Author: Sarah-Jane Field

Exploring emergence, fragmentation and value systems

Artist: Gregory Eddi-Jones

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Flowers for Donald is, as stated on Eddi-Jone’s website, “is a series of digital collage work begun in the days following the 2016 U.S. election” (2016-18). I saw these at the Foam exhibtion I went to earlier this year but I must admit they did not draw me in initially. (It was very busy when I went to see the exhibtion and not an ideal scneario for looking – too many people strainging to be seen there that evening.) It was only when looking for references to flowers recently that I really took notice.

I really like that the artists says, “I wouldn’t feel right with myself to make work that doesn’t address this very significant social and political paradigm shift we are undergoing. It is too large to ignore.” I agree.

The work references dadaesque montage which Eddi-Jones suggests are, “strategies of appropriation, collage, and aesthetics of absurdity to reflect instability in political and media environments.” Thinking back to what I wrote yesterday as I responded to Roberta’s feedback , I could refer to Flowers for Donald in my essay however, I’m not sure it addresses her query about why it – “it make no sense to talk about the original photo or film” in post-modernist appropraition work. (I think that is what she means). In my notes yesterday I talked about the articualted nature of Dada montage and the fluidity of today’s infomation language  – I think I would try to incoporate that into anything I do today. Although Eddi-Jones does not do that, he does include screen grabs from news about the election and other remnants of the ‘spectacle’ -note he also includes the iconic opening shot from Society of the Spectacle film. And I mentioed being brave myself and grabbing modern contemporary imagary.

I particualry like the way Eddi-Jones has taken a text as his starting point and the challenge “the role and function of art itself in politically turbulent times” (2016-18)

https://www.gregoryeddijones.com/flowers-for-donald#9

http://hafny.org/blog/2017/1/new-work-in-progress-uses-flowers-for-algernon-as-metaphor-for-donald-trumps-presidency

CA A1 – Research & Reflection (written after draft 1 submitted, inc. some comments re. tutor feedback)

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Time and shame

I’m not doing this in the order I would usually do things. I was away from home for 4/5 weeks and didn’t want to fall too far behind, so I packed up a selection of books I thought would be useful and planned to write my essay once I’d arrived in Italy. I hoped this would be a good place to write. After all, I was away from London and my paid work demands, plus able to live in a kind of denial about the stresses and financial difficulties of life for a little while. However, family, lack of WIFI and other tech issues made it challenging. So research was a bit tricky… Although I loved being away, I really longed for a quiet, properly resourced space. I mention all of this because while there an article about women not having time or space to think, to create and make work went viral.

Brigid Shults wrote in The Guardian, “Women’s time has been interrupted and fragmented throughout history, the rhythms of their days circumscribed by the sisyphean tasks of housework, childcare and kin work – keeping family and community ties strong. If what it takes to create are long stretches of uninterrupted, concentrated time, time you can choose to do with as you will, time that you can control, that’s something women have never had the luxury to expect, at least not without getting slammed for unseemly selfishness.” (2019)

I think there is probably something to retain for possible future developments about this fragmentation of time and focus, the stop/start way of working and ceaseless interruptions women live with and that successful creative men have been able to live without. I suspect at some point I may want/be able to weave something of this into some work. And of course, not forgetting the shame. Even as I write this I feel tremendously guilty for sounding unappreciative of the time I took, and how I was able to catch up with so much reading. I feel compelled to express my gratitude for all that was given. (And a great deal, not only in terms of time, was gratefully received by me.

Essay

I wrote the essay which I sent to Roberta and warned her that I would look at it again after a few weeks and see where I could make better connections. Predictably, the minute I sent it off I noticed that I had relied on quotes I’d used in previous essays and I was sort of repeating myself. I don’t think there is too much wrong with this as I refine ideas and rely on really important concepts that are at the core of my developing work. However, I felt I was beginning to limit myself.

Therefore, I will take the comments that Roberta made plus a few I made myself and respond, sometimes based on reading I did following submission. Then I hope to have a short online meeting with her and following that I will fill in the formative feedback form taking edited highlights from this document and anything vital form our talk.

