Author: Sarah-Jane Field

Exploring emergence, fragmentation and value systems

CS: Literature​ Review A2 Notes

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

To be clear; here I discuss the topic I am aiming for as I plan for the extended essay. I mention several key texts that I think will be helpful and which I will include in my A2 Literature Review. A previous blog also links to several important texts but there is minimal reflection in that one:

I need to get on with writing the literature review element of my extended essay. I am still thinking and gathering  – but wanted to just put something down in writing to help me clarify where I’m at at the moment.

I’ve identified a key problem so far – how do I relate my inquiry which I think is about ‘the loss/destruction of reality (as it has been construed)’ to photography? After all, the degree has photography in its title and I need to link the central theme to that discussion. Photography has played its part in that destruction – although there are plenty of other factors/actors.

NB Destruction might also be seen as transformation. I believe this is what my BOW A1.2 is expressing.

Photography’s role in mythmaking

  1. As I said in parenthesis in A1, “photography may have been a very brief interlude in the journey that begun with cave drawing, developed to become printing, followed by the invention of mechanisation, and moving towards a total simulated reality” (2019; 6) In response, Roberta suggested, “Although this has not diminished the demand for those other media – indeed it has given them a new lease of life.”

Printing is in trouble – we do still buy books but it is in a terrible competition with digital text. Painting, not mentioned above, which played such a big role in expressing religious propaganda existed in a feedback loop of development for that purpose.  Although people still paint, I wonder if it is fair to say it is no longer used for what it was originally developed for – and that is a relic like still photography is perhaps becoming. People will continue to revel in it but they are making ghosts – sorry to all painters and still photographers. I do not intend to be dismissive – I understand lots of people still gain pleasure from these media.

2. I am also aware that my first essay could be read as a justification for moving away from photography ‘proper’ and focusing instead on moving image.

3. It seems like a key question in that essay and previous ones, along with the way my work is going is: Why is it more useful/fun/relevant/interesting to look at how images are used rather than the making of them? This is where Postmodernism is relevant.

But I’m not sure that’s really what I believe or what I want to ask.

If the construction of reality is a continuous re-invention of the moment we’re in (which I think is a simplistic way of describing current scientific understanding), the conscious self relies on…

i. memory – an intangible remnant of consciousness which we sometimes exteriorise using various forms/materials;

ii. our hyperdyadic* existence – perhaps represented by collage made with appropriated material;

iii. and mechanical construction (which includes language as a technology – see Andy Clark)  – perhaps represented by the output of machinery we have invented, and which to greater or lesser extent becomes prosthetic – i.e. phones.

*dyadic  – interconnection between two things. Hyerdyadic – interconnection between many  – lots of people but also the environment

4. Whatever route I take, James Elkins book What Photography Is (2011) is an entire book which isn’t really about photography, even though its title suggests that’s all it is about. It’s a response to Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), another book which suggests photography is its main topic but it might also be read as an elderly man coming to terms with his mother’s – and so his own impending – death. I need to learn from them.

How do I keep this related to photography?

  1. I think I need to state early on – that I am looking at the moving image as well as still and come up with a generic term to encompass both. I might use ‘image’ and then qualify that. Image, therefore, might refer to drawing /painting/film. In which case, is there space or a need to address the arguments made about differences between each of these forms and attempt to lay them to rest for the sake of the discussion? (See Barthes – indexicality of photography and also Elkins’).
  2. Perhaps I need to also talk about why moving image is key nowadays, and perhaps more so than still – as the masses embrace technology which makes video recording so easy, and advertisers use it more and more as it can potentially grab our attention with its movements and flickers more successfully than still. Or at least suggest we can make that assumption with some certainty.  This feels a bit like a justification again and might take up too many words, but it feels crucial.
  3. Although it may seem like I am dismissing still photography, I am not. In amongst the plethora of photographic projects and bodies of work which all seem very similar and flaccid, there are a number of photographers making potent and striking work, such as (but not exclusively) Thomas Ruff and  Zanele Muholi.
    (Intention is key)
  4. Elkin says, “beyond that, talking about the surround as I did for the photograph of the greyhound reveals that the surround is boring, and possibly also that photography as a whole is, in the end, also a bit boring.” (loc 1706) Perhaps, I will suggest that if this is true it is because we as a society are desensitised to photography, now that its initial magic qualities have faded. Seeing a photograph in 1845 must have been incredible and exciting and perhaps awe-inspiring. To capture a person and then have them rendered as delicately as those older processes were capable of would have seemed extraordinary. But now it is mundane and every day. Now our representations move, can be built by anyone – even children as young as two, and offer adventure and flexible narratives. They are engrossing and enticing and overstimulating. So the poor old still photograph has a great deal to compete with. While some, perhaps people with time on their hands, may revel in the luxury of contemplating an image of a leaf or a fragment of a person or people, or the emptiness of a blank page, others are fed a diet of shiny, fast-paced, noisy and enticing media. Most of us have this latter fodder in our lives and perhaps that is where the mythology I am interested in exists. If still photography (academic art) is to remain relevant, then perhaps it can a useful tool for deconstructing the myth I’m exploring.
  5. Art photography is often inherently elitist. Not always, but so much of it can’t help being so – refs from Elkins:
    “It is easy to agree that photography’s apparent realism has been formed by the middle-class hope that the photographs give us reality itself (as Bourdieu says).” (loc 762)“‘photography is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration’. (Bordieu, Un Art moyen, 48)” (loc 707)“For Bourdieu, photography is bourgeois to its bones, and it even includes its own futile anti-bourgeois gestures, like my own attraction to things that aren’t family photographs.” (loc 716)
  6. Still photography is one fragment of a re-enactment of our biological processes – by focusing on it alone we persist with a Cartesian construction/understanding of reality. But it might be more relevant nowadays to explore these topics more holistically. Intro/preface?

