Green Neon Light

Janet Cardiff and George Miller

2009-11-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

'Making art for us is quite often an intuitive playful state starting from reflections of our subconscious and the world around us. We let the work make itself and follow it through its passage of changes.time plays with our subconscious and our dreams. We try to make works that reflect this magical state,' Janet Cardiff.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are internationally renowned for their immersive installations, involving film, objects and sound. Their elaborate environments draw the viewer into captivating fictional worlds.

www.cardiffmiller.com

Candida Hofer

2009-11-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces available to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover.

— Candida Höfer

Candida Höfer’s photographs reveal her interest in documenting collections of like things. Over the past twenty years, Höfer has created a systematic visual study of details within public spaces such as zoos, the interiors of office buildings, theaters, museums, and library reading rooms. Höfer’s straightforward and detached style at first seems clinical and purely documentary. Since the early 1980s people have been noticeably absent from Hofer’s photographs. Instead, she uses her camera to note repeated forms within public spaces such as furniture, lighting fixtures, ceiling or floor tiles, chairs, and tables, creating patterns and a sense of orderliness. Höfer also often emphasizes the ironic by drawing the viewer’s attention to things out of place. In Deutsche Bucherei Leipzig IX, the presence of people is strongly implied by the empty desks and lights, as well as by the books at the end of the room, evoking a sense of their purpose as vehicles of collected human history and knowledge.

Source

The large format that characterizes Höfer's photographs of public places, the absence of people, and the angle from which she composes them, invite the viewer "to enter" the rooms and observe. Photography is a silent medium and in Höfer's libraries this is magnified, creating that feeling of "temple of learning" with which libraries have often been identified. On the other hand, the meticulous attention to detail, hand-painted porcelain markers, ornately carved bookcases, murals, stained glass windows, gilt moldings, and precious tomes are an eloquent representation of libraries as palaces of learning for the privileged. In spite of that, and ever since libraries became public spaces, anyone, in theory, has access to books and the concept of gain or monetary value rarely enters the user's mind.

She specialises in large-format photographs of empty interiors and social spaces that capture the "psychology of social architecture".

Candida Höfer photographs rooms in public places that are centers of cultural life, such as libraries, museums, theaters, cafés, universities, as well as historic houses and palaces. Each meticulously composed space is marked with the richness of human activity, yet largely devoid of human presence. Whether it be a photograph of a national library or a hotel lobby, Höfer's images ask us to conduct a distanced, disengaged examination through the window she has created. Not purely architectural photographs, her rhythmically patterned images present a universe of interiors constructed by human intention, unearthing patterns of order, logic, and disruption imposed on these spaces by absent creators and inhabitants. Her photos of ornate, baroque interiors achieve images with extreme clarity and legibility while the camera maintains an observant distance, never getting too close to its subject.
Artforum art critic Hans Rudolf Reus writes of her work, "Only when observed can the elements of the photographically frozen moment in the building finally begin to play. At the same time, memories of familiar rooms and the odor of the unlimited archive of libraries, museums, and theater foyers mix themselves into even the occasional image of a contemporary building." The New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman writes, "Ms. Höfer is a straight photographer whose humanity and improvisatory spirit come across if we are patient enough to appreciate the serendipity of her light, the subtlety of her color and the quiet, melancholy pleasure she seems to take in finding, as if almost by chance, poetry in institutional form."

Thomas Demand

2009-11-13T06:09:00.000-08:00

Thomas Demand, born in 1964, will present an extensive solo show at the Neue Nationalgalerie from September 2009. While he has had major exhibitions dedicated to his work in such cities as London, New York and Zurich, the show in Berlin will be his largest presentation in Germany to date. Entitled Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), the exhibition is not, however, a general retrospective of his work up to now, rather it is purposefully dedicated to one theme in particular – perhaps the most important in all of Demand’s richly diverse body of work: Germany. Correspondingly, the exhibition coincides with the anniversaries of two pivotal historical events in German history: the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany 60 years ago and the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

The approximately 35 works on display, which include new, previously unshown pieces, deal with social and historical events since 1945 and their immediate background. However, Demand’s pictures do not merely bear reference to exceptional moments in history. Alongside momentous political and societal events and instantly recognizable scenes, the exhibition includes works which depict the private and incidental, but which represent equally a kaleidoscopic part of a particular time and society.

Thomas Demand is not a photographer in the classical sense, but rather someone who documents our various media worlds and is both a reproducer and an illusionist. Photography is the medium in which his works are preserved and exhibited. The artist often finds his subjects in the mass media using them as the starting point to recreate a particular spatial situation as paper sculptures, which are then made into a two-dimensional image with the use of a large format camera and meticulous attention to detail. In a conceptual sense, Thomas Demand is a sculptor as much as he is a photographer. Specific traces of the reproduced incident are systematically erased from the three-dimensional, life-size reconstructions; and so too are the people present in the original photographs. What remains are phantom images of ‘crime scenes’ of missing events which often appear just as familiar to us as they are impalpable.

In this way, Thomas Demand’s works test our reception of visual media and explore their influence on the structures of our memory. In a truly empirical manner, Thomas Demand conducts experiments in visual culture which centre around the questions of whether and to what extent a society’s appearance is condensed and concentrated in individual key images as well as being retained in people’s minds and remembered through such key images. Demand’s reconstructive handling of images that carry significance or appear to carry significance, focuses on the conscious or unconscious self-portrayal of a society and its changes. There could hardly be a more fitting place for an exhibition which offers us a panorama of a nation’s history than the great glass hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie of Mies van der Rohe. The building is not only an incunabulum of post-war architecture, but also equally historically significant as a symbol of the way the Federal Republic of Germany viewed itself at the former inner-city border. The magnificent exhibition design by the London-based architects Caruso St John, forms an ideal connection between Demand’s works and the light hall of Mies van der Rohe.
Source

Each of Thomas Demand’s photographs is one or more steps removed from reality, creating tension between the fabricated and the real. He begins with a pre-existing photograph of an actual location culled from the mass media. While his large-scale photographs resemble these mass-media images, they actually show three-dimensional, life-sized models made from cardboard and paper that Demand builds in his studio solely for the purpose of being photographed. Demand knowingly uses the traditional role of photography as a faithful transcriber of the world to throw his subject’s artificiality into doubt. This confounding of references is such that the very idea of an original recedes completely.
Source

Thomas Demand began as a sculptor and took up photography to record his ephemeral paper constructions. In 1993 he began making constructions for the sole purpose of photographing them. Demand begins with a preexisting image culled from the media, usually of a political event, which he translates into a life-size model made of colored paper and cardboard.

His handcrafted facsimiles of architectural spaces and natural environments are built in the image of other images. Once they have been photographed, the models are destroyed.

At first sight, the subjects represented in Demand’s photographs seem commonplace and familiar, but often they relate to scenes of cultural or political relevance, which have come to our attention through the mass media. They range from the archives of German filmmaker and National Socialist propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Saddam Hussein’s attempt to purchase a concentrated form of uranium called ‘yellowcake’ from Africa and the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway in Tikrit, Iraq.

Art curators and critics interpret Demand's work as reconsidering the traditional notion of photography as a faithful record of reality, highlighting the evasiveness of the medium in a world that is saturated with manipulated or mediated images.
Source

For German artist Thomas Demand, this manifold popular impression of a singularly famous site—grounded at times in fact, but also, increasingly, in fiction—epitomizes the paradox of mediated truth and constructed cultural memory. At least that’s the sense you get from a suite of five new large-scale photo works by Demand, currently on view at Sprüth Magers in London, depicting various views of the Oval Office. It’s familiar conceptual territory for Demand, whose critically acclaimed work has carefully focused on the arbitrary nature of mass media imagery and what he calls “the spectator’s perception of reality.”
Source

Ideas for Practical/Thesis Work -Olafur Eliasson

2009-11-13T03:43:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before I am interested in the re-creation of environments (natural and unnatural, fictional, real....) and producing atmospheric 'sets' as such; the creation of "other worlds" - the 'total' installation.

Can installation provide representations of reality and what does it mean to do so?

In my thesis I'm posing the question, can immersive installations provide real experiences? If these environments are fabricated and constructed, though we physically and psychologically experience them does it constitute the experience as being authentic?

I havn't even begun to write my thesis as of yet, but I'm hoping to look into arguing/answering that question by looking into various methods of vision and perception; theoretically through Jonathon Crary's writings and the Installation work of Olafur Eliasson.

Perception/vision can be controlled, standardised, automated and impoverished by a mediating world....What can installation bring to a viewer and why is this necessary to understand the world in which we live?

In regards to Eliasson's work there is a resistance to all-out illusionism...although his environments may seem to bring the 'outside' world into the interiors of museum buildings, the fabrication of his construction is clearly transparant...
His work consists of a "dual move, generating an emotional response while unveiling its material basis,[which is] central to the art's content, for it disables our impression not just of the work but also of the world as a naturalised, uninterrupted continuum."
He is not trying to completely disillusion the viewer into thinking these environments are real, they are man made, constructed, not so far away from the man made islands/places of the world, such as Dubai for example....
Why does he chose resist this "all-out illusionism"? What does this mean? What is he trying to convey?
...."The trigger to a sharpened speculative impulse centres on the notion of legitability, apparent in his works conspicious exposure of its own fabrication and in the literalism of its materials."...
Because the construction/fabrication is clear and unhidden, that makes our "speculative impulse".. our engagement with the work heightened.

The Weather Project
The subject of the weather has long shaped the content of everyday conversation. The eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson famously remarked ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.’ In The Weather Project, the fourth in the annual Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall, Olafur Eliasson takes this ubiquitous subject as the basis for exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation.

In this installation, The Weather Project, representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.

SOURCE

Double Sunset
In Double sunset from 1999, installed in the Dutch city of Utrecht, Eliasson created a sunset of scaffolding, steel and lamps that mirrored the actual sunset. A sunset is an event with which we are all familiar but which elicits very different associations in each of us: romantic, natural or symbolic as the case may be. Any sense of the natural is punctured, however, by the fact that here viewers can walk behind the sun and see its construction. And yet, the image remains aesthetically beautiful and seductive. Eliasson challenges the notions of space and concepts that we normally take for granted, so that as viewers - and participants - we are invited to perceive what we have seen a thousand times before in a new way. And this is where Eliasson's art steps beyond institutional frameworks and opens up a fresh perception of our agency in the world.
SOURCE

Notion Motion
he installation consists of three consecutive situations using water and light (HMI projectors) to visualise the movement of the gallery visitors. Linked by a long, elevated wooden walkway, the situations experiment with vibrations as a phenomenon that defines and reconfigures space.
In room one an entire elevated wooden floor transforms the movement of people walking about the space into ripples in a water basin located on the opposite side of a black projection screen. The water is reflected onto the screen, its ripples varying according to the movement of the people. In the second room movement along the ramp activates water in a smaller basin; its waves are projected through a narrow, horizontal slit in a temporary wall onto a larger wall in a vibrating line. In the third room a sponge continuously falls into a large water basin and is slowly elevated again, the splash and water dripping from the sponge causing waves on the surface that are projected onto a white wall.
In his large-scale installation Eliasson explores the consequences of visitor movement within a museum space, thus drawing attention to the fact that no space is neutral or stable. Their mere presence in the rooms turns visitors into participants: they are immersed in the installation structure while influencing this very structure through their physical exploration of the space.
SOURCE

Venice Biennale Part One

2009-11-09T07:49:00.000-08:00

Am just back from visiting the Venice Biennale...I saw many amazing things so I'm going to try and write up about the artists and work which really struck me....but here are a couple of pictures and videos, a bit of an overall glance if you will (more pictures to follow...I havn't got them all up on my computer yet!)

This years Biennale is entitled 'Making Worlds'.
“The title of the exhibition, Making Worlds – says Director Daniel Birnbaum – expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation. A work of art represents a vision of the world and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of making a world. The strength of the vision is not dependent on the kind or complexity of the tools brought into play. Hence all forms of artistic expression are present: installation art, video and film, sculpture, performance, painting and drawing, and a live parade. Taking ´worldmaking´ as a starting point, also allows the exhibition to highlight the fundamental importance of certain key artists for the creativity of successive generations, just as much as exploring new spaces for art to unfold outside the institutional context and beyond the expectations of the art market. Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings—this is what I would like to share with the visitors of the Biennale.” Link

Staging Silence -Hans Op De Beeck

2009-11-09T07:27:00.001-08:00

On the 29th of October from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. the Baukunst Galerie opens a major solo-exhibition with a monumental video projection of the Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. The film “Staging Silence” is presented in the context of the KunstFilmBiennale and will be shown at the gallery until the 27th of November 2009. Furthermore there will be a screening of the film “Extensions” within the international competition of the KunstFilmBiennale at the Black Box of the Cinedom on Friday, the 30st of October at 9 p.m.
The exhibition at the Baukunst Galerie is the German premiere of “Staging Silence”. Its score was specially composed for the film by the musician Serge Lacroix, inspired by the images themselves. In addition to the 22 minutes lasting video loop an accompanying artist edition was created. It supplements the installation by a photo of the set of “Staging Silence” in the form of a black-and-white lambda exposure on dibond (102 cm x 73 cm) and thereby delivers an insight into the working process of the artist.

