I have had useful feedback from Ruth about the work I submitted. Attached are her thoughts and my responses, some of which we discussed in our meeting and some of which were written only (from both of us).
Main points –
stick to working on my own for the moment. I agreed and had reached that conclusion already. As interested as I am in collaboration because a) I used to act so was used to that way of working – although have found working on my own more productive and the autonomy more satisfying b) I am interested in the collapse of boundaries and boundaries between selves is one aspect of that – from a personal point of view, establishing and maintaining my own boundaries is something I have needed to do and so I have resolved, for now at any rate, to do that.
If I were to write down what the book I submitted was about in two sentences how would I do it? I am not yet sure but I know I am looking at nebulous boundaries, a lack of certainty and a move away from ‘fixedness’ in today’s world.
The writing I included was written after several weeks of watching the stars and listening to stories wondering why on earth humans are so hubristic and nuts about our egos since all you have to do is look up and see how insignificant we are. A favourite line from Measure for Measure which I have referred to before is;
“…man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.”Measure For Measure Act 2, scene 2, 114–123
Keep writing, keep taking images. I am doing so. I must say that the text I wrote about the mummies took a summer of being in Italy and having relatively little to distract me. Normal life is frustratingly less conducive but I am doing what I can.
Spend some time reviewing your personal reflection and yourtutor feedback. Develop a series of carefully considered images that moves your idea forward. Hand in this series to your tutor together with a new reflective commentary setting out where you plan to go from here.
After discussing my plans with Ruth, I decided to submit new work rather than developing the first assignment, Sirens (2019) any further. The research, development, and various elements I made during the leadup to this submission have many of the same qualities and tropes as Sirens, i.e. exploring versions of collaboration, working with archival images and moving-image collage. However, what I’m actually submitting is very different. Nevertheless, the work is still ‘my voice’ and ‘style’ and I see it as a development from the previous work.
A brief preamble:
I submitted OCA DI&C work to pic.london’s open call. A blog for We Are OCA (Field 2019) describes my experience albeit in a relatively easy to digest way. I didn’t feel in a position to write anything more analytical in that forum but it may be worth scanning, (although there is no need for the purpose of this assignment as everything necessary should be on this page).
Up until very recently, I thought I would submit the work included in the show for this assignment – see here. However, after more thought (explained below), I decided not to, as the book I’ve made seems more of a cohesive project than the collective ‘manifestation’ – and stronger than the collage film I edited.
Therefore, for this assignment, I will talk about my experience in the collaboration as well but submit a proposal for a book which is not part of the pic.london exhibition but a development using some of the material I included there in a different format.
In the book version, the verse is split across pages emulating the Bourgeois book below but I might prefer it on one page.
Assignment work
ON THE EDGE OF THE VILLAGE
Individual Plates below or PDF of A5 -BOW Assignment Two Draft 5 (Please click on images to see a larger version)
Work in progress and contact sheet
Some of these images were originally included in the film – I really wanted to experiment with found and original images together. But I didn’t feel it was working so took them out. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t work but I was unable to find a way with this. I feel like this work has the potential to grow into something else and may eventually include something of the film or an element that might emerge from it.
I am submitting this work as work in progress – knowing the sequence isn’t finalised and some of the images could yet be replaced and crop revisited, the text re-set. Below is a small contact sheet. Should I wish to add to these in the future (perhaps before assessment) I think I would want to make sure they were taken in the same village, which would mean waiting for my next trip there.
I have also wondered if I would just present the text with a single image and played around with that option.
Additional layout suggestion (added 16/10/2019) which does not follow Bourgeois’ pattern and keeps the verse in one place (although still not content with the way it’s presented here). Again – sequencing not set.
Although there is a wide range of influences feeding into my ongoing work, and I discuss them at length in all my blogs, some key artists and writers are summarised in L3 BOW A2 Research & Reflection, Cultural Influences blog, there are three significant ones for this project as presented above.
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence 1947
I was very struck by Bourgious’ book He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947) when I saw the plates in a retrospective at Tate Modern (2015). I have wanted to do something inspired by the layout, and combination of text and image which don’t seem obviously related. (See my UVC notes on Barthes Rhetoric of the Image (2016)) Bourgious’parabels are individual whereas my text follows on, but I hope that my plates could function as self-contained items too. I have emulated the layout in the PDF mock-up above.
2. Assemblage
I am currently reading Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) as I suspect it will be integral to CS and BOW work. She summarises her ‘more-than-human’ approach in the opening chapter: she “recognizes that humans and non-humans are entangled in hybrid, unstable, and generative ways; takes into account the importance of considering the distributed agency and ‘vital capacities’ (‘thing-power’) of human and non-human assemblages” and “places an emphasis on the embodied, sensory and otherwise material nature of meaning, knowing, perceiving and making as part of human embodiment” (43)
Lupton is interested in “where the boundaries between object and life are constantly blurred” (25). “Western societies”, she says, privilege “world views that seek to stringently define and police the boundaries between humans and non-humans and nature and culture.” (25). She defines her approach as diffractive but stemming from a feminist new materialist viewpoint. A significant part of her book is about the boundaries between life and death, and of course, digital culture and technology’s impact on that. Although I had not read or even heard of Deborah Lupton until recently, many of her ideas seem related to systems theory, Santiago’s theory of cognition, and quantum-influenced philosophy which inform my own thoughts. I have also since discovered, thanks to fellow OCA student Holly Woodward, Object Orientated Ontology (OOO) (Field, 2019b) which rejects materialism and is suspicious of the over-belief in scientific philosophies where the idea of process rather than object dominates, but also rejects the privileging of human beings over everything else in the universe. (I don’t understand the view that materialism is reductive because emergence is so important – emergence, it seems to me, is where the inexplicable occurs, where the strangeness and ‘enchantment’ (Lupton, 2019: 32) (Bennet, 2001: 2) take place. Emergence, I think, gives us this vast mysterious area that exists between raw information (process) and solid lived experience (objects). For emergence to occur there has to be various types of assemblage.
Lupton also quotes Donna Haraway who “now positions humans metaphorically as compost, intertwined with other living and non-human entities in a rich dense matter in which the boundaries between objects cannot be distinguished” (Lupton, 2019: 26) (Franklin and Haraway, 2015: 50). She refers to herself as a compost-ite according to Lupton. (26) As much as I like the metaphor (and the humour) and personally buy into a rejection of Cartesian separateness while embracing the idea of relationship and a multi-dimensional meshlike universe, I think language, our parochial positioning, and our evolutionary visual system prevents it from accurately describing our reality. Granted, our version of reality may indeed be a complete illusion and according to Donald D Hoffman, author of The Case Against Reality (2019), the objects we see may effectively be icons on a desktop, contrivances in a user-interface which we have evolved over a very long time to give us the best chance of surviving long enough to make and raise offspring. Nevertheless, it’s the only reality we’ve got access to for the moment and I suspect quite a long time to come. And isolating, defining language is fundamental to our being.
