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 :-)

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 

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.

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."

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:

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.