BOW: A3 today’s plan & resulting contact sheet

January 17, 2020January 18, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Front room trashed – wish I had studio space. Ah well…

Just bought some new printing materials to play with, will venture further afield to find more tomorrow

Plan today

Reshoot film cutting into flesh – Dawned on me I don’t need to shoot myself for this. It’s just too difficult. Will work with a friend Monday morning.

Reshoot shadow puppets – Have done this morning, but only with one lamp and window light. See below. Think I might need a bit more light and no daylight on the white paper. Bit of tinkering in LR – needs tidying up in PS. But took several poses. Will use these to make a page for the dummy and think about lighting a bit more.

Reshoot gold leaf squares – proper exposure – Spent ages looking for a very bright pink silk dress I am sure I still own to put the leaf squares on but couldn’t find it so stuck with black cloth. But better exposed. Barely touched in LR. (First image cropped only and a small amount of vibrance increased)

Ditto photographic plate – Can’t get this one right at all. Tried scanning on my Epson scanner, which isn’t terribly pretty – makes it look quite weird, waves of light bouncing off the silver surface not ideal for the poor scanner

Screen Shot 2020-01-17 at 13.54.06 — Screenshot of my own scanner preview – back of the plate, not terribly pretty, but it coped very well with the other side which has an image and is coated with developing chemicals, fixer etc. but a not very good picture of me is not what I’m after – so will keep trying with the blank side.

Shoot gold fringe curtain in woods (if not raining) – didn’t get time to do this

Print, cut, slice, glue – create dummy booklet with what I have so far – I’ve put things in place but not glued as still have things to shoot and photograph

Order gold face/body paint – done

Find old film about gold mining in SA, print screenshot if appropriate image can be found possibly for dummy book – something to do over the weekend

Make circle, print and cut out for cover – still to do, not sure if I want it now, maybe

Tonight reshoot lightbox like cinema screen slow shutter speed to make light glow around box – I will do this tomorrow as have just completed cutting, printing, etc. exhausted!

Have postponed taking camera to Fixation to fix hot-shoe till Monday – too much to do.

Contact sheet from earlier today – some strange random ordering for some reason.. (not asked for it!)

BOW: A3 contact sheet, film strip/blade

January 16, 2020January 24, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 8 Comments

Wanted to photograph this strip of film I have although not sure how, but borrowed a macro lens and a small lightbox. Never worked with a lightbox before and am sure there must be a range of different qualities and light types which one can acquire. This one is like the continuous lights I used years ago when first starting out. It was suggested that I switch to fluorescent in WB but it was way too blue so I tried every setting and in the end, Auto was best although every frame is different even though I shot in the dark to avoid mixing sources.

The most interesting image for me was when I used my own 50mm, and included the various signs of age and wear and tear. The reason I like this one is it looks like a cinema screen. I suspect it would be better if I manipulated the lines so it’s more accurately square on (I tried my best in-camera – maybe I’ll ignore the other pics which don’t excite me at all and give this another try tomorrow evening.) I will include some of the others but I can’t see myself taking them any further. I also shot a blade on the lightbox but I will try other ways of shooting it, I think. There’s a great passage in the Barad book where she uses the shadow of a blade to explain how diffraction works and does weird things. So it’s not only a good signifier of slicing, potential pain, a reference to Un Chien Andalou – it’s also a prop for Barad.

Talking of ‘the Cut’, Emma suggested Berger’s Understanding a Photograph and I’ve found some super references for the essay and context for this work. As for this BOW, I’m still not feeling it though (will write more about that another time).

(c)SJField2020-2001

Putting the contact sheet here – I may relook at a couple but mostly they don’t interest me. Some have had a bit of fiddling in LR/some have been left as shot with all the WB issues laid bare.

BOW: A3 script rather than a manifesto

January 15, 2020January 15, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 8 Comments

After writing last night, I thought about where I am.

