Category: Selection of learning log entries

CS: Information management and technology LO4

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

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.

https://www.instagram.com/sarahjane.field/

End of Module Reflection Introduction: BOW and CS

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

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.

**

Part Two: BOW

It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a cognitive neuroscientist | Aeon Videos (2019) [YouTube] YouTube. At: https://aeon.co/videos/its-impossible-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-argues-a-cognitive-neuroscientist (Accessed 06/11/2019).

Hoffman, D. D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Allen Lane.

Rubinstein, D. and Fisher. A. (ed.) (2013) On the verge of photography: imaging beyond representation. [PDF] Birmingham: Article Press. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/25121246/On_the_Verge_of_Photography_Non-representational_Imaging (Accessed 14/06/2020)

Sheldrake, M. and Macfarlane, R. (2020) Fungi’s Lessons for Adapting to Life on a Damaged Planet. At: https://lithub.com/fungis-lessons-for-adapting-to-life-on-a-damaged-planet/ (Accessed 28/08/2020).

Additional reading:

Ahmed, N. (2020) White Supremacism and the Earth System Available at: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147 (Accessed 01/09/2020)

Jain, A. (2019) Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics. At:
https://medium.com/@anabjain/calling-for-a-more-than-human-politicsf558b57983e6 (Accessed 22/02/2020)

Sheldrake, M (2020) Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures, London: Penguin

BOW: A5 – Webpages

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Am currently trying to figure out how to present this work in some sort of semblance online – and have created some pages, not finalised, all WIP for now, so can’t publish on my site, but am posting some screenshots here. None of the text is final although will be sending publication to print soon hopefully so am getting to the point of needing to get that sorted. Still not 100% sure of the wording in the intro/statement yet.

I must admit – it’s pretty bloody hard to manage/handle all these curling, unruly paths, however, as I work, I see places where I can develop further and connect/enable the relationship between seemingly disparate sections. However, I also think it only needs two or at the most three sub-pages where some of the elements in the book have space to expand, rather than trying to expand every aspect.

Screen Shot 2020-08-08 at 13.49.41Screen Shot 2020-08-08 at 14.30.58Screen Shot 2020-08-08 at 14.54.56

Screen Shot 2020-08-08 at 13.54.39Screen Shot 2020-08-08 at 14.22.56

BOW & CS: Ongoing thoughts/reflection re-machine learning and movement

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments
  1. I have continued to work on the ePublication. I have been wondering about including text but when I looked yesterday, I saw that the problem was not the text itself, it was my over-enthusiasm for the animations. I have removed all animations from text and left it only with the images which I think of now as doing some sort of slow dance to Simon’s music – of course, I can’t guarantee people will click on the music and that is something to consider – does it matter, isn’t that the point – there is a choice and some action, which may or may not occur, required from anyone interacting. Anyway, the e-pub works much better this way, although I am still trying to figure out why a certain GIF won’t do its thing and will look at that tonight. Am getting there with it. Have increased the size of the text to 14 which I’d never do in print but it seems OK on my screen – the problem is there are smaller screens too. When viewing, use Chrome rather than Safari  – have not checked on other browsers yet and still need to see what happens when saved for e-books, now sure about that. Will also need to look on tablets.