3. Alain Fleisher Mummy, mummies 2002
I have quoted and referenced Alain Fleisher’s work repeatedly since Self & Other when I stumbled across a mention of him in another student’s blog. I describe why I noticed him on my Sketchbook blog while writing about some images I took of my family,
“Each year I visit a small village in Umbria called Ferentillo where my mother owns a house. While there, like most mothers I take lots of photographs of my children. Ferentillo is one of two places in Italy with a strange and unusual history relating to mummification. Beneath the church, Santo Stefano, in Precept, one of two sides to Ferentillo, there is a crypt where 20 mummies are displayed. The bodies become mummified due an unusual micro-orgamism in the soil. You can read a little more here. After reading a paper via a fellow student’s blog which links the mummies to photography I decided to explore this further since I had already made work for an early module in the photography degree I am doing while visiting Ferentillo about my family called This Family. In the previous project I documented my family and combined words in a short book. (2017)
I mention and refer to him again at the end of S&O when describing the still images element of my A5 project, i will have call you
“Mummification and photography are united against the disappearance of appearances: they are alike in their materiality, their techniques, and their codes of resemblance” (Alain Fleischer) A photographic performance, placing mirrors in my mother’s garden in Ferentillo, known for a micro-chemical in its soil which mummifies the dead. Mirrors have historically been seen as a doorway between the living and the dead. Phones nowadays perform some of the same functions as a mirror, seen most notably in relation to Selfies. (2018)
There is a decent image of the front cover of Fleischer’s book here. He has photographed the mummies in black and white and made them look very much more dramatic than they do in real life. Although that is quite dramatic too. But in Fleisher’s images he’s beautified the mundaneness of them. For many years there was a huge shabby 70s table (which my ex-husband was desperate to buy and I’m very glad he didn’t/couldn’t because it struck me as ugly, shabby and not in a good way, which could also describe the venue) at the entrance fo the ‘museum’ which has the feel of someone’s basement. The mummies are behind glass and are rotting (albeit arrested/extremely slow rotting) and there is something quite tacky about these poor souls on show. They are simply dead bodies – the word mummies exoticizes them somehow. They’re not very pleasant as you might imagine. However, as Deborah Lupton says about some other remains, they are “reanimated with affective force and meaning” (38) and so a ‘lively’ element in the universe (which she likens to digital data). Death when seen in this way, she says, is a continuum. (39)
Collaboration
A rumour reached the village is a collective inquiry that began in a game set in an imagined community, riven with witchcraft, industry and accusation. Over three months, six artists exchanged challenges and responses, out of which common themes emerged: loops and circles, colonies and growth, architecture and language, nature and storytelling. The culminating exhibition is a settlement of images, objects, moving image and living cultures, questioning the stories and materials on which communities are built. (2019)
The work I’m submitting emerged from my collaborative time with 5 other artists working under the auspices of pic.london. My collaborators were:
As part of my on-going research into language, culture and reality, I’d been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (2019) and books by Nicholas Christakis who wrote Connected (2009) which is about social networks (in general, not just digital ones.)
Wrangham’s book centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, while simultaneously developing a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence. Humans also became hyper-co-operative; and today collaboration is part of our DNA. Wrangham suggests these trends are underwritten by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that we have an ever-present unconscious fear someone might be watching, gossiping, and planning to do away with us if we don’t conform. Gossip allows us to conjure up stories, deny and blame others, and plan punishment for anyone deemed a deviant. Wrangham’s theory along with Christakis’ ideas about connection sit at the centre of my contribution to the project. (2019a)
We created a research booklet, thanks to the efforts of Rowan Lear and the Publication Studio at CCA Glasgow, and built an installation onto which we placed images, objects, moving image, and living cultures. (see below)
I hesitate to write the following as I am well aware much of my frustration comes from my own uncertain place which is bound up with having been an actor and wanting to incorporate that into new work. Despite leaving acting years ago, it’s still a huge part of my inner being. What’s probably important for me to take on board is the others are visual artists rather than actors. They did not go to drama school nor did they spend a lot of time attending acting classes and learning to improvise.
When you begin a theatre job as long as you’re lucky with your director you might spend a good amount of time playing games that allow you to build up relationships. Even simple rehearsing with a text should be like game-playing and games are often used to facilitate exploration. These relationships go on to help form a universe. It has to happen fast – you might get three weeks to rehearse and then you must create the universe you’ve made every day in a show where it should continue to evolve and grow. At the end of a job (they are often just a few weeks long), it often dissipates just as fast which can feel weird given how close everyone might have felt a few days earlier.
I come from a school in which ensemble is highy valued – companies who work this way often work together for a long time. You cannot have an ensemble unless all contributors are invested in the universe you’re creating. Being invested means different things, but having conversations and responding to others helps. For some reason, this was extremely difficult and I don’t think it was simply because we were scattered about the world, although technology did play a part.
Ensemble is – I think – all about making that compost which Haraway describes. But definition or form which might emerge cannot happen unless the compost has been made. And because we are creatures of language, definition seems worth aiming for – when collaborations are most successful the definition is often something no individual could have created on their own. There is a synthesis in that middle emergence ground as described above.
Although there is some valuable work, I don’t feel we made rich enough compost. And so the work is less of an ensemble than a collection of individual’s work presented in a form which shows potential but which ultimately doesn’t meet the criteria for ensemble. The word collaboration seems to carry many versions of people working together though – and ensemble is probably the most cohesive ideal to aim for.
Saying all of that we worked together well when we began to install the work. And communication is much freer now after the event. We were also by far more of an ensemble than any of the othe groups who worked in pairs or alone or with others outside their group. (William Kentridge is a good example of an artist who embraces collaboration and ensemble).
Nevertheless, an overwhelming sense of isolation is what I’ve made work about here. Because that is what I picked up during the months we were trying to forge a common language. And it probably began to emerge quite specifically for me when I suggested a visual improvisation. We had agreed we wouldattempt to improvise using images/text via social media. After saying, let’s create a ‘self-portrait’ based on the character we’d played in a game during one of our workshops, someone refused saying, “portraiture was so isolating”. I felt blocked and frustrated by this probably because I had this memory of ensemble in my expectations; but, while I respect someone’s discomfort with the idea of photographing themselves (I don’t like it either) that kind of response goes very much against the spirit of the process. One of the most important rules in improvisation is to avoid blocking. If you’re handed something, no matter how awkward or difficult or uncomfortable, you go with it. You transform it. You make it work. If you don’t the improvisation dies and so when you refuse something, which you may feel ideologically compelled to, you should know you’re making that call. What’s more, what I’ve submitted here is a self-portrait although I don’t physically appear in any of the images. We can and must take liberties with language when improvising. For improvisation to flourish, we absolutely must take the baton pass it on. Anything else goes. That’s it for improvisation. But without those two crucial foundations, it cannot come to anything. I didn’t feel this happened and perhaps mainly because it’s not a familiar language for artists who are used to working on thier own.