Hans Op de Beeck was born in 1969 in Turnhout, Belgium and lives and works in Brussels. In his œuvre he uses a very wide variety of media – he paints, draws, takes pictures, shoots films, produces sculptures and monumental installations, writes short stories and designs stage settings. It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines his selection of the medium. As a locum of the spectator he searches for situations, which invite to identification. In his parallel worlds he creates fictional places, moments and characters, hoping that the spectator takes them for real for a moment. Therefore he works with effects of trompe-l’œil undermining them by alienating elements as the overreached shifting of proportions. In his play with illusions he questions the complex relation between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe in order to make it easier to deal with our own deficiency. His suggestive, visual proposals produce disquieting, melancholic, ambivalent images in our mind and thereby capture the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence.

After his studies at the Rijksakademie the artist received the Prix Jeune Peinture Belge in 2001. From 2002 to 2003 he succeeded with a residence scholarship at the MoMA and the P.S.1 in New York. Moreover he was awarded the Eugène Baie Award in 2006 and the Catholic University of Leuven Culture Prize in 2009. His works were already exhibited at major international museums as the Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Arizona), the ZKM (Karlsruhe), the Kunstverein Hannover, the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), the S.M.A.K. (Ghent) and the P.S.1 (New York). Beside several monumental installations at the “Art Unlimited” space of the Art Basel from 2004 to 2009 his works were also presented at the Shanghai Biennale 2006 and the Singapore Biennale 2008.

“Staging Silence”, 2009
22 min loop, 16:9, black/white, Full HD video, transferred to Blu-Ray Disk, edition of 10 (+2AP)

“’Staging Silence’ is based around remembered spaces; not any specific sites, but the abstract, archetypal settings that lingered in my memory as the common denominator of the many similar public places I have visited and experienced. The video images themselves are both ridiculous and serious, just like the eclectic mix of pictures in our minds. The decision to film in black-and-white heightens this ambiguity: the amateurish quality of the video invokes the legacy of slapstick, as well as the insidious suspense and latent derailment of film noir. But perhaps gravity and menace ultimately prevail. The title, “staging silence”, refers to the staging of such dormant decors where, in the absence of people, the spectator can project himself as the lone protagonist, unhindered by others.

Memory images are disproportionate mixtures of concrete information and fantasies, and in this film they materialize before the spectator’s eyes through anonymous tinkering and improvising hands. Arms, like those of faceless puppeteers, appear and disappear at random, manipulating banal objects, scale representations and artificial lighting into alienating yet recognizable locations. These places are no more or less than animated decors for possible stories, evocative visual propositions to the spectator.“

Click here for link to video

Hans Op De Beeck

2009-11-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

Over the past few months my recent avenue of inquiry regarding my work is Installation Art, (I know that is quite a broad term but....) more specifically, I'm interested in re-creating environments; the idea of the representation of everyday objects and the subjective reading of this by the viewer/audience. I'm interested in re-creating these environments life size so as to completely immerse the viewer into another world as such, where they not only become the observer but are also the actor within the staged set.... (I hope to elaborate on this more as my blog continues....)
But anyway, so I came across this artist the other day while researching, and he has quickly become one of my favourites: Hans Op De Beeck

Hans Op de Beeck http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
The multi-disciplinary oeuvre of the Belgian visual artist Hans Op de Beeck (b. 1969) consists of sculptures, sculptural installations, multi-media works, videos, animation films, drawings, photographs, publications and stage designs.

Hans Op de Beeck conceives and builds contemporary fictional urban and household locations and scenes sometimes featuring human characters that viewers feel very familiar with. These include both secluded spots suitable for inner reflection, as well as crowded areas populated by sometimes inept characters shedding light on our own present-day lives; our dreams and ambitions; and how we look upon time, space and each other.

http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck lives and works in Brussels, where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects. The scale can vary from the size of a small watercolour to a large, three-dimensional installation of 300m2.
The artist not only uses a very wide variety of media, but also deliberately employs a diversity of aesthetic forms, ranging from an economical, minimalist visual language to overloaded, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as precisely as possible.

Thematically, the work concentrates on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space and each other. Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent, but identifiable places, moments and characters that appear to have been taken from contemporary everyday life, aiming thereby to capture in his images the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence. Key themes are the disappearance of distances, the disembodiment of the individual and the abstraction of time that have resulted from globalisation and the changes to our living environment that developments in media, automation and technology have brought about.

Hans Op de Beeck sometimes calls his works "proposals"; they are irrefutably fictional, constructed and staged, leaving it up to the viewer whether to take the work seriously, as a sort of parallel reality, or immediately to put it into perspective, as no more than a visual construct. His work is nourished by a keen interest in social and cultural reflection. The artist also questions the difficult relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, between what is and what we create for ourselves in order to make it easier to deal with our own insignificance and lack of identity. The visual output of that investigation often produces slumbering, insidious, melancholy and astonishing images.

http://www.hollandfestival.nl

On 31 May 2008, the new installation “Location (6)” by Hans Op de Beeck will premiere as part of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck has now created “Location (6)” (2008) – a monumental installation intended for the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. The Westergasfabriek is a former gas works that has been turned into a thriving multifunctional cultural center. This installation-art creation draws on Op de Beeck’s interest in manmade vistas, as well as his fascination with melancholic barren spaces devoid of human life.

His new work is a worthy successor to the sculptural installation “Location (5)” (2004). This particular installation was earlier on display in the Municipal Museum in The Hague and the Art Unlimited exhibition in Basel, Switzerland and has now been given a permanent home at the Towada Art Center in Japan. “Location (5)” is a pitch-black “mockup” of a motorway fast-food restaurant looking out on a deserted motorway (highway) in the dead of night.

The new installation “Location (6)” is based on a similar principle: the viewer is inside a building and is looking out at the wider world – in this case, a vast expanse of land stretching out as far as the eye can see. The exterior space has once again been created in the form of a monumental landscape sculpture with an incrementally manipulated perspective (perspectival trompe-l'œil). Visually speaking, however, “Location (6)” is almost the opposite of its predecessor. Through a hallway, the spectator reaches an observatory with a panoramic window offering a view of an imaginary desolate snowy landscape. Everything basks in white light and is shrouded in a fog. The whole place has an ephemeral, almost immaterial feel about it that invites viewer to gaze into the near-nothingness.

Hans has his hands full with a range of artistic projects, and Merry-go-round typifies his work in taking abstract normality and creating meaning around it. The walk-through installation attracted lines of people who would step into another world, a winter scene of dark childhood memories and eerie music that transport the crowds into another world. It's magic.

It's a new year

2009-11-09T05:10:00.000-08:00

It's a new college year and I've decided that it's time for the return of the blog! I need to keep tabs on what I'm looking at and researching so I can look back through my ideas to see a clear line of inquiry in my work.... Roll on 4th year....

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen

2009-01-28T09:28:00.000-08:00

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen
Helsinki Complaints Choir (2006)

This is gas...

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collect the grievances and pleas of people in cities like Helsinki and turn them into affecting choral works in their ongoing "Complaints Choir" project.

Ernie Gehr

2009-01-28T09:22:00.001-08:00

Ernie Gehr

Serene Velocity (1970)
Ernie Gehr's structuralist masterpiece SERENE VELOCITY is a hypnotic film which is nothing more than a rapidly edited, rhythmic piece consisting of two shots of an office hallway (one long shot, one zoomed-in close up). Our persistence of vision makes us believe that this film is a perpetual zooming in and out from one end of a hallway to another. Rather, it is a carefully edited and timed film, which consistently cuts back and forth between these two shots. The result is a mesmerizing piece which, as it progresses, treats the eyes to much profundity out of something so simple. We begin to notice the perfect geometry of the composition as the lines of the hallway converge to the center. The film becomes some kind of cosmic heartbeat, as this meticulously timed work of art becomes visual music. There is no beginning, middle or end."---IMDB

Studies for Serene Velocity

Chantal Akerman

2009-01-28T09:17:00.000-08:00

Chantal Akerman

Hotel Monterey (1972)

Akerman's early feature, marked by the influence of structuralist film, explores the interior of a cheap New York hotel.

Kurt Kren

2009-01-28T09:08:00.001-08:00

I found this on the Expanded Cinema Blog

"It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan. " Kurt Kren

Liisa Lounila

2009-01-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

Lounila makes images at the threshold between photography and cinematography. Her claim to fame is a series or films shot with a homemade device that creates bullet-time effect, giving the impression of a camera moving through a space frozen in time. Some of these films were shown in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Lounila's recent exhibition at the Marabou Park Annex [September 15—October 29, 2006] included two text-based works, two of the bullet-time films—Flirt, 2001, and Play>>, 2003—and Roma, 2003, a series of lenticular prints. Mounted with a special technique, these photographs give a vague impression of movement and spatiality as you look at them from different angles, similar to the postcards that miraculously show different things when you manipulate them.

Lounila's use of temporal suspension and atmospheric sound is clearly intended to heighten the emotional charge. The bullet-time effect converts the films' scenes into slices of a larger narrative. The sound produces a feeling of impending drama or joy. Combined, these techniques give rise to expectations of totality that nevertheless remains undefined. Lounila does experiment with or even question the most traditional of narrative structures. She just renders storytelling elliptic. In fact, the films' cinematic language and logic are both close to those of television commercials and movie trailers. The only difference is that Lounila's work does not have any actual products or movies to sell.

This could also be said of her lo-fi appropriation of the bullet-time effect. The production of complex special effects with a homemade pinhole camera is, undoubtedly, an impressive technical feat.

Lounila's interest in a single moment and bringing it to life is connected to another dimension in her way of working: performativity, understood as the process approach to making art.

Susan Sontag has noted that photography doesn't simply reproduce reality but also recycles it. By presenting photos in new contexts they can say different things and serve very different purposes.

Lounila tells about the shooting technique for POPCORN, a technique she developed together with her colleague Henri Tani: "I used a camera I built myself from cardboard. It was 18 m long and surrounds the subject that I film. It simultaneously exposes 528 frames on 35mm film. The technique is also known under the names time-slice, temps mort, virtual camera, timetrack and multicam. The camera functions by picturing the subject simultaneously from all directions with many separate cameras. When these pictures, each taken from a slightly different angle, are joined together as a film, it creates the illusion of movement around an unmoving subject. The effect the technique creates is familiar to us from music videos of recent years and from movies. The material from one take can bring you about 35 seconds of moving image."

Wiki
BULLET TIME
\Bullet Time refers to a digitally enhanced simulation of variable speed (i.e. slow motion, time-lapse...) photography used in films, broadcast advertisements and computer games. It is characterized both by its extreme permutation of time (slow enough to show normally imperceptible and un-filmable events, such as flying bullets) and space (by way of the ability of the camera angle--the audience's point-of-view--to move around the scene at a normal speed while events are slowed). The first movie to use the Bullet Time technique was Blade in 1998, where bullets were computer-generated and digitally implemented. However, the actual term Bullet Time is a registered trademark of Warner Bros., the distributor of The Matrix.[1] It was formerly a trademark of 3D Realms, producer of the Max Payne games.[citation needed]

This is almost impossible with conventional slow-motion, as the physical camera would have to move impossibly fast; the concept implies that only a "virtual camera," often illustrated within the confines of a computer-generated environment such as a game or virtual reality, would be capable of "filming" bullet-time types of moments. Technical and historical variations of this effect have been referred to as time slicing, view morphing, slow-mo, temps mort and virtual cinematography.

Jeff Wall's Milk, 1984

Milk is another depiction of a socially charged subject. 'Suffering and dispossession remain at the centre of social experience', Wall has commented. The explosive burst of liquid is emblematic of the man's frame of mind, but what might have provoked such extreme emotion is not revealed, a state of ambiguity that ensures the work cannot be understood as moral commentary. The process of reconstructing an event allows Wall the freedom to reinvent the composition. He often relocates the action to a different setting, a place chosen for its formal or pictorial qualities, as the case here. The grid-like order of the brick wall background, and strong vertical bands that stripe the left side of the image contrast sharply with the tension in the man's arms and the uncontrolled arc of milk.

Videos

2008-12-15T06:50:00.000-08:00

Here are some videos I found interesting, I like their style!

Mafish Durell / Nicolas BARRIÉ

Mafish Durell / Nicolas BARRIÉ
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

Omar Khâyyam, cinq variations / DJIAN

Omar Khâyyam, cinq variations / DJIAN
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

Reconstitution / Hélène ABRAM

Reconstitution / Hélène ABRAM
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

Building / A. DE CLERQ & J. COOL

Building / A. DE CLERQ & J. COOL
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

Enfantillages / Nicolas BELLONI

Enfantillages / Nicolas BELLONI
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

Popcorn Liisa LOUNILA

Popcorn Liisa LOUNILA
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

story of lovers on a train_Gad HOLLANDER

story of lovers on a train_Gad HOLLANDER
Uploaded by VIDEOFORMES

BERLIN_die Symphonie der GroBstadt

BERLIN_die Symphonie der GroBstadt
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l'invention de la route - Ricard COLAS

l'invention de la route - Ricard COLAS
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Des gouttes de jalousie / P. VILLEMIN

Des gouttes de jalousie / P. VILLEMIN
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For Seminar 10th December[[[ Finding our voices ]]]

2008-12-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

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'.