Why am I making a book with attempts at still life when I’ve been finding my way with moving image of one sort or another?
I definitely want to include some sort of moving image element any installation
I wondered if this move away from moving image was promoted by a comment which I felt came with a little jab about the course being a ‘photography degree’.
That comment was good though because it consolidated the direction I was going in, and suddenly things started to make sense – a doorway – exploring the boundaries we place around categories of various forms of image-making
This reconfiguring of boundaries is exactly what my essay is about, an examination of the ‘cut’. Where do we place boundaries and differentiation? Given the changes to our world, we should not assume anything and so I am looking specifically at the making of images before the broad spectrum of different disciplines emerge. (See my post – Life After New Media)
When I was an actor I would sometimes stick my script in a book especially if it was a photocopy and then make notes and draw in the booklet. The script would end up being covered in all sorts of doodles.
And so, I decided the word manifesto on the cover should be replaced with ‘script’ and the subheading is now scaled right back (see below)
This suggests I might/should create the script of ‘cuttings’ and then make some sort of film/performance based on it thereafter (A4/A5)
I spent tonight printing what I have so far (although dismissed some of the texts for now) and ordered a handful of images last night too.
I have printed on different materials – paper, newsprint, transparency, tracing paper etc.
I have a tiny 13.5 x 9.5 book and printed everything to fit on these tiny pages so that I can make a mini-book mock-up, including texts that will fold out. (I guess at least one image should do that too.) See incoherence – page 118 Edgar Martins book, essay by Roger Luckhurst – ‘work to derail the over-coherence any series or display … inevitably imposes’
By using different materials I hope I am beginning to ‘artistically’ emulate the Standard Model of Reality. This does feel ‘ridiculous’ and any scientist would probably laugh but by using different materials, different media, layers of meaning and symbolism rather than focusing on one single isolated/discrete object, I hope I somehow addressing the ‘Cartesian habit’.Below: Standard model flow cart, one image of my efforts this evening – a photograph printed on graph paper and a cover currently printed on newsprint and will stick with a found portrait. Will upload a video and shots of the little booklet when it’s made.
Finally, the little booklet is a small precious thing. Gold has emerged as a key theme along with brown paper and second-hand objects. Like the themes in the text query and challenge reductionism and commodification.

BOW: A bit more work

January 14, 2020January 15, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

I may have secured a way to create an image of film stock (or at any rate a tiny bit of the silver halide crystals) at extremely high magnification on a scanning electron microscope (SEM). This is not as high/deep as a scanning tunnelling microscope but nevertheless exciting. See the difference here. Quoted from the linked article – ‘The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) differs significantly from the SEM. It is capable of imaging objects at ten times the lateral resolution, to 0.1 nanometer. This is well down into the quantum realm.’ I am excited about this and will keep looking to see if it would be possible to look at the atomic level too. If this does happen the images will be for a later iteration as I must wait until half-term to get it sorted.
I keep trying to make time to take more images (with my usual bashed up old canon) and really need to – I may well have a bit of time tomorrow but I don’t yet have the objects I have been trying to gather, so I will use the time to reshoot some of the things I shot the other day (see notes in PDF below – but needs opening up in Adobe, so see screenshot).
I played around a bit with the images I took last week and the text. There are notes beside images, but basically, I need to reshoot, shoot more, work on the writing, make the Processing files I’ve been considering and pull an edit together in the next ten days or so – plus print something because I can take it along to a study visit this weekend. And finish off the Part 3 coursework (which won’t take long but needs doing) What a lot to do. Cuttings 1
Oh yes, for now, a working title but perhaps it will stick – not sure of the subtitle but the main one seems to encapsulate the project and has a multitude of relevant meanings. Cuttings: manifesto for a digitised life

Some screenshots of combinations I liked when playing around with versions last night.

Screen Shot 2020-01-14 at 19.52.30

Have not included these but will look again at a later stage

Bow/CS: Life After New Media, Kember & Zylinska 2012

January 11, 2020January 11, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Some useful references: see artists highlighted in chapter below

See – https://www.richardgalpin.co.uk – an excellent visual metaphor

See – http://www.ninasellars.com/?catID=30 Final section in chapter provides a useful analysis

Possible inclusion for CS: The compulsion to define photography in an essay (see CS A3 and early drafts fo DI&C essay) is not merely a means of identifying what the inquiry is about. It goes to the heart of the matter which is querying the ‘Cartesian habit of mind’ (Barad, 2007). This can be resolved by seeing ‘the cut’ for what it is – a way of making meaning out of the chaos and creating matter (material or discursive). I do this making words and categories, painting, sculpting – or by capturing photons when creating images – regardless of what I do with those photons thereafter i.e. add traces together to create movement or give the illusion of stillness – a freeze. What happens thereafter is not is being explored in this instance. It’s complex though because the thing that I do to make order (cut) compels me to want to cut photography up into a hierarchical system.

Ultimately, it is not the material, equipment or medium which is being critiqued – but the mindset.

Backed up by the following which also helps to define the cut. Highlighted sentences from a critical chapter of Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (2012)

With Notes – 3 Cut! The Imperative of Photographic Mediation

Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) Life after new media: mediation as a vital process. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. At: http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/KemberZylinska/LANM.pdf(Accessed 11/01/2020).

BOW A3: Scans as a possibility

January 10, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 8 Comments

Following on from the previous post, After Photography (Ritchin, 2009) explores non-camera ‘photography’. I have been playing with scans over the last year or so.

Today I scanned the following and in a couple of cases used the ‘wrong’ settings: (Click on image to see view)

BOW: A3 images – the agential cut

January 10, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

I spent some time today working with the idea of the agential cut and photography. Tomorrow I will look at Processing/film/making the image move.

