Fellow OCA student Holly suggested looking at Graham Harmen
A useful counter-argument to the overwhelming direction in science to reduce everything to process/event (naive realism)
Two kinds of knowledge – 1 what it’s made of (physics), 2 what it does (Some modern philosophy) But problem with these – they are related. Duomining (over and undermining but never really getting the true essence of the thing) PDF of paper – http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3466/Duomining.pdf?sequence=1
Relate to New Materialism
Relate to Michael Fried’s writing about photography
See assemblages (Feminist New Realism) (Lupton 2019 – very relevant, will need to record notes/bullet points soon for CS)
Rhizome
Relate to Thing-Power (Bennet, 2010, Lupton 2019)
Harmen – a phenomenologist
Relate to Klein object relations
Objects relate to each other, there is some causal power – this is also key in new materialism although much else is opposing. Harmen is not a materialist. But link this to Santiago theory of cognition.
like new materialism humans are not better than other objects (compare this to animism)
Doesn’t believe in matter – the world is made of substantial forms, there is no such thing as shapeless forms
You can’t describe the world, the best you can do is hint at what the real is
Does not believe in absolute knowledge, likes art because it alludes which is a better way of trying to describe the world than spelled out scientific language, believes metaphor is a better way to access the real (i.e. Zizek’s real rather than Lacan’s version)
Harmen’s philosophy is directly opposed to Donald D Hoffman’s theory about reality.
THIS WAS THE DRAFT FOR A2 BUT IN THE END, I DECIDED TO SUBMIT QUITE A DIFFERENTLY REALISED PROJECT – ALTHOUGH USING THE SAME MATERIAL AND SO HAVE LEFT THIS UNFINISHED AS A RECORD OF MY PROCESS
Spend some time reviewing your personal reflection and your tutor feedback. Develop a series of carefully considered images that moves your idea forward. Hand in this series to your tutor together with a new reflective commentary setting out where you plan to go from here.
After discussing my plans with Ruth, I decided to submit new work rather than developing the first assignment any further. However, it has many of the same qualities/tropes, and moves my practice forward, i.e. exploring versions of collaboration, working with archival images and text, and moving-image collage.
Quotes below were not included in the final work but the work circles around these ideas and if I pull together a booklet for assessment, they wouldn’t be out of place.
“It is hard to imagine [] considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible.”
Noel Coward quoted in The Goodness Complex by Richard Wrangham, 2019
**
“[Quantum mechanics] does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and how they interact with each other… [] Reality is reduced to a relation.”
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, 2014
**
“Just as brains can do things that no single neuron can do, so social networks can do things that no single person can do.”
Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, 2019
**
“There is a glut of images in the world and a stubborn obsession with holding on to them… [] Far from satisfying our need for information, the ungraspable abundance of indiscriminate data leaves us just as ignorant but much more confused .”
Pandora’s Camera by Joan Fontcuberta, 2014
The Goodness Complex by Richard Wrangham centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, and simultaneously developed a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence, for which language is needed. Humans also became hyper-co-operative across all activities, in particular with childcare and hunting/gathering, and are unlikely to have been the success they are without collaboration. Alongside that drive, there is an inherent desire to be good even when there is seemingly no payoff.
Wrangham suggests these paradoxes were facilitated by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that even when we aren’t necessarily being spoken about, there is always an unconscious awareness that we will be. Once humans were able to gossip, they could avert blame, conjure up stories and plan punishment for anyone who deviated or might be seen as a threat. Gossip, in these terms, underpins who and what we are as a species.
Wrangham’s theory sits at the centre of my contribution to this project.
Work to be included here:
About Pic London:
Workshops:
About Hal Silver:
Artists involved in the collaboration:
Resulting work:
Group Statement:
A rumour reached the village is a collective inquiry that began in a game set in an imagined community, riven with witchcraft, industry and accusation. Over three months, six artists exchanged challenges and responses, out of which common themes emerged: loops and circles, colonies and growth, architecture and language, nature and storytelling. The culminating exhibition is a settlement of images, objects, moving image and living cultures, questioning the stories and materials on which communities are built.