Comments

Essay text in green, Roberta’s comments in orang

  1. “However, rather than, or perhaps in addition to lamenting time past, these signs also make reference to Baudrillard’s writing on simulation and simulacra – the constructed non-reality of the reality of modern life via modern media, where everything is lived on the surface, removed from the real but therefore rendered so.” (p3)

    You might want to tease this out a little more in order and make a stab at defining these terms and their historical emergence.    Also, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.This may be reminiscent of techniques used by Adam Curtis in documentaries such as Bitter Lake (2015) or Hypernormalisation (2017) where vintage footage is also used to investigate our current reality. (p3/4)
    again, as above can you push this a little further. Curtis is a good example

    I ordered a cheap second-hand copy of the Harvey book which was waiting for me when I arrived home and read Chapter 1 where Modernism is discussed yesterday. I am really grateful for this suggestion as it’s a great book; lively, fascinating, and no verbosity (yay!) My favourite line so far – and be warned I will be repeating this several times – refers to what Benjamin calls ‘auratic art’ – Once reproduction and mechanisation arrived, in order to add value to work, “the artist had to assume an aura of creativity… to produce a cultural object” of value. “The result was often highly individualistic, aristocratic, disdainful (particularly of popular culture), and even arrogant in perspective on the part of the cultural producers, but it also indicated how our reality might be constructed through aesthetically informed activity.” (p22, 1990)    The disdainful attitude has not gone away, or if it ever did, it seems to have returned with alacrity. I am often appalled by the supercilious, superior and condemnatory way in which some people/artists/photographers look down their noses at practically everything, including forms they don’t themselves use, the general population who don’t have the luxury of an expensive education at their disposal, nor decades of reading interminable circular texts about the ethics of photography behind them, nor the time, space or money to wallow in historical processes. All of this is made worse when artists, as echoed by Harvey, on one hand, “mythologise(d) the proletariat” (p33) while also behaving like the “elite-international avant-garde”. (p25) The following may still be an accurate description in some circles: “Artists, for all their predilection for anti-establishment and anti-bourgeois rhetoric, spent much more energy struggling with each other and against their own traditions in order to sell their products than they did in any real political action.” (p22)

    The other critical element in this first chapter is how the articulated machinery on which Industrialisation relied affected perception and therefore artistic practice. The difference today is how digital machinery produces a far less articulated reality – and instead, there is a perceived flow as information travels and morphs and transforms. I was struck by the many references to machinery, “houses and cities could be openly conceived of as ‘machines for living in” (p32). Nowadays, existence is often written about in computer-related metaphor. Donald Hoffman’s recently published The Case Against Reality (2019) (which I will write about elsewhere) contains a hypothesis which describes reality as a series of desktop icons on a computer interface – and so, if one is wary of the current tendency to think of the brain as a computer, you have to tread quite carefully through his arguments in order to avoid being reductive. However, this loss of a fixed stable reality that is always around even when we’re not, which according to Harvey could be felt and was being expressed towards the end of the Modernist period, seems now in full swing.

    I realise I digressed slightly with my rant about the irony of snobbish artists who peer down their noses at so much while at the same time claim to be something other than and often better (more valuable) than the ‘bourgeoisie or petit-bourgeoisie’ – however, my desire to embrace popular culture as I did in Self & Other when I made work using Snapchat, and when I use proprietary filters is related to this aspect. Recently I have focused on vintage material downloaded from the internet, i.e. rendered digital, and where signs of age are fetishised, but it may be that at some point I need to be really brave and grab material that has none of that safety-net.

    But perhaps more importantly, the changes happening to our understanding of reality, the theories of which then go on to help design our technology are having the most seismic and profound impact on who we are and how we see ourselves. And I think that is probably at the core of what I’m aiming to explore.

  2. “In Sirens and Origin of the Common-Place the medium, its source, and transformative journey are as critical as the content. Marshall McLuhan’s mantra “the medium is the message” is relevant.” (p4)

    Why and how is McLuhan’s statement relevant? Can you explain in a little more detail

    As a practitioner, currently and internally there is a tension in me, an argument between the value of process and representation. I feel I am trapped in representation while the art world values process more highly and wish I could find a way out of representation, which is what I know and where I come from – what I feel most comfortable with. I will say something more about this at the end of this section. However, the making of these films, the downloading of digital data on my computer at home and then the reconstitution of them, again at home on my computer or even my phone is critical to the work. Today I can take films – which were once the preserve of institutions – and transform them and make them my own. I have some element of autonomy over the message which is (was) fed to me. I can take the slop that was served up and do what I want with it, as long as I can master the easy to use technology and retain access to it. This is a big change in the way we interact with media and certainly very different from the fixed frescos on church walls that people bowed down before in the middle-ages.     