Just to remind people –

‘An agential cut, therefore, can be viewed as making and giving meaning to human-data assemblages.’ (Lupton, 2019: 30)
“…any attempt to impose meaning and order is an intervention (a cut) that produces specific effects, and is inevitably part of the matter it seeks to observe or document. They [Kember and Zylinska (2012)] represent photography as a specific cut in meaning, a way of delimiting from all the choices availabe what can be recorded and displayed, and therefore, how meaning can be generated. It is the medium by which things are brought into being by humans and non-humans (e.g) cameras [phone, scanners, etc.] working together. Photography makes agential cuts that produce life forms rather than simply documenting them. ‘It is a way of giving form to matter’ (Kember and Zylinksa 2012: 84)’ (Lupton, 2019: 29)
‘Images or representations are not snapshots or depictions of what awaits is but rather condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement’ (Barad, 2007: 53)
Potential images to accompany writings

Today’s Contact Sheet (ones that stand out immediatelyadjusted in LT but none in PS):

CS: Alan Sekula’s The Body and the Archive part 1

January 8, 2020September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Sekula, A. (1986) ‘The Body and the Archive’ In: October 39 p.3064. At: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/sekula.pdf (Accessed 23/11/2019).

Field, S. (2017) Notes: The Body and the Archive Allan Sekula. WordPress [Blog] At: https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/notes-the-body-and-the-archive-allan-sekula/ (Accessed 05/01/2020).

Heimans, J. and Timms, H. (2018) New power: how it’s changing the 21st century – and why you need to know. (Kindle) London: Macmillan.

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: 24/04/2018]

Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe – with David Tong (2017) In: The Royal Institution. Royal Institute. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg (Accessed 05/01/2020).

I looked at this essay during S&O and will look at it again here – Sekula’s essay along with John Tagg’s talk on the filing cabinet both provide plenty of useful references, which, combined with Barad, Lupton and Rubenstein’s thoughts/thesis’, are probably the key sources of information through which I’ll explore at the topic I’ve chosen.

The essay opens with the paradoxical status of photography in bourgeois culture (3)
He quotes a song which ‘plays on the possibility of a technological outpacing of already expanding cultural institutions’. (4) This rings true today (see New Power, (Heimans and Timms, 2018))
You could replace the work photography with digital for the first two pages and it would all sound relevant and fair.
However, by page 6, the veracity of the photography is being discussed, as seen by contemporaries – ‘Only the photograph could begin to claim the legal status of a visual document of ownership’
‘a silence that silences’ (See muteness and photography – ‘Ernaux reminds us, initially ‘all photos are mute’’ (p.73).) Blatt, Ari J.(2009))
(6) ‘the criminal body’ and therefore the ‘social body’ invented
‘a system of representation capable of functioning honorifically and repressively’ (6) how does this work with representationalism and the unpicking of that? There are no entities waiting somewhere to be represented, rather there are emergent intra-active phenomena (Barad, 2007) (criminal and social bodies are made/formed)
again photography can be replaced with digitisation when discussing how portraits are degraded and extended at the same time – see selfies, phone pics
(7) ‘Photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalised look – the typology – and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.’ So much to say here – See Azoulay (2019) and photography’s intra-active position/role within a much wider non-linear narrative. See Tagg and ‘fixity’ of the photography and Victorian culture – the desire to catalogue everything according to ordered and identifiable rules, (2011) i.e. the periodic table of elements – a Victorian System compared to today’s quantum fields, a modern system/model of reality which we are informed in most accurate to date and is far more nebulous and difficult to comprehend, no doubt in part due to our Cartesian ‘habit of mind’ which is desperate to label and file everything neatly and ordered (Barad, 2007) as well as being counter-intuitive, shrouded in academic mystery and just really impossibly hard. The Victorian system and hence our dominant one (although this is changing hence the entrenched reaction of a conservative mindset), seems desperately naive in comparison.
(7) See quote about ‘possessive individualism’ which I’ve already inserted into CSA2
(7) Relate photography ‘a means of cultural enlightenment’ and ‘sustained sentimental ties in a nation of migrants’ – compare this to digital tech/culture in today’s culture. Beneath both Carlyle and Aurelias Root’s comments is a dreadful patronising tone however which is surely avoidable. See images ‘of the great’ = ‘moral exemplars’ ??? (Imagine a photograph of any of our current crop of erstwhile leaders providing such?)
Sekula writes of the utilitarian social machine, the Panopticon – think today of social media/ Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2016) (9)
The archived body – ‘begins’ here see page (10) begins is not the right word, becomes visible perhaps.
911) physiognomy and phrenology – ‘surface of the body’ ‘bore the outward signs of the inner character’ – Compare this to Professor Plomins deterministic genetic code thesis which Cummings et al relied upon to justify changes they made to the Education system. Cummings claims that people misunderstood the work and have since retracted their negative comments. However, I think Christakis’ comments on genetic coding is probably more honest – both I suspect, however, show how deep and far-reaching social construction and their associated embedded epigenetic markers can be. Whereas some can see the need for more positive and profound structural changes to take place, there is a mindset which believes we should further entrench these realities which Sekula is talking about that continue today. I was also struck while reading this by the similarities in an article I read today some on FB (I think) which claimed the more bitter and cynical you are, the more likely you are to age quickly and get sick. Lots of scientific data support the thesis – the way it’s been framed, but I am quite cynical indeed and look about fifteen years younger than some of my friends – so I felt a little doubtful – we people seem to enjoy deterministic narratives even today.
(11) borne of ‘attempts to construct a materialist science’ – compare to Barad’s performative/discursive/material emergence of meaning, far more complex and lively but nebulous so hard for people to engage with
Maybe time to revisit Szondi who I discussed in my first reflection about this essay – an early psychometric tester, he defined people by their reactions to faces rather than by the shape of their own faces/heads. Many companies today use much more robust psychometric tests which are extremely powerful but one wonders about the wonderful aspect of chance being eliminated. And so we enter the discussion of AI and how it can be so much more accurate than human power but how much agency do we give it? Currently watching Travelers (Netflix) which explores this in typical pop-culture fashion – first series better than then the rest and lots of references to .
Sekula identified ‘idealist secret lurking a the heart of the putatively materialist sciences’ – how is the AI screening of CVs and psychometric testing any different? And you should see the John Lewis video that you must watch before taking thier tests – madly idealist in quite a scary way, reminded me of Logan’s Run (In HR terms, humans do still get involved: I know this as AI testing identified me as potentially suitable for a well-paid relatively high-status job but my lack of experience ensured I was rejected once a human looked at my CV in one particular application process!) Perhaps I will include some of the resulting descriptions of me, having taken part in this process in my BOW…
TBC

