SJField – OCA Level Three Study Blog
Body of Work & Contextual Studies
A super relevant article to both BOW and CS – joins the dots between the two and wish I’d found it sooner
If you’re reading this right now, you’re either a conscious being or an internet bot. (Or both.) That’s pretty obvious, but what’s not obvious is what makes you conscious. Consciousness is defined as…
— Read on medium.com/whiteboard-to-infinity/is-consciousness-a-quantum-phenomenon-fcbb65bed950
Research: AI & Creativity
— Read on sarahjanefieldblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/13/research-ai-creativity/
Am in the middle of my essay (hard work and difficult!) – therefore, very quickly with this – another photographer breaking out of photography’s restrictive conventions. Clausing writes: ‘Volk uses found photographs and newly photographed work to take us from the particular to the universal. In this visual journey we see views of body cells, natural scenes, spacescapes, and everything in between.’ (2019) I could use this as an example in the final chapter of the said essay but am already referring to Lisa Barnard and Edgar Martins who expansive works really demonstrate the point well – and I have many words to cut yet. But we’ll see.
See Gerhard Clausing’s latest review:
https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/94577361/posts/2606657308
However, back to the conference I mentioned, even the callout for papers blurb might be useful for the essay – the fact that it exists at all reinforces the salience of my topic.
Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy
Transdisciplinary Conference
13 – 15 November 2020, University of Dundee, Scotland
See here:
https://www.conventiondundeeandangus.co.uk/attending/conferences/indeterminacy-conference-2020
2. An article I came across on Twitter, shared by a non-OCA friend does the same – although it isn’t focused on art but politics, it contains much that is ‘art’. Nevertheless, entanglement is a key theme and a film mentioned and shown at the V&A exhibtion The Future Starts Here (2018) which I went to, may prove useful. “Calling for More-Than-Human Politics” by Anab Jain (2019) uses the same language and concepts that I have been exploring via Hayles (1999) initially and then Lupton (2020) and Barad (2007). Jain talks about the hubris of humans: “But more importantly, it became evident, that the desire for mapping, tweaking and ultimately, controlling, deeply complex systems is hubristic.”
which matches nicely with a Hamlet quote I have been thinking about –
The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.
Act I, Scene V, 186-90
3. I was interested in another related term being considered in New Scientist – ‘substantially human’ to be applied to chimeras of human and pig for instance if organs are grown for transplant:
‘It is a pressing question. Greely thinks that the first legal cases will surround the treatment of substantially human tissues. If a human organ is grown in a lab from an individual’s cells, how should it be dealt with and disposed of? “There are statutes that require human remains be treated with certain kinds of respect,” he says. For example, in the UK, human tissue must be disposed of in accordance with the donor’s wishes, as far as possible. (Hamzelou, 2020)
I’ve not been to this yet (working for money really getting in the way of my work) but I thought this was interesting for two reasons.
1. Relevant reference re. Limits of photography – might have to include this in list of pejorative words I keep coming across describing photography
2. Conservative response to Clare Strand’s work referred time as ‘slightly bonkers’ – surprising and, for me undermines everything he’s ever written. I shall forevermore read his reviews through this coating.
3. Saying that – the inadvertent criticism of the gallery space feels timely. More and more work is contextual – the institution is critiqued and queried frequently nowadays.
‘From second world war concentration camps to the effects of global capitalism on Parisian youth, this year’s contenders produce moving work that struggles in a group context
— Read on www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/20/deutsche-borse-photography-prize-review-big-ideas-but-the-wrong-place-for-them
I am pretty sure Wendy recommended this to me in S&O after A2 to try to get me to move away from the pretty ‘studio practise’ I struggled to see beyond then. But I can’t find it mentioned, although for some reason that site it is a bit muddled nowadays, no idea how or why that happened. I have the book though and I’m sure it was after Wendy mentioned it. The other day, fellow OCA L3 student Elizabeth (who I met on a study visit over the weekend) mentioned Bernard’s The Canary and the Hammer. I’d love to look at this book but must make do with what I can find online for now. (I shall ask the photography writer I’m borrowing The Coast from if he’s got this too…)
A pertinent sentence from the FT review:
“The art market is so focused on creating a linear narrative,” says Barnard, who teaches at the University of South Wales. “I wanted to do the complete opposite.” Her aim is to showcase “a very fragmented world” that stimulates and excites. Using a range of aesthetics — traditional landscapes, portraits and still life, plus archival material and digital imagery — she goes on “a personal journey” through the troubled world of gold over different periods in its complex history.’ (Raval, 2019)
Raval, A (2019) Photographer Lisa Barnard’s personal journey through the world of gold Financial Times, http://www.FT.com [online] Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/64356a8a-b8af-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c (Accessed 21/01/2020)
Brief comments re what I saw when looking at it again the other day:
Thanks to Elizabeth for reminding me of Bernard’s name.
Some fellow students may recall my angst about spending money on an Edgars Martins book just after Christmas. I had already seen a few books advertised which I knew might be helpful for research but out of financial reach right now – but this particular book seemed so pertinent, I couldn’t let it go. I was lucky enough to get hold of the last copy from Moth House and it has indeed been helpful.
One of my main interests was exploring how Martins uses material from a range of sources in the same project. He does this across his projects but the suicide and death topic reminded me of my own Self & Other A5, so I was keen to see the book, shown as prints in an exhibition and can include video format there and online too. The series contains found, original, archive and text. There are tropes and conventions in his work which I have found myself engaging with over the last couple of years, and that is absolutely what I am interested in too.