Hence, my work explores that isolating experience and literally isolates objects using the flash, and in the text, I convey isolation hinting to much that was discussed before the Collaboration section in this blog as well as those feelings I’ve described. I was interested to watch Netflix’s The AO (2016/19) which explores the isolated lives of the characters who are separated by glass while forced to live in a cave – one of a plethora of modern productions about people who break boundaries between life and death, or else live in the afterlife (and I am looking at the significance of this if any in CS.). As I say in my CS literature review, unlike Plato’s Cave, the reality is not happening outside. It is inside the cave, the characters are the shadows themselves. There are many references to digital culture in the programme.
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In the end, I made a film for the exhibition. All of the elements in it are a response to the conversations we did manage to have. But it was made alone and we never reached a place where we could share constructive criticism which I do find useful – plus it allows for a collaborative conversation to take place. I do know reaching such a point can take a good while and requires trust.
A group where the impro/game rules were very clear and the resulting example here truly collaborative https://artlicksweekend.com/2019/event/short-straw/ I woud not have known about this group if not for one of my ccollaborators. (Added 17/10)
What I showed there:
I showed three minutes of four-minute film on a Kindle within the collective circle (as described here)
The Kindle is an object of value itself and perhaps in a McLuhanesque way, perhaps it doesn’t matter what was on it. However, I wish I’d showed the final minute (Challenger exploding) rather than the first three. It’s called Gossip.
I also showed the same three minutes on a TV screen on the wall which alternated with a film of us playing the stick game. In fact, I wish I hadn’t added it. It’s a film made for projecting or watching on a computer or small digital device. Not a TV. But that’s just something to learn for next time. Before making final decisions about equipment make sure you’ve seen the work on various options.
The room is very light so projecting it wasn’t really an option although others just put up with the light or got the organisers to build them a dark space (which wasn’t desirable in our case).
I made a full version of the film available online. (see below) This differs from the exhibition version too as the sound online is the Game Boy audio-track. I do not like the space sounds I added to the exhibition version – it’s quite rubbish, really. And there are silly reasons for making that mistake but it’s done. I like the kitschiness of the online version of the film – it’s made that way by the combination of colours and the music and that works for me.
I showed the verse in full unlike here where it’s cut into segments on each plate. It was placed beside and under other’s contributions which worked well enough.
These elements existed in relation to others’ work and functioned as objects regardless of the material (digital/growing/image/archive/glass – crockery etc).
See the installation below. I do plan to take some images when I invigilate on Wednesday.
Some of the images I constructed on my phone while away and added to the IG platform (often but not always appropriated, some from a Situationist book, and adjusted using proprietary apps – playing with the accessibility of digital tools) Sadly my phone broke while away and I lost quite a few too. (click to see larger version)
Although I feel I have submitted a more cohesive element/work which emerged from this process, I like the kitschiness of the online version of the film. I think it is far better in the end than the version in the gallery but the sound was too much without earphones and one of the collaborators expressed ‘a hatred’ of earphones in galleries and I didn’t feel it was worth arguing about, perhaps because I was uncertain about the work in the first place. I also think the first section of the film is too long and it could afford to lose a minute or so.
I was also grateful to Josh Phillips for being in charge of the wooden platform and building it and making it work. Installation images:
OCA Reflection:
Demonstration of technical and visual skills
Further evidence of strengthening skills and the ability to recognise what and why things work or not. Lots of work to draw from.
Quality of Outcome
I think the book I’ve suggested is potentially much less incoherent than the film or the collective work. I quite like incoherence to be honest, or at least don’t’ have a problem with it but think something potentially precious never emerged in the collective, although it might have done. I think there is some interesting and strong individual work within the collective but that it does not work as an ensemble piece as well as it could have done. I am really interested in collaborating, assemblages and objects, however, and look forward to exploring this more. A book or an online version of some type is an assemblage in any case, as is the film above. I found it very difficult to think straight in a group of six quite different people. I think I also prefer the verse unbroken so if I decide to print a booklet for assessment I will play with different ways of compiling it.
Demonstration of creativity
The book format is much more sedate, perhaps even more mature, less histrionic than previous work. The written work is a good standard. (The film which I’ve not submitted is not as potent as my previous one although some aspects of the montage are are successful, the music with the challenger seems to have an effect on viewers.)
Context
Strong, pulling from different sources. Perhaps could add a photographer although looking at the issue of photography as a medium (rather than an art in itself) to make art within CS A2. References:
Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf (Accessed: 24/5/2017)
Cluitmans L & Zeqo A(2011) He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, Rereading A Single Artwork by Louise Bourgeois, Amsterdam, De Hallen Haarlem/Onomatapee
Christakis, N. and Fowler, J. (2011). Connected. 1st ed. London: HarperPress.
THIS WAS THE DRAFT FOR A2 BUT IN THE END, I DECIDED TO SUBMIT QUITE A DIFFERENTLY REALISED PROJECT – ALTHOUGH USING THE SAME MATERIAL AND SO HAVE LEFT THIS UNFINISHED AS A RECORD OF MY PROCESS
Spend some time reviewing your personal reflection and your tutor feedback. Develop a series of carefully considered images that moves your idea forward. Hand in this series to your tutor together with a new reflective commentary setting out where you plan to go from here.
After discussing my plans with Ruth, I decided to submit new work rather than developing the first assignment any further. However, it has many of the same qualities/tropes, and moves my practice forward, i.e. exploring versions of collaboration, working with archival images and text, and moving-image collage.
Quotes below were not included in the final work but the work circles around these ideas and if I pull together a booklet for assessment, they wouldn’t be out of place.
“It is hard to imagine [] considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible.”
Noel Coward quoted in The Goodness Complex by Richard Wrangham, 2019
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“[Quantum mechanics] does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and how they interact with each other… [] Reality is reduced to a relation.”
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, 2014
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“Just as brains can do things that no single neuron can do, so social networks can do things that no single person can do.”
Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, 2019
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“There is a glut of images in the world and a stubborn obsession with holding on to them… [] Far from satisfying our need for information, the ungraspable abundance of indiscriminate data leaves us just as ignorant but much more confused .”
