BOW A4: Contact sheet

A reminder – some of the experiments from BOW A3 can be seen here

The earliest experiment was with the piece of film I bought from Ebay – it is only a few minutes long and after receiving it, I felt there was not enough material to make a whole BOW there so now it appears in the project but is not the basis of it. I have felt conflicted about whether it still belongs there but I think once I create a microsite of moving image pieces so that the publication becomes an accompaniment, it will make more sense.

There were 337 frames from the Processing generation. I chose 45 to concentrate on as possible stills. There is definitely something ‘moving’ worth doing with this – but simplicity is probably key – although not sure what yet. The images I’ve chosen to use are the ones that I struck on first – I printed them stuck them on my wall and saw no reason to change although did look through them again and again.

I also liked the idea of creating unconstructed collages and am probably influenced by the idea of assemblages (some images by Joe Rudko and Thomas Hauser – see end of post) But my attempts haven’t worked so something to keep trying.

As I worked on this project I was more and more aware of the way I was exploring materials and digitisation – the value of it (sounds odd, I know as it is obvious and what I’ve been banging on about for ages). Perhaps this made me go in a certain direction. I felt some of the experiments were over-contrived and trying too hard so pulled back and am much happier with the picture of graph paper on its own – only scrunched rather than overlayed with objects in PS. The same with the newspaper picture of the moon landings.

I have also edited the textual images in the same way I would pictorial ones – ruthlessly and without too much attachment where possible. I felt in BOW A3 that Orpheus in Homebase did not fit but I persisted and finally after trying so many ways to make it work, decided it didn’t.

I also have no issue with using obvious filters and signs of digital manipulation but getting that right is tricky. I was happy with these but there were plenty that didn’t make it.

Here is a contact sheet of attempts (mostly made since BOW A3 but not exclusively – previous contacts sheets are available in relevant BOW sections. I really wanted to photograph the tools used to ‘see’ in a scanning tunnel microscope but lockdown meant I couldn’t. I will continue to think about how this can be resolved: