Tuesday 27 November 2012

Kaliedoscope Concept

So I thought it would be a good idea to make a kaleidoscope out of a close up screen shot of pixels on an analogue television. Then Project this onto myself and stand in front of it with a t-shirt on. Here's some stills from the film below.







So having recorded the projection/performance I would now stretch the t-shirt I wore in the video like a canvas over a frame.
Then I re project the recorded video onto the frame with the t shirt on. The t shirt being on the frame not only acts as a screen but also has the intent to render me as the person in front of the projection naked. There is a metaphor for the t-shirt being like our ego our surface persona that weathers the everyday. 

I had thought about printing onto the shirts to add another physical layer of depth to the piece, and as I have been interested in the idea of self and reflection I am drawn back the story of narcissus. In Particular Oscar Wild's version of the story; where there is this relationship between the observer and the observed which becomes a representation of the human struggle with the existence of the other; This sense of separation.  Visually I am addressing this by using different layers or mirroring and repetition, across mediums. Print, textiles and video. Similarly to Velazquez in his painting below, I intend to displace the viewer, ask them to consider the dimensions of the work and their position in relation to it.


Here is an image of what I am considering printing onto the white shirt:






Monday 26 November 2012

2 years in the making


'The Source' is a video installation that is currently at Tate Liverpool  and features filmed conversations with creative individuals – including BeckJack White and Tilda Swinton – as they share their thoughts on the roots and realization of the creative process. In summary it is an investigation into creativity; the versatility of the creative process from one individual to another and how these different approaches relate and overlap. He says in this vein "One thing I found really interesting about this project is how many avenues it exposed."



This  video is an extract from a conversation between Doug Aitken and the artist Ryan Trecartin. For me there are some seminal suggestions being made about the approach of creating art works. The liberation of different influences is discussed, along with a notion of transcending cultural and media boundaries. The two also discuss the role of the viewer in Ryan's work and how the narrative is created in a dialect between the work and the viewer. The segment of the interview I am discussing I have transcribed below.

R.T. "The editorial process for the viewer kind of happens inside themselves, cause without the viewer the arc isn't really there, cause there are so many potential arcs happening that you have to curate that narrative yourself."
D.A. "Your kind of empowered to make these links. . ."

R.T. "Yeah were able to see sort of the symbolic meaning and a vibe, rather then just an image."

D.A. "And would you say that more about navigating in an intuitive way, rather then a literal way?"
R.T. "Yeah, like our intuitive intelligence is being developed, and were also more proud of it now I think, and were also recognising that its valid and important. Like our curatorial  our editorial, our hobbyest voices are all growing."

D.A. "I think in many ways, if anything its a form of empowerment . . ."

R.T. "Yeah."
D.A. ". . .and i really like that, because I don't want to be fed anything that's on the top of a pyramid."
R.T. "Yeah. TV, Movies, games, the Art world, Writing and journalism, its all gonna merge into creative programming. The intersection of all those things, it wont have a hierarchy, I don't think."
D.A. "Yeah, and simply just who you are, every viewer has their own energy source; and as they move through time, whats around them merges and transforms constantly."
R.T. "Yeah. I want there to be no such thing as reality or fantasy. It just is, you know. What it is, when it is." 


Elizabeth Price

     Recently whilst in London i took some time to see the turner prize shortlist at Tate Britain. There among the other three artists was Elizabeth Price's video 'Choir'. The film is part of a series of three films shown at her exhibition at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art. They had to say about her work:
Elizabeth Price creates immersive video installations incorporating digital moving image, text and music. They draw upon existing archives of film, photography and physical collections of art to invent new, apocalyptic narratives.
Each video opens by establishing a particular setting: an auditorium, a sculpture gallery or, in her newest work, a wrecked container ship at the bottom of the sea. She draws upon historical film, photographic archives and collections of artifacts to generate fantasy episodes. 

The word 'fantasy' is used here and in the same context that Trecartin pursues a subversion of reality and fantasy, here Price crafts a narrative from various existing sources where differing from Trecartins approach, there is a more prescribed narrative that appears. Particularly in choir, separate situation and components are described quite literally and yet they are composed together in a way which is both imaginative and unexpected. Just as Price explains the link between hand gestures in an interview about Choir below:


Now to my work
     This week I had a meeting with a tutor of mine John Czernik. We hadn't met up this year and so i was trying to update him and we spoke about the work I had done and how my ideas and developed. After 15 minuets or so I He asked where my recent kaleidoscope video had come from and so i explained that I have edited a video i'd made on foundation 2 years ago. After agreeing that we felt the new kaleidoscope work was too 'pretty' in its abstraction, I showed him the original video. Watch below:

We sat and laughed, the video ended, and John tunred to me and asked me how long it had taken to develop the process for this result. I remembered back and realised that it had taken me a good 4 to 5 months of work to source all the programs and come to grips with it. He looked at me and asked why I would put all that work in and not use this technique more; At that moment I realised two things, one that the best piece of work I'd made was over two years ago, and two, that i wanted to make more of it. This thought has been renforced through exposure to the artists above.
Developing down this avenue, surprisingly talks very clearly to my interest in the palimpsest, and the overlapping of both culture and imagery in my recent works this academic year. Here are two works by Luke Fowler, the piece is a photo collage using both juxtaposition of imagery and composition to create a visual narrative:
 All Day Monday And Tuesday (Lost Lake), Luke Fowler,  2010
 All Day Monday And Tuesday (Library of Congress), Luke Fowler,  2010 

These two images serve as a metaphor for the sort of consideration I want to making in relation to the development of the video work. The playing off of imagery against each other and the narratives that can be created within that. Interestingly I saw this work at the Turner Prize alongside Elizabeth Price's; at the time it inspired me with the possibility of collage and montage, i suppose it was telling when put into context with my tutor later that week. Price uses text and audio in her collage. Audio I have tried, Text I have not, and this will be among my thoughts going forward.

Monday 19 November 2012

Palimpsest And Kaleidoscope



              David Hockney, Nude, 1984                                      Pablo Picasso, Girl with Mandolin, 1910


To view things from multiple perspectives; the palimpsest is washed and rewritten imbuing the parchment with some sort of history, as if the paper were a vessel for information:



Here I have taken a film made years ago and transformed it into something Kaleidoscopic. 
"kaleidoscope" is derived from the Ancient Greek καλός (kalos), "beautiful, beauty",[2] εἶδος (eidos), "that which is seen: form, shape"[3] and σκοπέω (skopeō), "to look to, to examine",[4] hence "observer of beautiful forms." Wikipedia




Tuesday 13 November 2012

Whats the fucking point = Growing Pains

Whats the fucking point, its an easy thing to ask though there must be something that made me want to do art. There must be. Is it because it offers an escape from reality, or because it allows us to see whats real; is it because there is the priceless, unattainable thing that we try to point our finger at, asking the questions that arise as part of being human, or is it because we feel we can be the genius of creation, producing something that will make the others throw their wealth at us which we can use to fulfill our needs. I suppose like any object it can be used in different ways, there are objectives. Is expression not enough, the truth of interpretation, though through collective ideas we develop cultures and what is it that they value, art culture is not art and yet it is the institute in which I find myself supplicating too, I am training to open debate of all things and yet i'm not sure anyone wants to listen. Ahh maybe it is this that is causing me such disturbance, am i worried that no one wants to listen to me, I have always prided my self on being intelligent and now my pride has lost its measuring tape, how can i compare how big my dick is now. I feel like I am constantly justifying something to myself; second guessing is boring me. Potential stares me in the face, out of reach laughing. why am i so angry that its laughing at . . .

Ok. Rant over. My mum just come and told me that she has been worried about me and it seems that this is timely evidence of that. stewing for a minuet, I searched for some reasoning, and as i listened I heard it pour forward. beating tears to the punch, I declared 'There must be a reason why I do this, there must be a reason why I am here. I need to stop second guessing myself because its tiring me out, Its repressive, this weekend i stepped out of my comfort zone for one of the first times in years and the view was beautiful." as we hugged the tears flowed and smiling cheeks cushioned the streams. If its making me cry at least i know there's something true happening, tears never lie. Growing pains :-)

Saturday 10 November 2012

Image Compression Revisited

 Have you ever driven somewhere, only to arrive at your destination and wonder, "how did I even get here" in some sense or another. Most drivers have experienced something of the sort, The left spatially aware side of the brain takes over and the right brain which perceives time is subdued; there is more information about it here. In response to this I have filmed various car journeys with a camera attached to my rear-view mirror. Then I have collected all the frames and converted them into a mean of the thousands of stills. Two examples can be seen directly below:




Idris Khan's piece below uses a similar process only starting with stills instead of video, though the considerations for temporarily are less obvious the aesthetic of the image relates very clearly.   

Every…William Turner Postcard From Tate Britain, 2004

Now Continuing my interest with time and the ever present now, I began to reconsider the relvenace of the Ouroboros and my readings in the concerned post.

Considering the visual composition of the mythological creature, I warped the car journeys compressed images into a similar formation.




I decided to try using the same process with the portrait video image compression, here is how it went:




I tried using another process of image warping involving rotation and here is the result.


Now instead of using an mean of all the images I decided to use a process which adds the value of all of them together, a summation. Now in theory I had every image being visible at once.