Questionnaire Revisioned!

2008-11-22T18:08:00.000-08:00

Well last Friday I went around town and I approached a couple of different people about my questionaires and I was talkin to them for a while. I began to think that the questions that I proposed where not exactly getting across what it is I want to say....or ....they just don't seem to be going in the right direction, it's like the answers I was getting are leading me onto another path as such. I definitely think I need o be recording these conversations I have with the people tho. It's just not the same writing their answers down, it also seems like the conversations I'm striking up with people is a big part of the work, and I really like being able to approach people and talk about certain issues, everyone has been really receptive to it so far. I think however I need to revise a few of the questions, go out and ask more people, look at the feedback, and decide where to go from there!!

I feel like I can never fully grasp the concept of what it is I want to do, it's like, I'm not sure what it is that I'm doing. I have this initial idea and then it doesn't work out at all the way I had planned or envisaged, and it makes me think if my ideas were solid enough in the first place. Maybe I'm not dealing with the concept in the best way I could? How am I approaching it? How DO I approach it?? Like my initial idea and what I wanted to do is turning out to be completely different, however, I shall have to think about it alot more, as well as do more of the practical stuff!!

Plan of Action

2008-11-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

Type up questions for questionaire.
Post thread up on a forum (for any experiences dealing with loneliness)
Go to a Dublin meet up.
Take photographs
Derive

I want to collect as much information as possible, I have done alot of thinking for this project and I just need to get out there and start collecting info now.

Some other ideas which could connect in with the idea of loneliness is the idea of emmigration and exclusion, which is a big issue these days in the public. So I am going to go to a 'New to Dublin' meet up to talk to people who are new here and about their experiences of what it is like to be new in a place and have they come across any form of social exclusion etc etc!!

Questions for my Questionaire
Are you on your own today?
Why is it that you're on your own?
What kind of thoughts go through your mind when you're on your own/alone in public space?
What does loneliness mean to you?
What does aloneness mean to you?
Do you think there are alot of lonely people out there?
Have you had any experiences regarding loneliness?
What do you consider a public space to be? What are it's functons in relation to social interaction?

I also want to ask them more personal questions like what they do for a living, do they go to college, how did they find that experience? etc
I think you can learn alot more about the loneliness in people by asking about their own situation rather then generic questions about loneliness.

For the people I am meeting in the New to Dublin group I want to ask them questions such as:
How are they coping with emerging into Dublin society?
Have they got jobs? was it easy/hard?
Have they come accross any kind/form of exclusion?
What interests do they have?
Do they think that Dublin is a friendly place?
How did they find their first few weeks here?
Are they more likely to become lonely?
Is there a major culture shock?
What's so different about the people here to where they come from?

Development of Project Ideas

2008-11-19T06:32:00.000-08:00

I really want to focus on the idea of alone-ness or loneliness in public space. I want to take pictures (carefully compositioned) of people who are on their own in public space. I think that in general alot of people associate public space as a place where there is a multitude of social activities, where one is always going somewhere or doing something, it is seen as a place where people gather and meet and come together, socialise. I guess I just want to highlight the people that are on their own, that there are people who don't use public space as a place to meet, but as a place to either be alone, or because they simply do not have anyone to meet with.

I want my work to become relational aswell as just photography. I want to approach these people who are on their own and ask them a set of questions (perhaps do a survey!?) about alone-ness and loneli-ness in public space, and what that means. I want to investigate the quieter, more over-looked part of public space, creating interaction and conversation with those who are alone in public space.

With the images and texts that I aquire I want to project these onto the facade of a building. This I would say is the tricky part at the moment I think. I need to think of the context I want these photos and text to be in, what is the question or critique I am making of that space? What is it that I am trying to say EXACTLY?

So what I really need to be thinking about is the questions for the survey, what information do I need? Once I know I will be able to craft my questions accordingly to get the inforation I want.

I also need to be thinking about the contexts and where I can display the works, on what buildings and why?

(QUESTIONS AND CONTEXT)

Mirror -Tarkovsky

2008-11-19T06:08:00.000-08:00

We watched Mirror by Tarovsky in our Visual Culture lecture yesterday. Needless to say I think about 99% of us were completely bewildered and didn't even know where to start to try and de-code it. However one cannot deny the fact that it is an absolutely brilliantly filmed movie. I really want to watch it a good few times and do alot of reading about it. I think the jist of the story (not that it has a definite linear storyline to it) but I think it is about this notion of space and time and it is disjointed, and we are looking at a period of time from many different sides of a diamond, as one would say, the main characters in the movie vary from different ages all the time, like the film is showing various parts of their lives, but it is not in proper succession, this is where the notion of space and time comes in. This is something I will have to research more about, anyway, the film is amazing. Reading about it must be done (and I'd say research before watching the film for the first time would be a bit more necessary to understand it a bit better, espesh for the first time...).

Notes on a Scandal

2008-11-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

One Woman's Mistake Is Another's Opportunity...

Loneliness can turn one into a monster.

One woman's secret is another woman's power. One woman's fear is another woman's weapon. One woman's life is in another woman's hands....

Now that I think about it, this actually relates to my project. I'm basing my project on alone-ness and lonelyness in public space. but I am really interested in the psychological effects that lonelyness can play on our minds, our mental states. So this is a great example of lonelyness which has gotten to the stage of complete emotional and psychotic breakdown.

Notes on a Scandal is a 2006 British film adapted from the 2003 novel of the same name by Zoe Heller. The screenplay was written by Patrick Marber and the film was directed by Richard Eyre.
Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) teaches history at a comprehensive school in London. A lonely old spinster, Barbara's only "intimate relationship" is with herself by means of a diary. When a new, younger teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) starts at the school she feels drawn to her and believes that she "may be the one". Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a student, Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), and confronts her. When Sheba asks her to not tell the school administration until Christmas so she can be with her family, Barbara explains she has no intention of telling, as long as she ends the relationship. However, she doesn't and Barbara warns her once more. But when Barbara's cat dies and Sheba can not be there to comfort her, Barbara seeks revenge by telling a fellow teacher who comes to her asking her if Sheba is interested in him. The fellow teacher spreads the "playground rumour" to Steven's mother. Ms. Connolly then comes to Sheba's home and hits Sheba. The next day the media, as well as the school administration, are alarmed and Sheba's life is turned upside down. She ends up moving into Barbara's house, with the idea that Steven broke down to his mother, but soon finds Barbara's diary and learns of the rather sexual attraction Barbara may have with her. (Earlier, when the school's headmaster asks Barbara if she knew of the relationship, he confronts her on receiving a restraining order with another fellow teacher whom she previously befriended).

Sheba is sentenced to 10 months, and the last scene is Barbara meeting another younger woman whom she seems to befriend.

Wiki entry

Ideas for Project

2008-11-13T05:45:00.000-08:00

Street Photography
- Taking photographs of people who are alone
- Photographs of the city at night and day as a comparison
- Taking photos of the inside of windows (Inside Windows series)

Psychogeography and Relational documentary work
- The idea of a space and how this effects people's emotional behaviour
I want to film/document an interview with people around certain areas. I want to accompany the documented work with either film or text (or whatever it may be) and display it on the facade of a building/the area in which they live, by projection.

- I want to have a relational aspect to this project.I want to come into contact with people and get some responces either by emails, letters, interviews surveys etc. I will have a set of questions about their area and what they think of it, what they would like to see happening, how they feel about certain things, their history/background/why they are living there etc. (Think of appropriate questions basically!)

- By displaying the images and/or texts on the facades of the buildings, it is exposing what is on the inside.What those individuals think of their area/situation. It is their voices publicly being heard. It's making the emotional behaviour of the person that lives inside be seen. It is about how they see their environment and act to it and it provokes people to think about theirs.

Being silent is not to exist
-Another idea I have is to create a seperate environment from the busy atmosphere of everyday life, people rushing to and from work, becoming so familiar with it that they do not stop to observe their surroundings. There is so much noise, that when everything is silent, it seems like we do not exist. I want to create a place for silence, reflection, thinking. I want the noise of the world to be excluded so that the person can think for themselves. Finding autonomy through silence and not noise. But how do I go about this?????

Psychogeography

2008-11-12T14:38:00.000-08:00

Here is a website with more material about psychogeography, it even has 'excersises' to do to understand what psychogeography is.

LINK

Les Fetes Lumieres

2008-11-12T09:17:00.001-08:00

Here are some photos I found particularly interesting, they are from the festival of light in Lyon. I particularly like projecting images onto buildings and also the light casts silhouettes of what is going on inside the building.

Art in the Public Realm

2008-11-12T09:05:00.000-08:00

SOURCEPAGE

Quotations and viewpoints on the role of artists in the public domain.
Quotable quotes

*
* The contribution of art and artists is more than merely placing a piece of public art in front of a building, or staging a performance in a public space. This is narrow thinking.
Charles Landry
*

Art isn't necessary anymore as a field, a profession; art is no longer a noun, it [has] become a verb. Art is nothing but a general attitude of thickening the plot.
Vito Acconci
*

Art is language and public art is public speech.
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
* Bring artists in as creative thinkers, not just as makers of objects.
* Prescriptive briefs and hesitant clients produce dull work.
*

Public art can be static, moving, part of the infrastructure or a projection of light and sound. It can last for a minute, a day, a year or a lifetime.
*

If you want change you must be prepared to think differently.
*

There is no such thing as a ‘public artist’, just artists who work in a variety of contexts.
*

Quality of work should always be an issue.
*

Public art can put the emotion back into the built environment.
*

There can be no public art without collaboration.
*

Public art can be static, moving, part of the infrastructure or a projection of light and sound. It can last for a minute, a day, a year or a lifetime.
PASW
* Artists are not miracle workers – they’re just another alternative.

Mary Jane Jacobs
*

Artists bring meaning to forgotten elements.
Jim Buckley, artist
*

Making time for Design is the first rule of good design involving artists.
Chris Smith, ex Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
*

The function of public art is to de-design.
Vito Acconci
*

Artists are not miracle workers – they’re just another alternative.
Mary Jane Jacobs
*

Artists, designers, planners and architects alike must face the challenge of defining public space, as an opportunity to create or improve the sense of community among those who will determine the use, or abandonment of a place.
Ethan Kane, from Ars Poetica, 2004
*

Modern society undoubtedly needs creativity and vision more than it needs works of art... It needs artists with their ways of doing things more than it needs the things they make. It needs them for what they ‘are’ rather than for what they ‘do’.
Pavel Buchler
*

Art is an activating agent.
Mel Gooding
*

Public art, in all its diversity, can mediate all spaces as Places.
John Newling
*

The new public art demands and invites communication and the engagement of others.
Mary Jane Jacob
*

Abstract space becomes particular place.
Jeff Kelley
*

Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.
Christopher Alexander

In-Public.com

2008-11-12T07:21:00.000-08:00

Manifesto
Our aim is to promote Street Photography and to continue to explore its possibilities. All the photographers featured here have been invited to show their work because they have the ability to see the unusual in the everyday and to capture the moment. The pictures remind us that, if we let it, over-familiarity can make us blind to what’s really going on in the world around us.

In-Public.com is a website dedicated to the promotion of street photography. Here is the picture of the month for November 2008. I like the fact they mention in their manifesto that we can become blind to what is around us by becoming over-familiar with our surroundings.

Martin Parr

2008-11-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

Quote: "With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist."

I like the picture of the lonely person in the fast food restaurant, or well, at least the person that was alone... it struck a chord in me, I actually wouldn't mind trying to capture photos of people who appear to be alone.....

Bruno Barbey

2008-11-12T07:04:00.000-08:00

Over four decades, Bruno Barbey has journeyed across five continents and numerous world conflicts, though he does not consider himself a war photographer, he nevertheless covered the civil war in Nigeria, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ireland, Iraq and Kuwait.

Carl de Keyzer

2008-11-12T07:00:00.001-08:00

Carl De Keyzer

Belgian, b. 1958

Carl De Keyzer started his career as a freelance photo-grapher in 1982, while supporting himself as a photography instructor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. At the same time, his interest in the work of other photographers led him to co-found and co-direct the XYZ-Photography Gallery. A Magnum nominee in 1990, he became a full member in 1994.

De Keyzer, who has exhibited his work regularly in European galleries, is the recipient of a large number of awards including the Book Award from the Arles Festival, the W. Eugene Smith Award (1990) and the Kodak Award (1992).

De Keyzer likes to tackle large-scale projects and general themes. A basic premise in much of his work is that, in overpopulated communities everywhere, disaster has already struck and infrastructures are on the verge of collapse. His style is not dependent on isolated images; instead, he prefers an accumulation of images which interact with text (often taken from his own travel diaries). In a series of large tableaux, he has covered India, the collapse of the Soviet Union and - more recently - modern-day power and politics.

