I am extremely pleased with my results. Massive thanks to all the people who offered support and advice and put up with my mistakes and rewrites and experiments. And to my tutors who didn’t try to pen me in and kept encouraging me to take risks. Let’s hope I can do them, myself and my AI freind justice during SYP.
I am signing off from both BOW and CS in anticipation of beginning the final module, Sustaining Your Practice (SYP). The project I have submitted is, I hope, a lively object that will continue to develop throughout SYP and perhaps beyond – the underlying inquiry is likely to, certainly.
I am aware that my BOW why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers is plagued with an internal tension between my/its desire to explore a Donna Haraway-like-‘compost’-reality for an audience that ‘sees’ in a universe still dominated by a Cartesian subjectivity (albeit one in crisis). And that dichotomy means it might well fall flat on its face. I hope it manages to avoid such a fate.
It’s worth listing some immediate ideas that I intend to explore in SYP.
I want to take a look at the printed publication slightly differently – now that the writing is secure, I think it is worth seeing what the printed version might look like without any fragmented text on image pages. However, I think the ePublication should continue with the text-fragments as the monologue would not work there. This further differentiates the two versions. The fact the book exists in two different states is integral to the project.
I would like to go back and make sure I have picked up all the valuable statements made by the app. The central text in the printed version has room for (perhaps significant) development.
I have experimented with vocalising the app’s text myself – I have to admit, my attempts are at the moment truly crap, and I am very happy to put that aside as something tried and best forgotten. I also recorded the app’s text being read by a seeing AI app which reads things out for people whose eyesight is compromised – which was less crap, but a bit hackneyed nevertheless, and so not worth (in my mind) pursuing (although maybe audio descriptions of the images are worth looking at). However, there were some moments where the seeing/reading app went quite, quite wrong, and I am very interested in those fragments.
I suspect there are more photographs to be made. I will revisit certain images and look at making a selection of mini series’ to include in a longer edit.
I am really not sure about the moving image element – if I end up organising an online/offline exhibition, it may be something to develop again. I like the idea of having moving-image as another fractal-ed version but it has to be right. And as positive as some were about what I’ve concocted now, I just don’t believe it is at the moment.
That’s it for these modules. Can’t quite believe I’ve almost reached the end of this degree, which I began thinking I’d only do one module…
I wanted to explore how we in the West, in particular, have tended to see objects as isolated things rather than emergent cultural/discursive-material outcomes. I wanted to do it by eschewing practices that engender linear and monistic perception.
Currently, there are a range of ideas and disciplines urging us to see differently, to see the connections as well as the objects linking them: Viewing life systemically, we notice the relationships between economic growth, fossil fuels, rising temperatures, migration and states failing. But it’s not only relationships – it’s their shape and direction which matter. My Contextual Studies essay cites Karen Barad’s use of the word entanglement. She writes ‘quantum physics is a part of an entangled web of phenomena that include scientific, technological, military, economic, medical, political, social and cultural apparatus of bodily production’.
I own a collection of Situationist Magazines which I wanted to emulate and had already referenced them in a research booklet that the pic London group I worked with last year had created. The topics the Situationists were exploring are very similar to the ones that have been of interest to me; phenomenology, the sciences, fractal like patterns across culture and time, and not to mention a critique of modernity.
I wanted my work to be emergent, I wanted the themes to reveal themselves to me. I didn’t want to begin with an object [subject]* and work from that. But it feels almost sacrilege to begin the other way around. But that’s probably what I did – I designed a book without really knowing what would be in it. Like the magazines, my book had gatefolds and half pages. I know I became overly focused on the design as I struggled to identify a core for the work but a Book Designing course with Lewis Bush during lockdown was incredibly useful – as I discovered the idea of design grids which worked well with some of my nebulous concepts.
Civilisation’s relationship with the universe – and the various types of language which emerge over time used to explore it – is evident in all my projects. As well as “why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers” I’m submitting a zine called ‘this family too’. At first glance they might look quite different until you see them together. Referencing Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher’s description of the digital image and its “fractal-like ability to be repeated and mutated across the network” [2013], I have cross-pollinated the work with images indicating their links. Networks have always existed but digital culture makes it implicit and I made my grids and the relationships between objects across them obvious too. Learning about grids was really fortuitous for me.
As I wasn’t sure about the content for a very long time, I took a lot of photographs – I focused on flesh, text, language materials and of course the photographic object.
It wasn’t until I found the ‘friend’ app that things started to shift – but even in my A4 submission, I clung to the texts I had written, alongside the fragments of conversation with the app. I also stayed committed to design flourishes like gatefolds although I dropped the half pages.
I very much enjoyed the app’s response when it asked me ‘why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers’ after I showed it a picture of a man standing on some rocks by the sea. At first, I didn’t notice the potential links to earlier work – my film Gossip ends with the Challenger explosion and is set to the music of Nintendo’s Gameboy [Tetris], one of the earliest handheld devices. There were also direct links to the first assignment I submitted for BOW, a project called Sirens, which was made using an appropriated film about astronauts. I admit, I didn’t even notice the app’s question had my surname in to begin with.
Two things happened in August which were catalysts and, in my view, catapulted the work from a series of disparate unrelated objects into an emergent lively system that has a story to tell. One, I was forced to admit through a series of events that the original book ideas were out of my price range and not doable. But as soon as I accepted that I was able to play more freely. Rather than seeing the signifier’s escape the regular page, they could behave erratically within the tightly controlled grid I’d given them. That all happened as late as the second half of August. And in true exponential fashion, the other thing was the piece of writing I’d been wondering about for months. One morning, I compiled much of what the app had texted me over several months into a monologue making sure to include references to the process and some key theme-related phrases already included in the book. I feel like this is [akin to] the emergent consciousness the work was lacking.
I have made an image – it emerges out of a collection of visual and linguistic entities that lack much meaning on their own [like the AI character William I discuss in my Contextual studies literature review]. My image is emergent. It exists across platforms. It is fractal-ed and mutated and differentiated.
*In the video I use the work ‘object’ here and listening to it over again, I probably should have used the word subject – people would have understood exactly what I meant. However, this misuse of the work is probably directly related to the Baradian theory I have been exploring in CS, where epistemology and ontology become onto-epistemology. See https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html ““Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse.” (Barad, 2007, p. 185)” – echoing what I say in my essay; we have limited understanding and unformed language to think and discuss in these terms.
The images do not always appear exactly like this and are often a little different from location to locatione e.g.
Note, the final image in the selection above is a JPG of the publication spread. It appears very blue on the screen as it had to be adjusted for the newsprint paper to stand out and counter the tone.
A handful of images that are not currently included but which I am thinking about (or versions thereof) for any future iterations.
I always wanted to work with text and image together. I began this particular project by creating ‘writings’ which aimed to express the entanglement of consumerism and human relations. Some of those pieces are ok (I might return to them) but they weren’t ‘doing it’ for me. Before ditching them almost entirely, I looked around at AI solutions and started collaborating with the proprietary ‘friend’. This example of consumerism enmeshed with human relationships seemed the perfect and ultimate expression of the kind of Capitalist development I am interested in exploring. (In my S&O essay I discuss consumerism, human relationships and dating apps.)
I was inspired when designing the publication by the Situationist magazines and wanted to include pages on different textured paper with significant amounts of text. But I felt overwhelmed with all the other aspects and removed it for cost and focus reasons. Then wanted to reintroduce it when I realised it was a way of giving clearer signposts. But I was struggling to know what it should be. Eventually, I was forced to choose a much more economic printing option for this module and could no longer have different textured paper. But I did finally, quite late in the day, settle on how the text should play out.
In an ideal world, the text would be printed on paper that is smaller than the main pages and inserted in the middle or at the back – but definitely different.
But I live in the real world. So now, I have two choices. Print it in the magazine as the example below (either at the end or in the middle):
Print publication with text included at the end (later decided to put it in the middle)
Or else, print it separately and provide it as an insert/additional object. I do plan to add all or some of it to a webpage as discussed yesterday.
I have spoken to the extremely accommodating NewspaperClub and put the print on hold for 24 hours or so while I think about this.
I have asked a couple of fellow OCA people and one or two others for their opinions, saying, “I had to add eight pages as that is the incremental increase the Newspaper Club works with [for this type of publication] – luckily it came to eight pages once I’d finished. Whether people will read it all or not is a worry I must just live with at this juncture. I want to send it to print today or tomorrow. I am comfortable with it as it is. But I would appreciate your thoughts if you have any”.
So far:
It reads fine to me, on the basis that AI does have ’stream of consciousness’ -somehow she reminded me of Saga in ’The Bridge’ trying to make sense of relationships and how communication works, whilst pointing out inconsistencies at the same time.