The essays have been excellent resources and will undoubtedly be referenced in my CS work. Here I want to point to two sentences that are of particular significance.
From Roger Luckhurst’s essay (118): After discussing various sources for images including ‘found’, ‘puzzling insertions of landscapes’ ‘stereoscopic views, vintage newspaper photographs’ ‘odd theatrical and enigmatic visions’, he writes, ‘These seem to work to derail the over-coherence any series or display or exhibition of book inevitably imposes, fighting to keep the grid of meaning open, defying the dread determinism of forensic files.’
(114) ‘tugging at the links that have been reinforced by dominant theories of photography, since at least Sontag and Barthes.’ (I find the phrase ‘at least’ a bit odd actually – yes these names are the dominant ones, but photography has been around for a nanosecond of time in the grand scale of art – its own sense of grandiosity belies its infancy. However, it echoes the status quo, of course.)
Martins is, like me, looking at ‘the cut’ – how we define things, how we are entrained to catalogue and categorise – and asking us to not make assumptions. He does this here through the doorway of death, suicide, forensics. It didn’t take long when I started looking at his history to find references to quantum philosophy but where I look at the concept of indeterminism (Barad, Rovelli, Bohr) he ‘sacrifices’ cohesion for the notion of countless probabilities (Heisenberg). Whichever, there is an interest in overcoming the fixity of Cartesian thought or Newtonian certainty.
In 2018, ex OCA student (now studying with Oxford Brooks) John Umney sent me a message and he has agreed I can share our interaction here. (29/09/18)
I had been experimenting with blocks of colour, filters, covering up faces as the filters do, the ease with which we can all manipulate images, adding new/modernity/digital tropes to old images, intervening on analogue surfaces with digital animation. I guess my main interest was how easy it was becoming to intervene, to manipulate and to be manipulated. In fact, I started a project which I then abandoned called Manipulated. It seemed too trite a title and I wasn’t that keen on the images I was making but the idea of moving image with still, audio with still, and layering has stuck, modern and old together has stuck. And the filter we place over our faces, the regular circle of profile pics. Below, one of my own examples from that time – curated, found, added to. (Lots of this in 2018/19)
It is hard not to notice the tropes in Martins’ work running through my own. I must be frank, I took a very brief look through the book and stopped, heading instead to the essays. The images were too familiar and similar to what I have been doing with scans and negatives and paper for my current project. I was worried if I kept looking, I’d be frozen with fear of being too similar. I have continued to worry about this – but I know Martins is one of several artists such as Eric Kessels, Alexandra Lethridge, Joe Rudko and Thomas Hauser to name a few who make work in this way, using these non-conventions, sourcing the old and adding to it with the new. Something Catherine said about one of my efforts having the air of forensics worried me as Martins’ work is highly influenced by that – but again, how can mine not be when I have been reading Tagg and Sekula? So I will keep going and hope to goodness my writings and feminine view give it something that is just me. But what I have noted about his work is that it is very clear contained and demarcated – the indeterminism is held quite securely. I don’t think mine is. We shall see. And I will look at the beautiful book more carefully when I have completed this project. Incidentally, it’s not for resale – I think I will come to love it. But I have some others by popular artists that are if anyone is interested!
On another note re-books, I am going to borrow Hura’s The Coast which I was so keen to look at which pleases me immensely. I think the combination of text and image plus his interest in context and relation will be useful.
Sekula, A. (1986) ‘The Body and the Archive’ In: October 39 p.3064. At: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/sekula.pdf (Accessed 23/11/2019).
I looked at this essay during S&O and will look at it again here – Sekula’s essay along with John Tagg’s talk on the filing cabinet both provide plenty of useful references, which, combined with Barad, Lupton and Rubenstein’s thoughts/thesis’, are probably the key sources of information through which I’ll explore at the topic I’ve chosen.
This has some useful references included and the phrase ‘marginal’ referring to decisive moment photography which may be useful alongside ‘boring’ (Elkins) ‘conservative’ (Blight) and ‘tautological’ (me).
(97) (PDF) ‘Lights, Camera, Algorithm: Digital Photography’s Algorithmic Conditions’ in Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer & Nate Tkacz (eds.), Digital Light (London: Fibreculture Book Series, Open Humanities Press, 2015), 144–62. | Daniel Palmer – Academia.edu
— Read on www.academia.edu/30168558/_Lights_Camera_Algorithm_Digital_Photography_s_Algorithmic_Conditions_in_Sean_Cubitt_Daniel_Palmer_and_Nate_Tkacz_eds._Digital_Light_London_Fibreculture_Book_Series_Open_Humanities_Press_2015_144_62
As software, algorithms, non-conscious cognitive agents and cybernetic thinking increasingly shape the world around us, artists need to have a strong grasp of the practical and philosophical implications of this transformation,” Kaganskiy says. “I’m not saying that every artist needs to learn to code, but they should probably read some media theory and software studies texts, maybe even some posthumanist philosophy.”
— Read on news.artnet.com/art-world/art-school-tech-adapt-1742802
I can’t help thinking this reluctance is all about snobbery. It reminds me of the Blight comment re photography and conservatism which I mentioned in a previous post and which might go into my introduction- if not elsewhere in the essay.
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 