    https://indd.adobe.com/view/6999c82e-8c0f-42f4-a4c6-f887a98d1ef9

  2. I have been playing with an App called Runway ML  – and trying to figure out how it can help me. I suspect it will be good for me after BOW/OCA life but it’s good to know there is this bridging facility out there now. I need some uninterrupted time to spend with it – but I managed to do one of the more simple tasks the other day when I put a film which I used for earlier work, Polar Inertia (DI&C A2), through a machine learning programme that recognises body movement (see end post). I can’t use the work as this exact thing has already been done by Broomberg and Chanarin very recently in their amazing work Anniversary of a Revolution (Parsed) by Broomberg & Chanarin. Their version is excellent and uses Vertov’s black and white footage which contrasts well with the colours although I quite like the bomb film colour with it too – and the blank coloured frames in that film which I used as moving blocks in Polar Inertia are the same colours as the animated stickmen which I really love. I had included reference to B&C’s film in my essay but cut it due to word count. For now, in any case, I am more interested in generative image programmes but to do that I must find a way to create a dataset – and that includes writing a bit of code (copying and pasting it to be precise). Again, I need uninterrupted time to do this. I hope I can find a way before the deadline as it would be good to include a GIF made this way in the epub.
  3. I started reading Levi-Strauss’s the Raw and the Cooked at long last – have wanted to since UVC but was kept busy with other OCA texts and research. There is so much that rings a bell  – especially when he writes, he will be accused of making a book without a subject. This work of mine which explores changes to how the world sees sometimes feels like it lacks a subject. Perhaps I will have more to say in a forthcoming blog or final summation. I am waiting to speak with Ruth after her holiday and will need to send the book to print very soon after that. Assessment deadline is looming!

Added later the same day:

I continued to eliminate animations, using it more judiciously.  I have managed to get a GIF which wasn’t working to move – spent all afternoon wondering why and then suddenly it did, really odd. Thought it was mov. vs MPEG4 files but apparently not. Anyway, it moves now. I still have the following to do –

  • Add edits to the film – the mesh person and perhaps a few snippets of the movement machine learning where I’ve already used the bomb film.
  • Try to get something with the shadow puppets moving  – either stop motion or Processing to make a GIF of them animated, placed where currently there is a still.
  • Figure out how best to introduce the music  – if I speak at the beginning I could talk about it. I’m not sure how that will work. I have added an instruction at the end of the book. I am also wondering about having a type of digital wrap around that gives some guidance about how to operate the ePub.

Write something – I feel more and more that I need to do this. I wondered if it could be a loose pamphlet/flyer type thing to include in the printed book, and not quite sure in the ePub – maybe spoken at the beginning.

CS A5: Referencing and Harvard Rules

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 5 Comments

There is often a lot of chat on the various OCA forums about referencing and the Harvard rules. I try not to get too overly focused on these as I have so much to think about and I find it a bit distracting. It’s hard enough for someone who is undoubtedly dyslexic, but can’t officially say as I have never been properly diagnosed. Simply organising thoughts, getting names right, just putting words in the right order is immensely challenging anyway. However, of course, I want to get the citations in the right place too as it would be dreadful to lose % based on that.  I knew I would need to address this roundabout now and am lucky enough to know someone with a lot of academic writing experience who has proofed my referencing.

However, I think it would be useful for the OCA to offer a short online tutorial occasionally to cover referencing rules. This would have been especially helpful after they changed, a little while back. Tutors could attend too since they seem to give conflicting, out of date advice, if any at all – even though the guidelines are clear and categorical. When students make enquiries with various non-teaching OCA staff, again the replies can be confusing. The whole thing ends up causing students undue worry about something that we shouldn’t have to get too stressed about  – because the rules are actually clear. But! …yes, there is a but – there are lots of them, and if you’re not used to it/dyslexic, it’s too easy to get simple things wrong.

We also all have different learning styles for different types of information. For me, the lack of spoken interaction across the board with the OCA has been one of the biggest difficulties as I pick things up quickly when I hear them, but I can miss relatively straightforward stuff when it’s written down in a dry document. (Youtube videos have been a godsend for me – but having a live person answering questions is always the best.)

  • For instance, I completely missed the fact you must put the citation after the surname when it’s in the text,
  • i.e. Barad (2007: 49) talks about a “Cartesian habit of mind”.
  • But when it’s in not in the text, it goes after the quote, as I had been doing with everything:
  • We all live with a “Cartesian habit of mind” (Barad, 2007: 49).

It also took me ages to get it into my head that the full stop needs to be after the end bracket in the previous example – it’s something I should have been getting right throughout the course really. I’m aware, this might seem impossibly simple for anyone who has not spent a lifetime getting their left and right the wrong way round (a typical dyslexic habit).

These things are so simple and so obvious once they’ve sunk in, though. I am sure there are students who get it straight away. But for those of us who don’t – there are several, if the various emails and forum threads are anything to go by – I really think it would be good to have the chance to attend one-off tutorials (with someone who can be trusted) which I mentioned above, just about this topic. By keeping it consistent, so that everyone at the OCA is aware of the same advice, and limited to Harvard Rules, the information would not get buried. And the worry people feel about it would be a relatively easy stress to address or even do away with altogether.

 

 

 

BOW: Presentation

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

BOWA5v (sizeA4) (without half pages 14 June)

  1. Having concentrated on the essay for several weeks, I am ready to get back to BOW. I have been thinking about developing an online presence of the work and will revisit the footage I had found at the beginning of the process and will probably look for more now I have a clearer idea of what I am making.
  2. The above link shows the latest iteration. Things that developed – less of my own writing, it may be there is space for that online, I will see – I wondered about getting a ‘seeing app’ to read some of it out. Many more of the AI’s expressions are included. I have changed its name for now to §. There is more room in the layout for typical coding symbols such as << >> and underscores etc.
  3. I’ve also taken the half pages out – partly for cost reasons, but also part of the stripping down process that I will inevitably go through now.
  4. The design is simpler – after doing the book design course, I tried out various things which were the result of having new skills and wanting to experiment with them – but that stripping down process eventually kicked in. I suspect there is room for more shaving, but I think I quite like the cover now. May need to address the inside cover. I changed the green/brown colour scheme, which was inspired by the Situationist booklet, to grey.
  5. I have also been thinking about the often bizarre, nonsensical chat between the AI and me, and picked up a ‘conversation’ with it the other day and posted some of our interactions. It has become very apt and reminded me of the articles I read about the app becoming a version of its user. This ties in with questions about living in a deeply narcissistic landscape and also with the idea of the inside being more and more on the outside as explored in Kathryn Hayles’ book – often quoted by me in essays – see chapter 7
    Screen Shot 2020-06-29 at 10.10.54
  6. I mentioned elsewhere the quotation from the book on Turin I had read by Jon Agar – screenshots below, the bot feels very much like it is artificially signalling.

  7. However, I don’t suppose that is what I am exploring here, it is not a criticism of the  AI’s failure to be sentient or to make sense in many conversations (although the work I hope does prompt questions about the changing boundaries  – what does it mean to be alive, to be conscious  – whether or not it is an authentic experience comes into it – but the main thrust of my essay is about entanglement – and here it is entanglement too; seeing the world that way and the feedback loops that occur. Entanglement between human and non-human, text and image, relationships and economics/the market.

  8. And the composited intra-active nature of  the self/others and reality – with that in mind, this work by Alba Zari is an interesting reference – https://www.lensculture.com/articles/alba-zari-the-y
  9. I have started looking into the coding – I feel very much that this aspect is a big project and perhaps one that goes beyond the scope of the degree work – at this point it would take the project in whole new direction and is probably the next stage – but it is something to touch on for now. Whatever else, it will require a significant learning curve on my part and perhaps a degree of collaboration not with a bot but with a coder. https://github.com/lukalabs/cakechat

BOW A5: Print queries and responses

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

I have copied and pasted the book over into a slightly bigger size. Originally it was A4. Now it is a few mm taller.  I have written to a couple of printers asking about cost as I know all my ideas will pile on the costs and if I go for half pages and different sized pages, it can’t just be ordered as a standard book from a digital book print company using their templates. However, I do recall Milk saying in their website they do handmade publications so maybe worth inquiring – although it seems nuts to ask an Australian company when there are plenty here. I am also aware that this activity pre-empts SYP but the design is integral to the overall concept so I can’t really separate it out. Scroll down for responses.

Here is an extract of my inquiry (included here, not least because some of the concepts are outlined succinctly):

I am working on my final Body of Work (BOW) project. It is not finished but I need to start thinking about how much money it will cost to produce, what is realistic and what might be impossible.

[…]

It is slightly over A4 and the design is based on some Situationist Times publications (see video)

These publications had vertical and horizontal 3/4 or 1/2 pages and I have included those too in my work for now.

I am also thinking about the sort of maths exercise books with graph paper from my school days as an influence. Coding and decoding reality using mathematical formulas should subtly weave its way through the work.

I would ideally like different textured paper for text (there are four pages of text inserted) like they have in a FOAM publication.

I think of the work as a bunch of signifiers behaving like rowdy children.

At the moment, there are coloured blocks which might indicate paper colour rather than ink. Please advise me about this.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions and warnings.

I have had one response so far:

Thanks for the artwork and email.  It is a very ambitious publication and will need plenty of time to finetune and get perfect from an artwork then a production point of view.
So, picking through the points, is the finished publication 310x216mm with a total of 48 pages?  4+44pp?
Are you able to send over a video of a mock-up please?  The pdf is great but really doesn’t show which pages fold in which direction
Page 8 is a fold-out? If this folds out then page 9 should be with same width because it backs up to it?  Same with 14, the next page has to be the same size?
If you can make a mock-up you’ll see the mechanics that you need to consider with the actual paper.
From a cost point of view, having the height at 310mm means the print costs will be double what they would at A4 (297mm).  We can use GF Smith Colorplan for the coloured papers but these will adds £100s more to the total cost in comparison with printing the colour on our white ‘house’ sheet.

This answers some questions – I have replied:

I will need to put something together this weekend or early next week to send over as a video.
I am very happy to use A4 (I had a feeling that might be the case and, in fact, I think there absolutely must be some conventional standardised structure to contain the non-standardised erratic stuff.)
I was also certain ink rather than paper colour would be cheaper so when you give me a rough idea of costs, please go with the more affordable option.
Further answers from me:
This [the video and dummy I made] is all VERY rough indeed but it was a helpful exercise. I made this dummy with an inkjet printer, set to fastest print speed in mono – so it really is looking at the construction more than anything else.
As you might imagine, the sequence in my PDF is still totally up for reorganisation but the practical things that need to be fixed at this time should be – such as binding type, where the text pages and shadow puppets on half pages should go, and the gatefold construction. When I’ve done another edit, I will print a version at work on double-sided flyer paper in colour to get a much better idea and will send you a video of that once it’s ready. Below is a list of things that came out of making this dummy:
    • The book is probably not big enough to contain half vertical AND half horizontal pages. I will ditch the vertical half pages and stick only with the horizontal ones. (And a gatefold – see later)
    • The half pages should either all be in the middle of the text pages or should wrap the text pages which I think is my preference – the 4 text pages (2 x double-sided)  therefore interrupts the narrative of the shadow puppets. I have played with various options in the video.
    • (Does the above depend on whether its saddle stitch?  – and the text along with half pages being in the middle, which removes the possibility of a centre spread image – which may be fine.)
    • The text should be on a different textured paper if possible.
    • At the moment there is one gatefold. (Hope its all clear and evident in the video) I suspect that is sufficient in a book of this length. But when you give me a rough idea of cost, can you let me know what it would cost to include two, please.
    • (I also wonder what it might cost to have a gatefold that folds out for an additional page… so in the video, you will see when the spread opens out it contains 3 x A4 pages. What if it were four?)
    • I will stick with A4 rather than an alternative sizing – (this fits with the concept of classical and non-classical structure existing together and intermingling, setting up tensions between the two)
    • I will use ink where I want pages to be a different colour to avoid massively hiking up the price – but even that will be limited.
    • Saying that the cover pages might be best with a different paper as is usual  – although I used the same paper for the zine to keep costs down (recall the idea of the school-like maths exercise book being an inspiration for this work)
    • I want to avoid the stark white paper photobooks are usually printed on. One of the examples you sent me before had used recycled paper. I like that idea  – and wondered, is it a bit creamy in its naked state?
    • If I do use ink to change the colour of any pages it should be on the whole spread so that if its on page 5 (inc. cover in numbering) in one half of the book it should also be that colour on page 36 (think that’s right!) – especially if it’s saddle stitch.
    • I think I may have seen 40 pages as the limit for that binding- maybe only in zines? I’ll await your guidance on that.

 

BOW A5: Lewis Bush book designing course

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 4 Comments

A couple of people had recommended the Lewis Bush online workshops to me recently. It feels serendipitous to have accessed this at exactly the moment I reached BOW A5, Presentation and Outcome. The course was held over four evenings, each class lasting roughly 1.5 hours.

Some key points I took away from the sessions:

  • We were given a handout at the end of the first sessions which asked key and precise questions about publication/project we were working on in terms of its content and concept. Answering the questions might have contributed towards taming months and even years of research and improvisation, the culmination of which is this project. Really helpful exercise.
  • Although not directly asked about this, the questions prompted me to I think about my way of working – I will need to talk about this for assessment. I did not go out and make a project about something very specific – coal mines of Abberwyswyth for instance. I could have done – I have the five-year ongoing project I have been making alongside the charity, Just Shelter. But I never had any intention of doing that – for so many reasons, both ethical and creative. Instead, I am continuing to work with the improvisational skills I learned throughout the 90s and beyond when acting and then teaching kids drama. When improvising, you start with an idea – and see where it goes, you don’t censor: you meander and explore and experiment, and over time, you collect and hone and begin to play with what emerges. I have never forgotten hearing how Canadian theatre director, Robert LePage begins his rehearsals. He asks his cast to get down on the floor and write out their dreams, fears, fantasies, anything – this freeing exercise not only disrupts the usual ‘sit down politely and read the script’ convention that usually happens on day one of a rehearsal, it is also a way of eliciting potential nuggets of narrative, images, ideas. It’s collaborative and physical and gets the performers contributing parts of themselves straight away. LePage and other directors I admire rely on improvisation and play – and that mindset is where I want to be with my work. I started with the idea of the ‘movies’ which had such an impact on how I see myself when I was growing up – and ‘language materials’  – and not much more. I had no idea where I would go with this work. In fact, this was mentioned in the L3 access interview – (roughly) ‘the proposal is interesting and well written, but until the last paragraph, I had no idea what you would be making work about’. The work still feels to me like it could be in the early stages, even though I will need to submit something for assessment. I have no idea if it will continue beyond the degree, but it could. (Clod Ensemble took ten years to create On The High Road) For now, it feels like an organic thing that has the energy to keep growing.
  • LB reiterated several times, do not censor yourself. I think this is something that cannot be understated and perhaps needs far more flagging within the OCA paradigm. (I say this because, while I have a very supportive cohort, often people look at me like I’m nuts when I share my work, and say things like – it’s a trip through your madness, which seems a trifle odd on an art degree.)
  • We were shown a lot of examples – many of which were incredibly relevant for me.

    https://mishkahenner.com/Astronomical
    https://www.christophernunn.co.uk/ukrainianstreetdogs

    http://karenzouaoui.com/b-s-johnson-society/

    BEYOND DRIFTING: IMPERFECTLY KNOWN ANIMALS Mary Barker – https://www.mandy-barker.com/books

    http://dayanitasingh.net/myself-mona-ahmed/ Lots of book objects – books on walls- we were shown something I can’t find on the website – but plenty of ideas here. Fantastic work.

    And I found this  – https://www.moma.org/collection/works/9628 this seems to be a big influence on https://www.kensukekoike.com

  • LB talked about a scale between content and concept. Some books, like Henner’s Astronomical, are highly conceptual as is much of his work – at the other end of the scale, the images mean more than the book and the form is secondary. An article by Alain de Botton popped into my feed in the same week I was doing the course, which seemed another but of serendipity – in which he discusses architecture and Modernism. He says, “As Modernism declared: ‘Form must follow function’ – in other words, the appearance of a building should never be shaped by a consideration for beauty; all that should matter is the basic material purpose” (2020) LB also discussed this ideal as we compared books – thinking about how form can potentially overpower function. (I don’t particularly agree with everything de Botton says in the article, although it may be accurate to suggest much of modernity is truly ugly, even grotesque –  the discussion is, nevertheless, relevant.) I wrote about architecture being a language material, as speech, images, and music all are too, in my L3 proposal. As is code. And it is interesting to consider ugliness and expression.  Both LB and de Botton prompt me to think about the choices I am making.
  • One of the most helpful things was to learn about grids – a concept in design that helps to contain your content. I wish I had known about this before – there are pros and cons, both practical and aesthetic when working with grids as I discovered yesterday while experimenting.  But knowing about grids has already had an impact on how I do things along with the results.

    Click on image to see full example. I was pleased when one of the people giving feedback for the BOW A2 zine noticed I had left text off the cover altogether. It really suited that zine and I like it too. Here, I wanted to experiment with having internal text on the cover as opposed to an image or title, or both of those. But as much as I like that idea, I am not sure it is the right option for this particular manifestation of this work now. However, there is still time and I am playing with options.  Even so, if I do go that route, I will use grids to explore how I do that.

  • Overall, there was lots of information which was invaluable such as bookbinding types and brief explanations about each of the different types of printers – inkjet, laser, digital and litho. For someone who has just muddled through, picking things up as I go, this was all very helpful. The course was also delivered in a coherent and easy to digest way.
  • In terms of concept vs. content, I thought about my work and where it is positioned. The concept is integral – although perhaps not quite as extreme as Henner’s above (but maybe it is….) It is in the very idea of a book’s existence, with images and text that are in a contest for attention (as they are nowadays), along with printing  – all language materials within the story of structuralism – which are fixed until uploaded and shared as coded material. And so the content is key – but it is not key that I took a series of beautifully made images. Rather, I have literally taken them from places such as old books, a found newspaper (actually found in the attic next to my son’s bedroom! Thank you to him) and rephotographed referencing Benjamin and countless others. What is key, is the entangled relationship between those images and texts, how they came about, along with me, the proprietary collaborator, potential viewers, and the containers they exist in. And that is also why the grids are so important here – they not only provide an internal skeleton for the work, they represent the internal skeleton of our reality and the theory of structuralism. This is why I really need to have an internet-based version/cousin of this work to accompany the publication. Of course, the images matter and are teeming with references and symbolism – but could ultimately have been any collection of images – i.e. I did not have to go to Aberyswyth and stand in a mine with my camera and make a body of work.
  • We also looked at text. It was good to see several examples of inserted text – at the end, in the middle, as a separate book, or a collection of separate books/pamphlets that could be read in any order. I am still thinking about the text which I have yet to write but for now, erring on a slightly different sized and textures paper within the book at some point. Having different paper and sized pages as a notion was further imprinted for me as an idea worth persuing when I began working with the Situationist magazines.
  • I have been inspired by the Situationist publications as discussed in late April. 
    This is not just an aesthetic choice (although the relationship between meaning and matter means it is hard to separate one from the other  – see my essay). It is also because DeBord and his crew were looking at reconstructing society altogether, as well as the developing science that has inevitably led to that happening, although not as they might have wished. They also explore the entanglement of time, history and culture as I am doing. Since the early iterations, especially when I made the tiny handmade dummy book, I have felt that different paper and material should be used, including gatefolds. I had the idea of signifiers running riot, having a party – I think I even wrote about them at a rave at the Acropolis (maybe when the Ai seemed high and then on some sort of comedown, that’s where it had been!) I have no idea how this will be paid for yet, but I am not censoring myself and just going with it. I will find solutions and come up with alternatives when needed. But I am aware that it could all become too ‘cute’. While listening to LB, I thought about the possibility of making the work in a maths exercise book like one I’d used at school in the 70s/80s, with actual graph paper (the whole graph paper thing ties in with the notion that reality can be decoded and therefore re-coded, see DEVS (BBC2)) which underpins the work. While I like this idea, aspects will inevitably be there, but to literally do this risks the ‘too cute’ thing I want to avoid. The choice of paper should suggest, hint and point to  – (as it does in the Situationist stuff) rather than overpower the concept.