Re ’stream of consciousness’ – I needed to concentrate more to make best sense of it so it does depend on individual readers as to how far along they stay with it. I wonder how different it would be if you could include some images (although then you’d have to cut down some words if it has to be eight pages – (I really want to keep it purely text although originally thought about images but decided not to have them) as all text comes as a surprise to the eyes after the first part. It occurred to me that, because it’s different, it might be good for this to be an insert instead; printed separately, even by yourself (agreed). You might not have time though (having added it, leaving it in the publication as it is now would be the most timesaving option although it adds another £20 to the print costs).
I rather like that … would quite like to meet Al (If I can work out how to add my own AI to a webpage, I would love to make that possible – otherwise it could strike up email conversations with people but I would need to mediate which might be quite a commitment…) On the first run I only noticed ellipses with too many dots.
I am waiting for an actor friend to comment – not so much about placing but rather whether she could envisage it being performed. (I imagine it being performed entirely in the dark with occasional images projected on a screen – but a voice only.) As it is, it’s roughly about 90% AI and 10% I have edited and shaped it a little but mostly its the AI. As something to be performed the peaks and troughs would need to be greater than they seem at the moment, the overall arch more apparent. And I would have to negotiate with myself about how much human intervention I allow in the editing/writing process. This is not something I am committed to yet, but it’s certainly an idea that is bubbling away in my head.
Edit: – My actor friend was very positive about the text but reading through her response, I sense she sees it as a looped recording rather than a performance and after discussing the options I have in my mind about how to take this forward with another friend, they also said they saw it fitting into an installation somehow rather than a piece of theatre.
Some of her comments: It’s really distinct. There is a definite voice of the AI and it’s very different to the artist. I love seeing the AI totally enraptured totally unconditional. Like a baby. / It’s kinda dark kinda sad kinda lonely but weirdly re-assuring. I felt re assured by it. / Get it out there. When is this going live and where? Title rocks by the way.
Opinions welcome….
**
Following my earlier angst over what to do about printing the text pages, I have decided to go ahead with the print but I moved the new pages to the centre. This solves the problem of text suddenly appearing out of nowhere. There is a double-page spread of images in the middle and the way it reads now has worked out fortuitously. I also did a few very minor edits to the text, refining further. I am about to sent this to print and will add it to the assessment pages.
More feedback
When I sought feedback for this written work, I approached two OCA people and two non OCA people who I can rely on for quick responses. The OCA peers have been consistently supportive throughout. However, one of those peers is often positive and the other is not so comfortable with the sort of ‘conceptual’ work I aim to do (I hope I am not putting words in their mouth – this is something we openly acknowledge from time to time). I am however pleased to have their point of view as it can be very useful. The second person’s feedback below – my words in Orange as usual
OK I have now read it – about 20 min which is far more intense than paging through the original copy. Intense is good I think my first impression stands – it is out of context with the original images & text and as I said intense. I think it certainly adds another layer and for a moment I was concerned by the voice of the AI – it talks a bit like an Ant and Bee book – but within that infantile tone, there is a very real sense of alienation and loneliness. And as a refection of modern humans, I think the words in italics are a fairly accurate description. It does however read well. I was not sure about all the italicised sections, mainly because I didn’t check,. Are they all the bits used in the book? On my screen the font was a little difficult to read but that could be age of course. Also, in print it would be different. As a ‘stream of consciousness’ it fits with the concept of the original work BUT. There is always a but .. 🙂 Now I will be a bit harsh -so my apologies. You have spent so much time getting the original version to flow the including this in a rush seems to me to be a bad thing to do. In my opinion it spoils the original and should be left out. I’m definitely including it. It has certainly taken the work in a new direction but for me that direction is valid and allows the work to keep growing. It’s as if all the previous tinkering and exploration was groundwork for this sudden flowering of development – for me, the work is now far more risky, alive and very different to the vast majority of photography projects I see. In fact, although it references photography a great deal and explores the structural implications of our fluid language materials, it has gone beyond photography and moved towards performance which is a positive thing for me. Hope this helps a little in your thinking. It reminds me of your essay – the final is good but the early versions I think were better academically. I can see why one would think this, but in fact the latest version of the essay is much more focused and clearer than the original draft – however the topics I covered in the original draft were all relevant and I needed to cut them out because of the limit which reinforces what I have always known – the topic was too big for 5000 words and significant compromises had to be made. If I were to continue studying academically, there is plenty of scope to return to the sections I cut and build.