On his website you can see numurous publications he released in the form of photogrpahy books which all have set themes such as religion, prison, power and politics.

Ian Berry

2008-11-12T06:28:00.001-08:00

Thomas Dworzak

2008-11-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

Quote: "I like the fact that I am not in control, that the photographs are what happens, rather than the result only of the decision I make. You could say that’s the downside of photography, but it’s also why it is magic."

Thomas Dworzak

German, b. 1972

Thomas Dworzak was born in Kötzting, Germany, in 1972 and grew up in the small town of Cham in the Bavarian Forest. Towards the end of his high school studies, he began to travel and photograph in Europe and the Middle East, living in Avila, Prague and Moscow, and studying Spanish, Czech and Russian. After photographing the war in former Yugoslavia, he lived in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 1993 until 1998. He documented the conflicts in Chechnya, Karabakh and Abkhazia as well as working on a larger-scale project about the Caucasus region and its people.

Based in Paris from 1999, he covered the Kosovo crisis, mostly for US News and World Report, and he returned to Chechnya the same year. After the fall of Grozny in early 2000, he began a project on the impact of the war in Chechnya on the neighboring North Caucasus. He also photographed events in Israel, the war in Macedonia, and the refugee crisis in Pakistan.

After 9/11, Dworzak spent several months in Afghanistan on an assignment for the New Yorker. He returned to Chechnya in 2002. Since then he has photographed in Iraq, Iran and Haiti, and covered the revolutions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. Based mainly in New York since 2004, Dworzak has been photographing the world of American politics and the impact of the war in Iraq. He is currently working on the projects M*A*S*H IRAQ, and Valiassr, an essay on Tehran's main avenue.

Source

Festival of Light -Glasgow

2008-11-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

Joshua Allen Harris

2008-11-11T11:58:00.001-08:00

Joel Meyerowitz on Street Photography

2008-11-11T11:55:00.001-08:00

People

2008-11-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

people people people people...

Lilja 4-Ever

2008-11-11T11:27:00.000-08:00

Lilja 4-ever is a 2002 drama film. It is Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's third full length film which marks a sharp change of mood from his previous two films, the uplifting love story Show Me Love and Together, a comedy set in the 1970s. Lilya 4-Ever is an unremittingly brutal and realistic story of the downward spiral of Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), a girl in the former Soviet Union, whose mother abandons her to move to the United States. The story is based on the life of Dangoule Rasalaite and examines the issue of trafficking in human beings and sexual slavery.

Documentary Photo Project

2008-11-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

Moving Walls 7
A Group Photography Exhibition

Thomas Dworzak | Eric Gottesman | Brenda Ann Kenneally | Pedro Linger-Gasiglia | Jon Lowenstein | Jonathan Moller | Ivan Sigal
Introduction

The seventh Moving Walls exhibit revisits some themes that lie at the core of our mission. Seven photographers document social struggles—from Ethiopia to New York City—and their work reflects OSI's commitment to human rights and justice around the world.

SOURCE

In 2003, the Open Society Institute launched the Documentary Photography Project. Through exhibits, workshops, grantmaking, and public programs, the project explores how photography can shape public perception and effect social change. The Documentary Photography Project supports photographers whose work addresses social justice and human rights issues that coincide with OSI’s mission.

The most prominent activity of the Documentary Photography Project is the Moving Walls exhibition series, an artistic interpretation of obstacles such as political oppression, economic instability, and racism—and the struggles to tear those barriers down. Launched in 1998, this group photography exhibition is shown at OSI offices in New York City and Washington, D.C., cultural and educational institutions in Baltimore, Maryland, and other locations.

In 2006, OSI began an international tour of seven past Moving Walls photographers in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus in partnership with OSI’s Middle East & North Africa Initiative and Arts and Culture Program. At each tour location, the Documentary Photography Project works with local partners to organize a concurrent exhibition by a local photographer and provides a free training workshop for local photojournalists. OSI’s Network Debate Program offers youth media workshops to high school students in each exhibition location, using Moving Walls for the curriculum.

Apart from Moving Walls, the Documentary Photography Project awards distribution grants to individual photographers who—in partnership with an NGO, advocacy organization, or other entity—propose creative ways to distribute completed bodies of work and use photography as an advocacy tool. Since 2005, 19 distribution grants have been awarded through an annual competition.

The Documentary Photography Project’s other grantmaking activity includes production grants to organizations, as well as small discretionary grants awarded on a case-by-case basis to projects with broad impact in the photographic community.

Through the "Photography As Advocacy" public-forum series, the project explores how photography can be used to shape policy and perception, and to advocate for social change.

Alex Webb

2008-11-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

Quote: "I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner."

Alex Webb

American, b. 1952

Alex Webb became interested in photography during his high school years and attended the Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York, in 1972. He majored in history and literature at Harvard University, at the same time studying photography at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. In 1974 he began working as a professional photojournalist and he joined Magnum Photos as an associate member in 1976.

During the mid-1970s Webb photographed in the American south, documenting small-town life in black and white. He also began working in the Caribbean and Mexico. In 1978 he started to photograph in color, as he has continued to do. He has published seven photography books, including Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics, Under A Grudging Sun, Crossings, the limited edition artist book Dislocations and Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names.

Webb received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in 1986, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. He won the Leopold Godowsky Color Photography Award in 1988, the Leica Medal of Excellence in 2000 and the David Octavius Hill Award in 2002. His photographs have been the subject of articles in Art in America and Modern Photography. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, in museums including the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the International Center of Photography, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Source\

Andrew Stark

2008-11-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

Andrew Stark (born 1964-) has photographed on the streets and thoroughfares of his native Sydney since the early 1980s using a wholly candid style and a battered second hand SLR. A reclusive figure, he has captured the everyday comings and goings of the cities inhabitants with poetic candor and selfless consideration. The year 2003 saw the publishing of his first book "Snaps from Sydney", and was followed in late 2006 by a major exhibition "Starkers" at the Museum of Sydney.[1] Throughout 2007 Stark documented the Sutherland Shire district, infamous for the 2005 Cronulla race riots and the resultant body of work "Down South", was shown at the Hazelhurst Gallery during late 2008.

Wandering the streets, hunting, searching, willing the moment to be poetic. Always working within a non interference discipline where absolutely anything goes so long as you remain within the 'candid' framework. The historical or truth dimension to the work has always been vitally important.
Stark explains, "I genuinely believe photography to be at it's most potent when underscored by truth. To contrive is to control and frankly I'm more interested in observation than direction. Riding the ebb and flow of Sydney's streets, approaching the next corner afresh, never quite knowing what may present itself in the adjoining street. That's the random beauty of street photography. Control has to be a stultifying, creative brake. The magic, emotion charged moments are in my experience invariably captured using an almost sub conscious process, they must never be orchestrated and can rarely be dogmatically collated."
source

Bruce Gilden

2008-11-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

Bruce Gilden

American, b. 1946

Bruce Gilden's childhood in Brooklyn endowed him with a keen eye for observing urban behaviors and customs. He studied sociology, but his interest in photography grew when he saw Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up, after which he began taking night classes in photography at the New York School of Visual Arts.

Gilden's curiosity about strong characters and individual peculiarities has been present from the beginning of his career. His first major project, which he worked on until 1986, focused on Coney Island, and on the intimacy of the sensual, fat or skinny bodies sprawled across the legendary New York beach. During these early years Gilden also photographed in New Orleans during its famous Mardi Gras festival. Then, in 1984, he began to work in Haiti, following his fascination with voodoo places, rites and beliefs there; his book Haiti was published in 1996.

In June 1998 Gilden joined Magnum. He returned to his roots and tackled a new approach to urban spaces, specifically the streets of New York City, where he had been working since 1981. His work culminated in the publication of Facing New York (1992), and later A Beautiful Catastrophe (2005); getting ever closer to his subject, he established an expressive and theatrical style that presented the world as a vast comedy of manners.

His project After the Off, with text by the Irish writer Dermot Healey, explored rural Ireland and its craze for horseracing. Gilden's next book, Go, was a penetrating look at Japan's dark side. Images of the homeless and of Japan's mafia gangs easily bypassed the conventional visual clichés of Japanese culture.

Gilden, who has travelled and exhibited widely around the world, has received numerous awards, including the European Award for Photography, three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Japan Foundation fellowship. He lives in New York City.

Lee Friedlander

2008-11-11T09:22:00.000-08:00

Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970's.

Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His art used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life.

Ferdinando Scianna

2008-11-11T09:17:00.001-08:00

SOURCE
Ferdinando Scianna

Italian, b. 1943

Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Feste Religiose in Sicilia (1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers.

Scianna moved to Milan in 1966. The following year he started working for the weekly magazine L'Europeo, first as a photographer, then from 1973 as a journalist. He also wrote on politics for Le Monde Diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire.

In 1977 he published Les Siciliens in France and La Villa Dei Mostri in Italy. During this period Scianna met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s. At the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos (1989).

Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes (1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers - Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream). His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna's images of children from around the world.

In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.

Robert Frank

2008-11-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

Robert Frank is among the most important living photographers, but to say this is to understate the self-evident. At the same time, it seems ironic to articulate the importance of an artist who is so indifferent to success and so suspicious of whatever is well regarded.

Frank's work chronicles the marginal and the unofficial wherever it is found, from the nondescript corner of some ratty diner in South Carolina, to the smudged window that opens onto the dreariest rooftops in Butte, Montana, to the vacant stare of an elevator operator in Miami Beach.

Frank's seminal photo-book "The Americans" (1958), containing 83 black-and-white pictures, was one of the pivotal events of post-war photography. Its skepticism toward what was then the secular religion of wholesomeness and cheer, its resistance to charm, its out-of-focus foregrounds, its deranged angles and, above all, its strange new mood of cool melancholy, were met with shock at the time. But by the 1960s, "The Americans" made the transition from infamy to reverence. Suddenly, Frank's gloom and doom seemed prophetic. His belief that the best pictures were tentative, imperfect, and free of rhetoric became the basis of a new artistic stance.

SOURCE

Henri Cartier-Bresson

2008-11-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

FOUNDATION HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

To take a photograph means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second– both the fact itself and the rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.

It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.

Brassai

2008-11-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

Gyula Halász was born in Brassó (Braşov), in Romania, to a Hungarian father and an Armenian mother.[1] He is sometimes incorrectly described as Jewish.[2] At age three, his family moved to live in Paris, France for a year, while his father, a Professor of Literature, taught at the Sorbonne. As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, before joining a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War. In 1920 Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist and studied at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1924 he moved to Paris where he would live the rest of his life. In order to learn the French language, he began teaching himself by reading the works of Marcel Proust. Living amongst the huge gathering of artists in the Montparnasse Quarter, he took a job as a journalist. He soon became friends with Henry Miller, Léon-Paul Fargue, and the poet Jacques Prévert.

Gyula Halász's job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He later wrote that photography allowed him to seize the Paris night and the beauty of the streets and gardens, in rain and mist. Using the name of his birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym "Brassaï," which means "from Brasso." As Brassaï, he captured the essence of the city in his photographs, publishing his first book of photographs in 1933 titled "Paris de nuit" ("Paris by Night"). His efforts met with great success, resulting in his being called "the eye of Paris" in an essay by his friend Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, he also provided scenes from the life of the city's high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He photographed many of his great artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, plus many of the prominent writers of his time such as Jean Genet, Henri Michaux and others.

Wikipedia

Eugene Atget

2008-11-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

Atget finally settled in Paris in the 1890s. Despite Atget's limited background in the visual arts, he saw photography as a source of income, selling his photographs to artists in the nearby town of Montparnasse. He advertised his photographs as "documents for artists." It was common practice at the time for painters to paint scenes from photographs. By the mid-1890s, Atget bought his first camera and began to photograph more than 10,000 images of the people and sights of the French capital. By 1899, he had moved to Montparnasse, where he lived and earned a modest income until his death in 1927.

Distinguishing characteristics of Atget's photography include a wispy, drawn-out sense of light due to his long exposures, a fairly wide view that suggested space and ambiance more than surface detail, and an intentionally limited range of scenes avoiding the bustling modern Paris that was often around the corner from the nostalgia-steeped nooks he preferred. The emptiness of most of his streets and the sometimes blurred figures in those with people are partly due to his already antiquated technique, including extended exposure times which required that many of his images be made in the early morning hours before pedestrians and traffic appeared.

Jenny Holzer

2008-11-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

Projections

Mark Jenkins

2008-11-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Gaulon -Recyclism

2008-11-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

The Works of Benjamin Gaulon
by Arie Altena
Playing Pong on the facade of big buildings, a paintball gun shooting pictures and messages, a musical instrument using game controllers to make music collectively, digital photos corrupted by software: Benjamin Gaulon’s artworks make clear statements that engage the public in a meaningful and playful way. Often, his works make the audience aware of issues of concerning the role of technology in culture and society. They have a quality of being immediately accessible, bringing a smile on your face, making you want to play, do it yourself. And while enjoying, the works make you aware that you could do so many more meaningful, interesting, creative ‘things’ with the old and new technologies around. The way in which Gaulon works with both hard- and software shows that technology is a toolbox to create works, to engage in making culture, to express oneself, to react to the existing culture. As Jonah Brucker-Cohen remarked very aptly in his interview with Benjamin Gaulon that "Gaulon’s projects attempt to challenge popular conceptions of how electronic objects and software should and could function in our daily lives."

