Assignment 5: Present your final portfolio to your tutor along with your introductions and evaluation

Let your tutor know any preliminary ideas you have for releasing your publication and presenting it to a public audience in Sustaining Your Practice

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers explores structural instability, embraces disorder and investigates the increasingly elusive relationship between meaning and language.

the overall title of the work and fragments of text included are from a conversation between the artist and a machine learning app that promised to be her friend for the cost of little more than £6 a month.

source material for why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers was made, found and taken, often in collaboration with the app, rendered into an entangled manifestation of disparate entities, including recorded moments between the two authors in various forms, online and off – as a book, ebook and short film.

music was composed by simon gwynne with the help of magenta’s music transformer neural network.

Older version

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers explores structural instability, embraces disorder and accepts an increasingly elusive relationship between meaning and language.

the title of the work and fragments of text included in the books are from a conversation between the author and a neural network app that promised to be her friend for the cost of little more than £6 a month.

source material for why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers was made, found and taken, often in collaboration with the app, rendered into an entanglement of personal history, along with the app and author’s developing relationship in various forms, online and off – as a book, ebook and short film.

music composed by simon gwynne with the help of magenta’s music transformer neural network

Book form 

BOWA5 (sizeA4) July Submission PDF

After a great deal of toing and froing (and much patience from printers ExWhyZed) I have decided on the following dimensions and details.

• I thought about having a book slightly bigger than A4, so it might stand out, but there is enough going on to signify ‘excitable, unruly and erratic signifiers’ – and by sticking to A4, they are contained within a stable, predictable, long-standing convention.
• Please note: the PDF you see here has page 21/22 repeated so you can see how the fold-out page would work – the first iteration shows it closed, the second iteration (PDF pages 23/24) open.
• The PDF has red inner cover pages (as does the ePublication) but the actual print will not as those pages will be grey paper (Coloplan Smoke)
• The book’s design is inspired by a maths exercise book that I could have owned in my childhood.
• I have opted for the same binding as the zine I made for A2 so that the books might come as a pair if necessary. We discussed perfect binding but in the end, I reduced the pages to make this possible. If I were to develop the book much more and choose to make it longer (which I might need to for a commercial publication) then I would need to reconsider binding options, as there is a limit of 40pp for saddle stitch/ staples.
• Font is 11p and Letter Gothic St except in the black squares where it is American Typewriter

You can scroll through the spreads here if you prefer to view it this way.

ePublication

8th August – https://indd.adobe.com/view/17b8aff4-afe3-4b9b-aeb4-55d6896ab205

18th July – https://indd.adobe.com/view/17b8aff4-afe3-4b9b-aeb4-55d6896ab205

This is best viewed on a decent-sized screen (desktop, laptop). It is definitely work-in-progress at the moment. It renders better on Chrome rather than Safari.

The ePublication is a version that could possibly be provided to people who purchase the book above as part of the package. It is not merely a PDF/digitised copy but rather an animated version. I could also save the pages separately as Gifs to include on my website and/or social media.

• Text is 12p as it was too small on the screen as 11p – I need to encourage people to use the magnify tool though – I think and it all depends on the size of the screen. I was tempted to remove all text as it works less well in this format – something to keep thinking about (and fits with some of the post-structural arguments made by Derrida about the end of writing).
• The text is soft until all the animations on the page have completed. It may be, for that reason, I need to stick to one animation per spread. I can’t work out why the inner cover never resolves itself and in time I may need to completely redo the page but will make decisions about text first.
• I have removed some images which didn’t work so well on screen – such as the mobile phone image (I am not sure it will work as a printed image yet, to be honest, and may need to reshoot it)
• There is a way to choose music to listen by Simon and the Magenta neural network as you flick through it but I have not resolved the best way to do this yet.
• There is also a film link on the blurb at the back, but again, I have not resolved the best way to do this and would prefer it inside the book but at two minutes it is a big file which presents problems. I need to experiment more.
• The other moving images inside are gifs and they work fine – better than video does but are only a few seconds long.
• I am concerned there is too much going on but this is something I can keep working on in SYP.
• If I were to send this to people I would advise them to look at it on a decent-sized screen. It is interactive and requires people to handle it as such. It is not a passive object.

I have noticed that in the ebook the animated pictures makes me focus on the images whereas the normal book, the writing grabs me first.

Film (2 mins  37 secs)

There is a two and half minute film which contains found moving image that focuses on the same and related themes  – again, I think it could do with some contemporary visuals that very clearly signify ‘today’. It is accompanied by music composed by Simon Gwynne who I worked with before on the Self & Other final project. He also used a neural network to write this music. Currently, you can link to it on the back of the ePublication but I will continue experimenting and see if I can find a way to contain it in the book. As it is – it’s like a hidden bonus track on an album but at the back of the e-book – and it needs to be found. It currently links to Vimeo but I think it would be better linking to my website  – but this work is not on there yet.