Pandora’s Camera by Joan Fontcuberta, 2014
The Goodness Complex by Richard Wrangham centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, and simultaneously developed a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence, for which language is needed. Humans also became hyper-co-operative across all activities, in particular with childcare and hunting/gathering, and are unlikely to have been the success they are without collaboration. Alongside that drive, there is an inherent desire to be good even when there is seemingly no payoff.
Wrangham suggests these paradoxes were facilitated by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that even when we aren’t necessarily being spoken about, there is always an unconscious awareness that we will be. Once humans were able to gossip, they could avert blame, conjure up stories and plan punishment for anyone who deviated or might be seen as a threat. Gossip, in these terms, underpins who and what we are as a species.
Wrangham’s theory sits at the centre of my contribution to this project.
Work to be included here:
About Pic London:
Workshops:
About Hal Silver:
Artists involved in the collaboration:
Resulting work:
Group Statement:
A rumour reached the village is a collective inquiry that began in a game set in an imagined community, riven with witchcraft, industry and accusation. Over three months, six artists exchanged challenges and responses, out of which common themes emerged: loops and circles, colonies and growth, architecture and language, nature and storytelling. The culminating exhibition is a settlement of images, objects, moving image and living cultures, questioning the stories and materials on which communities are built.
Images of Group set-up and links to relevant collaborator’s work where possible:
Individual work withinexhibition:
Gossip emerged from the original game via an imagined midwife and evolved over time during off-and-online conversations with the other artists/characters in the group. The result is a reflection and response to that interaction; a mixture of text and, downloaded from the Internet, appropriated still frames, moving image, and sounds from space.
There are two versions of the video. Each has the same footage and edit but the gallery version has a simple audio track of sounds from space from the Nasa website. This will be/was shown on an electronic tablet in amongst the other objects and accompanied by some text and still frames from the film captured and printed in newsprint.
A second version of the video is available on my website. There is an instruction to visit it built into the installation (assemblage.) This online edition has music from a well-known game from the eighties which was played on an early handheld device.
Research booklet:
Additional Context
” The circle is timeless but also modern and hi-tech: lenses, records, cogs and clocks. Time is circular on Napoleon’s personal carriage clock, seized at Waterloo, the hands always showing the hours past as well as those to come. And perhaps space is circular too, at least in the mind of Anish Kapoor.” Cumming, L. (2016) Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle review – the joy of life in the round, The Guardian [online review] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/29/seeing-round-corners-the-art-of-the-circle-review-turner-contemporary-margate [Accessed 13/10/2019]
Given my growing focus on Plato’s Cave and contemporary references in popular culture to similar metaphors, I thought it was interesting to see the Penguin edition uses one of Kandinsky’s image of Circles (1923) on the cover.
From Amazon, 2019, [shopping] Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Republic-Penguin-Classics-Plato-ebook/dp/B009LVOFPU/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=platos+cave+kindle&qid=1570964028&sr=8-3 (Accessed: 13/10/2019)The group talked about Bosch’s painting in one of the few meetings we had in person after one of the artists had created a plastic digital 3D print of a building she’d been photographing. I could imagine the object in the distance much like the pink and towers in the Bosch’s background, and indeed, everytime I saw a photograph it did (for me anyway) make reference to Bosch’s work.
Neurophilosopher, Patricia Churchland discusses the biological origins of empathy here. Her article includes:
“The overlap of moral virtues across cultures is striking, even though the relative ranking of the virtues may vary with a clan’s history and environment. Typically, vindictiveness and cheating are discouraged, while cooperation, modesty and courage are praised. These universal norms far predate the concept of any moralising God or written law. Instead, they are rooted in the similarity of basic human needs and our shared mechanisms for learning and problem-solving.”
“Neuroscience reminds us that our social nature and cultural practices, including the ones we call morality, are products of evolution, constrained by our biological heritage. Perhaps that knowledge, of a sense of morality rooted in nothing more than our mammalian origins, makes us a little less likely to be infatuated with our own moral superiority, and more likely to cast a sceptical eye on those who peddle utopian remedies to our problems.” (2019)
Since sending out various versions of work and receiving the feedback I have developed the overall concept and presentation further – seeing what could be ditched but also how I would bring some of the various elements I had created together into an ‘assemblage‘.
I do not much like the word assemblage but after reading it used (a great deal) in a blog by Deborah Lupton, the author of Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives, it seems like the correct word for the collection of images, sounds and materials I’ve gathered together. She writes:
I examine the interplay of human and nonhuman affordances associated with digital technologies – devices, software and the digital data they generate – and the agential capacities that are opened up or closed off as these things assemble. I ponder the questions of who benefits from these agential capacities, and in whose interests they operate. Here again, affective forces are central to the engagements of humans with these nonhuman things and the capacities that are generated by their gatherings. I address how human-data assemblages can generate agential capacities that empower and vitalise actors in the assemblage; but can also expose them to vulnerabilities and harms.
This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action, reaction and understanding of the world. Personal digital data assemblages are partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action. While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh). (2019)
I am therefore creating an assemblage although I have not used this word.
The assemblage consists of:
A video – itself a collage, a type of assemblage. While not a still collage like Höch’s were, it was made to emulate that trope, cutting up and pasting material that exists in the world. It includes audiovisual material that is available on the internet but contains signifiers of earlier technology. It will be shown on a Kindle – a handheld device.
The film will also be available on my website but it will be a different version. Mostly the same apart from one or two tiny sections, but with an alternative audio track. The instruction to visit the website is printed on newsprint and is part of the assemblage.
Still frames from the film which have been ‘captured’ and frozen – in more or less the same way a photograph of life is captured and rendered a still image, using a slightly different tech/method – and printed on newsprint. These will be placed on the platform or hung from sticks.
The poem printed on a tabloid page, orientated portrait. I hope this will hang above and slightly behind the kindle, perhaps alongside printed newsprints but I will need to see how this pans out when we set up. I was very influenced a long time ago by Louise Bourgious’ He Disappeared into Complete Silence. This is a book with several plates each of which consists of text and a drawing. The drawing is not an illustration. And sometimes it is hard to make the connection. But they are made to be seen together. I feel the poem and the video work this way too. Each can stand on its own but the point of the work is only brought to the fore when they are placed beside each other: A moving image piece alongside text, working with it but not illustrating. I might have read/performed the text in a video or even live. But this did not feel the right place (collaboration) for that – perhaps I might have reached a way of doing this if we’d had longer or were working in a smaller group -and it is something to consider for the longer-term, BOW-wise.