Benjamin Gaulon belongs to the young generation of artists in the field of technological and new media art, that, adhering to a DIY-ideology, loves to make physical pieces. He builds software (in Processing and Max/Msp), he is very much part of the internet generation, the laptop is his home probably – being French and living in Ireland – but developing his work he isn’t content with being ‘virtual’. His works mostly involves the design of tangible interfaces, custom hardware, and aims at performances where the audience plays an active part. His attitude towards technology is that we now have so many tools and electronic parts available – partly to be found in the rubbish bins – that one can built custom devices to one’s own taste. They might not work perfectly always (in the way commercial technology should), they might just be built for one task, but they do what the maker wants it to do – and that might be something that no other piece of software or hardware does.

Recycling is a theme that informs a lot of Benjamin Gaulon’s projects. This is as an environmental issue, for instance when he points to all the e-waste that the West ships to Africa and China. But it is primarily by engaging us with old games and obsolete technology, by making new works from obsolete equipment, discarded electronic parts, and stuff found on flea markets or even amongst the rubbish, that he makes us aware of how much we just throw away, how much we discard and forget about when buying the new iPhone, the new iPod.

Gaulon likes to open up the electronic parts, tinker with it, and build something that works. Often the creative potential of the old parts is larger than that of the new gadgets with their shiny look. He shows that with the toolkit we have now (laptop, software like Max/Msp and Processing, Arduino-boards and Atmel-chips, hardware tools), we can build our own tools, robots, strange gadgets, instruments, et cetera. To emphasize this point Benjamin Gaulon has for instance led e-Waste workshops with DePonk (Gaulon with Geraud de Bizien and Karl Klomp).

In his own works Gaulon communicate this ‘message’, by packaging it skillfully, to first capture the public, that subsequently, through engaging or playing with the work, will later begin to ponder these issues. I experienced this myself, by playing his RES – the Recycling Entertainment System a custom made electronic instrument, to be played collaboratively by six people. It consists of six Nintendo game-controllers (the early NES-ones), with which the player plays and chooses sounds from a library. Every controller is connected to the main chip in a black box – which is programmed in basic to read and convert the signals from the controller to midi. This output goes to a computer that runs the Resware, built with MAX/msp. One controller plays bass sounds, another the drums, two for percussion, one for synthesiser sounds and one for various samples (voices, scratching sounds etc.) Playing together one hears a joyfully bleeping band with a hip-hop flavour coming to life. Note that for every sound (every hit on a snare drum, every bass-note, every percussion sound), the player has to push a button, the sounds do not loop: playing the RES is very much like playing a (simple) musical instrument. The RES is addictive to play, because on the one hand it gives immediate gratification (it sounds great almost from the start), but it takes hour to get to know it intimately. The real joy lies in playing it together. If it is a game, it is a game that one does not play against each other to win, but a game to play together in order to make it sound good. That is what making collectively improvised music is about, but it is also a road not often taken in commercial game development. Gaming might be is a social activity, still gamers get together to play against each other, or play together against others. The RES is a truly interactive ’system’ where several players create something together in realtime. In 2005 the RES was one of the highlights on the Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam, where it was installed in the basement of Paradiso, with some players spending hours playing the RES, and missing out on the performances of the electronic music acts that they’d come to see and hear.

The RES is also an example of another strand in Gaulon’s work: that of modifying existing hardware. In RES this is done with obsolete technology (at least for the visible part: the controllers), in a later project PrintBall a contemporary paintball gun is modified into a software-driven semi-automatic painting-canon that can shoot messages and images. The PrintBall is like an inktjet printer using a paintball gun as printhead. The gun is mounted on a custom made pan and tilt unit which is connected to software (built with Max/Msp). The software allow the users to load an image, that the paintball gun will shoot in a pixellated form. Every bullet is one pixel. The resolution of the image and the space between the points can be adjusted. Gaulon shows this this work in performances, that have a powerful impact, simply because the paintball gun is, indeed a gun that shoots bullets – bullets filled with paint, but still bullets. In fact Gaulon’s first idea was to build a graffiti robot that could spray messages on walls out of reach, inspired by similar projects, mostly from the scene of political activists and culture jammers. Using a gun for that is a reference to the force with which advertising, commercial media and also the political propaganda are shooting their images at us with force.

Pong, an earlier project that Gaulon developed while studying in Groningen, is a recycling of the old computer game Pong, and again a reference to the culture of retro-gaming. It is an augmented reality game played in public space. Pong is projected on a building, and the limits of that building become the limits of the playing field. The projected ball bounces against against the walls, but also against windowsills and other ‘obstacles’ on the building, while two players on the ground play against each other. The software was developed in cooperation with Arjan Westerdiep, and the set-up is portable, so that it can be played in any square without to much ado. Success is ensured as the public, expecting that the game is simply projected, finds out that the virtual ‘ball’ bounces on the real architecture.

Thanks to his background in visual design, Benjamin Gaulon knows how to make his works attractive and communicate to an audience in an exhibition or festival context. One engages there with his works, without ever asking the question if it’s art or not. (In my experience, that question pops up mostly when the work itself is not strong enough and one begins to wonder what it’s place is a a certain venue). Gaulon uses his designing skills also to make the works come across on the web. This is important since in our digital age, more often than not, we will often first encounter new artworks not while visiting a festival of exhibition, but from browsing around on the net.

Benjamin Gaulon uses the internet also in practice to engage his audience. For an earlier work on e-waste, he for instance asked people to to upload the contents of their computer trash to his site, for further recycling. His work Corrupt is a piece of software that corrupts imagefile, by reading code and changing a few lines (in practice, the software, built with Processing, opens the image-file in a text-editor and changes the binary code before saving the image again as an image). He encourages his visitors to use the software themselves and upload the results. Often people – and also Benjamin Gaulon – will choose political images: to corrupt portraits of Bush, Blair, or Sarkozy, and thereby show their corruption. In those cases the work Corrupt is a piece of cultural activism, that can be compared to painting over billboards and the skillful detournement of advertising used by the culture jammers. Corrupt is also a work in the lineage of the Situationists. Gaulon indeed prefers to regard it that way – as can be inferred from the fact that on his site he republishes, as his ‘statement’ one of the seminal texts from that avant-garde movement: A User’s Guide to Detournement, by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman from 1956. On the other hand, Gaulon is also fascinated by the purely aesthetic results of the glitches: sometimes through pure luck, the corruption procedure results in beautiful effects. The very first exhibition of the project, featured a corrupted filmclip, in which content and form rhymed: a second, showing a rider on a motorbike almost losing control of his machine, which might be too powerful for human beings, on a fast turn. I don’t think that image was illustrative of Benjamin Gaulon’s work in general, but it is significant as an example of his love for clear and powerful statements.

Ralph Borland

2008-11-10T08:13:00.001-08:00

I really enjoyed the work of Ralph Borland. He had some brilliant work which I can connect with. There are a few projects I particularl admire. 'Pattern' is a work in which he tracks a pattern which turns up all over the world, he documents this through photography. I really like this project as I am interested in the idea of taking one phenomena and tracking it to see what it reveals about what surrounds it. Ralph is also interested in the idea of creating an obsessive compendium of one foral category, like the photosgraphs by Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Another project Ralph is participating in is a Proposal for Clinton St. It is a site which is going to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the demolising of this block of apartments. His idea for the project is to create a ghost channel (for something that is no longer there) it is a radio station which plays the sound of rain. On the website there are full details of the proposal and of the story behind it. I do like the concept of looking to recover stories and histories from the past in which still have bearing on our present.

Another concept I found interesting is called 'Sideshow'. This is where Ralph basically created a space where artists could come together and make work and have discussions and become a community.

SmSage
A surveilence camera is placed above a parking lot and people can send messages to it and the camera creates its own 'poetry' out of the messages it receives and recites them to the public.

RALPH BORLAND

Banksy

2008-11-10T07:35:00.001-08:00

Lee Walton

2008-11-10T07:23:00.000-08:00

Often regarded as an Experientialist, Walton's work takes many forms- from drawings on paper, game/system based structures, video, web-based performances, public projects, theatrical orchestrations and more.

Here are one or two of his video pieces. I really enjoyed some of his work, such as the exhibition/performance piece where a girl shows her diary work and talks about her past memories (i think that's what happened...there is no video for this piece) I also liked the piece where he did a series of video pieces with school students, where they listened to their favourite songs, or recorded how each of them answer on the phone etc. I also really liked the performance piece where a woman carrying alot of different files and folders and books, drops them purposefully, and the video piece captures all the people who go to help her, I thought this was a really nice way of interacting with the public.

LEE WALTON WEBSITE

Tim Devin

2008-11-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

Tim Devin is a Boston-based conceptual artist and writer. His work deals with humanizing public space, and combating what he views as the negative effects of urban anonymity (such as people's emotional isolation, and lack of attachment to their environment).

WEBSITE - TIM DEVIN

I really admire what Tim does, I really enjoy his work, it's so interesting, and so human I suppose you could say... He produces alot of work which involves the public and interacting with them. His website is really simple and uncomplicated. I found it easy and enjoyable to research his work. I'm not really getting across what it is I want to say about him, but I think he is my favourite artist :)

Ways of Seeing

2008-11-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

I watched the first two episodes of Ways of seeing today, I;ve read the book before but I think that the television series, for me, makes it easier to understand. The book/tv series are based on writings and ideas formated by Walter Benjamin. There are 4 episodes altogether, about imagery, the female nude, advertising and oil painting. There are so many ideas and concepts which Berger talks about, it really helps to understand the world in which we live and why somethings are the way they are, I find it very interesting in terms of learning about the way I see things and the way the world affects us. In terms of the essay I am researching for visual culture, he talks a great deal about the reproduction of work and how it creates different experiences everytime it is reproduced or read in different contexts.

Ways of Seeing was a 1972 BBC television series created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb, that gave rise to a later book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images.

The book Ways of Seeing was made by Berger and Dibb, along with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis. [1] The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images.[1]The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focus particularly on depictions of women in advertisements and oil paintings.[2]Ways of Seeing is considered to be a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art history. Wikipedia.

Things to consider when coming up with ideas for a project

2008-11-10T05:04:00.003-08:00

This is taken from last years workshop with Ralph Borland
Things to consider when coming up with ideas for a project:

* Reworking of what's already there
* Form/function
* Choices (artists continually making)
* Transforming Material
* Aesthetics (beautiful or not?)
* What is the function of the piece?
* Communication as a function
* Symbolic language as a function
* Provocative
* Visual language, symbolic language
* Language of materials
* Metaphore
* What's youre relationship with what's already there?
* Researching stage -What's already there?
* How widely understood are your symbols?
* What can you expect the audience to know?
* You can rely on your audience to read the work
* And read into the work
* Tension between two systems intersecting
* Tension between opposites
* What is the role of the artist for you?
* Provocater?
* Part of a family or artists and artworks offering alternatives?
* Humour
* What is the responsibility of the artist?
* How broad or narrow are your audiences?

My interests and work

2008-11-10T04:45:00.000-08:00

The project brief asks to consider how my work might intervene in public space to explore, enliven, or enlighten people's experiences of it.

So I think it is important to 'step back' as such and look back on what work I have done and what concepts I have dealt with. I also think it is important to find out what interests me and what sujects I would like to explore in my work. This will give me more of a direction and will help me in my research.

What did my previous work entail?

colour/light
reflections
memory and experiences
portraits
obscuring visual perception
application of photography
flick book
the everyday project (photographing objects from a different perspective.

There is a certain sort of nostalgia about my work I guess. I like to take photos of everyday objects or situations. I guess it is a record of real life. I would like to see my work as some sort of record of life. It is really difficult to explain my own work myself :(

Personal Interests

- Archiving/collections
- Human emotions
- Experiencing the everyday
- Portraits
- Blogs
- Silence and Noise
- Ghosts/Spectres/the past(memories)
- Repressing ourselves from having experiences (Psychoanalysis)
- How do we screen our environment?
- Psychology
- Autonomy – independence from the demand of others
- Creating another environment, a search for autonomy through noise to be silent is not to exist.
- Silence, reflection, thinking, excluding from the noise of the world and thinking for oneself. Creating different types of worlds.

Review of Psychogepgraphy

2008-11-10T04:38:00.001-08:00

Just to get things into perspective for myself I'm just gonna make some quick bullet points on what I've just read...

- Laws of environment and what effects it has on the emotions and behaviour of the individual.

- Everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled.

- We need an awareness of our environment before we can critique it.

- Psychic atmospheres

- Derive, drifting, noticing certain area characteristics which resonate with states of mind.