Mythmaking

Hoffman’s book below references advertising and images extensively. Held within these images are myths.

I have become really interested in mythology – and the relationship between science and religion. It seems to me that both do the same things, i.e. put difficult concepts into narratives we can try to manage.

The following is from the author, Jonathan Raban’s biography A Passage to Juneau.

“Within the last 9,000 to 12,000 years, when people were present to witness such events, they would have seen the sea close over islands as earthquakes rearranged topography. You couldn’t look at the delicate compromise made here between land and sea without imagining the Flood: and you couldn’t imagine the flood without inventing a Noah or a Gilgamesh” (1999) (Perhaps this quote will be on the cover page or at the top of the essay).

Books

Return of the Real Hal Foster 1996

The Case Against Reality Donald D Hoffman 2019 (see below) (He mentions Plato’s Cave his description may be useful to quote.)

How we Became Posthuman Kathryn Hayles 1999 (in particular Chapter 7, Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties of Philip K. Dick)

What Photography Is James Elkins 2011 (see identified quotes here – https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/09/08/a2-useful-links/)

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, 1980

Essays

Myth Today Roland Bart’s 1957 https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/notes-on-myth-today-by-roland-barthes-1957/

Baudrillard (Disneyfication): From Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

Originality_in_Postmodern_Appropriation – JULIE C. VAN CAMP (Academia.edu)

I need to look at Deleuze but I do not know his work and have no idea where to start.

Popular Culture, films, TV

The AO (Netflix) 2016-19 TV – Series One explores a kind of inverted Plato’s Cave which becomes a metaphor for digital culture. As part of my research, I have been watching plenty of reality-bending films and TV, this being one of them.

Total Recall, 1990 and 2012 Film

Inception, 2010 Film (this leads to Memento – also directed by Christopher Nolan but I am trying to avoid clinging to memory as a key theme, even though that is an important topic.)

Added 2/10/2019 45 Years, 2015 Film

Specific Artists’ work

  1. Mark Lecky’s O’ Magic Power of Bleakness 

(In the link above, I talk about several influencing works which had fed into my own practice but which may also be useful for the essay.

I will need to revisit this at Tate Britain as there is much to link to, moving image, youth culture, myth, everydayness.

2. Katinka Schuett, Cosmic Drive – I have only just come across this work and will look at it as a possible example of still photography looking at similar themes. ““Cosmic Drive primarily explores the way humans handle ignorance,” says Katinka Schuett of her Female in Focus winning series, which examines the contradictory spheres of fantasy and hard science. “I am interested in our perceptions of space, and the question of whether or not life can be found in the universe.” Schuett is as concerned with fantasy as she is with facts, merging the two to consider the illusions we create when there is a void of information. ” (Roberts, 2019)

https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/09/female-in-focus-cosmic-drive/

I probably need to have a few more references here.

Blog Conclusion (not essay) – is there a question/title here yet? 

I’m not sure … perhaps:

Should we re-evaluate our relationship to myth/humanity’s need to create myth? (And what role does the image play?)

I feel it will be necessary to use the word image in the extended essay rather than photography – because photography is such a nebulous term and describes a range of activities –  and perhaps I need to explain in a preface. Does a preface count towards word count? Something to ask when submitting the review.

Something I’ve not addressed here which I think fits but which may be too far outside the inquiry – the body/blood/softness/boundaries/flesh. Hayle’s looks at this and references Donna Harraway several times  – I don’t think I fully comprehend what’s going on here yet and need to read these sections again, as well as Haraway’s Cyborg essay which I’ve only read once so far (and found it a little bewildering – perhaps I was tired/distracted).

I know I am interested in the fractal nature of reality and our conscious understanding of it. So, we function (construct reality) in a certain way and the patterns of that construction are evident in our expressions (media –  films/adverts.any narratives, the way we produce them.)

I still think I’m focusing too much on why photography is becoming irrelevant and need to look more at boundaries/flesh/death – life/self-other; I suppose these things to tie into myth and the breaking down of self as a definitive object as technology and science evolve. Therefore perhaps we might say, “it is a myth that you and I exist at all”  – however, this myth is all we have and so we need to take it seriously even though we understand it is a myth.”

Added 2/10/2019 – https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ai-will-forever-change-create-find-truth-images

“Sometime in the not-too-distant future, anyone will be able to take a picture without a camera. Instead, we will be able to generate photographs, indistinguishable from those made by a camera, using artificial intelligence (AI) software. You will be able to create an image by simply typing out a description of the scene, or describing it to (presumably) Siri. “Siri,” you’ll say. “I’d like an image of a red-haired woman walking through a park in autumn, the breeze blowing red, orange, and yellow leaves around her.” And—though it may require more detail than that—presto! Your phone will provide various options on the screen to choose from.” (Palumbo 2018)

 

Other refs:

Raban, J. 1999 A Passage to Juneau, Picador, Basingstoke and Oxford

 

 

BOW 1.2: Latest version of the film

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

I have removed my own images taken with flash. I really don’t know what to do with the poem or those pictures. I don’t think they fit but are part of the process.

Or else, if they are anything, they are separate albeit related work.

Ruth really liked the poem and I am glad she did. But every time I think about adding it in some way, I feel now like I am shoe-horning it in. When I look at Ruth’s work, I think I can see why this appeals to her more than the montage film.

Here is the film as it is today. Same password as before.

But it does repeat what I have done before.

After thinking about adding the poem and images to the film in some at the end as an epilogue perhaps, I will now try somethings out with it in PS or Illustrator. I read yesterday in a group email from someone who attended Unseen in Amsterdam that much of the work was alternative processes and that there were hardly any digital prints at all. Why would everyone rush to do the same thing? I will keep exploring digital – how can we not at this time in our history? When digital is having such an effect?

Bow 1.2: Artistic and Cultural Influences

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

The following are some specific influences in the work I’m making for BOW 1.2 (actually A2 in the file but I’ve been referring to it as A1.2 all this time…)

  1. Joan Jonas

Interview on MOMA https://www.moma.org/artists/2930

I learned about Joan Jonas last year during her show at the Tate and so much was useful for my own practice – such as layering moving image, sometimes mixing performance with other mediums, and all related to working from a feminist perspective, eschewing or perhaps exploring and offering alternatives to historical-artistic habits which might be construed as coming from the masculine i.e. relating it Irigray’s suggestion that the female subject cannot exist within current constructs. But perhaps one of the most helpful things Jonas said was when she asked viewers not to try and understand her work, but rather, allow themselves to experience it.

From an interview about her work: (Louisanna Channel, Vimeo)

“My work is all about layering, because I think that’s the way our brains function.” Jonas argues that we always see and think of several things concurrently: “We see one picture and there’s another picture on top of it. And so I think in a way my work represents that way of seeing the world – putting things together in order to say something.” When Jonas started incorporating video into her performances in 1970, this presented new technical possibilities as she could not only do everything herself, but was also able to show different aspects simultaneously. Furthermore, it provided her with new ways of exploring the notion of “female imagery” in the prime of the feminist movement: “Women were kind of bursting out of their seams.” (2016)

Jonas makes work which attempts to operate in a different realm where instinct isn’t jettisoned and emotions are triggered although we may not fully comprehend why. And that is the kind of work I am experimenting with. I do this by trying not to think about what and how I’m making the work too much, influenced by Dada and Surrealism – and automatic writing. I might simply grab footage that appeals to me in some way, perhaps it is related loosely to themes I’m investigating, and then edit them together without thinking too carefully, to begin with. When I look at what I’ve made, I can find meaning and signifiers that make some sense (to me at any rate) and might develop certain threads which I recognise as having a connection.

2. Re-evaluation of strict rational/logical

I do not eschew rationality but we have throughout Western history (Logocentricism) valued it more highly than instinct in our culture. However, there are many instances nowadays in popular culture where the non-rational is being re-examined and celebrated – any superhero film, but also and more specifically, although the list is much longer than this: Inception (2010) film, The Lost Room, (2006) TV, The OA, (2016/19) TV, Russion Doll (2019) TV. (I do plan to write about the bleakness in many of these shows and relate it to Leckey’s work – see below as well as the blurring of boundaries between life and death, this world and some other world, about the loss of reality which might also be described by some as ‘the end of history – Hegel etc.).

Neuroscientists are also more inclined nowadays to suggest non-rational thought has been under-valued, instinct has something positive to offer, and that we may have lost something along the way.

“Indeed, relying on your intuition generally has a bad reputation, especially in the Western part of the world where analytic thinking has been steadily promoted over the past decades. Gradually, many have come to think that humans have progressed from relying on primitive, magical and religious thinking to analytic and scientific thinking. As a result, they view emotions and intuition as fallible, even whimsical, tools.”

“However, this attitude is based on a myth of cognitive progress. Emotions are actually not dumb responses that always need to be ignored or even corrected by rational faculties. They are appraisals of what you have just experienced or thought of – in this sense, they are also a form of information processing.” van Mulukum (2018)

http://theconversation.com/is-it-rational-to-trust-your-gut-feelings-a-neuroscientist-explains-95086

However, this revaluation of rationality also seems dangerous in many instances, such as the growth of the anti-vax movement or the Flat Earthers (I am convinced some Flat Earthers are simply ‘taking the almighty piss’ – Australia is a hoax, for instance, is just too, too mad.) Even so, I can’t help but see that the story of Cassandra as salutary – in it, the symbolic and the rational are valued but the imaginary and instinct aren’t. The feminine and the traditionally related non-rational, are dismissed as the mad ravings of a lunatic even though in the end Cassandra, condemned never to be understood, was right.

The desire to revisit tales of witchcraft (as seen in the collaborative work with Pic London – some are exploring elements) is also related to this trend. One of the workshop leaders Una Hamilton Helle is part of another collaboration – Waking the Witch:

“Traditional witchcraft has a strong connection to the earth with an intimate knowledge of herbs, plants and the elements – as well as the human body. As gatekeepers to altered consciousness witches have been both feared and sought out for their dealings with the unknown. Historically persecuted as an outsider, the witch has been taken on by artists as a challenging force to prevailing norms and as a symbol of dissidence. Looking to symbols, tools and the coven as a space for focusing collective intent, the artists in this exhibition explore the path of the witch as one for how we can connect with the earth and each other.” (wakingthewitch.uk)

http://www.unahamiltonhelle.co.uk/index.php/waking-the-witch/www.wakingthewitch.uk

3. Walter Benjamin as quoted in James Elkins What Photography is (2011)

Another reason for making work this way, is because my head is filled with fragments of emotive information gathered from a lifetime of watching films and TV.

Loc 1311 – “…film he said, creates a percussive shock to the consciousness by continuously changing scenes, “I can no longer think what I want to think.” he writes. “My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” (The Work of Art, in Illuminations, 238)

See mention of Virillo below – who also discussed fragmentation and film.

4. Hannah Höch

I have been a fan of Höch since seeing her work at the Whitechapel when I first started with the OCA. I couldn’t believe I’d not learned about her before. Strangely before going, I was not particularly looking forward to seeing her work and didn’t think much of montage! “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the Hannah Hoch show quite as much I as did, despite having read somewhere that it was the must-go-to show of the moment. I’m not sure why, especially as I’d been in a reenactment of The Cabaret Voltaire at Manchester Metropolitan University, shortly after graduating in 1994 and enjoyed it immensely.” (Field 2014)

http://sjf-oca.blogspot.com/2014/03/font-face-font-family-font-face-font.html

From artsy.com:

“Photomontages were the original remix. In the early 20th century, a group of European artists spliced together images they’d found in popular media, creating singular artworks via a strategy of sampling. The results show both individual statements by their makers and cross-sections of visual culture from a particular historical moment… []

… one of the few female members recognized by the movement, offered a refreshing antithesis to such macho constructions. Her own photomontages offer kaleidoscopic visions of German culture during the interwar era, often from a distinctly queer, feminist perspective.” (Cohen, 2019)

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-radical-legacy-hannah-hoch-one-female-dadaists

Collage is a representation of fragmentation and may be an expression of the sort of continuous changing scenes as mentioned by Benjamin and also Paul Virilio who I quoted in DI&C A2.

“The cinema shows us what our consciousness is. Our consciousness is an effect of montage. There is no continuous consciousness; there are only compositions of consciousness […] collage, cutting, and splicing. We’re in the age of micro-narratives, the art of the fragment.” Paul Virilio (1932-2018)

In my work, I make collage although it is moving-image and contains audio as that is more relevant for today when we are surrounded by adverts that flicker and emit sound constantly – on our phones which we carry around but also in adverts, on escalators, everywhere. This is explored in plenty of science fictions films too, for example, Blade Runner (both 2017 and 1982) and Total Recall (1990 and 2012).

Fragmentation was embraced in theatre, and Brecht’s desire to move away from soporific shows that hypnotised people into accepting their lot in life was replaced by episodic writing of his Epic Theatre which he hoped would make people angry and to act. Ironically, TV today routinely follows the same pattern and time is chopped up and edited, especially in soap-opera’s and sit-coms which are also often accused of hypnotising the masses into accepting their lot in life.

5. Mark Leckey

I had not heard of Mark Leckey until my friend, a filmmaker who I showed DI&C A5 to, said that the first section reminded her of Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1990). Then Catherine (OCA student) suggested meeting up and we chose Leckey’s new show at Tate Britain – O’ MAGIC POWER OF BLEAKNESS (thank you Catherine for kindly suggesting something she knew would be useful for me). I went along and watched the film and spent the whole time thinking, “F*%K! This guy is doing what I do and including signifiers such as networks and space and noise and computer-generated pixels. Except he has way more money and lots of amazing audio and huge screens and other equipment with which to do it!! I am very much committed to a Brechtian eschewing of expense and prefer to embrace using everyday objects, to beg, borrow and steal, to creating Heath-Robinson contraptions. But I was nevertheless somewhat envious as I’m currently desperately trying to bring something together with no money and no tech skills.

However, watching his work also gave me the confidence to keep going.

The overriding sense was, as mentioned in the title, bleakness. The AO (Netflix) also generates something of this in relation to youth culture – and it is this bleakness and indeed horror which sends the characters into different realms. (Which of course also relates to quantum suggestions about multiple universes – I keep thinking about how this relates to myth in general – and the relationship between science and religion.)

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/mark-leckey

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/24/mark-leckey-o-magic-power-of-bleakness-review-tate

(Will write a separate post about this visit.)

6. Jean Painlevé

Ruth suggested Painlevé’s work and they are indeed beautiful films which look at the strange and wonderful creatures that are part of our world, and which looks bizarre to us but we are no doubt horrifying to them. In my work, I look at the very small and liken their worlds to ours. What I rather like about is the music which is more like something you’d expect from a Hitchcock film. Constructing realities…

7. Rivane Neuenschwander born 1967, Cao Guimarães born 1965

Continuing from above – looking at creatures smaller than us, I loved the film described below when I saw it at Tate Modern recently. Although there is no montage here, the focus on creatures with which we share the world and who interact with us, even though we may not know it, is key.

“Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue 2006 is a single-channel video lasting 5 minutes and 48 seconds and shown on a loop. It features a ground-level, close-up view of red and black ants carrying coloured confetti across the floor of the Brazilian rainforest. The film starts with one ant carrying a piece of gold confetti over a gritty surface, followed by shots of differently sized ants attempting to grip or drag confetti across soil and tree trunks. As the video progresses it begins to show multiple ants per scene: a pair collaborate to move a disc up a small hill, and a group fights over a piece of silver confetti.” (Karmen, 2018)

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/neuenschwander-guimaraes-quarta-feira-de-cinzas-epilogue-t12412

8. Pipilotti Rist

Rist was suggested as someone I might look at in feedback for BOW A1. I wrote about her in S&O. I have been influenced by her work in many ways and love how she discusses language. While thinking about how/what to do with the poem, I have been reminded about Rist’s recent work – pressed up against the glass. This glass screen image has been referenced in Netflix’s The AO too – where young people (Millenials) are imprisoned in glass tanks, like fish – unable to touch each other, as if locked behind screens and reliant on a powerful but far from perfect and punitive God-like character what manages their time/food, etc. (A metaphor for the keepers of the technology that imprisons us).

image.aspx

Artists: Pipilotti Rist

Image from: http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/media/press-releases/pipilotti-rist-open-my-glade-flatten/index.aspx

I need to work out why I thought of this. I think it came about by thinking about filming my mouth speaking the text – but this feels a bit hackneyed.

Although the poem doesn’t mention glass or social media, but as Ruth (happily) picked up on it is very much about now, about being unconnected and existing in some sort of limbo much like the imprisoned Millenials in The AO.

One of the things Ruth said about the earlier iteration of the film is that it didn’t feel political in the same way the text did. I hope by simplifying I have rectified that. (All my work aims to be deeply political).

James Elkins What Photography Is (2011)

I am adding this after writing about my Literature Review. Elkins spend a great deal of time examining the same sort of things I am referencing in the film and the poem.

The very small and the way technology is used to make the A-bomb and then dissect it. perhaps this inspection of what reality is the same inquiry into what a photograph is.

Martin Mach – http://www.baertierchen.de/sweets.html

Dust from the world trade centre after 9/11

From https://911research.wtc7.net/essays/thermite/explosive_residues.html

HEE-NC-52011
Harold Egerton, Atomic explosions caught on camera

From: https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/09/28/130183266/abomb?t=1569676113183

BOW 1.2: Research & Development

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

As discussed I attended three workshops organised by Pic London at LCC, led by Una Hamilton Helle and Joshua Bilton who were original members of a group called Hal Silver. 