    McLuhan, and later others such as Kathryn Hayles in How We Became Post Human (1999) (a very important book for me) discuss how we instantiate technology; i.e. how the media we use becomes an extension of our nervous systems and how we internalise it. McLuhan’s ideas inform systems theory; not only does the type of media rather than the message have an impact on us – there is a feedback loop, both language (whatever media is used) and we exist in a living, dynamic symbiotic relationship. Andy Clarke is another philosopher who suggests that language itself – the process of speaking – is a prosthetic extension, a technological tool which has changed (through feedback loops) the way we evolved.As perception of fixed Cartesian concepts dissolve, replaced or added to by dynamic atomic units, and as relationship and context become more and more valued, perhaps it might be appropriate to say, you cannot view one without the other – the chosen medium and the content together are the message and to try and separate them risks being reductive.

    In reference to representation – perhaps I am worrying too much about this. Hoffman’s book about reality suggests that the way in which we construct our so-called ‘real’ representation is absolutely critical to how we animals experience existence – and so maybe how I make things that end up looking and sounding and feeling a certain way is key. But what appears is also key and one cannot separate the two – or else it risks being reductive. Of course, lots of art seems to deliberately aim for reductiveness as perhaps it strives to make sense or unpick tiny aspects of living.

  3. As the barriers between exterior and interior, or between physical and metaphysical break down

    Again as above – see Harvey

    I think this could become a very important subject for me. As well as Harvey, the later chapters in Hayles’ book explore this a great deal. I also posted some work by Albarado Morell recently which looks at it and further comments here. But perhaps Hayles in more relevant. Chapter 7 – Turning Reality Inside Out and Ride Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick is absolutely teeming with relevant information and I have touched on this previously. Before the summer, on my Sketchbook blog, I was recording Random Notes for Short Story. I do not know where it is going or what I will do with these but I suppose I will continue and they may inform or become part of any BOW work. #12 in particular references this change in human experience and links back to media.     
  4. (And before that, drawings, which suggests still photography may have been a very brief interlude in the journey that began with cave drawing, developed to become printing, followed by the invention of mechanization, and moving towards a total simulated reality) (sp. corrected, p6)
    Although this has not diminished the demand for those other media – indeed it has given them a new lease of life.

    Exactly, so why is Photography at times so neurotic and defensive? Why can’t it get over itself and stop trying to prove it really is in Art.     
  5. Barthes’ death of authorship may be easier to accept than the suggestion that all meaning is negated leaving us with a zero sign. In Sirens and other appropriated work, it might be argued, signification is transformed rather than nullified, even if the reader doesn’t particularly agree with or ‘like’ the altered content.
    death of the author – which gave birth to the reader’s primary role in creating meaning – hence one of the biggest problems is in visual literacy in particular – and literacy more generally. Increasingly it becomes more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lies – for many it does not even matter (your Cambridge Analytica is one extreme example). See Francois Lyotard.

    For the time being, I would always argue that photography, like all language, exists within a rich, complex, dynamic interplay – (recognised in the death of the author which might also be understood as the birth of the collaborative producer who understands that their work doesn’t emerge until there is a receptor, even if that consists of only one person) one of many nebulous elements that emerge and feedback in the process of reality construction. I don’t believe there is a zero sign, only that some ‘actors’ say things which bear little relation to their pretended intentions; there is still meaning, it is simply more difficult to unpick. Advertisers, fascists, narcissists are all excellent examples of those who employ such tactics. As an actor who studied Stanislavskian uniting of text – it is very difficult to accept that the sign could actually be empty. And I think that metaphor comes from a world in which discrete objects exist in the universe rather than one which emerges through relationship.