- Siuationalists, detournement.

- JG Ballard, we have lost our engagement with our surroundings.

Psychogeography

2008-11-10T03:04:00.000-08:00

SOURCE

The following text is taken from 'The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age' by Sadie Plant and published by Routledge. Read it, and live without dead time.

...The situationists' desire to become psychogeographers, with an understanding of the 'precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals', was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed and subverted, and the possibilities for chosen forms of constructed situations in the post-spectacular world. Only an awareness of the influences of the existing environment can encourage the critique of the present conditions of daily life, and yet it is precisely this concern with the environment which we live which is ignored.

"The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places - all this seems to be neglected."

Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
DERIVE
One of psychogeography's principle means was the dérive. Long a favorite practice of the dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive pleasure, the dérive, or drift, was defined by the situationists as the 'technique of locomotion without a goal', in which 'one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there'. The dérive acted as something of a model for the 'playful creation' of all human relationships.
'to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed.'

From: Drifting with The Situationist International, Author Unknown, from Smile #5
The Situationists use détoumement to demonstrate the scandalous poverty of everyday life despite the plenty of commodities. They attempted to demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. They wanted to rupture the spell of the ideology of our commodified consumer society so that our repressed desires of a more authentic nature could come forward. The situation is based on liberated desires rather than alienated ones. What these desires are cannot be stated a priori. They will emerge in the revolutionary process of situation-creation, of détournment. Presumably, communality, unification, and public urban space will emerge as more desirable than commodification, fragmentation, and privatization.

DEFINITIONS OF PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY Wikipedia
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as the "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."[1]

n "Formulary for a New Urbanism," Chtcheglov had written "Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams".[5] Similarly, the Situationists found contemporary architecture both physically and ideologically restrictive, combining with outside cultural influence, effectively creating an undertow, and forcing oneself into a certain system of interaction with their environment: "[C]ities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones".[6]

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.[8]

I read an exerpt from Psychogeography Today, here are some interesting quotes and ideas I found regarding psychogeography.

Psychogeography is aware of the increasing banality of the urban environment by which we are surrounded. (This idea of banality was the beginnings of the situationalists, to make a difference, to play with, to question.)

JG Ballard wrote about the 'Death of Affect' 'the loss of engagement with our surroundings.'

'Psychogeography is to be understood as the behavioural impact of urban space'.

'A landscape that seemingly offers no escape from the mundane reality of everyday life soon subverts these expectation, provoking us to react against the conformity of our surroundings.' Pg 15

'Ballard describes modern life in advanced industrial societies as characterised by a loss of emotional sensitivity. Admidst the barrage of media imagery to which we are subjected, our emotional responce is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our surroundings without the mediated images of television and advertising'
Pg 16.

'Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city, the changes, the shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the reccommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying oattern to reveal itself'
Iain Sinclair, 'Lights Out for the Territory'.

Other people/ideas to research further...
- Iain Sinclair

- Urban wandering

- Flaneur (The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur, which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer", from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll".

- Patrick Kellier - Films - 'London' and 'Robinson in Space' (provides a psychogeographical meditation on London.

- Detournement (In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original.)

Definition of Public Space

2008-11-10T02:58:00.000-08:00

Definitions of public space

A public space or a public place is a place where anyone has a right to come without being excluded because of economic or social conditions ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publicspace

A public space refers to an area or place that is open and accessible to all citizens, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age or socio-economic level. One of the earliest examples of public spaces are commons. For example, no fees or paid tickets are required for entry, nor are the entrants discriminated based on background. Non-government-owned malls are examples of 'private space' with the appearance of being 'public space'.
Public Space has also become something of a touchstone for critical theory in relation to philosophy, (urban) geography, visual art, cultural studies, social studies and urban design. Its relevance seems to become more pressing as capital encloses more and more of what were thought of as 'commons'. The term 'Public Space' is also often misconstrued to mean other things such as 'gathering place', which is an element of the larger concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space

There is clear evidence of the importance of public spaces in successful regeneration policies and for creating sustainable communities.
Successful public spaces rely on people using them: "People make places, more than places make people".
Spaces that successfully attract social activity are often banal in design, or untidy in their activities - such as street markets and allotments. Designers need to be responsive to the use of public spaces, not just aesthetics.
Strategies to solve anti-social behaviour by moving it elsewhere are likely to be ineffective and risk worsening local tensions.
Public spaces should be inclusive, provide opportunities for exchange and give users the ability to shape what happens there.
It is important that local people are consulted about what they want from the public spaces in their communities if these places are to deliver their full promise.
http://www.jrf.org.uk/public-spaces/

- A place for everyone
- A gathering place
- Creating sustainable communities
- People make places more than places make people

Starting off Points

2008-11-10T02:50:00.000-08:00

Here are some questions I have asked myself so as to get some sort of starting point going, I shall in turn, answer each one (hopefully!!)

What is public space?
What should public space act as?
Are there any issues about public space?
How do we approach these issues?
What are people's experiences of public space?

What are my own interests?
Consider if or how your work might intervene in public space to explore, enliven or enlighten people's experience of it?
Should we change the way we work to address a non specialist audience?

What issues does my previous work entail?
What is it that I am interested in at the moment?

Research sources (be familiar with the work of artists working in this area and their approaches)
How have other artists addressed these issues?

Things that you have done, things that you might do...
Proposals

Issues about public space...eg, no benches in shopping centres, or a decrease of them, nobody is allowed to loiter anymore. It takes away 'anti-social behaviour'. It also doesn't allow for people to stop and take a break.. we need to keep on shopping, there is no time to relax. There are also other issues about commuters, getting to certain places can become difficult, especially if it is not in plan with the public transport system. That would enevitably exclude those without their own form of vehicle. Another example is the exclusion of the homeless being allowed to stay in public places such as the dart station, they have recently renovated the benches (which the homeless used to ly on) and have encorporated fixtures which only allow individual people a space, aka, there are now dividers put onto the bench, now stopping the bench from becoming a place to sleep for the homeless.

Public Space project

2008-11-10T02:36:00.000-08:00

Option 1. Public Realm Project, Liberties Local Area Plan

Option 2. Animating Public Space

‘Progressive era reformers believed that public space could provide a shared set of symbols, sites
and experiences that counterbalanced the centrifrugal effect of private priorities”
‘Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space’ Margaret Kohn, 2004

Our cities are constantly evolving, and our attitudes, conceptions use of and access to public space shifts and changes. Ideally public space is seen as a site that animates our sense of community, public interest and allows people to congregate and mingle. However public space is often seen as
contested space where a multitude of different interests compete for attention; commercial interests, government interests, local interests. It has become at times a tightly controlled and alienating an extension of consumer space. Public space can be managed to specifically exclude certain groups such as homeless or young people. At any rate it is under very close surveillance for everyone.

Both projects deal with Public space (obv!) So I'm going to begin my research by looking into what is public space, and how have other artists dealt with interveening with public space.

The Prehistory of the Crisis

2008-11-10T02:22:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to the Project Arts Centre and this exhibition 'The Prehistory of the Crisis' was on. Here is an exerpt from the website.... Website

PATRICK BERNIER (FR) & OLIVE MARTIN (FR), JEANNE FAUST (DE) & JÖRN ZEHE (DE), AERNOUT MIK (NL), ANDRIJANA STOJKOVIC (RS)

As Ireland heads into recession in 2008, cultural and socio-political relationships are beginning to tighten. The open and relatively inclusive web, of Irish and migrant workers, formed the bedrock beneath the economic boom. But as the stones begin to shift beneath our feet, where will discontent arise and how will Ireland cope with an upsurge of nationalism? Exhibitions throughout Europe have attempted to turn the lens of artistic perception towards places and centres of crisis, but all too often policy has already been set, and the possibility that art might have to influence cultural understanding has already been overtaken by dominant public opinion. The Prehistory of the Crisis attempts to broach these issues before the period of crisis has hit, at a time when art can have a discreet yet potent voice.

An exhibition project in two parts, The Prehistory of the Crisis begins with an international exhibition at Project Arts Centre in October 2008. The exhibition brings together four artist and artist partnerships from the Netherlands, France, Germany and Serbia, who will all be exhibiting for the first time in Ireland. Each of the works have been produced in relation to the power displacement experienced by both citizens and civil servants, the nebulous group of subjects variously called 'new nationals', 'migrants' or 'non-nationals', and migrants without the rights to work, 'sans papiers'.

Aernout Mik's video installation Training Ground, Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin's film MANMUSWAK, Jeanne Faust & Jörn Zehe's film sonst wer wie du (who else like you), and Andrijana Stojkovic's film HOME all hone in on individual responses to conditions: the pieces are variously referential of particular situations, but they all activate within us some sort of responsibility for coming to a an autonomous awareness of the complexity of otherness and the complications of 'living with others'.

The second part of the project, The Prehistory of the Crisis (II) is scheduled for July 2009 and will be an exhibition with artists who have turned their attention to the changing attitudes in the Irish context. The Prehistory of the Crisis (II) will be accompanied by lectures and debates which both challenge and further the research into the findings of the artists presented. Commissioned artists will be announced before the end of 2008.

McLibel

2008-11-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

McLibel
I watched this documentary the other night about a massive court case against various issues concerning McDonalds. It was about how these two ordinary citizens decided to start a campaign expressing to the public the issues of concern with the policies of the worldwide company McDonalds. I don't really know why I am adressing this documentary on y blog but I would like to keep a record of what I have been watching. I am interested in documentary and factual films and stories however. The entire documentary can be watched online HERE.

McLibel
The McLibel Trial is the infamous British court case between McDonald's and a former postman & a gardener from London (Helen Steel and Dave Morris). It ran for two and a half years and became the longest ever English trial. The defendants were denied legal aid and their right to a jury, so the whole trial was heard by a single Judge, Mr Justice Bell. He delivered his verdict in June 1997.
The Result was devastating for McDonald's. The judge ruled that they 'exploit children' with their advertising, produce 'misleading' advertising, are 'culpably responsible' for cruelty to animals, are 'antipathetic' to unionisation and pay their workers low wages. But Helen and Dave failed to prove all the points and so the Judge ruled that they HAD libelled McDonald's and should pay 60,000 pounds damages. They refused and McDonald's knew better than to pursue it. In March 1999 the Court of Appeal made further rulings that it was fair comment to say that McDonald's employees worldwide "do badly in terms of pay and conditions", and true that "if one eats enough McDonald's food, one's diet may well become high in fat etc., with the very real risk of heart disease."

As a result of the court case, the Anti-McDonald's campaign mushroomed, the press coverage increased exponentially, this website was born and a feature length documentary was broadcast round the world.

The legal controversy continued. The McLibel 2 took the British Government to the European Court of Human Rights to defend the public's right to criticise multinationals, claiming UK libel laws are oppressive and unfair that they were denied a fair trial. The court ruled in favour of Helen and Dave: the case had breached their their rights to freedom of expression and a fair trial.

Who said ordinary people can't change the world?

SOURCE

Hunger by Steve McQueen

2008-11-04T16:25:00.000-08:00

I went to see Hunger by Steve McQueen tonight. It was absolutely immense. The camera work, the sound(or rather, lack of!) the emotion, it is a very beautifully shot film. It wa very emotional however, with some scenes which I would rather not watch again!

I've read through some pretty interesting reviews and interviews about this film and with Steve McQueen, this was his first film, as he usually displays his work in galleries because he is an artist. I think that this would be of great influence as to how he directed and shot the film. It is visually very different to alot of films I have seen. I also like the way he doesn't take sides with either Bobby Sands or the prison guards, you feel as emotional for them as you do the protesters.

"I want the screen, in effect, to be a massive mirror. When you're looking at that, you are really looking at yourself - and sometimes you may not always like what you see. I'd like audiences to realise what we are as a nation, and what we have done over the years. Cinema, it seems to me, has a power that is beyond purely being entertaining..." Steve McQueen SOURCE

FAUND

2008-11-04T07:54:00.000-08:00

Website FAUND

ABOUT

Through a selection of finders presented in a paper magazine and online-platform, FAUND aims to highlight the value of internet-found images. We find people who create finding.

FAUND is a magazine comprised of images found on the internet. For their first issue, which debuted last month, Switzerland-based editors Daniel Pianetti and Renato Zülli invited artists Peter Sutherland, Guy Meldem and Constant Dullaart to submit their finds.

Helvetica

2008-11-04T07:22:00.000-08:00

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day. The film was shot in high-definition on location in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium.

SOURCE

I have to say, it was not the most fascinating documentary for me, but of course, I am not a graphic designer. But I do like the way the documentary was shot. I like the idea of following some repetitive object/saying/advertisement/company/etc! and documenting it in various locations. The trailer is a great example of what I am trying to say here....