Pic London’s site told us:

The workshops will be experimental in nature and the focus of each session will be on collective forms of making, improvisation and group dynamics. This could take the form of games, role-play, unskilled mask and costume making, photography, video and sound recording. These process-led activities can be gathered into a final exhibition display, the form of which will be established throughout the workshop sessions. (2019)

_MG_2858
Improvising in the dark at LCC with Hal Silver Courtesy of Pic London

We played a number of improvisation games including some vocal games devised by Pauline Oliveros called Sonic Meditations. (See below) These games reminded me of the kind of thing I did at drama school (1991-94). I introduced this exercise to the OCA Music Collective when Emma and I shared Sirens.

We also played an imaginary game where each of us had to come up with a character and then imagine ourselves in a village. Someone, it was rumoured, might have done something untoward and the rest of us had to make a decision about whether it was true or not. People were ejected from the game/executed/banished if individuals believed the story others told about them. We played it several times and invented many strange and bizarre tragedies which we blamed on eachother.

The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made Us Both More and Less Violent Kindle Edition, Richard Wrangham, 2019 and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Nicholas A Christakis 2019

I had just finished reading the above books both of which deal with the way in which societies keep themselves in order (or not). Wrangham’s central thesis is that humans are the most violent and the most passive of primates at the same time and that it is language which enables this paradox. Language gives us the opportunity to gossip. Once we have that capacity we can lie, protect oursleves and send blame in a different direction. Cliques form which protects the group – the most cost-effective way to ensure survival for the individual and the group. Outsiders are seen as a threat to the group. To deviate from the norm is to invite extreme danger, ultimately execution. Through language, violence is planned and carried out over time, thereby distancing oneself from spontaneous aggression, but often finding ways to be far more aggressive in the long term.  This distancing is contained in the law.

IMG_4982
A photo I found on Twitter showing executions during the Spanish Civil War (will need to do a bit of digging to make sure that’s right and find the link)

The second book covers some of the same ground but also looks at networks and co-operation. It is a more expansive thesis than Wrangham’s.

However, the two main themes emerged from the games and which I had just read about in these books; the role of language in establishing and maintaining groups and the networked nature of human existence.

A group discussion also led the circular nature of existence, history, culture and relationships.

Bringing objects, books, and games to the group.

We were all asked to bring some items to the second workshop – these could be objects, photos, text or games for instance.

I provided a range of things but the following have stuck.

  • Text from Christakis’ book
  • Books by the Situationists which focus on circles
  • A stick game I used to play at drama school which demonstrates to the players where your connection is strong and where it breaks down. At university, we might have used this as a warm-up game or as rehearsal support with lines.

PIc London Research008.jpg

PIc London Research011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the spirit of collaboration here are some cropped images on one of the member’s of our group  – Eva Louisa’s –  Instagram feed which I took during a meeting at the end of the summer while playing the stick game. I should share it with my old head of school Niamh Dowling, now head of Rose Bruford – I suspect she would be pleased to see it. I think this image is being used by Pic London so I will wait and see and share that with her if so.

For me, the most interesting aspect of all of this is the language.

I am the oldest in the group and therefore immediately the outsider. There is one other person who is probably slightly older than the majority but everyone else is early-to-mid-twenties.

I grew up the 80s and the early to mid-90s were my heyday.

However, that is the least of it, I am sure. As another collaborator said to me when we worked together at the beginning of Self & Other while discussing the meaning and implications of other,  “But what about your otherness, Sarah-Jane?”

(c)SJField 2017 with Lottie Ellis-8833IMG_88332017
Image from Self & Other A1 (2017)

And then how did we maintain satisfactory communications across social media? This was the only route open to us since we would all be scattered across the globe for the duration of the summer. Of course, prior to social media’s existence, we would have had letters and the telephone to use. We now have more opportunity than ever. However, it felt to me that we struggled to genuinely connect despite digital access – which was often unreliable, frustrating and fragmented. Or so it felt to me.

Most of the time I sensed I was talking into a void. I felt isolated and alone, often paranoid and like an outsider, a freak. Of course, some of that must be me – I do sometimes feel that way but it’s been a while since I’ve felt it with such force. Perhaps while I was married and in relation to some other mothers in the playground (but I know lots of other mothers feel this way in the playground too), certainly while I quite insanely joined the PTA after my dad died in 2010 (a short-lived experiment!), and when I was in a play at the Library Theatre shortly after graduating. Everyone else in the cast lived in London. I lived in Manchester and got the job at the last minute after someone dropped out. I felt horribly inadequate and was suffering the most awful acne at the time too. When I was a child I had this same feeling when I was sent to boarding school. A few months after being there I told all the boys about the girls wearing bras which was a desperately self-defeating thing to have done – I was the outsider and felt so wretched about it I made it worse by making sure I had to remain an outsider for even longer.

This sense is, I am well aware, partly self-generated but then some sort of transference and counter-transference starts taking place. I mention all of this as the poem I will likely include in some way is very much informed these feelings and my personal history with my own mother.

Continuing the improvisation across social media

Perhaps my history with impro or the fact that I meet OCA people regularly online meant I was flummoxed when attempts to get this going failed. I felt like a disappointed child realising that all the other children were really very grown-up and somewhat irritated by my enthusiasm.

Instagram 

At our first online meeting (where it was very difficult to hear and see what people were saying) we agreed we would set up an IG account and post collectively there, responding to each other and attempting to continue playing improvisations games. One member suggested each taking it in turns to give another a task – out of which a resulting photo or text should be posted on the IG. We said we would start with some thought experiments. Then each of us should pass the baton on. Of course, if no-one started or passed it on the game would die.