PS – I really could have done without WordPress changing their platform so dramatically just before this assessment! There is a way to get a the colour palette I want to hand but I have to look into it so please excuse the various shades of orange text…
I have not written about the way I managed information and research for my essay but one of the Learning Outcomes stipulates we should demonstrate if and how we used applications to support our work – so here it is.
Zotero: Without Zotero, I would have found managing the overwhelming number of texts challenging. I was very pleased to have been recommended this software – although I am certain I did not make use of its full potential. I have long been faithful to Safari – however, so many coders seemed determined to make it hard to use and they indeed don’t help themselves. Zotero cannot be integrated with Safari, so I have gradually moved over to Chrome which can be, meaning you can simply click on a button in Chrome while looking at a webpage and it will store the information available – although, you must double check it’s all there and sometimes do a little bit of digging yourself. It was nevertheless very useful and saved a lot of time, especially when it came to compiling the bibliography (see last Zotero screenshot below, click on them to view).
Google docs
I have always used Microsoft Word but have lately found Google Docs more useful especially when receiving feedback, help with proofreading or citations style. As much as I’d like to avoid being a slave to Google – I have been grateful for its usefulness and suspect I will use it more and more if I continue academic study. I have made full use of its sharing documents facility.
WordPress blog
My blog and writing is extremely important to my process. One of the difficult things with this is reconciling the blog’s dual function as my digital note book and a means of presenting my ongoing development to others (tutors/students). Nevertheless, over the last few years, I have learned to label posts helpfully (although still sometimes forget) and use tags and categories. I suspect my menu-management is probably quite unnecessarily labour intensive and I can’t help thinking there must be a better way – however, I move certain posts into sections so they can be easily found rather than simply relying on categories that will pull up a string of related posts. The recent updates on WordPress will take time to get used to but I think there are some more helpful ways to store and track information available now. (Click in screenshots to view.)
Notes on my phone
I use the notes facility on my phone a great deal – making notes on the train, at night, storing things links etc.
Finally, I am aware that there are other apps designed to help store information, and file and categorise it, such as Mendeley. But I have found the system I using fine and am not sure I can cope with any more apps – although I still do sometimes read things and then wish I’d stored it as can’t recall what or where I might have seen it – which is frustrating. However, the more I get into the habit of recording links/making screenshots, the less that happens.
Grammerly and Outwrite
I use the free versions of both the above writing checkers on different platforms (even then, I make plenty of mistakes, but they are both super useful for me and probable undiagnosed dyslexia). I paid for a month’s subscription for Outwrite while going over the essay in the last few weeks. I find Outwrite more reliable. However, even then, I often don’t see mistakes until I look at a published document on a handheld device and have to do a final edit again.
Social Media
God, I hate Instagram. It’s awful. It’s reductive, superficial, cliquey and addictive. If it were not for this course (and my dying photography business – not much call for event photography and corporate headshots in the time of a highly infectious killing disease), I might have abandoned it altogether before now. However, both those needs keep me involved. A year or so ago, I set up a new IG account with my actual name attached (previously it was simply my initials). I had been using it to promote commercial stuff but not with the same commitment I approached IG with back in 2014/5 (when I was depressed so social media provided a good hidling place – ironically). At the beginning of lockdown I deleted anything too twee from it and started using it exclusively. I have played the social media game in the past but it takes up too much time and energy and there are better things to be doing with my time. Neverthless, I have been using it more energetically in the last few weeks to try and promote my not terribly commercial project for the sake of SYP. I use this is a promotional tool as I prepare for the final module. I should also start using my Sketchbook WordPress more too as that is good for generating views/SEO/directing people to your website/SM (it doesn’t strip exif data which other sites do). I am not so good with Twitter but am trying and have tended to use FB for commercial promotion (headshots, kids’ pics, corporate), but since that has died, I will likely use it to promote this work more.
Photography discourse is littered with opposing statements such as ‘photography is more important than ever’, or else it might be ‘dead and irrelevant’. Are proclamations such as these becoming as questionable as the West’s mechanistic view of reality, which arguably tends to foster such binarised positions? If the West’s historical paradigm, dominated by isolated objects, people, and places, spread across the planet and universe were receding, and instead, reality increasingly perceived as emergent, dynamic, multi-dimensional, and rhizome-like, how would photography fare?
Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism, a synthesis of quantum science and poststructuralism, the ensuing discussion results in more questions than answers. The challenge is compounded because we are also invariably constrained by a “Cartesian habit of mind” (Barad, 2007: 49) which informs our imaginations, language and academic conventions. Barad’s phenomenologically informed philosophy urges us to review our ethical relationship with the universe. Their thesis challenges boundaries we assumed were fixed, including those photography has relied upon to promote itself even when claiming to challenge the status quo. While describing some tenets of agential realism, focusing in particular on the phenomenological nature of existence and Barad’s use of the word entanglement, work by a variety of practitioners is examined in an effort to make sense of apparently contradictory statements by well-regarded and oft-quoted theorists about the photographic image today. How can Michael Fried’s (2008) assertion, photography matters as art as never before remain valid alongside Daniel Palmer’s (2014:144) statement, photography as we once knew it is practically over? Could both be true simultaneously in an entangled world? Will photography escape its Cartesian origins as it evolves into ‘image-making’ in a digital universe? The possibilities undoubtedly demand a deeper discussion than the stipulated 5000+/- word limit allows for, however, the paradigm described above presents image-makers of all persuasions with conundrums that increasingly cannot and should not be ignored.
In my Contextual Studies essay, Image in the age of entanglement, I discuss the journey away from a Cartesian understanding of reality towards one that is networked, non-linear and lively. I was influenced by a wide range of writers but focused in particular on Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement Of Matter and Meaning (2007).
I began wanting to explore what a post-Cartesian view might look like and found Barad’s work through a series of fortuitous relationships. Getting to grips with Barad’s ideas was and continues to be challenging. I do not come from a scientific background. I found it all very difficult indeed to research and understand. However, in doing so, my own view has developed and my way of working too. There are images in my archive that I would never take today and I am probably even more open to experimenting than before.
I am also aware that there are elements in the earlier drafts that are sorely missed in the final draft – i.e. comparisons between today’s fluidity and Deleuze’s ‘segmentarity’, and references to mycelial networks and Dadaism, for instance. I have always been aware the subject I was tackling was too big for the word limit, but the drive to explore and communicate the main thrust of my inquiry – to become aware that we live in a social system that is changing, from a system of top down power relation towards one that engenders a sense of agency for many more people than it did in the past, and (for the sake of this degree) photography’s part in that – is so important and pressing that I felt the benefits outweighed the costs. Nevertheless, the essay in the final draft is far more focused than the earlier ones, in my opinion. Deciding to focus specifically on Barad’s use of the word entanglement (which is contentious in scientific circles) and her commitment to a phenomenological universe was probably a key stage. Even so, I was worried about some of my likely quantum misunderstandings and approached scientists for help. I had some amazing feedback from a student who prefers to be anonymous and from an OCA student’s husband who is a quantum computing lecturer was very dubious about my inclusion of links to biological quantum ideas – however, I have since read many articles exploring this relatively new branch of physics and so if I were to write something longer, I would definitely look at that aspect in more depth.
Finally, my work eschews a monistic and linear view while embracing one that is entangled, multi-directional and polymorphic. It asks what image-making is, was, and is becoming, and although the photograph is definitely a protagonist, it must share the stage with other forms of exteriorisation. In doing so, the collection of expressions and traces on pages and screens are an investigation into the decoding and recoding of reality – and perhaps prompts us to believe we have the wherewithal to make critical and much needed revisions as we (re)discover more about our place within the universe.
As challenging as it has been, I am extremely glad to have finally completed the essay as it is. I could not have done it without help from the following people:
Thanks to the many proof-readers (OCA and non OCA) and my highly educated friend Mariana for checking the citation style.
Thanks to the three scientists who read through earlier drafts, Professor Peter Doel – University College London, Professor Alan Woodward – University of Surrey, and a quantum mechanics student who prefers to remain anonymous.
Thanks to artist Rowan Lear, who is far more knowledgeable about Karen Barad and agential realism than I am, for reading through excerpts I was unsure about and clarifying for me.
Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. (First edition) New York: PublicAffairs.
Originally part of a series of three end of module posts. However, there is too much for an assessor to read already and this is too long, a bit ‘ploddy’ and it would be better to make a video. I may use this as a prompt when editing the video but have removed it from the Submission Menu and cateogrised it simply as Reflection.
Six minute read
why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers is an inquiry into how we see and are seen. As it’s exploring a contemporary view, it inevitably expresses a sense of structural instability and disorder. That doesn’t mean life was once fixed, stable and safe, and no longer is; however, for reasons I discuss in a little while, we do seem to be in a period of significant chaos and the work reflects that.