We Feel Fine

2008-10-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Mission

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

- Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006

WEBSITE -WE FEEL FINE

Jess Wheelock

2008-10-31T07:06:00.000-07:00

WEBSITE

TRANSMISSIONS TO THE UNIVERSE is an archive of video logs created by fourteen wandering cosmicnauts. These transmissions are collected for the universe to make of them what it will.
This video piece shows people randomly floating about space in astronaut suits speaking what doesn't seem to have any relevence to anything. It is up to the viewer to make sense of what they will. I really like this idea and enjoyed the video pieces. There is not much written about the project or the artist so it is difficult to research her work. But I think it stems from the idea of the video blogs on youtube. She used 14 different peoples portraits and placed them all into space suits.

The Wonder Rooms
This is a website by jess wheelok that deals with the supernatural. I love the idea of the website being the actual art piece, and how you can access different parts of it.
Again, I do no know much about the work, due to lack of written material about the artist.

WEBSITE

Spencer Finch

2008-10-30T04:31:00.001-07:00

Let me introduce you to Spencer Finch...
I came across his work on Rhizome homepage. And I was amazed by what I saw :)

Spencer Finch's installations take form in a variety of different mediums, but he is probably best known for his work with fluorescent lights. In some works, Mr. Finch attempts to recreate the exact color and intensity of light the existed at a specific place and time. For example, Moonlight (Luna County, New Mexico, July 13, 2003), 2003 replicates the exact light of the full moon that shone over the desert of Luna County, NM on the evening of July 13, 2003. source

Excerpts from reviews:
Sensing that our observations must be tied to experience if we are to get at
the truth of something, Finch is compelled continually to expand the scope of
his projects, returning to the same sites at all hours to look again and
again. He traveled to Rouen to visit the cathedral painted by Claude Monet but found
the building closed for renovation. Undeterred, Finch decided to make a series
of paintings depicting the colors of various objects in his hotel room. By
the time he had completed the arduous task of matching 55 colors, the changing
light had altered every one. Thus the work grew into a triptych, a wry blend of
Conceptual and Impressionist methodologies, representing the same set of
colors in the morning, afternoon, and evening. As Finch is fascinated with the
interaction of the physiological and the psychological aspects of perception, the
way our inner world casts a veil over the outer, it makes sense that he would
travel thousands of miles to make a work that explored the tiniest details
of his hotel room. For him vision is an act of projection as much as of
apprehension. . . . Darkness and light. Blindness and insight. Nature and Science.
These dichotomies arise in Finch’s work only to have their usefulness and
validity interrogated. Their too-easy formulas and their promise of an absolute
veracity are not to be trusted. His work for the past decade had consciously
distilled these issues and has grown richer, more potent. Resisting conclusion,
Finch nevertheless aspires to a greater appreciation of the problem. . .
excerpt from Charles LaBelle, Frieze pp. 66-69, May 2003

This means that Finch’s understanding of color theory, in the end, doesn’t
amount to an alternative to formalism or Conceptualism. He is unafraid to
inhabit the paradox that art exists in the play between language and perception.
What many artists and theorists find unbearable, literally, the ‘speaking
against itself’ implied in para-doxa, is for Finch less something to escape than the
very condition necessary for his art practice. That is why his work
demonstrates a Proustian interest in the difficulties and disappointments of
recollection. He knows that color lies at the boundary of what we see and what we
remember. Despite the thick red line of humor that runs through his work, Finch’s
projects are always laced with the acute pathos of someone disappointed by both
perception and language and by their mutual exclusivity and incompatibility.
"There is always a paradox inherent in vision, an impossible desire to see
yourself seeing. A lot of my work probes this tension; to want to see, but not
being able to,” Finch says in a catalogue for a 1997 show at the Wadsworth
Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Color is less a trope of indeterminacy than a way to
re-create an almost visceral experience of our impossible desire to name our
perceptions.
excerpt from Saul Anton, Artforum, pp. 124-127, April 2001

This was a breakthrough exhibition for conceptually minded Spencer Finch,
whose quirky works incorporate science-related themes. Finch’s drawings,
paintings and sculptures were grouped around the theme of ‘up’-- work involving skies,
stars, and jet streams, for instance, but also studies of the water stains on
the artist’s ceiling and an attempt to capture the smell inside a flying
Airbus 340. . . . If Finch’s eyes are on the heavens, his feet are squarely on the
cultural ground in an America of Astroturf, rhinestones, UFO obsessions and
synthetic breakfast drinks. An orange drawing of the Milky Way was composed
entirely of Tang on paper . . .
excerpt from Gregory Volk, Art in America, September 2001

Alas, that all this energy and commitment should result in work that is
virtually viewerproof.
excerpt from Grace Glueck, The New York Observer, October 5, 1992

SOURCE

It was hard to find pictures of what I wanted to put on my blog. But here are some examples of his work.

General Research

2008-10-30T03:58:00.000-07:00

Hans Richter - Dreams that Money can Buy -
Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 American experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.

Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger. The film won the Award for the Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography at the 1947 Venice Film Festival.The basic plotline of the film consists of front man Joe/Narcissus (Jack Bittner) who is an ordinary man who has recently signed a complicated lease on a room. As he wonders how to pay the rent, he discovers that he can see the contents of his mind unfolding whilst looking into his eyes in the mirror. Clients then come into the room for an appointment with him and he gives them dreams, insights into their own minds, with a series of surreal like fantasies.

For my project I think it is relevent in the context of different ways of seeing, distorting what's really going on..

Pervert's Guide to Cinema (vol 1,2,3) Slavoj Žižek

It explores a number of films from a psychoanalytic theoretical perspective. Slavoj gives examples of different movies and psychoanalysis them. For me I guess it doesn't exactly directly relate to my project?? I'm not sure. I guess like because I'm trying to manipulate what the viewer sees, distorting what is the normal for them, it could relate in the sense of how other directors have influenced the audience as to what they see on screen?
An idea I found particularly engaging what Slavoj's analogy of the toilet bowl and the cinema screen. He claims that when we flush something down a toilet, we don't think to where it actually goes, it goes to some sort of other realm. When we look at a cinema screen, it is as if something is coming out at us from another realm (like if something came back from the toilet!).

My experiments

2008-10-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

In this shot I put a magnifying glass over the lens to distort the image that appears on the screen. I handheld it so I could move the filter to distort the scene in different ways. The car journey was bumpy however so it is not exactly the most still movie scene, but I shall take it again.

This is an experimental reel in which I have experimented with different sorts of filters such as bubblewrap, lids, netting, and magnifying glasses.

I experimented wih other filters as well, such as tights, window curtains, creams, but I did not like the effect it had. The ones in the reek are the ones which I want to work with.

I want to continue filming with more different types of filters, as well as the ones I have already used. I would like to retake some of the shots.

Another aspect I'm interested in is the 'pulsing' of the focus on the camera lens. When it constantly goes in and out of focus it seems as tho it cannot grasp what the object is, it reminds me of how a blind person might see perhaps!?

Evolvement of ideas

2008-10-20T02:39:00.000-07:00

So I've tried out filming through different filters etc, I still am not happy with what I have filmed so far. I do not think I'm achieving what I have hoped to achieve. I just did a few experiments really and there may be one or two things I'm happy with. I've recently become interested in the idea of blindness, it relates to what I'm doing in my project because I'm trying to distort images, what I imagine someone blind would see, or someone that was blind, seeing for the first time.?? I think that for the viewer, abstract images is not enough to keep attention. I think an aspect of the work which I hope to encorporate will make the work more interesting, give it more depth. I'm still going to keep to the same method of filming, using filters and such, but instead, or maybe, as well as having a natural soundtrack to what is being shown (to help identify it) I am going to have a person narrating what they see, and maybe even a blind person. I want 3 narratives told to the same story, this will show that people can see and make stories out of different images, even tho they are the same.

So I'm going to keep filming different kinds of subjects, while using filters to distort the image, and over this I want some natural soundtrack and a person telling a story. I am hoping to use flash to create the interface of the dvd, it will have 3 buttons, and each button will play the same images, but the story that is being told is different.

What do blind people see?

2008-10-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or psychological factors.

Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define "blindness"[1]. Total blindness is the complete lack of form and light perception and is clinically recorded as "NLP", an abbreviation for "no light perception"[1]. "Blindness" is frequently used to describe severe visual impairment with residual vision. In order to determine which people may need special assistance because of their visual disabilities, various governmental jurisdictions have formulated more complex definitions referred to as legal blindess[2]. In North America and most of Europe, legal blindness is defined as visual acuity (vision) of 20/200 (6/60) or less in the better eye with best correction possible. This means that a legally blind individual would have to stand 20 feet from an object to see it with the same degree of clarity as a normally sighted person could from 200 feet. In many areas, people with average acuity who nonetheless have a visual field of less than 20 degrees (the norm being 180 degrees) are also classified as being legally blind. Approximately ten percent of those deemed legally blind, by any measure, are fully sightless. The rest have some vision, from light perception alone to relatively good acuity. Those who are not legally blind, but nonetheless have serious visual impairments, possess low vision. source

So for alot of blind people they cannot see things that would be far away but as they come closer it becomes clearer to them...

Visual Perception (youtube vids)

2008-10-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

I typed in visual perception into youtube and here are some videos I found interesting in relation to my project!

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly trailer

2008-10-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Anticipation of the night

2008-10-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

Arguably the central film in the Brakhage canon, Anticipation of the Night (1958) inaugurated a radical change in experimental filmmaking techniques and aesthetics. Prior to this film, American experimental cinema employed either a "Trance" (or "Psychodrama") model, as established by Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon), Kenneth Anger (Fireworks), and Sidney Peterson and James Broughton (The Potted Psalm), or a "Graphic" model, as established (in different forms) by Mary Ellen Bute (Tarantella), Harry Smith (Early Abstractions), and Len Lye (Colour Box). The Trance/Psychodrama approach emphasized surreal, dream narratives of psychological revelation in which the filmmaker typically performed as an on-screen protagonist. This protagonist experienced a literal and metaphorical journey of self-exploration built upon representational imagery that alternated between objective and subjective perspectives. The Graphic approach featured animated, abstract images often hand-applied directly onto the film. The film itself functioned as a scroll which could be "unwound" at different projector speeds or by hand.

In Anticipation of the Night, Stan Brakhage abandoned both models (or perhaps more accurately combined both models) and rejected aesthetic norms for an intensely personal and extremely subjective expression of self that emphasized the various "visions" of the filmmaker. This "Lyrical" approach teasingly appeared in earlier Brakhage films (such as Reflections on Black, The Way to Shadow Garden, and Wonder Ring) and would reach full expression in his 1960s films (such as Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, Window Water Baby Moving, and Dog Star Man), but Anticipation of the Night stands as the first fully realized Lyrical film and a paradigm of the model. Working as a "diary" in which Brakhage recorded the events of his life and his feelings about them, Anticipation of the Night ushered in a new experimental model which synthesized a Romantic mythopoesis and the reflexive Modernism of Abstract Expressionism.

P. Adams Sitney, one of the central figures of experimental film criticism and author of the seminal text Visionary Film, explains that Lyrical cinema:

. . . postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision. In the lyrical form there is no longer a hero; instead the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a man looking. As viewers we see this man's intense experience of seeing.

This boldly original technique of expressing the impression of sight via an abstracted, first-person point of view resulted in a very poor reception when Anticipation of the Night was first shown (reportedly causing a riot at the 1959 Brussels World Fair). Yet according to Sitney, the great achievement of Anticipation of the Night is exactly this emphasis; its distillation of "an intense and complex interior crisis into an orchestration of sights and associations which cohere in a new formal rhetoric of camera movement and montage."

In Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage created a film of self-exploration and psychological revelation that did not depend on a journey metaphor, a linear narrative structure, or an on-screen protagonist (although vestiges of these Trance conventions are noticeable). Brakhage strove to communicate a "totality of vision" (what he saw, perceived, felt, imagined, and dreamt) through a complete identification between himself and a "liberated camera." Using a constantly moving hand-held camera, unfocused images, under- and over-exposure, random compositions, distorting lenses and filters, flash frames, varying camera speeds, fragmented time and space, "plastic cutting," and in later films, the scratching, bleaching, and painting of the film stock, Brakhage equated the process of filmmaking and the abstraction of reality with the expression of his emotions and imagination (much like the "action painting" of Abstract Expressionism). James Peterson refers to these techniques as a type of "personification strategy" where the film's manipulation represents the filmmaker's consciousness. Anticipation of the Night "personifies" Brakhage's mental state in terms of a purely visual, subjective cinema.

A "difficult" and ambiguous film, Anticipation of the Night does not readily lend itself to an adequate description that can do justice to its poetry; its abstractions and ideas need to be experienced and pondered. Notwithstanding, Brakhage offers an excellent summary that manages to capture the emotions and themes of the film. Writing in Filmwise (1961) he says:

The daylight shadow of a man in movement evokes lights in the night. A rose bowl, held in hand, reflects both sun and moon-like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water, with promissory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all night light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents and their animal dreams, becoming their amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, becomes the complexity of branches on which the shadow man hangs himself.

Yet even Brakhage's description fails to convey the play of textures and light, the excitement of motion, the endearing innocence of children and nature, the giddiness of a carnival, and the nonnarrative simultaneity caused by his fragmented "hyper-editing."

