I guess you never know where your work is going to take you. Right now I'm considering filming a sex tape. How I got here . . .
Creating my grey paintings, I became fascinated by the concept, that the universe only exists because we are here to witness it, and that this symbiosis is akin to a 'grey area' where perception and reality meld into something malleable In retrospect I realised the work was also about a meeting of different peoples perspectives. It became about the experience of empathy.
Through hindsight, now I recognise that I am promoting the appreciation of a unity that we all share. People Often talk about losing themselves in the moment. What this means exactly is something I want to explore.
Gustav Klimt - The Kiss
Konstantin Brancusi - The Kiss
These two works are examples of physical embrace between two people and the intimacy of this connection. The figures appear as a single compositional element, unified. In exploring options for articulating someone losing themselves, these works suggest that n losing ourselves we can find our 'oneness', like the single piece of rock carved into Brancusi's sculpture.
Sex provides a vessel in which to present this concept; addressing the physical, tangible connection as well as introducing a temporality to the design. The moment. Climax is seen as an ephemeral ecstasy. Though this euphoria transcends sensation; the self dissolves through conciousness , and the eternal present is realised.
I'd been considering simply filming two people having sex and slowing it into something akin to Bill Viola's video work (seen below).
Now I feel that a more congruent exploration of my interests with the concept would be to explore the notion of time in video and how I can condense this document of the sexual experience into a moment. Consider Idris's Khans work only with video.
Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All is an LA collective of young producers, rappers, photographers, writers, directors, t-shirt makers, skateboarders, bloggers and all-in-all cult creators. This group consists of highly driven musical artists, creating some of the most unhinged, funny and profound hip hop in the market today.
These young minds are brash, bizarre and amazing. The collective acts with all the love and support of a family - but with a load of sweets, vomit, dinosaurs and alligator wrestling thrown in for good measure. The music is a mixture of 'anarchy rap,' the warped humour of 'salad fingers' and what sounds like the over-usage of a thesaurus. Each member has a personal style, creating grey areas in the categorising of musical genres - and when they work together they blur the lines further, which has created a huge fan base and worldwide acclaim.
Since their origins in 2008 the collective have produced over 20 albums, bagged themselves a TV show, won VMA's, created a clothing label and made 'Musty Butthole' trend on Twitter!
Odd Future have been criticised for their use of homophobic and misogynistic lyrics, but they claim not to mean any of it and view the words as a test for the uninitiated and lazy critics.
Regardless of the criticism, group leader Tyler the Creator has not only become famous, but made all his best pals famous too. They have single-handedly caused so much hype and aggro, that they are impossible to ignore. Their tongue in cheek references to drugs and murder mingle childishly with catfish, rainbows, Earls big lips, swag, unicorns and centaurs. They cause offence, but say it's only to make fools of the easily offended.
Expect a bombardment from the screwy world of Odd Future, on tour and at home in LA, with screaming fans, intimate honest interviews and Taco's guide to surviving a zombie attack. In the words of Jasper Dolphin...SHAZAM! Article taken from here
So earlier in the year I spent some time looking at the 'Grey Area' between Light And Dark, the Minimal and the Graphic; the work opened a conversation for the area between different cultural attitudes, and I began using this as a metaphor, for the distance that can appear between two peoples perceptions of life when they try to start a dialect. The indeterminate horizons that sit above the images ambiguous landscapes aim to emphasise this duality.
The ambigious nature of the image and its graphic layer of social commentary is my attempt to bring into question: How much of what is apparent to us, is shared with others? . . . And how much of what's true is lost in translation?
Memory
Following from the previous questions with the grey work I began to question the reliability of not only what we perceive, but also what we visually see. I came across this little test here (below):
Retinal scan
Though this is evdience of our inability to 100% trust what it is we see, there is a larger question at hand about the nature of how our visual sensory perception is then trasnslated into our mental perception of the thing. The disparity between the physical and the meta-physical. This thread discusses the topic in more detail.
So if we cant fully trust what it is that we are seeing, then im now curious about how it is that we can trust our memories. How much of what we remember is truly remembered, considering that some of it wasn't ever really 'seen' in the first place.
Heres an example of an old video tape. Imagining that as our memories get replayed over and over and time passes, just like the tape, some information is lost:
I want to start considering how I can begin to respond to this developing idea. So I begin to consider ways in which i can translate the concept of memory and its ambiguity into work.
I saw this video In the TED talks (follow the link if interested, they have an amazing collection of presentations). The speaker talks about mapping a working model of the brain and explains some of the structural elements of how we create our thoughts and images in a vast web of neuro-electrical networking. Fascinated, I am considering how I can some how incorporate this weblike structure and grid into my imagery.
Say how the pathways reminded me of minesweeper, how you would click one square and all of a sudden you could unlock an entire area, like a puzzle our memories can be triggered by specific stimulus. and yet also like minesweeper, these areas leave the screen with a barron area or nothing, like gaps in our memory.
Here are images of family memories, I have distorted the images taken from videos, using a process popularly known as 'Datamoshing'.
Now combining the minesweeper gridded system representing memory and the images of family memories (below):
Video Tape:
I took a diferent aprroach to the concept here, using the physical material of the video tape to create a (not really sure what to call it); literally its a reflective sculpture I suppose. The tape was wrapped around a frame over and over until a solid mesh was made. The reflective nature of the material turns the frame into a mirror. Where the tape and been crossed and overlapped, the reflected image is distorted. This has a lot of relevance to my questions about the nature of video as well as a very relevant relationship to the way a old video tape losses its video quality (as seen in the video earlier). Now however instead of the work being pre-determined, the piece establishes an interactivity with the audience, in real time. There is a photo of the piece and me in its reflection below.
I am now currently in the process of figuring a way to cause the frame to vibrate. This will add another level of distortion to the reflection, in real time. Similar to Jeppe Hein's mirror here:
Here is a video of the frame being vibrated manually as a test of the effect:
Memory & Self Over the summer I read a book called 'The Power Of Now' By Eckhart Tolle, The book brings into question our ideas of self, the image of our ego and how we associate our 'self' with particualr things which we use to define us as individuals. Ultimatly it argues the detrimental nature of the ego and how our alienation, wether it be concious or not is delision, taking us away from the essence of being and the interconnectivity that we all share. Read the book if anything I just blurted is of interest to you.
Now in relation to the development of my work; A large art of where we gain our identity is from our memories, as if the things in the past define us in the present. Theres a scene in the remake of the film 'Total Recall' where the protagonist is asked about the nature of self and individuality.
If you had forgotten everything you owned, everyone you knew, your name, the date, the time, would you still be you? The answer is ofcourse, yes? right?
When people say 'I lost my self in the moment', what does this really mean . . . You become so present, that your ego is lost, this sense of self dissipates, you transcend your 'self'? Now time is in question; the video of the vibrating canvas shares a temporal element, as we experience the distortion second by second, frame by frame.
I used the process I used to make the memory images above, to repeat a single video clip over and over, As the video replays, the process losses some of the original clip data each time, as it is constantly overwritten the image is distorted. This represents my curiousity about memory and acts as a metaphor for our inability to live in the past as it forever recesses from the present into obscurity.
I'll be back with more, this is the beginning. . .