The work will exist in a ‘village’ (the platform) alongside other work made by my collaborators. The contents were influenced by their interests and the interactions I had with them. It is a reflection of them and my time with them. So my work is part of a greater assemblage, a network of creators which itself exists within a further larger assemblage – i.e. the three groups organised/curated by Pic London. That too is an assemblage which is again part of something greater. And so on = the fractal nature of existence.
Looking back, this is the pattern of my work. And now I know why. I am not focusing on one tiny aspect. I am recreating the chaos and interaction of conscious experience (not an individual, not an isolated and alienated concept, not one thing).
When I submit the assignment I will include critical information I sent to Pic London – but here since it is relevant, I will just add a quotation I used which I have inserted into my work previously, and put at the front of my Self & Other blog:
“There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple unmixed with other human beings … [the self] is a composite structure … formed out of countless never-ending influences and exchanges… we are members of one another.” (Joan Riviere, 1927) It seems the assemblage whether it’s made up of flesh or tech or both and all sorts of other stuff is a description of Riviere’s statement.
I have removed my own images taken with flash. I really don’t know what to do with the poem or those pictures. I don’t think they fit but are part of the process.
Or else, if they are anything, they are separate albeit related work.
Ruth really liked the poem and I am glad she did. But every time I think about adding it in some way, I feel now like I am shoe-horning it in. When I look at Ruth’s work, I think I can see why this appeals to her more than the montage film.
Here is the film as it is today. Same password as before.
But it does repeat what I have done before.
After thinking about adding the poem and images to the film in some at the end as an epilogue perhaps, I will now try somethings out with it in PS or Illustrator. I read yesterday in a group email from someone who attended Unseen in Amsterdam that much of the work was alternative processes and that there were hardly any digital prints at all. Why would everyone rush to do the same thing? I will keep exploring digital – how can we not at this time in our history? When digital is having such an effect?
The following are some specific influences in the work I’m making for BOW 1.2 (actually A2 in the file but I’ve been referring to it as A1.2 all this time…)
I learned about Joan Jonas last year during her show at the Tate and so much was useful for my own practice – such as layering moving image, sometimes mixing performance with other mediums, and all related to working from a feminist perspective, eschewing or perhaps exploring and offering alternatives to historical-artistic habits which might be construed as coming from the masculine i.e. relating it Irigray’s suggestion that the female subject cannot exist within current constructs. But perhaps one of the most helpful things Jonas said was when she asked viewers not to try and understand her work, but rather, allow themselves to experience it.
“My work is all about layering, because I think that’s the way our brains function.” Jonas argues that we always see and think of several things concurrently: “We see one picture and there’s another picture on top of it. And so I think in a way my work represents that way of seeing the world – putting things together in order to say something.” When Jonas started incorporating video into her performances in 1970, this presented new technical possibilities as she could not only do everything herself, but was also able to show different aspects simultaneously. Furthermore, it provided her with new ways of exploring the notion of “female imagery” in the prime of the feminist movement: “Women were kind of bursting out of their seams.” (2016)
Jonas makes work which attempts to operate in a different realm where instinct isn’t jettisoned and emotions are triggered although we may not fully comprehend why. And that is the kind of work I am experimenting with. I do this by trying not to think about what and how I’m making the work too much, influenced by Dada and Surrealism – and automatic writing. I might simply grab footage that appeals to me in some way, perhaps it is related loosely to themes I’m investigating, and then edit them together without thinking too carefully, to begin with. When I look at what I’ve made, I can find meaning and signifiers that make some sense (to me at any rate) and might develop certain threads which I recognise as having a connection.
2. Re-evaluation of strict rational/logical
I do not eschew rationality but we have throughout Western history (Logocentricism) valued it more highly than instinct in our culture. However, there are many instances nowadays in popular culture where the non-rational is being re-examined and celebrated – any superhero film, but also and more specifically, although the list is much longer than this: Inception (2010) film, The Lost Room, (2006) TV, The OA, (2016/19) TV, Russion Doll (2019) TV. (I do plan to write about the bleakness in many of these shows and relate it to Leckey’s work – see below as well as the blurring of boundaries between life and death, this world and some other world, about the loss of reality which might also be described by some as ‘the end of history – Hegel etc.).
Neuroscientists are also more inclined nowadays to suggest non-rational thought has been under-valued, instinct has something positive to offer, and that we may have lost something along the way.
“Indeed, relying on your intuition generally has a bad reputation, especially in the Western part of the world where analytic thinking has been steadily promoted over the past decades. Gradually, many have come to think that humans have progressed from relying on primitive, magical and religious thinking to analytic and scientific thinking. As a result, they view emotions and intuition as fallible, even whimsical, tools.”
“However, this attitude is based on a myth of cognitive progress. Emotions are actually not dumb responses that always need to be ignored or even corrected by rational faculties. They are appraisals of what you have just experienced or thought of – in this sense, they are also a form of information processing.” van Mulukum (2018)
However, this revaluation of rationality also seems dangerous in many instances, such as the growth of the anti-vax movement or the Flat Earthers (I am convinced some Flat Earthers are simply ‘taking the almighty piss’ – Australia is a hoax, for instance, is just too, too mad.) Even so, I can’t help but see that the story of Cassandra as salutary – in it, the symbolic and the rational are valued but the imaginary and instinct aren’t. The feminine and the traditionally related non-rational, are dismissed as the mad ravings of a lunatic even though in the end Cassandra, condemned never to be understood, was right.
The desire to revisit tales of witchcraft (as seen in the collaborative work with Pic London – some are exploring elements) is also related to this trend. One of the workshop leaders Una Hamilton Helle is part of another collaboration – Waking the Witch:
“Traditional witchcraft has a strong connection to the earth with an intimate knowledge of herbs, plants and the elements – as well as the human body. As gatekeepers to altered consciousness witches have been both feared and sought out for their dealings with the unknown. Historically persecuted as an outsider, the witch has been taken on by artists as a challenging force to prevailing norms and as a symbol of dissidence. Looking to symbols, tools and the coven as a space for focusing collective intent, the artists in this exhibition explore the path of the witch as one for how we can connect with the earth and each other.” (wakingthewitch.uk)
3. Walter Benjamin as quoted in James Elkins What Photography is (2011)
Another reason for making work this way, is because my head is filled with fragments of emotive information gathered from a lifetime of watching films and TV.
Loc 1311 – “…film he said, creates a percussive shock to the consciousness by continuously changing scenes, “I can no longer think what I want to think.” he writes. “My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” (The Work of Art, in Illuminations, 238)
See mention of Virillo below – who also discussed fragmentation and film.
