Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2022 - Student interview - 04. Kittu Hoyne

KITTU HOYNE: Hi, my name is Kittu Hoyne, and I studied visual arts at MLC Burwood. My body of work 'A Portrait in Frequency' plays with themes of time and the expansion and fragmentation of self. I was really interested in creating a video work that made time feel almost elastic for the audience. I wanted to play with a single young girl who morphs and melts her face, shifting almost as if she's in some sort of metamorphosis, but she always comes back to herself.

Well, I had a lot of inspiring artists throughout my journey of creating this final piece including Bill Viola and Pipilotti Rist as sort of leaders and innovators in the video art scene. I was really inspired by Bill Viola's style. His meditative video works that really play with time. I was also inspired by sort of emerging digital artists that play with animation and 3D and 4D art. In terms of my portraiture, I was really inspired by the painter Francis Bacon, and the ability to play with the internal struggles and sort of frustrations of the human psyche through still images and portraiture.

My video piece plays with one single young girl subject. It's one isolated concentrated shot that I've edited using After Effects with many sort of filters and echoes to really distort and play with the single subject. The sound was a really important aspect of the video piece as well. I created my own soundtrack with sort of distorted electronic sounds and low frequencies that pair really well with the video piece and sort of enhance every gesture. They also sort of helped my video play with time and sort of distort her movements even more.

I hope that the audience can really immerse themselves in my video art piece. I know some people may find it a bit unnerving or unsettling, but I really hope that they can also find the beauty in it and also sort of read their own or interpret and react to the work in their own way, whether they see a reflection of themselves or sort of think about time or their sort of internal journey.

So, in terms of my final photographs, they're sort of a blend of photography and video. So, to create the final still images, I actually sort of edited video and photographs together to create this really blurred, distorted effect that you can also see in my video piece. I did multiple shoots to get these 5 final photographs, both on like dark black backdrops or green screen or on white backdrops.

In terms of my art practice, I had had a lot of experience with sort of film shoots through various projects in and out of school. In terms of learning After Effects and Photoshop, I am mostly self-taught. I watched a lot of online YouTube tutorials but also did a lot of personal experimentation. I sort of came across techniques and effects by just playing around with videos that I had.

Now that I have finished Year 12, I'm studying a double degree in design computing and marketing at Sydney Uni. I'm really interested in interaction design, user experience design and electronic arts. My advice for any students about to embark on their HSC visual arts journey is to always be on the lookout for inspiration because you never know what may spark a great idea and also always be experimenting with new mediums and concepts.

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