Well, the game barely lived at all. And I got bored of waiting so set someone a task. They did it, posted an image prompted by the task and then stopped I think.

Nevertheless, we began to post images. I suspect some more than others. I posted images promoted by discussions online and in the workshops and in response to images by others.

Screen Shot 2019-09-24 at 15.08.38
Thought experiments provided by another group member as prompts/ideas for tasks being set. No-one had to use these but it was hoped they would prove useful.

I played quite a lot although did not share everything I made. My phone then stopped working altogether! And I was stuck in Italy. this was probably, in the long run, a good thing. I had a much-needed break from social media and had already posted quite a few pictures and videos anyway.

 

 

Click in individual images.

I don’t have all my images anymore after the phone broke and there was no wifi in Italy. So sadly I lost some originals but they are still on the IG account.

This account has led to a book which will act as a research footnote to the exhibition. I will add a low res PDF of the book after it opens. Massive thanks to Rowan Lear for organising this.

Research and Ideas 

All the time I was in Italy I kept thinking about the village I was staying in, Ferentillo. I wrote about it here. It is a village I have stayed in and made work about several times as can be evidenced in my Sketch Book blog and in Self & Other A5.

(c)SJField2018-1381
Image from Self & Other A5 i will have call you (2018) made in Ferentillo, exploring the boundaries between life and death via mirrors in the landscape, phone apps and filters, and moving image. 

 

This Family Too (2017) (A project which I never resolved and should return to – take some of these out and look again at the images and sequence. I recall wanting to make sure the sequence was random and could ask a fellow OCA person I know about setting this up in Processing.

And I submitted a book for TAOP A5 which was made in Ferentillo and included written work as well as images.

Notes which I shared about some of this work with the group:

Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies – a photography book with text in which Fleisher photographs the mummies for which Ferentillo is famous.

https://www.tumblr.com/membrane/123968677767/alain-fleischer-mummy-mummies-verdier-2002

As discussed in several blogs above this work is mentioned in The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘ by Ari J. Blatt.

What caught my eye was the following:

“If Bazin offers a compelling theorization of the photograph as mummified presence, in his wistful recent book Mummy, mummies Alain Fleischer plays with that paradigm and examines the mummy itself as evocative of the photographic process. In this combination of essay and fiction that focuses upon a group of mummified bodies housed for eternity in the museum crypts at Ferentillo and Palermo in Italy, Fleischer conceptualizes the relationship between mummified and photographic traces: ‘Mummification and photography are united against the disappearance of appearances: they are alike in their materiality, their techniques, and their codes of resemblance.’”

Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf [Accessed: 24.May.2017]

I sent this document to the group and one of them picked up on another sentence where the darkness in the tombs is stressed.

Fiore

I thought about Fiore (mentioned in the poem) and all the other tragic stories – suicide, cancer, airplane crashes and wondered why there so many of them. I suspect it is the fact everyone knows each other. Death is also everywhere in the village – a Catholic community with a cemetery on the edge and posters announcing death all over the town as is the Italian habit.

IMG_6842

And I thought about darkness and the work isolating. Before we got going with the IG, I had suggested a task – a self-portrait based on the character we had constructed in the game. This was blocked and portraits referred to as ‘isolating’. I felt this was unhelpful as self-portrait could be interpreted in many ways. I also wanted to say, that is what language is – isolating. All these happenings led to the flash images:

 

The film is made by adding all these fragments together. Although it may seem incomprehensible, I think perhaps that is what I am after as that is how I felt – as if life and language and being in the group were incomprehensible. I am not a Millenial. I grew up in the 80s as everything was changing and being set for the digital bubble to come in the 90s. (See Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation 2016).

However, now that I have worked on it this morning and added the Game Boy music as the only audio (which will be available online only so people can hold their devices and listen through headphones in the gallery is they want to – but a bit like holding a Nintendo Gameboy). Version 24th September 2019, Password Village3

Some further thoughts

Thinking back to the books I mentioned above – Wrangham and Christakis’, I have, throughout this process and while in Ferentillo, been thinking about the way societies evolve. Umbria is a perfect landscape/example for Virilio’s thesis whereby war is the main motivator of all technology stating that is what has driven civilisation’s development (1985). Throughout Umbria there are hilltop towns and castles demonstrating this aspect of human nature; villages maintaining boundaries between themselves and the outsiders. And yet their history is filled with outsiders – Chinese tourists in the crypts which were photographed by Fleisher, Assyrian refugees painted in local abbey’s. And how art has such a huge history here – the purpose of it – in chapels and churches for instance; and the very long history.  Below the Twitter link, there are some images from books on Umbria and I’ve focused in particular on the faces of the people from that other time.

https://twitter.com/fieldsarahjane/status/1079061770382262274

 

Influences in a further post.

Refs:

http://sjf-oca.blogspot.com/2015/06/assignment-5-context-narrative.html

https://membrane.tumblr.com/post/123968677767/alain-fleischer-mummy-mummies-verdier-2002

Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf [Accessed: 24.May.2017]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation

https://sarahjanefieldblog.wordpress.com/category/work-in-progress/oca-music-collective/

https://sarahjanefieldblog.wordpress.com/category/work-in-progress/ferentillo/

BOW 1.1: Live audio recording of Sirens

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 5 Comments

As described in the assignment submission I introduced live voices to the recording when showing this work to the collective in London just before the summer. Some of the group bravely joined in and went for it with tremendous trust and generosity, for which I was grateful.

The track was provided by Carla. Please note it contains a silent section with lasts just over a minute in the middle.

As I mentioned before, I do think it was the sort of thing which is best experienced live and is somewhat toe-curling as a recording!

 

BOW 1.2: Development

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

A short film to be shown in a group show on a platform or in a circle which functions as a village of work made by the collective.