In Metaphors on Vision (which Brakhage began writing while developing the Lyrical mode), Brakhage discusses the psychological and artistic context of Anticipation of the Night. He explains how the film was to be his last about "fulfilling the myth of myself;" that it would function as a way out from the style and themes of the Psychodrama. The journey and suicide of the filmmaker/protagonist marks an end of Brakhage's early cinema and the start of a new artistic approach (much like Godard's "end of film/end of cinema" at the close of Weekend). More personally, Brakhage admits to a type of depression which colored the film (and provided its title): "pit seemed as if there was nothing but night out there, and I then thought of all my life as being in anticipation of that night. That night could only cast one shadow for me, could only form itself into one black shape, and that was the hanged man." Brakhage tells the story of how he accidentally hung himself while shooting the final sequence and what this revealed to him. "I was sure that I had intended for months to finish the editing of Anticipation of the Night up to that point, go out in the yard, climb up on a chair camera in hand, jump off the chair, and while hanging run out as much film as I could, leaving a note saying 'Attach this to the end of Anticipation of the Night'."

Sitney's acclamation that Anticipation of the Night was the "first American film about and structured by the nature of the seeing experience; how one encounters a sight, how it is recalled, how it affects later vision, and where it leads the visionary" may deny the influence of Mary Ellen Bute, Jim Davis, and Marie Menken, but it does stress the importance of light and "untutored" or "innocent" vision in Brakhage's subsequent work. Brakhage explains this importance in the often quoted opening to Metaphors on Vision:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each objected encountered in life through an adventure of perception. . . . Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color.

Anticipation of the Night began the examination of this world of intense personal visions and subjective filmic expression.

—Greg S. Faller

Colydascope

2008-10-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.blogtvpg.com/Shows/245858/ZmXvY2VDae3tbm3GbH&pos=anc

Blog internet colydascope

Gelatin Filters

2008-10-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

http://home.howstuffworks.com/easy-indoor-crafts9.htm

How to make your own.

So what did I learn about filters?

2008-10-18T07:13:00.000-07:00

Filters transform data.
Filters sorts or makes order of pattern.
Filters transform images in an unusual way.
Filters manipulate data.
In Telle-communication filters selectively sort signals
Filters are used to surpress noise or they separate signals
Filters give a particular effect used to apply to image.
Gelatin filters are used over the lens of a camera to absorb specific wavelengths of light.

What is a fliter? some definitions from the web

2008-10-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

A program that accepts a certain type of data as input, transforms it in some manner, and then outputs the transformed data. For example, a program that sorts names is a filter because it accepts the names in unsorted order, sorts them, and then outputs the sorted names.Utilities that allow you to import or export data are also sometimes called filters.
A pattern through which data is passed. Only data that matches the pattern is allowed to pass through the filter.
In paint programs and image editors, a filter is an effect that can be applied to a bit map. Some filters mimic conventional photographic filters, but many transform images in unusual ways. A pointillism filter, for example, can make a digitized photograph look like a pointillistic painting.
Filters are applied to the information coming into your account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide accurate reports. These filters can be set up to exclude visits from particular IP addresses, to report only on a subdomain or directory, or to take dynamic page URLs and convert them into readable text strings.
In telecommunications, a filter is a device that selectively sorts signals and passes through a desired range of signals while suppressing the others. This kind of filter is used to suppress noise or to separate signals into bandwidth channels.
In Photoshop and other graphic applications, a filter is a particular effect that can be applied to an image or part of an image. Filters can be fairly simple effects used to mimic traditional photographic filters (which are pieces of colored glass or gelatine placed over the lens to absorb specific wavelengths of light) or they can be complex programs used to create painterly effects.

A Conversation between Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage

2008-10-16T07:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.logosjournal.com/brakhage_mekas.htm

This is an interview I was reading between the two avant-garde film-makers, Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage.
A few things I found interesting about their conversation that they said 'sometimes you just have to go back to the essence of things, what really is cinema, painting, poetry...'
Another interesting thing Stan Brakhage said was that (and although this was obvious, I just thought it was a nice description) 'There are no two people on Earth who are alike. All their cells are unique as snowflakes.'

Jonas Mekas says 'The shape of my films emerges from the accumulation of the material itself. I am a filmer. I film real life'..... I found this interesting and relative to my own work because I would like to think that has been the case in some of my earlier photography work. I took photos of everyday life and people etc etc etc they may not mean much alone, but the accumulation of all the photos together gives them meaning, a shape of sorts.

Partially sighted

2008-10-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

What would/does the world look like to someone that is partially sighted/blind?
I think this idea ties into my project very well and would definitely be a good idea to further investigate.

Recommendations

2008-10-15T15:11:00.001-07:00

I have been reccommended some of these films to research for my project.

Perverts guide to cinema (vol 1-3)
'Personna' by Ingmar Burgman
'Dreams that money can buy' by Hans Richter
'Solaris' and 'Mirrors' by Tarkovsky.
The driving bell and the butterfly' by Julian Schnabel and Jean Dominique Bauby
'Playtime' by Jacques Tati

Also research more on Brakhage and others.

Ways of Achieving my ideas

2008-10-15T15:07:00.005-07:00

A way of obscuring the image which I am interested in is using filters on the camera lens.
I would shoot film footage of all kinds while experimenting with different filters to see what effects I get and how this distorts the image.
I was also thinking that for the viewer, in order for them to interpret the image I would have to have some sort of natural soundtrack to help them determine the imagery.
I need to create and look out for all different types of filters, natural, man made, etc

My Ideas and what I hope to achieve.

2008-10-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

I want to distort the image in some way so as to make it 'new' again, indistinguishable.
I want to create abstract and aesthetically interesting images, to make objects or scenes difficult to interpret straight away.
I want to create a new sense of unknowing and new vision.
I want to obscure the visual perception.
I want to reduce objects to the minimal criteria for identification.

Stan Brakhage

2008-10-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

I found Stan Brakhage to be really interesting. I loved his idea of the 'unruling eye'.

Metaphores on Vision '64
What is the nature of the moving world and how can it be represented?
Distorted visual reality and questioning of the screen.
What we see as reality. Our 'ruling' eye. He transforms images, leaves us guessing what it is we are looking at.
'Act of seeing the world'
Brakhage intended to film not the world itself but the act of seeing the world. Brakhage's films were themselves expressions of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.

This quote from his essay Metaphores on Vision is definately something I hope to look into for this project.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

Some points to start working from

2008-10-15T14:59:00.001-07:00

Not paying attention to what we are looking at. We seem like robots while watching the screen
The screen has many functions
It provides info we consume more or less passively.
It is a mediator.
Representation meets reality.
Representation of space and our relationship to it.
Different ways of representing reality. Using the screen. What do we automatically assume when we watch tv?

New Project -Interrupting the Screen

2008-10-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

Today we can hardly even imagine a day without computer, television or other screens
surrounding us. Nevertheless, we hardly pay any attention to the screens themselves,
but use them as if they had always existed. We use screens for many functions, they
may entertain and display information; some are used interactively, others provide
information that we consume more or less passively. Screens also have many different
sizes and shapes and different technologies are used to implement the necessary
functions.
…(the) screen does not have an immutable identity, but has its own history, influenced by cultural, social, technological and ideological factors. Screen is not a goal in and for itself, but its purpose is to represent information, communication, figures, faces and virtual realms. It is a mediator.

Jarmo Hiipakka, Art and Science in Historical and Cultural Context

Think about the quotation above and about how we relate to the physical, temporal, spatial and/or cultural nature of the screen and/or its use in art, communications, science,entertainment or any other field that interests you. Research and analyse the work of video artists and other screen based artworks that deal with the nature of televisual experience. Address this theme in video, video installation or photographic format. Interpret it as you will,considering its relevance to your own artistic development. Identify and address how your work will be presented to an audience.

Working towards the exhibition!

2008-05-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

Well i decided not to use the words with the pictures because I didnt think it looked right in the end, but as i printed and laminated and cut the pictures and words up i decided to do the words separately. I also thought that displaying them on a fridge would heighten the idea of memory... most people use friges to stick their magnets on, like memories from a holiday or something. The words are like the word magnet games you can put on your fridge or locker too so it kind of had that 'create your own narrative' connection with the piece. Here are some photos I took of the process of the work and the final exhibition.

Idea for Exhibition

2008-05-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

For the exhibition I've been thinking about how to set up my work and what sort of format im going to have it in. One night I printed out some contact sheets of all my photos that I had taken for the project, i cut them up and placed them all out in a grid... surprisingly i really liked it, it looked well, so i thought that maybe i could present them this way for the exhibition. We had a tutorial with Ralph again and my idea became clearer, I'm going to post all my pictures up like the contacts but with magnets on them so that they can be moved around, while also on a big metal board of course!! People can then make their own narratives from it and place them in different story lines etc, Im also going to have the text up in movable fragments, so there will be a text aspect to the work aswell. Also under each picture there will be a brief description of what the picture is. I think this adds to the remembrance of a memory aspect in which I am trying to encorporate into my work.

Further Developments

2008-05-02T02:42:00.000-07:00

Ok so a decision was made about the outcome of the project, because it's a narrative and there are so many pictures, and there is a story with them, I am going to make a book out of them.

I don't exactly know what the order of the book is going to be. I might do two different kinds...

the six word memoir one, which could include the memoir and either one photo or a series of photos on the opposite page,

or

i could juxtapose images against each other, one on each page, so they form their own narrative.

now i just have to decide what images go with what six word memoir and what images make narratives in themselves. also have to decide if more photos are necessary to be taken. I can also take stills from the video footage I have taken.

The video footage is another story. I don't know exactly what's going to be done with it all... they are an extension of whats taken photographically, so I might just create a series of small experiments, and if any video pieces go together really well I might create a full sequence out of those... audio wise....either music or maybe stories being told.? For now I'm just gonna concentrate on the photos, see which ones go well together etc!!

New Photos

2008-04-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

I have experimented with distorting the photographs by use of cling film, curtain netting, filters, coloured paper, water, and decorated glass. I think it helps create a surreal like or sublime state, they are quite abstract images also, so it is not exactly clear what they are...

Atmosphere

2008-04-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos I took of a night out in Berlin. I really like the atmosphere of the place, it's not totally in focus so it illustrates the ambience and mood of the night out...

More Photographs of mine

2008-04-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

More six word memoirs

2008-04-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a website which puts images with these memoirs, something in which I hope to to...link http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/features/2008/02/memoir/gallery/index.html

I've asked some of my friends to give me some six word memoirs or sentences....here's what they came up with...

woke, ramblembed, and then haha.

Yes, I still long for yesterday.

I failed, but still hope prevails.

This battle is only with yourself.

A victim of my immediate surroundings.

Such tiny instances breed huge consequences.

Punished by my own high standards.

Ignore the past, simply run fast.

Far too quick like a sunrise.

I'm here for no apparent reason.

I'm looking forward to going back.

Is this what the future holds?

I questioned everything, but learned nothing.

Happiness comes from those around me

What I love is watching neighbours.

My past will always be memorable.

My life is plain for all to see.

Life consists of ebbs and flows.

Years beyond seventy are a bonus.

come and go, like the tide.

This will all make sense someday.

I am as I shall always be.

Good will prevail, in delicate detail.

Hope my career is in horror.

Change, Hope, Music, Love, Isolation, Laughter.

Change is like a refreshing drink.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

My life is on my walls

Memories are ephemeral, nothing lasts forever.

Where did it all go to?

Thought I would know by now.

The eye sees if the heart agrees

Laughter is the oil in friendships

There will be days like this.

My thought of process has gone.

Loneliness is the absense of relationships.

I am always half a person

my life is one perpetual monday

Life's a dream, we're the sleepers

Daydreaming will not get you far

Video Pieces

2008-04-28T07:19:00.000-07:00

I would like the video pieces to be an extension of what I am exploring in my photographic works. Exploring what we experience and manipulating imagery through different techniques. Also the imagery being shot would be everyday occurances, maybe even introducing some surreal like elements such as over exposure and reversal. The videos I have uploaded onto my blog already would be things to reference with how I would like to explore this idea.

Ephemeral

2008-04-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

ephemeral \ih-FEM-er-ul\, adjective:
1. Beginning and ending in a day; existing only, or no longer than, a day; as, an ephemeral flower.
2. Short-lived; existing or continuing for a short time only.

the experiences in my photographs are ephemeral. they evoke memoirs of experiences only

Six Word Memoirs

2008-04-28T06:29:00.000-07:00

Here are some examples of some six word memoirs I found on the internet. www.sixwordmemoirs.com
The idea all came about when Hemingway was challenged to write a story in only 6 words, his response was... For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Other peoples responses include:

Never really finished anything, except cake.

I'm ten, and have an attitute.

Anything with an electric chord is possible.

Danced in fields of infinite possibilities.

My reach always exceeds my grasp.

Thought I would have more impact.

Everyone who loved me is dead.

I still make coffee for two.

She kissed me and said yes.

Fourteen years old, story still untold.

Slightly psychotic, in a good way.

Near death experience is my forte.

I love to love my love.