    I also wonder when in our history the human population was ever able to determine fact from fiction. Our species is riddled with false assumptions about what and who we are, the majority of us left in the dark while those in power play merry havoc with our world while living off our efforts. It may be true that groups such CA have been able to flourish in these early pioneering days of a new epoch but there has to be hope – And I hope I am not overly optimistic, referencing Hayles as she says “Only if one thinks of the subject as an autonomous self, independent of the environment is one likely to experience the panic performed by Norbert Weiners Cybernetics and Bernard Wolf’s Limbo. This view of the self authorizes that fear that is boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing left to stop the self’s complete dissolution. By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on n the splice rather than be imperiled but it.” (p290) 
  6. The collaborative nature of Sirens can be seen as another example of dissolving walls, modern-day fluidity, not only, as mentioned earlier between inner and outer worlds but also between individuals; systems which were perhaps previously considered closed but which might become viewed as open, as technology continues to penetrate or dissolve barriers.

    Although, in other ways, it builds walls eg above re literacy. sure you can have access to cheap technology but you’ll be so bombarded with advertising – penetrating the mind while depriving most viewers/readers of an education that will provide them of the means to engage critically.     

    I do believe these walls have always existed. We see them more nowadays because that’s what digital technology does. It makes the structures visible. That’s not to say that digital technology hasn’t made it worse. See my response about the complex, dynamic interrelated process of reality below.Saying all that, I find collaboration incredibly challenging at the moment – and although there are many diverse reasons for this, I think it is interesting psychologically speaking that my reference to relationship below, although meant broadly, might also be suggestive of something more personal. I disagreed with Will Self’s comment about ‘there being no other’ in this new Millenial world of ours (how perfect that a man called Self should say this) but as I interact with people from a younger generation I am beginning to find it harder and harder to stray true to my conviction that he must be wrong. I mention this as it seems important to the whole issue of supposed ‘post-humanism’ and Hayle’s references literature that deals with the isolated individual.

  7. Repetition flirts with tautology, but perhaps, in the case of my own work, various video-editing techniques help to transform rather than mirror.

    and perhaps thwart the definition of photography as a ‘mirror with a memory’, so that you want to argue that photography, like language, constructs reality rather than reflecting reality, 

    For the time being, I would always argue that photography, like all language – it is, after all, a language itself, exists as part of a rich, complex, dynamic interplay – one of many nebulous elements that emerge and feedback in the process of reality construction.

Comments from the reflection section:
Yes, it is good to read more widely but state your case for doing so too. – the world is changing so much – I think it’s incredibly important to place what we read about photography in broader context otherwise it becomes insular, circular and drier and drier, and irrelevant. I can’t see the point in simply re-stating what has already been said when the world we live in today is informed by new ideas. Saying that I love reading perspicacious texts which could describe the digital world long before the internet was conceived of, such as Guy Debord’s’ Society of the Spectacle. It reminds me not to be parochial about time which can lead to us thinking that the issues we are facing are all about us and us alone now, rather than stemming from historical processes.
I think it will be more a question of greater depth of analysis of the avenues you touch on here: montage, structuralism, post-structuralism and its impact on film art. I totally understand that I will need to find a way to discuss things in more depth – this I think is the challenging (exhausting!) thing that I need to overcome.
Making a bold ‘claim’ is good. You then want to then back that up and place your own work within a wider context (historical theoretical etc). I re-read James Elkins who has given me much fodder for suggesting that photography is at high risk of being tautological, if not damn boring.
There is no problem at all using first person now in academic writing. The argument is that knowledge is not neutral and that all knowledge should be situated. I’m not convinced the OCA is up to speed with this and will discuss when we meet.

Overall, I could do with going back and fleshing out one of two topics while dropping others for now. Roberta wrote in an email “ease out your idea a little more so that you give yourself space to explore structuralism/post-structuralism in relation to photography and to film – and to why both have become so central within art discourse – esp. as it makes no sense to talk about the original photo or film. My suggestion would be to begin to look at theories you use in more depth. Montage/bricolage in relation to Modernism and structuralism/post-structuralism in relation to Postmodernism…also of course ideas of sole sovereign authorship: ‘The Author’ or ‘The Artist’ are put under strain by those theories – collaboration is, of course, interesting here” (2019)

Links

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/woman-greatest-enemy-lack-of-time-themselves?

CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR18oNQakkE_TGTiI8ED__wkMIXGQ42I71tui9CZIor9faiPsLDAcc_hKtg#Echobox=1564153102

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/25/will-self-humans-evolving-need-stories

Hayles, K. (1999). How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. KINDLE Edition Chicago, Ill, University of Chicago Press.

Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, London Blackwell

Research/Notes: Fiore & Berlusconi

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf

I had reason to return to the above text recently. I referred to it in S&O A5 as it mentions writer/artist Alain Fleischer and his work made in Ferentillo which is where I am now. He links photography with mummification as I quoted in S&O. One of my partners highlighted a different quote when I shared it with them.

“In the darkness of the catacombs … mummies are like

photographic images that have been developed but not fixed,saved from a fatal and definitive exposure to the light of the living, rescued from an ultimate oxidation by death’s

corrosives, thanks to a red, inactinic light, a laboratory light.

Like photographs yet to be printed, cadavers … to become

mummies, were initially material supports, emulsions, conserved in the dark, subsequently treated with acids, then exposed to light before being brought back underground.”

I visit the village regularly as my mother moved here in 2000 with her husband. He died suddenly in 2005. I made work for TAOPA5 and S&OA5 as well as a smaller project in between modules.

https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/assignment%e2%80%8b-5-i-will-have-call-you/

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

This summer, after my mother broke her ankle badly and ended up remaining here for far longer than she might have done, the boys and I decided to spend most of the break in Ferentillo with her, for a variety of reasons, not least of which was a desire to escape the U.K. and it’s interminable internal wrangling over Brexit.

As the collaborative project I’m involved with (Pic London) is based around the idea of a village it is perhaps fortuitous to be in this particular village with its references to death, mummification and previous work for an extended period.

I have also been re-reading James Elkin’s and struck by the discussion he has with himself about a realisation we are at times little more than hungry, violent critters despite all the symbolism with which we prop up our illusions of reality.

In addition, I sent in an essay for CS1 and have had some extremely helpful feedback from Roberta, my CS tutor which has prompted further thoughts and responses. I’ll revisit this on my return to London – however, some of my thoughts will likely end up in some writing I’m doing in preparation for the pic london work. (Not sure yet, how this writing will inform or be part of any work yet).

The writing centres around a man called Fiore who lived “both inside and outside” the village (Field, 2019 – draft foundation text for Pic London project). I don’t want to repeat myself but briefly, Fiore befriended my mother and her husband Roger. He built an illegal pool which we swam in and which was never blue, as Fiore couldn’t quite get to grips with the filter or chlorine. He had lost his wife to cancer and his daughter killed herself in grief soon afterwards. Later he got together with his housekeeper, Dora. He was a good friend to my mother’s after Roger died. Fiore owned a goat called Berlusconi who was strangled to death when his chain got caught on a tractor wheel. All Fiore’s neighbours were invited to a feast of Berlusconi but Fiori refused to eat him.

The writing is, like my previous writing, like a plait made up of different strands that will incorporate Fiore’s story, my reasons for being here – austerity, middle-class angst around failure, and a discussion about photography in relation to bacteria, citing Elkins’ book, and death.

At first I thought I’d be making a film like the previous two projects I’ve done – Origin of the Common-Place and Sirens. But the more I work on it the more it feels like it might be a photo-text like the ones discussed in the paper above:

The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo by Ari J. Blatt

There is not very much time but we’ll see.

Things to do;

Look at Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. I keep coming across his stuff which feels odd, like the universe is asking to to look at it. Then I suddenly clicked – flowers/Fiore. (Not to mention death).

In Format’s Talent there is a series called Flowers for Donald. I plan to take another look at that in more depth.

Try to find a vintage film/old book about flower arranging for possible use

Themes other than the subject of flowers which has emerged in the highly flashed night images I’ve been taking; water, stars, shooting stars, hear, climate, death.

Not sure how this work relates to BOW yet but some of the research Roberta talked about re. Modernism and appropriation should be relevant at the very least.

(NB: Quotes about photographs being mute and the closed circular arguments that arise out of only reading photography books in Blatt’s paper)

“Man, proud man…

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

I am so often reminded of this sentiment as I read critical theory (or the news). I want to keep it here and may refer to it in one of the essays if not the final assignment.