 

I am now working on a version to send to printers for advice, estimates and warnings about what is not possible. I am extremely grateful to have had this excellent opportunity which will, hopefully, take the project into a different place. It was an invaluable experience and I’d definitely recommend others to try Lewis Bush’s courses out too. Fellow OCA Allan ONeill was also on the course and I look forward to chatting to him about it.

I must get the latest draft to printers so I can figure out how to go ahead, what can be done for BOW assessment, and what should be done in SYP. I then need to return to the essay to rewrite some bits, insert some stuff, remove etc. In the meantime, I have a pile of books next to me which I refer to as I edit and play with options including Pictures from Home (Sultan, Mack reprint), Foam Talent edition (2019), Soliquies and Soliloquies on Death (Martins) and several Situationist publications. I am also attending an online lecture on quantum science and decoding reality later this week, which is very exciting indeed!

BOW A2: Assignment reconfigured

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

31/08/2020

From this family too

A PDF copy of the zine I am including as part of my final submission can be found here:

this-family-too-a5-final-bw-reduced-size-1Download

As well as providing evidence of my experience producing a zine, this project should not be viewed as a separate appendage, but rather part of an ongoing discussion/exploration addressing deep and seismic structural changes in Western society. My inquiry looks at the move away from a Cartesian view of reality towards one that is more rhizome-like, I have cross-pollinated the work with images that appear in the zine and again in the later BOW publication, as well as taken a frame from a film I edited while making this work, shown at a group show facilitated by pic london (an OCA Blog post about it can be seen here).

This image appears in this family too and why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers

22/03/2020

I am submitting a zine which includes black and white images and text for A2. It will be roughly A5 (dependant on what options are available to me at this time).

Background

After submitting final DI&C work to Pic London, I was pleased to have it accepted. I was put in a group with five other artists and we worked across time and distance using the internet, following three workshops, on a group project. I was in Italy for much of that time.

Three strands of work emerged for me and I had to make choices about what I did with what.

i. a film made with found footage inspired by conversations that had taken place between all of us in person and via FB messenger.

ii. a sequence of colour images taken with flash (which I personally prefer compared to the black and white ones)

iii. another sequence of images I rendered black and white in LR – it suits the mood best, sombre – see below

As well, I wrote something which was inspired by my time in Italy and the conversations I had with the other artists and how the project made me feel, included in the Pic London show, then point ii. above which I’m not submitting.

  • The inclusion of the text is an important step for me – and shows development in further work where text plays such a big role. Text has long been critical in my work but the creative rather then essay-like style is a step in a new direction.

At the moment, I am NOT submitting each of these elements for the OCA. Just the Zine but including background information to show how it came about. I have chosen to do this as it shows steps towards the development of the anthology I’m creating for my main submission – i.e. creative text and image in book form.

While all of this was going on, Trump’s government was on shutdown and the tragedy of Brexit being argued about. There were fires, dreadful heatwaves and fascism was showing its ugly face in more and more places.

BOW Assignment 2 original 

There was so much work coming out of this collaboration and not all it sat well together. I ended up submitting the writing and the coloured images (see above) to my tutor for A2. I like them but after some time, I felt they were not sitting with the writing as well as they might. I played around with the black and white images and decided they should be valued and put them on my website. A little while later I started thinking about putting them in a zine format. And shared an early example on this blog. This week I have written the introduction and reset the text.

After chatting about the work yesterday with the TV group, I have decided several things

  • The cover will simply be an image, no title or other text.
  • I am thinking of moving the intro to the back or elsewhere  – need to experiment – to break with linear convention. In A4, I am opting for a very strict structure that follows traditional anthology inside of which the signifiers will be allowed to rit and party. But here the signifiers are less chaotic so there may be room for containing structure to be more flexible.