4. Hannah Höch
I have been a fan of Höch since seeing her work at the Whitechapel when I first started with the OCA. I couldn’t believe I’d not learned about her before. Strangely before going, I was not particularly looking forward to seeing her work and didn’t think much of montage! “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the Hannah Hoch show quite as much I as did, despite having read somewhere that it was the must-go-to show of the moment. I’m not sure why, especially as I’d been in a reenactment of The Cabaret Voltaire at Manchester Metropolitan University, shortly after graduating in 1994 and enjoyed it immensely.” (Field 2014)
“Photomontages were the original remix. In the early 20th century, a group of European artists spliced together images they’d found in popular media, creating singular artworks via a strategy of sampling. The results show both individual statements by their makers and cross-sections of visual culture from a particular historical moment… []
… one of the few female members recognized by the movement, offered a refreshing antithesis to such macho constructions. Her own photomontages offer kaleidoscopic visions of German culture during the interwar era, often from a distinctly queer, feminist perspective.” (Cohen, 2019)
Collage is a representation of fragmentation and may be an expression of the sort of continuous changing scenes as mentioned by Benjamin and also Paul Virilio who I quoted in DI&C A2.
“The cinema shows us what our consciousness is. Our consciousness is an effect of montage. There is no continuous consciousness; there are only compositions of consciousness […] collage, cutting, and splicing. We’re in the age of micro-narratives, the art of the fragment.” Paul Virilio (1932-2018)
In my work, I make collage although it is moving-image and contains audio as that is more relevant for today when we are surrounded by adverts that flicker and emit sound constantly – on our phones which we carry around but also in adverts, on escalators, everywhere. This is explored in plenty of science fictions films too, for example, Blade Runner (both 2017 and 1982) and Total Recall (1990 and 2012).
Fragmentation was embraced in theatre, and Brecht’s desire to move away from soporific shows that hypnotised people into accepting their lot in life was replaced by episodic writing of his Epic Theatre which he hoped would make people angry and to act. Ironically, TV today routinely follows the same pattern and time is chopped up and edited, especially in soap-opera’s and sit-coms which are also often accused of hypnotising the masses into accepting their lot in life.
5. Mark Leckey
I had not heard of Mark Leckey until my friend, a filmmaker who I showed DI&C A5 to, said that the first section reminded her of Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1990). Then Catherine (OCA student) suggested meeting up and we chose Leckey’s new show at Tate Britain – O’ MAGIC POWER OF BLEAKNESS (thank you Catherine for kindly suggesting something she knew would be useful for me). I went along and watched the film and spent the whole time thinking, “F*%K! This guy is doing what I do and including signifiers such as networks and space and noise and computer-generated pixels. Except he has way more money and lots of amazing audio and huge screens and other equipment with which to do it!! I am very much committed to a Brechtian eschewing of expense and prefer to embrace using everyday objects, to beg, borrow and steal, to creating Heath-Robinson contraptions. But I was nevertheless somewhat envious as I’m currently desperately trying to bring something together with no money and no tech skills.
However, watching his work also gave me the confidence to keep going.
The overriding sense was, as mentioned in the title, bleakness. The AO (Netflix) also generates something of this in relation to youth culture – and it is this bleakness and indeed horror which sends the characters into different realms. (Which of course also relates to quantum suggestions about multiple universes – I keep thinking about how this relates to myth in general – and the relationship between science and religion.)
Ruth suggested Painlevé’s work and they are indeed beautiful films which look at the strange and wonderful creatures that are part of our world, and which looks bizarre to us but we are no doubt horrifying to them. In my work, I look at the very small and liken their worlds to ours. What I rather like about is the music which is more like something you’d expect from a Hitchcock film. Constructing realities…
7. Rivane Neuenschwander born 1967, Cao Guimarães born 1965
Continuing from above – looking at creatures smaller than us, I loved the film described below when I saw it at Tate Modern recently. Although there is no montage here, the focus on creatures with which we share the world and who interact with us, even though we may not know it, is key.
“Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue 2006 is a single-channel video lasting 5 minutes and 48 seconds and shown on a loop. It features a ground-level, close-up view of red and black ants carrying coloured confetti across the floor of the Brazilian rainforest. The film starts with one ant carrying a piece of gold confetti over a gritty surface, followed by shots of differently sized ants attempting to grip or drag confetti across soil and tree trunks. As the video progresses it begins to show multiple ants per scene: a pair collaborate to move a disc up a small hill, and a group fights over a piece of silver confetti.” (Karmen, 2018)
Rist was suggested as someone I might look at in feedback for BOW A1. I wrote about her in S&O. I have been influenced by her work in many ways and love how she discusses language. While thinking about how/what to do with the poem, I have been reminded about Rist’s recent work – pressed up against the glass. This glass screen image has been referenced in Netflix’s The AO too – where young people (Millenials) are imprisoned in glass tanks, like fish – unable to touch each other, as if locked behind screens and reliant on a powerful but far from perfect and punitive God-like character what manages their time/food, etc. (A metaphor for the keepers of the technology that imprisons us).
I need to work out why I thought of this. I think it came about by thinking about filming my mouth speaking the text – but this feels a bit hackneyed.
Although the poem doesn’t mention glass or social media, but as Ruth (happily) picked up on it is very much about now, about being unconnected and existing in some sort of limbo much like the imprisoned Millenials in The AO.
One of the things Ruth said about the earlier iteration of the film is that it didn’t feel political in the same way the text did. I hope by simplifying I have rectified that. (All my work aims to be deeply political).
James Elkins What Photography Is (2011)
I am adding this after writing about my Literature Review. Elkins spend a great deal of time examining the same sort of things I am referencing in the film and the poem.
The very small and the way technology is used to make the A-bomb and then dissect it. perhaps this inspection of what reality is the same inquiry into what a photograph is.
As discussed I attended three workshops organised by Pic London at LCC, led by Una Hamilton Helle and Joshua Bilton who were original members of a group called Hal Silver.
Pic London’s site told us:
The workshops will be experimental in nature and the focus of each session will be on collective forms of making, improvisation and group dynamics. This could take the form of games, role-play, unskilled mask and costume making, photography, video and sound recording. These process-led activities can be gathered into a final exhibition display, the form of which will be established throughout the workshop sessions. (2019)
Improvising in the dark at LCC with Hal Silver Courtesy of Pic London
We played a number of improvisation games including some vocal games devised by Pauline Oliveros called Sonic Meditations. (See below) These games reminded me of the kind of thing I did at drama school (1991-94). I introduced this exercise to the OCA Music Collective when Emma and I shared Sirens.