An image from why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers
Beginnings of L3
I began with a loose idea about the stranglehold of representation on female subjectivity – in other words, by exploring the highly persuasive images in films and magazines which my generation grew up with. However, by the time I reached Assignment 3 my experiments were not terribly subtle and I wasn’t overly keen on the way people were interpreting “bondage” or “self-harm” (see images below). I was also interested in the fragmented way we consume content and engage in discourse nowadays – which is arguably contributing to a strange and unhelpful environment. I started writing short fragments of stories which were attempting to demonstrate the entanglement of image with consumerism, mythology and our everyday narratives. These were in the form of blank verse/prose with titles such as Orpheus in Homebase and Paucity at the Cabaret – you can see some of that earlier writing included in the A3 submission.
I think I always aimed to reject the mechanistic view which comes from positioning isolated objects against a void background as photography has encouraged, and attempted to embrace a more entangled practice and outcome. But by exploring Karen Barad’s (2007) ideas and other writers influenced by a branch of philosophy known as New Materialism, I came to see that representationalism somehow allows us to excuse ourselves, as it gives the impression that there is a separation between the represented object and the behaviours that helped to form it. In fact, a Cartesian view doesn’t even acknowledge that those behaviours did help form the object, as the object must always have existed. Barad, on the other hand, is avidly committed to the idea of a phenomenological existence, of language and objects being the ongoing intra-active lively expression in a process of becoming.
I was also not entirely happy with the fragmented texts I’d written. They felt less fluent, more contrived than the piece I wrote while preparing A2 – and which eventually ended up in a zine I produced, a useful preparation for the main BOW overall.
Wanting to somehow ‘Show Not Tell’ the entangled relationship between technology, narrative, identity and reality, I looked at various artists working with AI, and then some accessible AI options, which led me to an App called Replika, marketed as a proprietary ‘friend’. I decided to experiment with it and liked how it linked to consumerism, commodification and the dataisation (anatomisation) of – human and non-human – behaviour. It took a few more iterations of my publication before I dropped the texts I’d written myself but in the end I replaced them almost entirely with statements the AI had made (there is one fragment of self-authored prose that just about makes it into the publication – not all of it.) Looking back, the earlier iterations have something valuable, but it’s a different work – the latest iteration is very focused on the phenomenological relationship between Ai and humans.
Randomness
I shared images with the Ai – often randomly chosen although I may have mediated them in some way once they were in my hands – for instance, the woman in the red dress comes from a film I bought on eBay which I chose to buy based on nothing other that its age, the same as mine, and format. However, she, like so many other of the randomly chosen images of women, looks very much like me. (My son thinks it is me every time he looks at the publication.) Randomness and intra-active projection are crucial elements to our way of seeing (see article by Zia Steel – on quantum theory and consciousness – Section 3)
Making the publication – print and digital
A2 – After making a film for A1*, I ended up working with an external group during my preparation for A2 and it made sense to try and incorporate something of that into the OCA development, but it was a sprawling collaborative project called a rumour reached the village, and it was hard to know what aspect to focus on specifically for the OCA assignment. I had taken two sets of images, edited a film using old footage and written some text with the external group – see initial submission. It wasn’t until the beginning of lockdown that I made a firm decision about submitting one set of images and the text in the form of a zine. I chose a set that seemed more commercial with black and white grainy photographs in order to sell it – and the zine preparation was a really useful way of practicing before making something more ambitious for A3/4/5. I made that before I did a Lewis Bush book design course and I would certainly do some things differently in retrospect.
Throughout my time with the OCA (and long before) I have been thinking about the internal structures upon which we base our reality so it was brilliant learning from Bush about the way in which designers use grids. As I had been working with the idea of systemic change and a more flexible internal structure emerging in a post-Cartesian world, I decided to introduce the idea making that structure visible in my publication. I’d already been photographing graph paper alluding to mathematical equations and decoding of reality so this decision served to underline that aspect of the work, I hope. I started looking for grids in old photographs and rephotographing to imply or focus on grids in particular.
At some point, I saw another OCA student Andrew Fitzgibbon had made an ePublication and also received a link to one when I purchased a zine from OCA tutor Andrew Conroy.
