the unfair and equally useless request to love someone from a distance, I like to see it here as a decision to bring the communication to a wider context as last resource when other social relationships fail. It’s not necessarily a pointless action and, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be interpreted as a desperate gesture inspired by loneliness but, on the contrary, as a desire born from love to overcome social and physical boundaries in search of intellectual elective affinities.
7 December 2008
More about New Atlantis
New Atlantis is become a difficult project to handle. Not because I don’t find it interesting anymore (actually quite the contrary) but because I’m realizing it doesn’t have any appealing for a possible commercial future. That’s ok, non complaining really -90% of the things I like work on has very little to do with commercial prospects- but that’s the reason I couldn’t dedicate much time to it. I’m still working on expanding the New Atlantis’ world though, adding bits and pieces from time to time. Lately I’ve worked on a new point of view about the “after the fall” panoramas, a kind of cross-section showing the ruins of the metropolis and the wildlife reconquesting their habitats.
12 January 2009
Webcamgrams
Webcamgrams is an amusement that came out from a exchange of posts between yours truly and Davide di Nardo, my long time good friend. At that time I was experimenting with time-lapse video and, since -at usual- I didn’t have money to waste, I found a free software on the web to shoot webcam pics at customized intervals (AvaCam). Talking about the idea and showing Davide the test video I made, we start discussing how fun would be to put someone in front of a so set webcam and see how he/she would behave.
People act invariably strangely if they are left alone in a room with a video-camera at their disposal but usually the consequent video itself doesn’t show the weirdness of the behaviour at its best because realtime footage runs too fast and actions are compressed in an apparent -even if sometime peculiar- normality. But if you have the opportunity to pull apart the video and view the single frames as portrait pictures, well, you’ll have some surprises. A photograph, in its immobility, allow the viewer to freeze himself in time because what he’s watching is a moment frozen in time; and if you display an action divided in motionless seconds in front of him, he’ll perceive the passing of time with a distorted rhythm, submerging himself in an extended lapse of time. The result is an unusual outlook of the world where time doesn’t exists anymore but instead is narrated through a collection of moments invisible in real life which are, at the same time, fundamental concepts and final result of an action.
The way you display the pictures is also important; since the passing of time is recreated firstly dissecting the action and then pulling it back together again, the order you show the stills changes the perception of reality in the viewer. Like notes on a pentagram, the stills from a sequence can be played in an harmonic or inharmonic series increasing the sense of comprehension or dizziness in who’s watching. Same thing can be told about the physical position of the photos on a wall. The majority of people read and write horizontally from left to right, so if you hang similar pics in a straight line from left to right, that leads the viewer to interpret the space as a logical timeline where the action starts from the first picture on the left and proceeds until the last on the right. Hanging the shots in a straight line but this time vertically, still gives the viewer a sense of time but since this ideal upright line is something that seems to perpendicularly break a regular timeline, the actions portrayed in the sequence look like they’re’ happening in a very short period of time, almost simultaneously. And if you arrange the pictures in a group, the timeline is definitively compromised and the photos become a new object that’s isolated in time and contained in space by the comprehensive shape created by the picture’s assemblage.
The last one is my favourite method to show the stills and, in this specific case, I find useful to my purpose to arrange the portraits in an ordered square or rectangular shape because that’s how museums display objects (like insects or fossils in thecae); in this way, the viewer receives the feeling of examining a precious collection of moments detached from the original time or space and the result is a multi-faceted portrait of one subject.
3 January 2009
Invasion of Plastic Dinosaurs
The idea of Invasion of the Plastic Dinosaurs is basically what the title says, London attacked by toy monsters. They are not evil, they don’t know why are here, they probably don’t ever know where they are; they just go around but since they are enormous (and made of heavy plastic) they represent a menace.
The idea of using plastic toy dinosaurs in photographs of the real London, came from my personal nostalgic memory of the Japanese Godzilla’s movies. I remember the first time I went to the cinema; I was probably 7 or 8 years old and even if it’s not clear anymore how I ended up in the theatre with all my classmates, I’ll never forget the emotions I felt when the light went out and some crazy rubber -there is a person inside, how ridiculous!- creatures started to “acting” on the screen.
Please, remember that at the time in Italy the television was still in black and white and also the tv schedule was limited at few hours every day (starting at 5 in the afternoon with what was then called “the youths’ telly”, a series of documentary and kids’s programmes) so try to imagine what a 160 feet green monster projected on a cinema screen would look for a little girl.
Back to the story, I like to think that, in some way, we have found a way to coexist. Plastic dinosaurs don’t eat therefore humans will survive. Some trouble would be represented by their size and the fact that they actually don’t give a damn about who’s around (they don’t have a brain) so I presume that at some point the city council would try to embank them but this creatures are so huge and so difficult to control that maybe the whole town will be forced to leave.
For this photos I used a fake lomo effect and very over-saturated colours as a tribute to old movie poster and, at the same time, to transmit a snapshot feeling.
9 February 2009
The Victorian Explorer
This little project derives from “Multiform”, a previous experiment about multiple exposure (see here>>). Few months ago I went to Kew Gardens for a job for my agency. I went two days in a row because there were a lot of thing to see (and also because I really love the park) and I ended up with something like 200 good photos. Not all of them were suitable for Alamy but (as usual) I kept the “leftovers” anyway, planning to use them sooner or later.
The idea here is to give the viewer the feeling of discover some old, forgotten Victorian age plates, maybe discarded by the photographer because faulty (the double exposures). The English gardens work perfectly well to maintain the illusion of the historical period and the result is, I believe, quite convincing.
There are two versions for every picture, one in sepia tone and another one with faded colours. Still I’m not sure which one is better, they look very different, both good in their own way.
The double exposure gives the photos a peculiar atmosphere: it is real -it’s a photo after all- but at the same time there is something mysterious about it, something magical. To obtain this effect, I dug in my memories. When I was a child, I used to play in the huge garden around our house. I remember very well the feeling of been alone in what I considered my kingdom, how amazing was to play in that enchanted land full of fantastical creature and adventures.
I see the Victorian Age as a child’s faded memory because its recollections came to me through literature. Jules Verne, the Italian adventures’ writer Emilio Salgari, Albert Robida with its Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul and the wonderful films of Georges Méliès, I grew up with all of them and they still live in me.
The return of the Giant Hogweed
Multiple exposures are quite easy to blend in Photoshop: what you need is to open two or three or more pictures of the same size (not a lot more otherwise the result could be too much chaotic) and underexpose them a bit; then just use the “screen” mode to blend the layers together leaving the one at the bottom untouched. Another way to achieve a similar result, is to use Picasa, the free graphic editor from Google which has a specific entry to blend together multiple exposures. There are pros and cons about the use of Picasa for this specific task: the pros are that it’s fast and that the software takes care of the exposure (so you don’t have to underexpose the images before); the cons are that the resulting picture can be saved as jpg only and that the ppi can be (I believe) no more of 72.
15 February 2009
Morphing away
I’ve just discovered a freeware software called Sqirlz Morph that is driving me crazy! I like to use the morph effect with series of still pictures because the animation that comes out is usually quite disturbing. I’m not talking of course of the traditional morphing effect (a human face that dissolves in a cat or, if you really hate your subject, in a pig/frog/spider etc) I’m talking about bracketing around with your camera and then putting together the photos in a kind of liquid perpetual fading that deforms every picture in a artistic (-ish) way. So I took my friend Davide’s portraits from the Webcamgrams project (yeah, he’s my favourite cavy) and I ended up with this creepy animation, which is a quite funny thing since Davide is the less creepy person I know.