“But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal”

Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, circa 1604

Inside out confusion

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been alluding to what I understand as a relatively new phenomena recently in my CS1 essay and in one of the short story fragments; others’ exteriorisation emerging internally in individuals due to technology’s ability to do away with traditional boundaries between individuals. (How interesting this should have come about in an era when individualism has been so highly valued.) I think is something I should look into more and am re-reading (and reading some chapters for the first time) Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman. Chapter 7 Turning Reality Inside Out: boundary work in the mid-sixties Novels of Philip K Dick is probably going to be useful and clearly demonstrates how these issues arose prior to the internet – although made far far tangible and evident by its now overwhelming presence.

“When system boundaries are defined by information flows and feedback loops rather than epidermal surfaces, the subject becomes a system to be assembled and disassembled rather than an entity whose organic wholeness can be assumed” (160)

… “the weaker system is made to serve the goals of the stronger rather than pursuing its own system unity” (ibid)

“… a persistent suspicion that the objects surrounding us – and indeed reality itself – are fakes” (161)

And finally for now …

“The interpellation of the individual into market relations so thoroughly defines the characters of these novels that it is impossible to think of the characters apart from the economic institutions into which they are incorporated” (162)

Artist: Gisèle Freund 1912-2000

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I read about Freund in Fifty Key Writers on photography and think her writing will be useful for me. Reading about her, I see further references to meaning being dissolved during the years leading up to WWII. “They (she and Benjamin) shared a mutual desire to displace the empty, iconic forms of fascist art and writing with an intimate humanism in the arts, and a need to restore meaning and value to a world emptied of content.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/freund-gisele

I have written about zero signs a plenty and will no doubt continue to do so.

Freund’s commitment to images which contained a sense of humanism and her aversion to props, posing and styling echo my own working preferences. She worked as I try to, engaging in a conversation and capturing moments which she didn’t believe signified the whole person or their ‘soul’ but aimed to represent a kind of stream of consciousness, according to the author of the Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women page on Freund, Carleen Meeker.

Her writing sounds very much like the sort of thing I’d find useful – she too is interested in ‘the role of context in meaning’ or ‘the relationship of “the artistic scope of a work to the social structure at the time of its production”‘ – and she sees the negative and positive aspects of technology when describing its affect and impact (2013, 110).

I look forward to finding out more.

Durden, M. 2013 Ed. Fifty Key Writers on Photography, Routledge, Abingdon

BOW Assignment 1: Sirens – an eleven-minute tale, a collaborative project for the OCA New Music Collective.

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 5 Comments

OCA New Music Collective 

When I responded to the call out for collaborators to work on projects under the banner of the OCA New Music Collective, I had no intention of using any work made for BOW/CS or L3. Rather, I saw it as an opportunity to experiment with original music but I also wanted to continue my ongoing investigations into imagery and its affect on us. Additionally, as I’ve done in previous projects, I hoped to explore the transitional structural state I believe we are experiencing today, by comparing and investigating how we respond to various media, i.e. sound, imagery, text (if at all possible). I was assigned to a composing student who I will refer to on my blogs simply as Emma, at her request. We began our journey together about three or four months ago.

Lately, I have been working more and more with moving image, and with appropriated found footage influenced by work I looked at during Digital Image & Culture, so it felt natural to keep heading in the same direction.  Unlike my DI&C film Origin of the Common-Place, however, the work I made for the NMC does not contain still images, so I was a little concerned it might not be appropriate for BOW A1. However, after liaising with my tutor, Ruth, I felt that the work demonstrates where ‘I’m at’ for now, better than a set of random still images might. It also deals with some of the themes I identified in my proposal – ‘the language of actresses and fairy tales’ although as I pointed out in my email to Ruth, in this case myth might be a better word.

Although I did not originally intend to submit this work, I did, however, keep a record of of development and reflection on my Sketchbook blog. (Once I’m back in London, if I’ve not had a chance to do so beforehand, I will transfer some of these notes to the correct menu on this blog.)