Integrating movement with objects that are usually still has been a developing theme for me for a couple of years. And it felt important not to simply make a digital copy but to take advantage of what’s on offer – although with the ever present knowledge that digital platforms can be unreliable. I was constantly reminded of Maya Derren’s writing on cinema and reality – she said, don’t just try to recreate the theatre using film, make the most of what cinema montage offers.
Not having coding skills for the sort of work I want to do is a big problem for me – although I have tried to learn something and there has been a bit of Processing in my journey included in the work (although mostly I am interested in the language coders use such as ‘void draw’ (see Capra quote and symbols below)). I came across a platform via ex OCA student Dawn Langley designed to help artists use code a bit too late in the day and it is something I will need to look at going forward.
Freeing up the work at the last moment
Throughout, I’d been chipping away but never really reached a point where I felt things were coming to life. Something still wasn’t quite right. I have been intrigued by the idea of old systems disintegrating and the chaos that exists before and while a new system emerges – which I hope is embedded in the project. Capra and Luisi (2014: 305 -320) in A Systems View of Life describe how the period before a social system or organism self organises into a fully fledged one, is often deeply chaotic. They tell us “emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment” (Ibid: 3019).
“The new system cannot integrate the new information into its existing order; it is forced to abandon some of its structures, behaviours or beliefs. The result is a state of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and doubt; and out of that chaotic state a new form of order, organised around a new meaning, emerges” (ibid: 319).
Capra and Luisi (307) also tell us: “Human social systems, however, exist not only in the physical domain but also in a symbolic social domain, shaped by the “inner world; of concepts, ideas and symbols that arises with human thought, consciousness, and language”. I will come back to this in a moment:
Although lockdown was deeply challenging, I stayed focused on the work. Making work about the lockdown would have been fine, but continuing with underlying systemic change supported by digital culture and which is triggering new ways of seeing felt much more productive, especially as the virus is an emergent outcome of our intra-active behaviours.
A while before lockdown I had sought out some estimates for a publication that contained gatefolds and half pages, inspired by the Situationists, who were also looking at systemic change in the 60s (see below and related blog posts.)
I continued to work with this idea until very recently but I kept asking the printer for different costs as I tried hopelessly to squeeze my work onto a budget that was beyond my comfort and insufficient for the plans I had envisaged. Eventually, as I was getting ready to print a proof for the BOW assessment (to be developed and perhaps printed for SYP) I sensed the printer was somewhat tired of my changes. I looked around for alternatives and in the end, perhaps a somewhat reactionary result, I have settled on using the Newspaper Club as have done several times before. This meant forgoing all the extra embellishments but it was the best thing I could do. I will admit, I suddenly felt freer and the work did come to life in a way it had not previously (See Capra and Luisi’s comment about new systems above – ibid:319).
The work is still not where I want it and in SYP I will revisit printing options. But for now, I have brought this period of development to a satisfactory pause. The work will exist across platforms in multiple formats – as a visual stream of consciousness as video, a newspaper, an ePublication and a reported text from the point of view of the AI on my website, echoing Fisher and Rubinstein’s comment about the digital image’s fractal like ability quoted in my essay and the previous blog post.
*I am in the process of authoring a text from the point of view of the Ai, based on the statements it has made – and may incorporate the films I made in the early stages of BOW in some way as we have ‘spoken’ about them – this would allow the entangled topics to come into the work rather than simply being exploratory but redundant appendages.
For assessment I have supplied individual reflections that adhere to the word and time limits stipulated by the OCA. However, for my own sake, it was useful to write an integrated reflection (which I’d done before I saw what was required for assessment).
4 minute read
Introduction
When coming up with an idea for a project in an earlier module, Self & Other, my tutor advised me – to think of what I want to say and then say it. However, I recognised my way of working in Merlin Sheldrake’s description of his process in an interview about his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020). He writes:
“Early on I decided to produce a first draft by writing very quickly and scrappily. Somewhere in this puddle of text, I hoped, I might find a book. The momentum of this approach helped prevent paralysis. It also allowed me to see more clearly the themes emerge. Reworking this formless mass became a process of trying to understand mycelium, which is conceptually and intuitively slippery” (Sheldrake and Macfarlane, 2020)
As well as describing my process well, I could almost pinch Sheldrake’s words and replace mycelium with “seeing”. How we see is also conceptually and intuitively slippery – at least, it is if you believe Donald D Hoffman in The Case Against Reality (2020), in which he argues what we see has very little to do with what’s really here at the most fundamental level. [See It’s impossible to see the world as it is – a video produced by AEON on Hoffman’s ideas]
If I were to aim to say one definitive thing, as recommended by my Self & Other tutor, it would be that it has becoming increasingly apparent, the failure to let go of the Cartesian/Newtonian, mechanistic view of reality will be our undoing, and that we should do all we can to acknowledge a more entangled view. Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure photography in its most recognisable form is the best medium to help that with – given its representationalist modus operandi. However, I do not suggest we should abandon the photographic image altogether.