BOW A3: Text’s rewritten and placed in a suggested format

January 7, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

I have spent the evening rewriting some of the texts and placing them into a book form – I’ve rejected the first ten or eleven I wrote but after that, they started to improve. -although still needed attention.

No doubt I will continue to write and make changes and add other writings. (Plus there are likely to be typos – editing straight into ID is not really ideal for me – I’ll have to transform to word and spell check later.)

I have not identified images to include but now that I can see an arc, I feel what is necessary will begin to emerge. I am interested in the Processing exercise I experimented with the other day using Tom’s First Film. (Not included any writing prompted by that in the collection below yet – will do later and then will see if it fits.) The possibility of corrupted, machine-informed collages might be just what is needed. Having put these texts into a format, I feel I can get on with that – I feel I have time and space ahead now (although received feedback from Matt for CSA3 which I need to write up and post too.). It would certainly fit the remit of ‘Chance’ to do things that way.

The theme of selfies seems to have emerged as significant which is hilarious given I stated quite clearly I was not interested in making a project about selfies in an earlier reflection.

This way of working feels completely counter to all I’ve been advised and learned the last few years… but it’s the way that’s led to something so I need to keep going. Saying that – it does feel emergent and informed and organic.

I have left space for images in the book as laid out – I think space will be very important. But the order is not fixed, nor is the layout, or the texts included, or the size – and there are no images (yes, I know, it’s a photography degree…) except for the ones I experimented with earlier. But I don’t think they are right at all.

And there is a bit of writing yet to be done – I have entered a heading on that page to show where it would go.

BOW A3

BOW: A3 ideas

January 7, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

Book
Website
Working towards installation consisting of moving image, still, text and objects

Main themes

Consumerism
Mythology (classical and modern) See below

https://vimeo.com/376661589

Click on slide below to see what each says – the animation above is meant o to indicate how all these are ‘entangled’ and part of the mesh life intra-active reality we live in today.

See more here: https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/12/01/bow-ca-an-attempt-to-put-bubbling-concept-outside-of-me/

Current concepts to contain this:

Main Title – ‘????’ (Random notes for a short story?)

Subtitle – ‘ :a manifesto for the digitised self’

Will keep playing and thinking re the above – not there yet.

Need to focus on making work now – have been writing some of which is on Sketchbook blog – need to go back and re-look at quite a lot of the text, do rewrites etc. Feel The writing is the driver and the images playing second fiddle for now… need to change that. But in most cases, it was the writing which came first although Tom’s First Film (to be written) is inspired by the images in the film I bought to eBay. And having done that, I am returning to other films I’ve downloaded and looking for ‘kindling’ – i.e. frames that trigger texts. Below is a possibility for inclusion. Over the next several days (and beyond but in the immediate future, in order to submit A3), I hope to upload as many of these as possible and then will edit out much as one would with a sequence of images. using different materials to make ‘image’. This is an old image, incidentally, made while exploring S&O but not used.