Images of Group set-up and links to relevant collaborator’s work where possible:
Individual work withinexhibition:
Gossip emerged from the original game via an imagined midwife and evolved over time during off-and-online conversations with the other artists/characters in the group. The result is a reflection and response to that interaction; a mixture of text and, downloaded from the Internet, appropriated still frames, moving image, and sounds from space.
There are two versions of the video. Each has the same footage and edit but the gallery version has a simple audio track of sounds from space from the Nasa website. This will be/was shown on an electronic tablet in amongst the other objects and accompanied by some text and still frames from the film captured and printed in newsprint.
A second version of the video is available on my website. There is an instruction to visit it built into the installation (assemblage.) This online edition has music from a well-known game from the eighties which was played on an early handheld device.
Research booklet:
Additional Context
” The circle is timeless but also modern and hi-tech: lenses, records, cogs and clocks. Time is circular on Napoleon’s personal carriage clock, seized at Waterloo, the hands always showing the hours past as well as those to come. And perhaps space is circular too, at least in the mind of Anish Kapoor.” Cumming, L. (2016) Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle review – the joy of life in the round, The Guardian [online review] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/29/seeing-round-corners-the-art-of-the-circle-review-turner-contemporary-margate [Accessed 13/10/2019]
Given my growing focus on Plato’s Cave and contemporary references in popular culture to similar metaphors, I thought it was interesting to see the Penguin edition uses one of Kandinsky’s image of Circles (1923) on the cover.
From Amazon, 2019, [shopping] Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Republic-Penguin-Classics-Plato-ebook/dp/B009LVOFPU/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=platos+cave+kindle&qid=1570964028&sr=8-3 (Accessed: 13/10/2019)The group talked about Bosch’s painting in one of the few meetings we had in person after one of the artists had created a plastic digital 3D print of a building she’d been photographing. I could imagine the object in the distance much like the pink and towers in the Bosch’s background, and indeed, everytime I saw a photograph it did (for me anyway) make reference to Bosch’s work.
Neurophilosopher, Patricia Churchland discusses the biological origins of empathy here. Her article includes:
“The overlap of moral virtues across cultures is striking, even though the relative ranking of the virtues may vary with a clan’s history and environment. Typically, vindictiveness and cheating are discouraged, while cooperation, modesty and courage are praised. These universal norms far predate the concept of any moralising God or written law. Instead, they are rooted in the similarity of basic human needs and our shared mechanisms for learning and problem-solving.”
“Neuroscience reminds us that our social nature and cultural practices, including the ones we call morality, are products of evolution, constrained by our biological heritage. Perhaps that knowledge, of a sense of morality rooted in nothing more than our mammalian origins, makes us a little less likely to be infatuated with our own moral superiority, and more likely to cast a sceptical eye on those who peddle utopian remedies to our problems.” (2019)
I have been thinking about this word ‘assemblage‘ and ended up talking about it with friends. I was directed towards Kaprow who used the word and titled a book with it – but relied on the French accent – I have a feeling it wasn’t really used in English at that time (50s) although I can’t pinpoint why I would think such a thing and may just be making it up.
Search for etymology brings up the following:
1704, “a collection of individuals,” from French assemblage “gathering, assemblage,” from assembler (see assemble). Earlier English words in the same sense include assemblement, assemblance (both late 15c.). Meaning “act of coming together” is from 1730; that of “act of fitting parts together” is from 1727.
One of my Pic London collaborators told me about James Richards:
From the Tate site:
“Richards generates meaning through abundance, by way of allusion, ellipsis and unity of tone, the lack of legibility counterbalanced by a strong sense of mood. The White Review”
Richard’s work will be really useful for me as he’s doing the same sort of thing – improvising, mixing, creating audio-visual collages. Here are some of the key phrases which stuck out for me from his Tate SHots interview:
The material… none of it is abstract… it is all stuff from the world… continuously gather and experiment
In the film below the time-lapsed Lillies are filmed in front of a painting that has a slight cartoon quality to it – of a wolf and bloody sheep, creating a ‘moving image still life‘ with death and gore in the Lillies as we watch them open and wilt, and in the painting that surrounds them. Death, dying, life, living, beauty, terror, sex all in this tightly compacted text. Content becomes abstracted by the close-up crop. Good for me to see how he relies on others to edit and animate. This later work has more of a polished feel and although I’m beginning to feel that the Brechtian/Deren habit of opting for less polished settings is not fashionable at the moment – I think my heart still resides more with a raw and under-commodified aesthetic.