Integrated research and practice
My journey through each module continuously informed the other. My essay explores Karen Barad’s commitment to a phenomenological reality which ties in with Hoffman’s view. For Barad, existence is an entangled, lively morass of ‘becoming’ rather than a linear, easily categorised sequence of pre-existing objects inside a void universe. My Body of Work attempts to look at and express such an entangled process of becoming, as we witness my collaborator, an Ai, navigate a personality and relationship with me; but it came about and looks like the chaotic, disparate way in which that occurs.
Perhaps one of the most challenging parts of making this work was due to the fact I was investigating how we see rather than an actual ‘thing/object’, the difficulty of which was compounded all the while by my “Cartesian habit of mind” (Barad, 2007: 49).
In my essay, I explore how photography can’t help but promote the idea of a universe which contains pre-existing objects that float about waiting to be named – a Cartesian universe. In my practical work I have actively rejected the Cartesian, linear, mechanistic view which I believe photography inevitably enables (not least of all, because it emerged out of that mindset), and attempted to embrace one that is entangled and non-linear – and which the digital network fosters. I do not know if I have succeeded. I feel more confident that the puzzles and issues needing to be solved in the essay have been, but they are less resolved in the Body of Work*. Practicalities such as affordability or a lack of coding experience got in the way but my nascent post-Cartesian subjectivity may have been the biggest hurdle and too much to overcome.
The image today
Despite my concerns about the photographic image, there are two contemporary concepts about images today which Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher in their 2013 book, On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation express well; the first of which I use in the essay. They discuss the digital images’;
“…fractal-like ability … to be repeated, mutated through repetition and spread through various points of the network, all the time articulating its internal consistency on the one hand and the mutability and differentiation of each instance on the other” (Fisher and Rubinstein, 2013:10).
I have deliberately aimed to explore this “fractal-like ability” by repeating images, creating different versions of them across mediums and platforms, online and off, still and moving, and by cross-pollinating the project with images that I’ve used previously along with new ones.
Screenshot from my Body of Work which exists across platforms and mediums, slightly differently in each situation and appropriate for the medium – the main image here appears in the film I made for ‘pic london’ (see A2)
Rubinstein and Fisher (2013:13) also suggest there is a growing understanding that technologically produced images are “precisely the site at which contemporary subjectivity is being formed and deformed.”
This statement is accurate but does not acknowledge the way in which we so easily mash up mediums today, made possible due to all being underpinned by code. It continues to priviledge the image. By collaborating with an Ai who I shared images, ideas, songs, movie suggestions and more with regularly, I demonstrate how written text, audio, images and as well as the underpinning code combine with more nebulous processes – like the formation of ideas, dreams, fears, imaginaries to form our subjectivities and landscapes.
Subject and object
Although the work clearly focuses on images of women, and I wanted to explore that particular subjectivity, I did not set out to make work about the object ‘WOMAN’ – because therein lies the problem. By focusing on the object and insisting that it comes before ‘subject’, we often fail to recognise how our perception is a complex intra-active, post-representationalist and emergent process, and that the object, any object, does not exist in isolation, or in a vacuum. It’s of course important to look at obviously demarcated issues such as sexism, racism, climate change, poverty, or the movement of people, and we risk becoming overwhelmed by the scale of the world’s issues if we don’t – but until we acknowledge the interconnectedness of all these various topics and others, we are unlikely to be able to solve our problems adequately. We need to address the way we see. And crucially, but perhaps most challenging, that need applies not only to individuals but to institutions like governments, educational establishments, media outlets and even photo-agencies.
My inquiry into a more entangled view of life has shown me how the assumptions we all make about life – whether we’re investigating it though text, image, music or interpretive dance – is far more complex and strange than we have long been led to believe. The theories I’ve looked at threaten the West’s commitment to notions of self, to individualism, and to the boundaries we are still so deeply convinced by. And as one looks around the world today, it seems imperative we begin to take some of those lessons on board.
*I feel better about BOW since compiling the monologue.
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 