We also played an imaginary game where each of us had to come up with a character and then imagine ourselves in a village. Someone, it was rumoured, might have done something untoward and the rest of us had to make a decision about whether it was true or not. People were ejected from the game/executed/banished if individuals believed the story others told about them. We played it several times and invented many strange and bizarre tragedies which we blamed on eachother.
The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made Us Both More and Less Violent Kindle Edition, Richard Wrangham, 2019 and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Nicholas A Christakis 2019
I had just finished reading the above books both of which deal with the way in which societies keep themselves in order (or not). Wrangham’s central thesis is that humans are the most violent and the most passive of primates at the same time and that it is language which enables this paradox. Language gives us the opportunity to gossip. Once we have that capacity we can lie, protect oursleves and send blame in a different direction. Cliques form which protects the group – the most cost-effective way to ensure survival for the individual and the group. Outsiders are seen as a threat to the group. To deviate from the norm is to invite extreme danger, ultimately execution. Through language, violence is planned and carried out over time, thereby distancing oneself from spontaneous aggression, but often finding ways to be far more aggressive in the long term. This distancing is contained in the law.
A photo I found on Twitter showing executions during the Spanish Civil War (will need to do a bit of digging to make sure that’s right and find the link)
The second book covers some of the same ground but also looks at networks and co-operation. It is a more expansive thesis than Wrangham’s.
However, the two main themes emerged from the games and which I had just read about in these books; the role of language in establishing and maintaining groups and the networked nature of human existence.
A group discussion also led the circular nature of existence, history, culture and relationships.
Bringing objects, books, and games to the group.
We were all asked to bring some items to the second workshop – these could be objects, photos, text or games for instance.
I provided a range of things but the following have stuck.
Text from Christakis’ book
Books by the Situationists which focus on circles
A stick game I used to play at drama school which demonstrates to the players where your connection is strong and where it breaks down. At university, we might have used this as a warm-up game or as rehearsal support with lines.
In the spirit of collaboration here are some cropped images on one of the member’s of our group – Eva Louisa’s – Instagram feed which I took during a meeting at the end of the summer while playing the stick game. I should share it with my old head of school Niamh Dowling, now head of Rose Bruford – I suspect she would be pleased to see it. I think this image is being used by Pic London so I will wait and see and share that with her if so.
For me, the most interesting aspect of all of this is the language.
I am the oldest in the group and therefore immediately the outsider. There is one other person who is probably slightly older than the majority but everyone else is early-to-mid-twenties.
I grew up the 80s and the early to mid-90s were my heyday.
However, that is the least of it, I am sure. As another collaborator said to me when we worked together at the beginning of Self & Other while discussing the meaning and implications of other, “But what about your otherness, Sarah-Jane?”
Image from Self & Other A1 (2017)
And then how did we maintain satisfactory communications across social media? This was the only route open to us since we would all be scattered across the globe for the duration of the summer. Of course, prior to social media’s existence, we would have had letters and the telephone to use. We now have more opportunity than ever. However, it felt to me that we struggled to genuinely connect despite digital access – which was often unreliable, frustrating and fragmented. Or so it felt to me.
Most of the time I sensed I was talking into a void. I felt isolated and alone, often paranoid and like an outsider, a freak. Of course, some of that must be me – I do sometimes feel that way but it’s been a while since I’ve felt it with such force. Perhaps while I was married and in relation to some other mothers in the playground (but I know lots of other mothers feel this way in the playground too), certainly while I quite insanely joined the PTA after my dad died in 2010 (a short-lived experiment!), and when I was in a play at the Library Theatre shortly after graduating. Everyone else in the cast lived in London. I lived in Manchester and got the job at the last minute after someone dropped out. I felt horribly inadequate and was suffering the most awful acne at the time too. When I was a child I had this same feeling when I was sent to boarding school. A few months after being there I told all the boys about the girls wearing bras which was a desperately self-defeating thing to have done – I was the outsider and felt so wretched about it I made it worse by making sure I had to remain an outsider for even longer.
This sense is, I am well aware, partly self-generated but then some sort of transference and counter-transference starts taking place. I mention all of this as the poem I will likely include in some way is very much informed these feelings and my personal history with my own mother.
Continuing the improvisation across social media
Perhaps my history with impro or the fact that I meet OCA people regularly online meant I was flummoxed when attempts to get this going failed. I felt like a disappointed child realising that all the other children were really very grown-up and somewhat irritated by my enthusiasm.
Instagram
At our first online meeting (where it was very difficult to hear and see what people were saying) we agreed we would set up an IG account and post collectively there, responding to each other and attempting to continue playing improvisations games. One member suggested each taking it in turns to give another a task – out of which a resulting photo or text should be posted on the IG. We said we would start with some thought experiments. Then each of us should pass the baton on. Of course, if no-one started or passed it on the game would die.
Well, the game barely lived at all. And I got bored of waiting so set someone a task. They did it, posted an image prompted by the task and then stopped I think.
Nevertheless, we began to post images. I suspect some more than others. I posted images promoted by discussions online and in the workshops and in response to images by others.
Thought experiments provided by another group member as prompts/ideas for tasks being set. No-one had to use these but it was hoped they would prove useful.
I played quite a lot although did not share everything I made. My phone then stopped working altogether! And I was stuck in Italy. this was probably, in the long run, a good thing. I had a much-needed break from social media and had already posted quite a few pictures and videos anyway.
Click in individual images.
I don’t have all my images anymore after the phone broke and there was no wifi in Italy. So sadly I lost some originals but they are still on the IG account.
This account has led to a book which will act as a research footnote to the exhibition. I will add a low res PDF of the book after it opens. Massive thanks to Rowan Lear for organising this.
Research and Ideas
All the time I was in Italy I kept thinking about the village I was staying in, Ferentillo. I wrote about it here. It is a village I have stayed in and made work about several times as can be evidenced in my Sketch Book blog and in Self & Other A5.
Image from Self & Other A5 i will have call you (2018) made in Ferentillo, exploring the boundaries between life and death via mirrors in the landscape, phone apps and filters, and moving image.
This Family Too (2017) (A project which I never resolved and should return to – take some of these out and look again at the images and sequence. I recall wanting to make sure the sequence was random and could ask a fellow OCA person I know about setting this up in Processing.
And I submitted a book for TAOP A5 which was made in Ferentillo and included written work as well as images.
Notes which I shared about some of this work with the group:
Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies – a photography book with text in which Fleisher photographs the mummies for which Ferentillo is famous.
As discussed in several blogs above this work is mentioned in The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘ by Ari J. Blatt.