Latest iteration following feedback: Password Village3

Following some constructive (and helpful) feedback from the regular OCA online hangout I attend, plus some comments from Ruth in my last tutorial, I have continued to develop this film (See earlier versions below). It is half the length than it was and has a less fragmented audio track. I am thinking I will only provide the audio online and visitors must use their phones to hear it in the gallery or on a computer at home, not least of all because it will drive the invigilators completely insane if it is on the whole time. There are further reasons to do this but I will discuss that on my blog. I need to match some clips up with obvious bits in the music still, but I think this is a much more accessible idea – although still incomprehensible I’m sure to some. In an accompanying brief statement, I need to say something like the following:

An audiovisual moving image collage, which contains themes and fragments that emerged out of a conversation with 5 other artists, and took place over several months as we were researching and developing the overall inquiry into what a village might be. Images, mostly found but some original, are combined with music from a well-known computer game from the 80s which was usually played on a portable handheld device, a precursor to today’s ubiquitous mobile phone. (When I played it, aged 11 or so, my three brothers were horribly annoyed that I reached the high score and saw the prize before any of them did.)

Earlier iterations  – all same password as above. 

Version 5

Original I shared with anyone

 

Themes and topics in the next blog

Bow 1.2: Background

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Since I am now going to submit some work I am doing in conjunction with a group called Pic London, or at least part of it for BOW 1.2, I need to record development and research in more detail than I have done to date.

I will be submitting work that is part of a group show titled A rumour reached the village. The project is the result of a collaborative process which took place over the summer and continues still, and is one for four groups showing work under the Pic London After School Collective strategies name at Lewisham Art House in October.

There are roughly six people in each group. Ours includes Michaela Lahat, Rowan Lear, Eva Louisa Jonas, Joshua Phillips, Christel Pilkaer Thomsen and me.

Why I submitted my work to Pic London in the first place

Before submitting for DI&C assessment I shared a newspaper element, which I eventually sent to the OCA, with OCA friends and a couple of external people for feedback. Sometimes when I share my work with people there are embarrassed silences as people don’t know what to do, where to look, or what to say. This can make it quite hard to feel OK with the work or get the sort of constructive feedback I am after. I have discussed this before and I am aware that quite often my work is hard to make sense of especially when it’s still in the early stages of being developed. Although I had received some useful feedback from my cohort about the way the paper might be construed by assessors (and a warning that I must stress the films were the main element in the submission while the paper a supporting document) I was searching for a conversation about what worked and what didn’t come across as I hoped. A good friend who is a photographer said she did not feel qualified to give me the sort of feedback that would be helpful but she felt the work was strong and urged me to submit it a call out by Pic London. (My fifteen-year-old son was in fact extremely helpful in the end.)

As an aside, my friend and I have spoken several times about where my work is heading and I have said I feel like the usual photography competitions are just not suitable places for me. And not do I want to be limited to straight photographs. I am in a constant state of flux at the moment about where my energies should be directed and what sort of work I should spending my time on. I am confused in my head and split, but not split in a clear and defined way. More a fragmented mess of a crisis way. This is probably apparent in the choices and mis-choices I am making with each discipline and how I choose to express it; commercial work photography and this other work I do for which I don’t yet have a name. I am also beginning to wonder if the commercial photography is the same as the non-commercial photography, so long as it is just photography; and the other unnamed stuff I do is not photography at all although at times it may contain images. That might sound terribly confusing   – and if it does, that’s an accurate reflection of where I am.

For Pic London, I submitted the final DI&C project, Origin of the Common-Place and Assignment 2 – Polar Interia along with the newspaper and was thrilled when it was accepted. However, having submitted that moving image work  – having so little experience in all of this – I felt that some form of video work in the same vein would be what was expected of me. Perhaps I was wrong – I am still figuring this all out.

Workshops

I actually had no idea what the resulting work would be. It took me a while to be really clear that whatever we had submitted wasn’t being shown but some new collaborative project which would emerge out of the workshops.

We were put into groups  – these were listed in the application where we had to state a preference. I went for Hal Silver who I had never heard about but that group seemed to suggest performance would be involved which sounded right for me and I was glad to be assigned to the group I wanted.

Hal Silver was made up from a group of RA photography students who wanted to explore practices beyond their narrowly photo-focused studies. I think they got together in 2010. The workshop leaders, Una Hamilton Helle, and Joshua Bilton have pages about Hal Silver on their websites but it was quite hard to pin down who or what Hal Silver was online prior to meeting them. I quite liked this slightly incognito and enigmatic air that Hal Silver projected when I tried to look him/her/it up. We were told he/she/it might not even turn up at all! So a form of performance seemed to begin before we even met or started playing together. (I do now wonder if the original members had hidden the relevant pages from their websites as none of us were able to find out much about Hal Silver by doing searches prior to the workshops beginning.)

Pic London’s description of Hal Silver’s plans:

The workshops will be experimental in nature and the focus of each session will be on collective forms of making, improvisation and group dynamics. This could take the form of games, role-play, unskilled mask and costume making, photography, video and sound recording. These process-led activities can be gathered into a final exhibition display, the form of which will be established throughout the workshop sessions. (2019)

We were given three talks from each of the leaders/groups over a period of several weeks on Saturday mornings, which were followed by workshops where the seeds of some ideas were introduced to us.

Find out more about each of the workshop leaders and focus on Pic London’s website.

As the work has not yet opened and is still in progress, I will either need to wait to publish any further information or publish privately (more likely the latter as I need to ensure there is enough material available for Ruth/assessors to see my process.)

BOW 1.2: Peer feedback

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Peer feedback (to be added to as and when it arrives)

MA student, not OCA

Ok, watched it a couple of times and – sort of – in the spirit of your word suggestions:
erotic,
sensual,
creation,
procreation,
recreation,
fragility of the personal,
timelessness/cyclicalness
I think this is the best ending you’ve made so far, I loved it.
I was interested (and happy) to be confused by certain juxtapositions, the narrative structuring that built in my mind. And those confusions are quite important at the length of the piece.