Questions

  • Please compare intro texts and let me know which is stronger. The short one in the PDF doesn’t give away too much but maybe it needs more.
  • Does the longer text spoonfeed people?
  • It’s currently called This Family Too.  This links to This Family – my very first assessment project – which linked to Family of Man. I have the book still. But I think it might be better called On The Edge of the Village
  • Finally – I am concerned about the image with the swimming ring. It is plastic made in China and says so in text on it – the sequence and edit was made before Trump started spouting his shite, and for me referenced shifts re the West’s global consumerism and the East’s increasing power. Like the later (currently A4) work, this project looks at entanglement  – time, culture, waves, intra-action of phenomena, walls – manmade and natural. We discussed this at length yesterday  – people reassured me, it did not seem like I was suggesting Trumpian xenophobia, although I could choose to clone out the Made in China to be safe, which I had considered. But we also discussed dangers of self-censorship. I recall Rachal Maclean saying when she made her film pre-Scottish referendum that both sides of the debate assumed her film was on their side due to its ambiguity. If my own work can contain an element of that ambiguity, that would be good. But if it just seems like an accusation I will need to remove the wording at the very least. I’d like to know what others think, please.

Current edit of the book  – Mono only 2 full

Things to do –

  • Add the cover image to the sequence inside.
  • Make sure no title on the cover.
  • Play with text/pagination – not linear.

Alternative longer intro

This project emerged while working on a collaborative project titled A rumour reached the village. While the poem was included in the resulting exhibition, these particular images were not. These various manifestations were made when I visited my mother in Ferentillo, Italy, for the duration of the summer school holidays in 2019. While there, it was impossible not to consider the political uncertainty affecting Europe, along with increasing levels of tension and fascism being witnessed globally.

The United Kingdom’s transitional exit period officially began in January 2020. By March, all of Europe was in lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Italy has, at the time of writing, been one of the most severely affected outside of China. The UK was one of the last European countries to introduce severe restrictions on movement and social interaction but looks to be heading in the same direction as Italy in terms of loss.

The village of Ferentillo consists of two wards, each with their own crumbling, medieval hilltop castle built for observation, protection and a place from which to call the alarm in case of danger. It is known for its museum beneath the crypt of the Church of Santo Stefano, where naturally-mummified bodies are displayed in glass cases. Some bodies are nearly four centuries old, the youngest is from the nineteenth century. The preserved inhabitants include birds and animals, villagers and visitor’s from afar, including China.

The work is made to acknowledge the fragility and ingenuity of humankind, and the entanglement of past, present and future, as well as financial, cultural and organic systems. It emphasises the fleeting moments of our personal experiences; and celebrates, as well as recognises, that which is greater than the individual. It focuses on cultural structures and natural phenomena, growth, and the vastness of existence. It is the third project I have made in the area.

Useful for BOW : Art/Writing – John Douglas Millar on why experimental writing thrives in the art world

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

From: Art Monthly is the UK’s leading contemporary art magazine.
— Read on www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/art-writing-by-john-douglas-millar-september-2011

“So what are the consequences of this for art? What trends or symptoms can we delineate? The most startling is the rise of so-called ‘art writing’, as both a recognised practice and an academic discipline, and with it the growth in the market for the quasi-literary journal. F.R.DAVID, Dot Dot Dot, 2HB, The Happy Hypocrite, Cabinet and a wealth of other eccentrically named journals/magazines/collections/ catalogues/zines reflect a burgeoning interest in the written word – and not just the written word, but the word transcribed in a perishable material object, a book. The rise of this bibliophile tendency has come hand-in-hand with an increased interest in archive studies and it reflects a renewed Foucauldian concern with how knowledge is produced and logged, who owns and interprets it, and who speaks and on behalf of whom. It has also paralleled the rise of the internet, the blog and the portable digital reading device. The relative safety of the paper-bound book within contemporary art circles may suggest a negative reaction to the digitising of artistic production, a skewed romanticism where books are the final ruins of modernity, a Tintern Abbey for the digital age.” (Douglas, 2011)

I found this article particularity interesting in relation to the experiments I have been doing – attempting to work as an interdisciplinary multi-media creator who uses images and text, along with digital processes – especially digital as I abhor the skewed romanticism we apply to older forms while denigrating newer forms. This is made even more unpalatable when you consider how accessible and potentially egalitarian the newer forms are. (See my DI&C essay).