What caught my eye was the following:
“If Bazin offers a compelling theorization of the photograph as mummified presence, in his wistful recent book Mummy, mummies Alain Fleischer plays with that paradigm and examines the mummy itself as evocative of the photographic process. In this combination of essay and fiction that focuses upon a group of mummified bodies housed for eternity in the museum crypts at Ferentillo and Palermo in Italy, Fleischer conceptualizes the relationship between mummified and photographic traces: ‘Mummification and photography are united against the disappearance of appearances: they are alike in their materiality, their techniques, and their codes of resemblance.’”
Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf [Accessed: 24.May.2017]
I sent this document to the group and one of them picked up on another sentence where the darkness in the tombs is stressed.
Fiore
I thought about Fiore (mentioned in the poem) and all the other tragic stories – suicide, cancer, airplane crashes and wondered why there so many of them. I suspect it is the fact everyone knows each other. Death is also everywhere in the village – a Catholic community with a cemetery on the edge and posters announcing death all over the town as is the Italian habit.
And I thought about darkness and the work isolating. Before we got going with the IG, I had suggested a task – a self-portrait based on the character we had constructed in the game. This was blocked and portraits referred to as ‘isolating’. I felt this was unhelpful as self-portrait could be interpreted in many ways. I also wanted to say, that is what language is – isolating. All these happenings led to the flash images:
The film is made by adding all these fragments together. Although it may seem incomprehensible, I think perhaps that is what I am after as that is how I felt – as if life and language and being in the group were incomprehensible. I am not a Millenial. I grew up in the 80s as everything was changing and being set for the digital bubble to come in the 90s. (See Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation 2016).
However, now that I have worked on it this morning and added the Game Boy music as the only audio (which will be available online only so people can hold their devices and listen through headphones in the gallery is they want to – but a bit like holding a Nintendo Gameboy). Version 24th September 2019, Password Village3
Some further thoughts
Thinking back to the books I mentioned above – Wrangham and Christakis’, I have, throughout this process and while in Ferentillo, been thinking about the way societies evolve. Umbria is a perfect landscape/example for Virilio’s thesis whereby war is the main motivator of all technology stating that is what has driven civilisation’s development (1985). Throughout Umbria there are hilltop towns and castles demonstrating this aspect of human nature; villages maintaining boundaries between themselves and the outsiders. And yet their history is filled with outsiders – Chinese tourists in the crypts which were photographed by Fleisher, Assyrian refugees painted in local abbey’s. And how art has such a huge history here – the purpose of it – in chapels and churches for instance; and the very long history. Below the Twitter link, there are some images from books on Umbria and I’ve focused in particular on the faces of the people from that other time.
Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf [Accessed: 24.May.2017]
Since I am now going to submit some work I am doing in conjunction with a group called Pic London, or at least part of it for BOW 1.2, I need to record development and research in more detail than I have done to date.
I will be submitting work that is part of a group show titled A rumour reached the village. The project is the result of a collaborative process which took place over the summer and continues still, and is one for four groups showing work under the Pic London After School Collective strategies name at Lewisham Art House in October.
There are roughly six people in each group. Ours includes Michaela Lahat, Rowan Lear, Eva Louisa Jonas, Joshua Phillips, Christel Pilkaer Thomsen and me.
Why I submitted my work to Pic London in the first place
Before submitting for DI&C assessment I shared a newspaper element, which I eventually sent to the OCA, with OCA friends and a couple of external people for feedback. Sometimes when I share my work with people there are embarrassed silences as people don’t know what to do, where to look, or what to say. This can make it quite hard to feel OK with the work or get the sort of constructive feedback I am after. I have discussed this before and I am aware that quite often my work is hard to make sense of especially when it’s still in the early stages of being developed. Although I had received some useful feedback from my cohort about the way the paper might be construed by assessors (and a warning that I must stress the films were the main element in the submission while the paper a supporting document) I was searching for a conversation about what worked and what didn’t come across as I hoped. A good friend who is a photographer said she did not feel qualified to give me the sort of feedback that would be helpful but she felt the work was strong and urged me to submit it a call out by Pic London. (My fifteen-year-old son was in fact extremely helpful in the end.)
As an aside, my friend and I have spoken several times about where my work is heading and I have said I feel like the usual photography competitions are just not suitable places for me. And not do I want to be limited to straight photographs. I am in a constant state of flux at the moment about where my energies should be directed and what sort of work I should spending my time on. I am confused in my head and split, but not split in a clear and defined way. More a fragmented mess of a crisis way. This is probably apparent in the choices and mis-choices I am making with each discipline and how I choose to express it; commercial work photography and this other work I do for which I don’t yet have a name. I am also beginning to wonder if the commercial photography is the same as the non-commercial photography, so long as it is just photography; and the other unnamed stuff I do is not photography at all although at times it may contain images. That might sound terribly confusing – and if it does, that’s an accurate reflection of where I am.
For Pic London, I submitted the final DI&C project, Origin of the Common-Place and Assignment 2 – Polar Interia along with the newspaper and was thrilled when it was accepted. However, having submitted that moving image work – having so little experience in all of this – I felt that some form of video work in the same vein would be what was expected of me. Perhaps I was wrong – I am still figuring this all out.
Workshops
I actually had no idea what the resulting work would be. It took me a while to be really clear that whatever we had submitted wasn’t being shown but some new collaborative project which would emerge out of the workshops.
We were put into groups – these were listed in the application where we had to state a preference. I went for Hal Silver who I had never heard about but that group seemed to suggest performance would be involved which sounded right for me and I was glad to be assigned to the group I wanted.
Hal Silver was made up from a group of RA photography students who wanted to explore practices beyond their narrowly photo-focused studies. I think they got together in 2010. The workshop leaders, Una Hamilton Helle, and Joshua Bilton have pages about Hal Silver on their websites but it was quite hard to pin down who or what Hal Silver was online prior to meeting them. I quite liked this slightly incognito and enigmatic air that Hal Silver projected when I tried to look him/her/it up. We were told he/she/it might not even turn up at all! So a form of performance seemed to begin before we even met or started playing together. (I do now wonder if the original members had hidden the relevant pages from their websites as none of us were able to find out much about Hal Silver by doing searches prior to the workshops beginning.)
Pic London’s description of Hal Silver’s plans:
The workshops will be experimental in nature and the focus of each session will be on collective forms of making, improvisation and group dynamics. This could take the form of games, role-play, unskilled mask and costume making, photography, video and sound recording. These process-led activities can be gathered into a final exhibition display, the form of which will be established throughout the workshop sessions. (2019)
We were given three talks from each of the leaders/groups over a period of several weeks on Saturday mornings, which were followed by workshops where the seeds of some ideas were introduced to us.
As the work has not yet opened and is still in progress, I will either need to wait to publish any further information or publish privately (more likely the latter as I need to ensure there is enough material available for Ruth/assessors to see my process.)
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 