For Seminar 10th December[[[ Finding our voices ]]]

Because we have just finished our public space projects and we have shown all our work, I felt a bit stuck as to what I was going to discuss for todays seminar.

However, I'm going to focus on the idea of the new project, finding out where our interests lie. What we are each trying to do is to accumulate the ideas and concepts and theoretical practices that interest us. In the light of all this, I thought the best thing to do was to literally, have a look on the web and see if anything
interests me and to figure out why it does so. It is definitely important to understand why it is we like a work, as in turn it will help us shape our own understanding of what it is we are interested in.

One of the works I found particularly interesting was a piece called Ordinary Show By Vanessa Louzon. Here is an exerpt explaining the work:

Ordinary Show is an ongoing internet-based project that started in 2008 in Tel Aviv, Israel.
A single white page is filled with a long series of extremely short looped video clips, like a deconstructed film stretched over space and fragmented into scenes put one next to the other and played at the same time.
The artist uses the page as her diary. She obsessively records everything around her: the mundane, the small, the insignificant, the repetitive, the beautiful, the ugly, the flashy, the mechanical, as not to miss anything, as if everything was to suddenly stop. A strip-show neon light flashing, a supermarket close circuit TV, a lady bathing in the sea, are thus frozen in time as they loop indefinitely and hypnotically on the screen. As they accumulate on the page day after day, they form an evolving record of each one of the artist's footsteps in the places, seasons, and states of mind she finds herself in. It is a kinetic diary, a visual record of everyday life. Vanessa's interests lie in exploring the persistent repetitions of life, and finding out what emotions the looped clips will trigger as they accumulate day after day.
http://www.ordinaryshow.com/

You may find that on her website there are other interesting projects which she has undergone, I reccommend checking out:

'Interference' there is actual video footage of this work. It is a 4 screen installation showing 4 looped animations of tv patterns (hand-drawn animated test patterns and interferences, with voice-imitated tv sound).

From Poland with Love
Drawings of found passport photographs of young people in 60s Communist Poland, to be made into a mural.

Stereotypes
Mural showing 4 comic strips made out of photos and text found in several stereotypical magazines: teenage girls, housewives, trendy people, businessmen.

All found on her website here >>>> http://www.vanessalouzon.com/

The ordinary show piece is my favourite however, I really like the idea of exploring the ordinary things of the everyday, making the ephemeral permanent somehow in space and time. It is this notion which I would probably like to pursue in my own work. Video and photography would be the main medium I would be using throughout my work. It also gives me a starting point in researching narrative, and time and space in narrative. I remember recently watching Tarkovsky 'Mirror' and being fascinated by his use of narrative, how there seems to be no apparent plot, but yet the story is displayed from all aspects of his life, like we are seeing the story through many "mirrors" at the same time.

Excerpt from Wiki
The Mirror has no apparent plot. Instead it rhythmically combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories and newsreel footage. At various points in the film poems by Tarkovsky's father are recited. The loose flow of visually oneiric images has been compared to the stream of consciousness technique in literature.

Youtube 8 minute video:




I don't know too much about the subject of narrative to give a big 20 minute seminar on it. I guess what I am trying to do is to briefly touch on some of the concepts that I find interesting, so that as I do research them, I will gain some sort of shape to my own artistic 'voice'. For this seminar I wanted to show some pieces which I like, hoping to engage in discussion about the work. I am currently looking into the idea of narrative, and am interested after Christmas in making short video pieces based on the different types of narrative perhaps. I'm still not quite sure, but here is some excerpts I've read regarding the topic.

Debates about how to tell a story go back, no doubt, to the time when some mythical humans sat around some mythical fire in some mythical cave. [1] Most of us today grew up under the premises so aptly described by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. There the King of Hearts advises, "Begin at the beginning ... and go on till you come to the end; then stop." [2] The King of Hearts implies that stories work in a single linear sequence. In contrast, many representations of stories in classical art juxtapose episodes that did not occur next to each other. While we can follow the classical stories, their parts often seem to be oddly ordered.
Source>>
Time in Space, Narrative in Classical Art

Psychological narrative

Within philosophy of mind, the social sciences and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology.[3] A personal narrative process is involved in a person's sense of personal or cultural identity, and in the creation and construction of memories, and is thought by some to be the fundamental nature of the self.[4][5] The breakdown of a coherent or positive narrative has been implicated in the development of psychosis and mental disorder, and its repair said to play an important role in journeys of recovery.[6] Narrative Therapy is a school of (family) psychotherapy.
Source <<

Here are some interesting quotes regarding Narrative:
All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder.

A ladder extending downwards the interior of the earth and disappearing in the clouds is the image for collective experience ...

Walter Benjamin

Let It Bleed (Left) Let It Be (Right), The Stones And The Beatles Getting Tweaked At The Same Time (2008) - Yoshi Sodeoka

Let It Bleed (Left) Let It Be (Right), The Stones And The Beatles Getting Tweaked At The Same Time, 2008 from yoshi sodeoka on Vimeo.


So I guess here are some examples of work that I'm interested in, hopefully now tomorrow it will provide some sort of platform of discussion regarding the topic of 'finding our artistic voices'.