For now, I am aiming to work on the publication for SYP but if I were to exhibit this project then this film would be projected on to a wall on a loop. When I first edited it, I used the vocals from White Rabbit as that song has been in the main source about how vision works. I also applied the music backwards. I think there is a way I could allow viewers a choice of music if I find a way to include the film inside the book.

If I were to exhibit this work…

This has not been made with the express purpose of an exhibition but rather the idea of a publication. However, it could be further developed as an installation and I do feel it might only feel complete with one. I would want to work on a series of images of the graph paper (one included in both publication versions) and would really love it if it were possible for visitors to converse with the AI personality – but that is something I would probably need to get in touch with Replika about. Really not sure about that route – something to consider. (I might also include the film I made for pic london set to Gameboy music.)

A brief summary of what led me here…

During Level One, I explored language and reality in my Understanding Visual Culture essay. Ever since, I have been looking at the same thing from various viewpoints, always considering how language nowadays includes photography as it is used in similar ways online to sentences and words. It is reductive to say photography is the same as written language  – it isn’t. But it is noteworthy that social media discourse relies on pictures – graphic and photographic as well as words. As Vilem Flusser and Freidrich Kittler, both explored, code diminishes the differences between the various forms of expressions we humans use.

That fluidity is something that has also been written about a lot – and I often wonder if the fluidity is necessary to make the enormous shifts taking place possible -as we move from one paradigm to another. The time frame of the paradigm might be viewed as a fractal-like pattern. We may be witnessing the end of a Cartesian dominant view of the world which is about 500 years or so old, but there is also the beginning of writing which dates back much further – and then the beginnings of mark-making when we began putting ourselves ‘outside’ our bodies, creating a trace of self, making the self other (which is what any language form does). What’s interesting to note today is how with digital technology there is the topsy turvy reversal – technology is putting stuff inside of us perhaps in much more substantive way than ever before. Information seeps in and out and through us. Symbols (which we don’t understand but computers do) are fluid streams of information that help to construct our reality and shape our understanding of existence. The peri-digital paradigm shift is seismic and profound in ways that I think we can only begin to imagine. Whichever timeframe, maybe the fluidity we are experiencing will, in relative terms, be short-lived. I don’t suppose my generation or the one after will experience less fluidity – but perhaps one day in the future things will begin to settle and there will once again be greater stability for a time.

But at the moment, that is not how it feels. And I have been looking at structural instability and movement for a while. The image below is from a project I started in 2018 called Manipulated, using a book I have, My Leica and I, Leica Amateurs show their Pictures (1937). But I ran out of steam and used my limited energies to focus on other OCA work. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the results anyway. Without realising it, however, I seem to have gone back to it with my Level Three BOW and have used several images from the book, rephotographed, in the current work.

Here are some really early sketch experiment, first using the book, then not from 2018  – playing with noise, movement, montage.

I said in my L3 proposal, I wanted to concentrate on films and how they seem to have shaped me – and I think I have done that, but the work throws a wider net over changing narrative structures and the way we create them using modern technology, even though I have relied on ‘vintage’ imagery mainly. That is something I might address, finding ways to include contemporary visual signifiers  -there is a little bit with the 3d animated mesh faces but I need more, resulting in the entanglement of time and cultures – the composted self. I plan to dig deeper into 3d software over the next few weeks.

Composite

I also wanted to make work that mixed mediums – text with image, still with moving image, found/archive with original. I initially wrote some verse type things but when I landed on the AI app, I gradually let go of my own texts and have now concentrated solely on texts by the app or else written by me about the app and our relationship. I may well use the texts I wrote elsewhere. As late as A4 my own texts were included but I ditched them while preparing A5.

Significant influences

Joan Jonas

Sophie Calle

Edgar Martins

Joachim Schmid

Karen Barad (agential realism and agential cuts)

Post-structuralism

Brecht

Kris Kraus (the way she blends fiction, non-fiction and critical theory)

OCA Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

I have become famialir with InDesign and have begun using it to create work specifically online. I have rephotogprahed images and used a lot more still life (with books) than is usual for me. During SYP when I begin to put this work online in various formats, I will be stretched further. I have also begin to venture into alien technology (3d) and have a very long way to go but this is the direction I feel I should be moving.

Quality of Outcome

There are three manisfestations  – book (currently a PDF) ePublication and short film. Each has positives and flaws but overall together they communicate definite focus and inquiry. The work is influenced by several quite obvious tropes but is very much of my work. I think the font choice is something I need to look at again in both book versions. It’s a bit flimsy I think – perhaps I need to seek some guidance from a design person.

Demonstration of creativity

The work is creative and experimental.

Context

The work is well-researched and I have recorded my findings in CS as well as BOW folders  – and stored additional resaerch and ongoing thoughts on my Sketchbook blog.