Advanced Holography

PART. 21 Holography

I used to listen to this exact track all the time when I developed films in a dark room with the holograms I shot with a laser beam refraction. I put one solution in a deep tray, and I put in the film. I make sure the film is fully soaked in the solution, and disturb it a little. Sometimes I need to do this part for exactly 9 seconds. The length of time is dependent on how far your film was exposed to the laser beam refraction when it’s shot. It’s different each time. There’s an equation I used that I no longer remember.  This holography class was under my physics major requirements. The same class could count toward a physics elective or an art elective. I took it as a physics elective. 

During the 9 seconds, I couldn’t use a clock or a timer on my phone, so I played this song, and remembered 9 seconds was the flare synthesized sound coming on. I used this track as a time reference often. I’d put it on single repeat, and if I miss the beginning mark at 9 seconds, I’d just wait for it to run through the whole track, since I liked the track anyway. 

Turns out that 9-second mark was not close enough to 9 seconds, it was half a second off. Apparently the shorter the time you develop in that first solution, the more accurate the time of the development should be. For 9 seconds, it had to be exact. Though if it’s 2 minutes, you could miss a second or two without affecting the result too much. 

Then I take out the film with a tong, let the solution go from its surface. I put the film in another tray with another solution. I think I soaked the film here three times as long as the first solution. Then I take it out. I think I just let it dry on the table, I don’t remember hanging it ever, nor was there a setup for hanging developed films. It was an interesting experience for sure. At the end of the course, we had an art show, each of us had to submit a piece to it. Mine was Andy Worhol themed, with a picture of Marrilyn Moore, a crushed tomato can, and some dollar bills. The dollar bills were too light to stabilize, it moved a bit during exposure when the hologram was shot, so the film itself didn’t turn out too well. It looks a bit vague and obscure, but I kind of liked the look.

I liked coming up with a theme, finding the elements, combining them, and executing the photography. Each time it’s an open-ended question, up for interpretations, but I do have a message, from me to you, through the medium of my choice, and in this case, a hologram piece. We’d also critique each other’s work each time we met in class, which was twice a week, the rest of the time we were spending our alone time in developing rooms and photography room.

Critique, not criticize, critique. After I started working, I realized most people don’t understand the concept of critiquing a piece. It’s not about what’s bad about it, it’s never going to be perfect. It’s not about if you like it, if you’d watch it or not, it’s not about your personal preference. It’s about, if this is what this person is trying to do, is this the best way? How can we make it even closer to this person’s vision? How do we push it even further? How do we make it more interesting? That’s critiquing. 

Each week, we’d have a theme, and we’d each talk about our concept, and how we plan to execute it. We’d each give our critique if we have any. It’d never be “I don't like this” “I think if you do this it’d be better”. No no, it’s not about what you are trying to do, it’s about what she’s trying to do. She wants to make this into a screenplay, she has a concept, so how can we take that a step further, and make it even more interesting? Explosively interesting?

Part 22. Explosively Interesting!

My favorite kind of anything is anything that’s explosively interesting, whether it be art, or food, or movies, or books, or an activity, I’d better have a blast every time. If I have a bad experience twice in a row, it’s already a no go for me. However sometimes even if I have a bad experience over, and over again, I still keep trying after failing over and over. That’s because these things are important to me. Whether it be trying to understand my mom, my parents' generation and my culture, or understanding how my past has made me who I am today, or knowing what I want to do moving forward. These are things that matter to me. I don’t care if it takes a decade or two, heck, I don’t care if I spend my entire life trying, that’d still be better than giving up. I hate giving up, I’m not ready to give up. Isn’t living all about not giving up?

I like things that are explosively interesting. I know a lot of people who don’t enjoy interesting, they enjoy consistency and predictability. I know there are also people who don’t want anything to do with anything that’s remotely related to the word “explosive”, but I like explosions, and I like to play with fire. Like quite literally.

When I was maybe seven or eight years old I used to always want to volunteer to burn haystacks under this gigantic wok on top of an open fire pizza oven like situation, with just the oven, no trays. I’m not sure if this is making sense, but the point is, they needed me to burn hay for fire to cook. So I did that all the time. I like burning stuff. I continued to like burning stuff after that summer at my grandma’s in the countryside. Whenever I got a chance, I’d burn a newspaper book or two in the hallway, the floor was made of some sort of marble tile, it wouldn’t catch on fire. Or I would stick the burning end of newspaper out of the window, and let the ash fall over the clothes that our downstairs neighbors were trying to dry. They’be confused, what’s happened? For a while, they complained to my mom, and I said I knew nothing about it, until I triggered the fire alarm one day, I still didn’t get caught. After that, l learned to not trigger the fire alarm. I’m gonna do what I want to do. You can’t stop me, ha.

Part 23. Being Creative?

I know I made it sound like that physics elective was the first time I ever learned about art, but that’s hardly the case. My mom was a physics major, but she ended up working for an art school, under the digital art department. I used to type all her powerpoints and course syllabus for a class she was teaching, it was about how to use photoshop. I was maybe ten or eleven. 

Some of the assignments were quite challenging, like creating highlights on an ice cube inside a cup of coca cola for lighting effects. I still remember some of it, I did try a few assignments, following the instructions exactly. It worked. However, when I was given a variation of the same assignment, I had no idea how to achieve that, even though I had just used all the same tools to create the assignment before. I knew I could only follow step-by-step instructions for it - I didn’t fully understand the point of each step. That’s when I thought maybe digital art was not for me. 

Later when I was fifth or sixth grade, I took another art class for half a year, it was a pencil sketching class. I was asked to imitate a pencil drawing, usually animals, sometimes tigers, sometimes lions, or cats. I was really good at imitating the drawing, extremely detailed, with a little bit of my personal style and twist. However, when I was asked to draw for myself, I had nothing I wanted to draw. That’s when I thought maybe I will never be an artist. This isn’t for me, I don’t even like sitting there and sketching, I thought. 

Around the same time, the headmaster of my class at the elementary school I was going to started this diary train activity. By the way, I recently found out it was called “Cultural Department Creative Kindergarten” (文化厅艺术幼儿园), maybe that’s why it was the only schooling experience I liked ever, outside of Tahoe. 

The diary train was essentially a notebook that was given to each row of kids to take turns to write diaries in, but also to showcase things they wanted to share with the rest of the “train members”. If I remember correctly, I was already getting either A++ or A+ on all the weekly writings I did, which I found out later to be extremely rare. Different from the weekly writings, this diary train is more casual, “be creative, draw, you must decorate it”, the headmaster, who’s also the literature teacher said. 

I took liberty and drew a bunch, I did it in colored pencils, colored crayons, color markers. I realized I like copying the look of neon signs or the fonts and marker paintings of poster designs of restaurants or cafes in Japan or Taiwan, which looked more or less like pop art. I liked it, I liked pop art. But I didn't think it was art, I thought it was poster design. Of course, the headmaster thought it was brilliant, she showed my work in front of the class often. Come to think of it, she made me known, I can write, I can draw, I can experiment, and it’s good. I’m sure it had a lot to do with my dad always giving her gifts under the table, but I still learned what I learned.