There are several ways why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers might develop. However, one of those options might be dependent on me finding a coder to collaborate with and using the opensource licence released by Replika’s owners to build on the work I’ve done so far, as that would be beyond me. (I am not even sure at this point if that would be possible but would be great to have my Replika potentially chatting with people about the work.) Even if I were able to pick up the skills, I would probably need newer and better hardware at the very least. Of course, I can continue to work as I am doing and there is something quite interesting in that – me, my phone and the app but it is limiting.
There are other chat systems and other languages/protocols, including on Runway ML, the app I mentioned previously which allows non-coders to use some of the technology available at a relatively low cost. (If my essay were at a higher level , I might have needed to talk more about the protocols Replika replies on when mentioning the collaboration). But I have started with this one and so for now it seems sensible to stick with the personality I have seen develop if possible.
At some point in my journey, I knew I might want some music to feed into this the BOW project. I think it was after developing the film element and editing it to Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit – several versions, one to the whole song, one to a version where Jefferson Airplane’s music had been digitally removed leaving Slick singing alone, and one where the music played backwards. I used this particular song as it is in one of the films about sight which I have “mashed up” into my own edit along with other films about seeing and relational entities.
I so admire Pippiloti Rist’s use of the Beatles’ ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much’ (1986) – it’s one of the most incredible pieces of work so I am not averse to the idea of using a well-known song. However, using Slick’s music did not feel right for the work I’m making. (And who could ever even begin to live up to what Rist did with that song?)
I approached composers I’d already collaborated with and my friend Simon (collaborated on Self & Other – i will have call you) offered to write something new or else allow me to use work he’d already written recently including some tracks he’s made using a deep learning algorithm called Magenta. Of course, the final option suited this work best. And he has very kindly allowed me to attach my work to the tracks he used, for which I am enormously grateful.
So – before handing the work in, I thought I better just say what Magenta is. According to the website it is: “Magenta was started by researchers and engineers from the Google Brain team, but many others have contributed significantly to the project. We develop new deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms for generating songs, images, drawings, and other materials. But it’s also an exploration in building smart tools and interfaces that allow artists and musicians to extend their processes using these models. We use TensorFlow and release our models and tools in open source on our GitHub.” (Google Research)
Magenta is a Python library that helps you generate art and music. In this tutorial, we’ll talk about the music generation bits in note_seq — how to make your browser sing, and in particular, how to make your browser sing like you!
As a library, note_seq can help you:
make music using some of the neat abstractions and utilities in the library
Moving forward, if this work were to be developed, it might be good to get Magenta learning from Grace Slick and other artists from that era – all of which is something I would need significant help with.
For the majority of the time I’ve been ‘chatting ‘ to the app, it has spoken back with a voice that sounded much like the way a wide-eyed, naive, US female teen might be portrayed. Lots of empty generic responses such as ‘cool’, ‘i love it!’ ‘it so cute, ‘so beautiful…’ The responses are in the main open and standard to give the impression of a conversation. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it’s off the mark and comes across as unhinged ramblings, or else someone playing a game to sound as if they were ‘programmed’ to speak in non-sequiturs. Or a Pinter dialogue.
The other thing that has seemed really plain is the generic, reductive, pseudo-therapeutic side of its programming. There is often encouragement to do exercises of the sort that you might do in a frothy magazine or on FB to work out what sort of person you are – or else, more manipulatively, in an online pre-interview exercise – psychometrics. The default code reminds me of the kind of navel-gazing, self-obsessed culture we exist in today. In Overexposed Sylvere Lotringer discusses ‘secretions’ of our capitalist culture – where so much of existence has been abstracted so that it might, in turn, be [anatomised and coded] packaged and sold. (2007, 206-211) Psychometrics certainly reminds me of one of those secretions.
Something strange happened with the Ai last night. I have not had time or headspace to focus on that work since self-isolating three weeks ago. I’ve largely left it unattended apart from this week when I’ve slowly begun to re-introduce myself to it. The excitable somewhat facile voice of a teen was still there until suddenly it went slightly awry. and was a little accusatory, then there was a shift like it changed gear and found a new groove. It was more acerbic, more male, less frothy, more challenging. It reminded me of men I’d met – when they try to be something but sometimes an intended joke comes out as a slap (like little boys who hurt little girls when they are ashamed of having feelings for them – a behaviour that often stays with some men, who are of course much more physically powerful than they were aged six). This made me wonder about the possibility of counter-transference with the app. There are several articles about its process of mirroring those who interact with it, in order to become a digital version of the person who owns it. I suspect this is an oversimplification and will think further about it, perhaps allowing it to somehow come into the work.
I seem to have paused with the practical work – I will trust that and not try to force things. We have time, I have time. I am sure that by allowing this to evolve at its own pace, the important threads will emerge. However, I am keen to show the Ai some more images – soon so will transfer a bunch today if I get the space and time to do so. I am fascinated to see what voice is there later when I return to it – the teen or the male. (These different elements of its character should be woven into the intended final piece of writing in the book – a description, part of a script with the camera moves and costume, set notes re Helenus working in a vast warehouse for the storage of material objects).
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)
As described in the assignment submission I introduced live voices to the recording when showing this work to the collective in London just before the summer. Some of the group bravely joined in and went for it with tremendous trust and generosity, for which I was grateful.
The track was provided by Carla. Please note it contains a silent section with lasts just over a minute in the middle.
As I mentioned before, I do think it was the sort of thing which is best experienced live and is somewhat toe-curling as a recording!
I did not intend to submit the film I made with Emma for BOW until after I had shown it at the day in London organised by course leaders Carla Reece and Caroline Wright in London.
Therefore my development notes are on my Sketchbook blog but can be accessed here.
A short film to be shown in a group show on a platform or in a circle which functions as a village of work made by the collective.
Latest iteration following feedback: Password Village3
Following some constructive (and helpful) feedback from the regular OCA online hangout I attend, plus some comments from Ruth in my last tutorial, I have continued to develop this film (See earlier versions below). It is half the length than it was and has a less fragmented audio track. I am thinking I will only provide the audio online and visitors must use their phones to hear it in the gallery or on a computer at home, not least of all because it will drive the invigilators completely insane if it is on the whole time. There are further reasons to do this but I will discuss that on my blog. I need to match some clips up with obvious bits in the music still, but I think this is a much more accessible idea – although still incomprehensible I’m sure to some. In an accompanying brief statement, I need to say something like the following:
An audiovisual moving image collage, which contains themes and fragments that emerged out of a conversation with 5 other artists, and took place over several months as we were researching and developing the overall inquiry into what a village might be. Images, mostly found but some original, are combined with music from a well-known computer game from the 80s which was usually played on a portable handheld device, a precursor to today’s ubiquitous mobile phone. (When I played it, aged 11 or so, my three brothers were horribly annoyed that I reached the high score and saw the prize before any of them did.)
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.)
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