After warping the image i wanted to experiment further with the image. The sum of all these images was now being represented in this single plane of pixels. I began to consider the entropy of memory that I have been considering through the video work. and if like thermal dynamic entropy i could disperse the image into an all encompassing vessel of these pixels,; as if everything of the image was there, had been absorbed, and yet like the car journey, it is hazy in memory. You know you got from point A to point B, but what happened to everything in between? or what does it matter? I used a prcoess which rpeatedly disperses each pixel in a random direction to create a dispersion.




 this version is blurred to exaggerate the sense of dissolve through dispersion.

Here are more images that speak to this line of thought:








Electric Sheep & Hiroshi Sugimoto

In continuing my venture in creating a video palimpsest using stock video footage, I came across the 'Electric Sheep' project. The way in which the data is designed to collate and generate these images asks similar questions of computers as I am asking of perception, how do we as humans collate all the information we are given, and when we look upon this mass of information as a single image, what does it say.




There is a certain similarity:

Beyond this I want to note the relevance of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work, this exploration of time and the culmination of information or energy, as seen in his long exposures of screens below.

Orinda Theater, Orinda, 1992 

La Paloma, Encinitas, 1993 

Thursday 8 November 2012

Palimpsest

The Kaleidoscope as Palimpsest


http://www.thegenxmom.com/hippies/index_files/kaleidoscope.html

Here is some narrative which exemplifies the sort of ambiguity of literal narrative that I believe we live in, and how we some how make sense of this.


Going back to my original adventure into Datamoshing process; where i was once describing the chaos of media that we are exposed to, it seems now I am seeing clarity in this chaos, Like the Mandelbrot there is a simplicity to its design, a beauty in the Kaleidoscopes pattern.




Saturday 3 November 2012

Clifford Stoll

"All truth is one in this light
May Science and Religion en devour here for the steady evolution of mankind
From darkness to light, form narrowness to broad mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance
It is the voice of life, which calls us to come and learn."


Sunday 28 October 2012

St Sepulchre Church Exhibiton

This summer, some of the then second year students managed to aquire space at the loval St Sepulchre church. Having applied to show my work in the exhibition i was accepted, and so began the process of helping set up the show. The two pieces I presented can be seen below.





Here is an extract from an interview about the pieces:

 Some photos of the church venue:




Here are a couple of my work hung:



Here are some group photos, the first of the exhibiting artists and student organizers  the second also including the mayor, and members of the church staff:





Friday 26 October 2012

Becomings and Ouroboros

Becomings

I came across a book in the library titled 'Becomings: Explorations of Time, Memory, and Futures' by Elizabeth Grosz. Time and memory I have been considering though my work since the beginning of the term however the future has escaped me so far.

"Determinism annihilates any future uncontained by the past and present" p.4 so here in the books introduction Grosz is highlighting that the everyday definition of time as a vector or arrow, pre-supposes that the future is inherently predictable in relation to the past/present.

In this section of the book on page 86 Grosz considers the 'glace' as the view of life in the present, without preconception, but pure unfiltered momentary viewing.

"Unlike any arrow, this shot (the glance) does not simply go forward to its target, following a one-way trajectory that, once completed, lapses into nonbeing or at least nonactivity. Instead, the glance loops back onto the subject who emitted it; it folds back on the subject, coils over onto this subject, falling back onto it. . . . The clearest case in point is glancing at oneself in the mirror. Here I start by looking out from myself; taking my glance with me outward, i send it before me into the mirror, where I see myself glancing at myself, catching myself in the act, as it were. No sooner does this happen, however, than my glanced-at glance returns to me and is absorbed by the very face that sent it out in the first place: it folds back over this face, rejoining it at its own surface, as if to acknowledge this face as its own progenitor. Yet the glance returns to me not simply as to the same self, but to a self augmented by its own looking "

In this describes a sort of duality with the present and the past, that the two unfold simultaneously. Bergson talked in his own terms about time and the mirror:

"Pure Memory is to perception that which the image appercieved behind the mirror is to the object placed before it. The object is touched as well as seen: it can act on us as we act on it; it is pregnant with possible actions, it is actual. The image is virtual and, although similar to the object, incapable of doing what the object does. Our actual existence, insofar as it unfolds in time. is thus doubled with a virtual existence, with an image in a mirror." from L'energie Spirituelle, by Bergson.


This takes me back to my considerations of Narcissus in a previous post HERE

The Ouroboros

The Ouroboros, The snake that devours its self, has appeared in may different cultures and has resembled through varying themes an illustration of unity. Here is a look at the symbol and its significance.

Here is another perspective that considers Ouroboros in relation to seemingly separate observations.


Like the snake the earth appears to be devoured and re summoned in its cycle of darkness and light.

Guido Cagnacci, Allegoria della vita umana, c.1650


The allegory of human life by Cagnacci uses the Ouroboros as a symbol in conjunction with the skull and flower representing creation and destruction, life and death, the hourglass symbolizing temporarily of human life.