Film

The film was shown to a group of OCA students and tutors on 20 June 2019 at Toynbee Hall. An improvised live ‘choir’ (volunteers I cop-opted from the NMC) joined in during the final section. The following text was not shared with the group and I am not certain how much of it would be needed by an audience – or if some of it is merely a part of my own private background work. The indented paragraph is probably a draft statement and the following text a description for study purposes.

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is a 1967 film about a journey to Venus where a group of intrepid male astronauts encounter a host of dangers in the form of a crash, a range of monsters and a band of sirens. Despite being about a world inhabited by women lasting nearly one and a half hours, the film contains roughly eleven minutes of footage where the women appear alone. That increases to just under twenty minutes if you include scenes where the women carry a dead fishy creature or appear alongside impending disasters or monsters.

This re-imagined film is a journey through time and a sample of the visual representation of sirens.

Sirens is a visual and audio poem which consists of three verses, and the entire length amounts to roughly the same time given to the women themselves in the original film.

Verse 1 contains the original film, sped up.

Verse 2 A version of the footage, containing the women, is reversed and blended with a negative copy of itself.

Verse 3 is a further representation of the women modified by a proprietary app and will be accompanied by a series of live vocal improvisations as we attempt to bring the sirens to life in the present.

I have discussed this film in my first Contextual Studies essay.

Live voice

When Emma and I showed the work we included a live improvised choir of the Sirens based on the sort of exercises devised by Pauline Oliveros which she calls Sonic Meditations. I wrote on my Sketchbook:

“While developing our film I had the thought that it would be great to introduce human voices in the final section but we did not have the time to write for and organise a choir. I had recently done some improvisation games with the Pic London group, which were very much like the ones I spent three years doing while at drama school (1991-94). Although I have not acted in some years now, the skills – I have recently learned – are still embedded within me; and improvisation and performance seem to be a language I am relatively fluent in. Revisiting has felt like a wonderful ‘awakening’ and these experiences are encouraging me to keep heading in this direction. I suggested to Emma we try out the improvised vocal games with volunteers, to see how that goes, and she was open to the idea.” (2019)

The improvisation went well and was effective as described in my post. What’s more, from a personal point of view, it feels like a significant step towards literally using my own voice in my work, and perhaps reflecting the more metaphorical meaning too, i.e. finding my voice.

Collaboration

The collaboration was not an immediate easy one, as Emma will no doubt also admit. We are quite different people with different backgrounds. I have talked about this a bit more on my other blog. I am very grateful to Emma for the extremely suitable and excellent music she wrote in the end. But I think will need to develop my communication skills and be more confident with my intentions – plus understand that I might be coming from a very different place to new collaborators initially. However, I approached the project with the expectation that we would really collaborate from scratch and I wouldn’t simply give instructions about the sort of music a finished project might require. We got there in the end but I think Emma was expecting me to work in a more traditional way.

Earlier versions – some of which are quite rough indeed:

 

Other slightly removed BOW work

As well as working on this project, I have been slowly writing very short fragments of short stories. I am not sure yet whether these will ultimately develop into something usable or not. But I felt they were worth recording as possible BOW work on my Sketchbook blog and I do intend to keep writing them as they keep popping into my mind.

Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

I always find it a bit tricky to write about this, as with this sort of work I am deliberately looking for the sort of artifacts in the found footage that modern photography does its best to avoid. I did manage to do some work in Premier Pro after fixing a long standing issue with my desktop and software, although in the end, for the sake of time, I edited it mostly on my phone and in iMovie. I suspect previous editing experiments have paid off as I become more fluid with the technology I do manage to use.

Quality of Outcome

The early experiments were a bit limited and it wasn’t until I felt slightly panicked as described in my notes that I found a way to make this project work visually. The middle section where I blended backward moving film with negative layer of itself went a long way towards bringing the film up a level.

Demonstration of creativity

This work is original and perhaps challenging for people who are looking for straight photographs, especially as I deliberately challenge notions of taste and simplicity, and by using proprietary apps – hopefully referencing apps such as Snapchat, filters, and the coded language used everyday by regular people. However, I hope to continue finding new ways to explore the subjects and themes I am interested in, and that may well lead me back to using my camera in a traditional way.

Context

The notes I have made in the coursework are probably at a good enough level for this stage in the course. This work does link to the concerns I discussed in both BOW and CS.