OCA Student

I watched both the Village work and also your Collaborative (music) work and remain in awe of your creativity – well done.
As so often in the past I struggle to understand and this is maybe because I don’t let myself ‘feel’ rather than trying to interpret.  So bearing this in mind the video made me think of the microspores around us all the time and the beginnings of life.  Some of the images are intact quite sensual.  I found that I needed to watch to the end and was not tempted to cut it short.  Overall, thought-provoking and creative.
In terms of showing it, I suspect that if it cannot be projected you are stuck with a screen of some form.  How about embedding the screen in some form of ‘box’ or ‘lightroom.  This could be large or small depending on how you want the viewer to see the screen.  It could be looking at it through peep-holes or fully immersed in the ‘room’  Thinking randomly, the room could be made of some form of black drapes with a few places for people to look in.  Alternatively a form of tunnel with viewers looking in.  Difficult but I am sure somewhere an idea will gel.
OCA Student
I felt that there were elements of: texture, ambiguity, alien, biological, and possibly sexual. Micro to Macro overlays.  I found the appearance of the woman in the red dress very sudden. The colour of your own images is jarring, as is the sudden audio. I liked the overlay of the images and juxtaposition between them. There is a theme of flowers opening – sexual reproduction, particularly when overlain with the cell movement? I felt that towards the end there was an overlay of control / eugenics and possibly abortion? The final feeling for me was tragedy.
Reading your poem reminded me of a book I read a few years ago – Mitchell, D (2014) The Bone Clocks London: Sceptre – there is a quote that I used for a documentary project:

‘Then all those little pale lights,’ whispers Holly, ‘crossing the sand, they’re souls?’

‘Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time.’ We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of Dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. ‘And that’s where they’re bound.’ We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one.

 I, like Doug, found I needed to watch the film to the end. But if you decided to make it shorter it wouldn’t matter either. Probably the first half felt ‘slower’ to me than the second half.
I think Doug has made some excellent suggestions regarding presentation. You could either project on a wall and go large, or have an ipad or small phone as the screen and make people look up close, with some headphones. Both could work. With the idea of an iMac, it may distract from the piece itself?
2 October Hangout
  1. Version with Game Boy music: Really felt taken back to the 80s and enjoyed it. Imagined it being watched on a small screen reminding her of Nintendo Gameboy further. Enjoyed the sexual angst present in the film. Was confused by the presence of the men – but didn’t mind feeling that confusion. Felt the film worked as a conveyor of a specific feeling.
  2. Felt the film was still in early development and imagined it would be refined further but enjoyed it on the second watching. Felt too confused by it the first time around though.

    There was a discussion about moving image and still photography and how/why moving image is accepted on the course.  I stressed that all tutors have been very encouraging about using moving image and indeed, I’ve seen some of them encouraging others to experiment with it more.

BOW 1.1: Feedback form and tutorial​

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I had a meeting with Ruth online and this morning I have added to the feedback form and sent it over to her.

An abbreviated version below: 

The film demonstrates technical and visual skills, and imaginative handling of the found footage to draw out its haptic qualities and communicate a critical re-reading of the material. The three sections ‘verses’ have distinct atmospheres. Overall sense of the film: it could be much shorter and thereby allow the viewer to be swept up in the whirl of the imagery and music but not start figuring out what is going on.  The length somewhat detracts from the open-endedness of the film, and suggests a potential narrative. Let’s discuss this, along with choice of film, precedents (similar/related work); rhythms (from sound and visual edits such as speed, image manipulation etc.)

Before meeting for an online tutorial, I sent Ruth a blog post (password protected, available on request or supplied for assessment) which explained why even though I agreed in the main with her about the film, I felt reworking Sirens was impractical and undesirable. I have been working on another collaborative project and suggested submitting the results (or a part of them) for the A1.2 and sent some work in progress. I can see that the course wants us to be prepared for reworking projects as part of an ongoing process. But I have often done this in any case during my time with the OCA and either do so or sometimes choose not to, moving on to something new instead or ditching previous ideas/work altogether and starting again from scratch. So accepting feedback and reworking is not unknown to me. We agreed in the end that Sirens had been a good stepping-stone but that my time would be better used moving forward with the next project.

Extra information which I’ve not talked about on the feedback form

Ruth and I agreed that submitting the Pic London work will be the best use of my time. I had shared some Work in Progress.

  • A film
  • A set of stills taken in the village I was in Italy (some of which are in the film at the moment – WIP – so who knows if they’ll stay)
  • A poem I wrote while making and thinking about this work. The poem will be in a booklet accompanying the installation made by the Pic London group and is a research document rather than a catalogue.

Ruth said as the film stood now she couldn’t make sense of it. But that she thought the poem was strong. I ended the session ready to ditch the film altogether but that feeling had dissipated by the end of the day. The film is important but needs more work. I try to remind myself of Adam Curtis’s comment about showing unfinished work. “I just think it’s incredibly risky to show stuff early on when you’re trying to combine, say, two or three different narratives together to make a bigger point. It’s so easy to get it wrong. Because you can see it in your brain, but they don’t know your brain.” (2018)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/18/adam-curtis-and-vice-director-adam-mckay-on-how-dick-cheney-masterminded-a-rightwing-revolution

However, it was great to have such positive feedback about the writing and I have been thinking about how I might show it outside the book, if at all. Ruth suggested submitting that part for A1.2.

I think the best thing to do is forge ahead thinking in terms of the exhibition and then think about which elements I submit to the OCA, if not all of it. One thing Ruth said which struck a chord was that there will be a lot of work at the venue, and it will be like a graduate show which I have thought before too. How do I make sure my work doesn’t get drowned out? Maybe I can’t ensure it doesn’t but presenting something striking but simple is one possible way of addressing this. The writing could potentially work, as it’s full of visual imagery but isn’t an image.