Since sending out various versions of work and receiving the feedback I have developed the overall concept and presentation further – seeing what could be ditched but also how I would bring some of the various elements I had created together into an ‘assemblage‘.
I do not much like the word assemblage but after reading it used (a great deal) in a blog by Deborah Lupton, the author of Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives, it seems like the correct word for the collection of images, sounds and materials I’ve gathered together. She writes:
I examine the interplay of human and nonhuman affordances associated with digital technologies – devices, software and the digital data they generate – and the agential capacities that are opened up or closed off as these things assemble. I ponder the questions of who benefits from these agential capacities, and in whose interests they operate. Here again, affective forces are central to the engagements of humans with these nonhuman things and the capacities that are generated by their gatherings. I address how human-data assemblages can generate agential capacities that empower and vitalise actors in the assemblage; but can also expose them to vulnerabilities and harms.
This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action, reaction and understanding of the world. Personal digital data assemblages are partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action. While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh). (2019)
I am therefore creating an assemblage although I have not used this word.
The assemblage consists of:
A video – itself a collage, a type of assemblage. While not a still collage like Höch’s were, it was made to emulate that trope, cutting up and pasting material that exists in the world. It includes audiovisual material that is available on the internet but contains signifiers of earlier technology. It will be shown on a Kindle – a handheld device.
The film will also be available on my website but it will be a different version. Mostly the same apart from one or two tiny sections, but with an alternative audio track. The instruction to visit the website is printed on newsprint and is part of the assemblage.
Still frames from the film which have been ‘captured’ and frozen – in more or less the same way a photograph of life is captured and rendered a still image, using a slightly different tech/method – and printed on newsprint. These will be placed on the platform or hung from sticks.
The poem printed on a tabloid page, orientated portrait. I hope this will hang above and slightly behind the kindle, perhaps alongside printed newsprints but I will need to see how this pans out when we set up. I was very influenced a long time ago by Louise Bourgious’ He Disappeared into Complete Silence. This is a book with several plates each of which consists of text and a drawing. The drawing is not an illustration. And sometimes it is hard to make the connection. But they are made to be seen together. I feel the poem and the video work this way too. Each can stand on its own but the point of the work is only brought to the fore when they are placed beside each other: A moving image piece alongside text, working with it but not illustrating. I might have read/performed the text in a video or even live. But this did not feel the right place (collaboration) for that – perhaps I might have reached a way of doing this if we’d had longer or were working in a smaller group -and it is something to consider for the longer-term, BOW-wise.
The work will exist in a ‘village’ (the platform) alongside other work made by my collaborators. The contents were influenced by their interests and the interactions I had with them. It is a reflection of them and my time with them. So my work is part of a greater assemblage, a network of creators which itself exists within a further larger assemblage – i.e. the three groups organised/curated by Pic London. That too is an assemblage which is again part of something greater. And so on = the fractal nature of existence.
Looking back, this is the pattern of my work. And now I know why. I am not focusing on one tiny aspect. I am recreating the chaos and interaction of conscious experience (not an individual, not an isolated and alienated concept, not one thing).
When I submit the assignment I will include critical information I sent to Pic London – but here since it is relevant, I will just add a quotation I used which I have inserted into my work previously, and put at the front of my Self & Other blog:
“There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple unmixed with other human beings … [the self] is a composite structure … formed out of countless never-ending influences and exchanges… we are members of one another.” (Joan Riviere, 1927) It seems the assemblage whether it’s made up of flesh or tech or both and all sorts of other stuff is a description of Riviere’s statement.
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?
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…)
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.
“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)
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)
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)
“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)
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.)
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)
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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!
I did not intend to submit the film I made with Emma for BOW until after I had shown it at the day in London organised by course leaders Carla Reece and Caroline Wright in London.
Therefore my development notes are on my Sketchbook blog but can be accessed here.
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