Tuesday, 17th July, 2007

Watch the World(s).

link machinima secondlife

Robbie Dingo building Van Gogh's "Starry Night". A wonderfully beautiful piece of machinima.

Yes, and hopefully not just a bucket-load of melting clocks dangling from trees

Typical

random

OK, so you wake up far too early — which is only natural given how light the mornings are at the moment (and your blinds are up). Your mind is full of things (that will get blogged later) meaning that it's nigh-on impossible for you to get back to sleep. For maybe an hour or so, you lie in bed toying with the idea of getting up, but decide instead to give it another go and thrust your face back into the pillows. For maybe another hour, thoughts churn around your head, gradually fading, until the luxury of sleep starts to slip its way back into your eyelids.

And then your alarm goes off.

Seeing Yellow

link conspiracy

"When you print on a color laser printer, it's likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. These marks exist to allow the printer companies and governments to track and identify you " — the skeptic in me is going to wait until I've tried this before I let my conspiracy theories run amok

/seconds. Things That Move

Issue number 6 of the art journal that I seem to spend more and more time each month putting together

Critical Reflection

'Scuse me for repetition, but I just wanted to touch back on the subject of that photograph from yesterday.

There was something I didn't really mention at the time — how difficult it can be to make considered objective decisions about photographs (and work in general, come to think of it) when there's a great level of personal emotional investment in them.

If you take the series of events that led me to post something that I (frankly) am not alltogether 'comfortable' with looking at online, I think what I mean is probably clear...

It was pretty-much the very first thing I did when I got home from Scotland the other day — short of lugging all the bin-liners of clothes and make-up back down from the loft, and (natch) having a quick cheeky glass of red. I probably wouldn't have dressed up much at all had my mother not forced a massive Deprincess on me, but the removal (and therefore denial) of my usual freedoms had the effect of almost demanding that I regain control of my 'space' in a suitably flamboyant fashion.

Which is why I went against my usual habits, and actually shaved for a change. And put on make-up. And wore my bestest dress

But hey, that's irrelevant. Kinda.

The thing is that after almost every dress-up-for-the-camera session I do (she said, realising that she's probably repeating herself a bit too much here), I have another stab at taking a picture of myself as a girl dressed as a guy. I'm dying (half-jokingly) to use the words "I'm not a guy, I'm a girl in a suit ... but it's a very nice suit" sometime

Honestly, I do this every time — with almost total failure-type results. As I've said elsewhere, the very thing that I find attractive about women wearing suits and ties — the conflict and jarring contrast between the masculine and the feminine — tends to work against me. The masculine shapes of the collar highlight my masculinity, and the 'phallicness' of the tie only serves to draw attention to how long my face is — whereas in a dress, things like necklines and stuff tend to shift the focus away from it.

So I'd taken off the wedding dress, popped on a shirt, and started messing around with different ties and poses. I must have taken about sixty-odd — each one with the tantalising thumbnail promise of "a good 'un" when seen in the little LCD screen on the back of my SLR.

After I'd finished (where "finished" is a euphamism), I shoved the card into my Mac, and patiently waited for them to load. Initially, things looked good — there are quite a few ones of the wedding dress that I might do something with at some other stage (or maybe not, they are all a bit samey), but as the 'suited tv' ones started to fill my iPhoto window, the excitement was replaced with a sense of "arse".

None of them were any good — at least, not as good as I'd thought they were.

So on Sunday night, all I did was dick around with the wedding dress one (and, can I just say, I'm rather bloody chuffed with it, thank you ) leaving the other ones be and presuming that I couldn't use them for anything.

But yesterday morning, I thought I'd just have a quick stab at two of them. The first one, I kinda over-processed, but it turned out OK...

...but it wasn't quite was I was after.

The other one — the one at the top of yesterday — I must have played around at it for hours. There's god-knows how many levels involved in that one — some to lighten things, some to darken others, some to add detail, some to enhance the colour.

The thing is though, I kept staring and staring at it — wondering whether or not it was any good. And I surprised myself how hard it was to come to a decision. In fact, it got harder and harder the more I looked at it — every time I took a break from it, I'd return to it with the same 'jarred' reaction. But after a few seconds it would start to grow on me again.

Like I said though, I think the more personal investment you have in something, the less able you are to make an objective critique of it. And for me, that photo has a ton of investment in it. It's not just a photo where I'm doing my usual "Hey look everyone! I'm a guy who looks like a girl — do you agree?" — I'm baring a side of me that I don't often let slip into public.

I mean, as I said yesterday, there's a lot of my sexuality bound up in that image — it's an exposure (perhaps) of the 'solitary' nature of some of my crossdressing.

But as well as that, it's possibly quite unique in the sense that I took one of the photos where I'm not adopting my usual three-quarters-from-the-left pose, nor am I doing any of the things that I normally try and do to pull a 'girl-face' (like raising my eyebrows waaay too high, or pulling a smirk).

Whenever I go out dressed, there's always two stages to the night. One in which I feel nervous and exposed, the other where I feel safe. "Safe", not in the context of "physically safe" — "safe" in a "safe with some history" kinda thing.

I'm not putting that very well. What I kinda mean is that when I'm actually at a venue, surrounded by other trannies, I have some form of 'previous' to register against, however I happen to look at the time. I've seen an awful lot of photographs of me at an event, where I don't look remotely like the woman I delude myself into thinking that I do — the fleeting glimpses in similarly-posed photographs are overwhelmed by the 'not my good side' shots.

But it doesn't really matter, because in those kinds of situations, we all suspend our disbeliefs (to an extent) — the fluidity of movement, and the photographic memories we have of people tend to cancel out the fact that we don't always look like our photos 'in the flesh'. We have our own sets of criteria by which we form aesthetic judgements of each other — criteria that are lacking in the first stage of a night ... the journey to the venue.

And in some senses, that's kinda how I felt yesterday before I did actually uplpoad that photo to Flickr. There's no 'previous' to that photo. I mention time and time again that I chuck a good 90% of the photos I take away into archives, because I don't look like 'her' in them — and that was one of them. It's a much more 'honest' image of what I look like when dressed, but it lacks that transformational 'performance' that I try to achieve in my usual photography.

I dunno. I'm probably making far too much out of something that most other people have gone "Meh" to, rather than "WTF?". I guess I just wanted to stress two things about it: (1) It's a very personal photograph that I really did stare at for hours trying to decide about. (2) It so looks better big — in the small sizes, the dark parts overwhelm slightly. At the big sizes, they spread apart and let some of the more delicate parts breathe.

...

Anyways, I should probably get on with some work...

I'm doing that "talking complete bollocks" thing again, aren't I?

Query Redirection

Dear person who keeps coming here from a search for "swim OR bathe OR dive in a wedding dress",

I think this is what you're after

you didn't make them for me

Hmm, you know, I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. There's always an inseperable sense of 'audience' whenever you make something. But that's something for another day.

snigger

I'm so glad that someone got that

Currantly

photo

Yes, that is PowerPoint. No, I don't feel particularly proud of myself.

Although I am hoping to wow the lecture-attendees tomorrow by using my mobile phone to control it

they always look unfamiliar when I come back to them

Just like me and my self-portraits