Tag: Cuttings

BOW A3: Almost ready to submit

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

I feel the shape of this element, if not length and content, is moving along. This is like a house that is still waiting for walls and maybe a roof, or plumbing/electricity. I promised Ruth I’d submit something in another 5 days from now (at the study visit last weekend).

Since deciding on the cover I came across a post about Sophie Calle using text before photos – someone at the study visit said they thought of her when looking at my little book. https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/sophie-calle-because

There is much to say about what I still need to do, will reshoot, rewrite (things spring out the minute I see it online) ditch/develop, how the writing might fit or not fit etc. But for now, I am just going to post it and have a think about over the next couple of days. I also know what I want to get hold of or places to go – various items/objects I might try out and see but not sure if I will be able to get some of these things and certainly not within the next five days – but I am attempting to set things up and organise.

This is No. 6 of this particular iteration. When I submit I will add JPGs of various pages/ideas I tried and ditched.

ID book 6

BOW: A3 Today’s​ efforts

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Dummy booklet – have created a dummy to demonstrate what I’m aiming for tomorrow when I attend a study visit run by my BOW tutor. I will make a little video and upload in the morning when there is some daylight to do it with.

Shadow puppets and Processing Managed to shoot the puppets and put them through one Processing thing I learnt while on the course. I like the fact of making shadow puppets – an original moving image narrative device, far older than photography, but requires light – into still images, then animating the stills. Playing with time, back and forth. I suspect I will make a little very slow stop motion with them at some point – it won’t be very long. But it might be good for one of the texts I wrote. Or all of them? Who knows…

The following is all very rough, as playing. I will obviously need to make sure the dimensions of the sketch match the image in future. Below is a rough screen-recording of the Processing sketch and a screenshot of it at the end plus original image.

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Shadow.jpg

 

 

BOW: A3 script rather than a ​manifesto

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 8 Comments

After writing last night, I thought about where I am.

  • Why am I making a book with attempts at still life when I’ve been finding my way with moving image of one sort or another?
  • I definitely want to include some sort of moving image element any installation
  • I wondered if this move away from moving image was promoted by a comment which I felt came with a little jab about the course being a ‘photography degree’.
  • That comment was good though because it consolidated the direction I was going in, and suddenly things started to make sense – a doorway – exploring the boundaries we place around categories of various forms of image-making
  • This reconfiguring of boundaries is exactly what my essay is about, an examination of the ‘cut’. Where do we place boundaries and differentiation? Given the changes to our world, we should not assume anything and so I am looking specifically at the making of images before the broad spectrum of different disciplines emerge. (See my post  – Life After New Media) 
  • When I was an actor I would sometimes stick my script in a book especially if it was a photocopy and then make notes and draw in the booklet. The script would end up being covered in all sorts of doodles.
  • And so, I decided the word manifesto on the cover should be replaced with ‘script’ and the subheading is now scaled right back (see below)
  • This suggests I might/should create the script of ‘cuttings’ and then make some sort of film/performance based on it thereafter (A4/A5)
  • I spent tonight printing what I have so far (although dismissed some of the texts for now) and ordered a handful of images last night too.
  • I have printed on different materials – paper, newsprint, transparency, tracing paper etc.
  • I have a tiny 13.5 x 9.5 book and printed everything to fit on these tiny pages so that I can make a mini-book mock-up, including texts that will fold out. (I guess at least one image should do that too.) See incoherence – page 118 Edgar Martins book, essay by Roger Luckhurst – ‘work to derail the over-coherence any series or display … inevitably imposes’
  • By using different materials I hope I am beginning to ‘artistically’ emulate the Standard Model of Reality. This does feel ‘ridiculous’ and any scientist would probably laugh but by using different materials, different media, layers of meaning and symbolism rather than focusing on one single isolated/discrete object, I hope I somehow addressing the ‘Cartesian habit’.Below: Standard model flow cart, one image of my efforts this evening – a photograph printed on graph paper and a cover currently printed on newsprint and will stick with a found portrait. Will upload a video and shots of the little booklet when it’s made.
  • Finally, the little booklet is a small precious thing. Gold has emerged as a key theme along with brown paper and second-hand objects. Like the themes in the text query and challenge reductionism and commodification.
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BOW: A bit more work

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment
  • I may have secured a way to create an image of film stock (or at any rate a tiny bit of the silver halide crystals) at extremely high magnification on a scanning electron microscope (SEM). This is not as high/deep as a scanning tunnelling microscope but nevertheless exciting. See the difference here. Quoted from the linked article – ‘The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) differs significantly from the SEM. It is capable of imaging objects at ten times the lateral resolution, to 0.1 nanometer. This is well down into the quantum realm.’ I am excited about this and will keep looking to see if it would be possible to look at the atomic level too. If this does happen the images will be for a later iteration as I must wait until half-term to get it sorted.
  • I keep trying to make time to take more images (with my usual bashed up old canon) and really need to  – I may well have a bit of time tomorrow but I don’t yet have the objects I have been trying to gather, so I will use the time to reshoot some of the things I shot the other day (see notes in PDF below  – but needs opening up in Adobe, so see screenshot).
  • I played around a bit with the images I took last week and the text. There are notes beside images, but basically, I need to reshoot, shoot more, work on the writing, make the Processing files I’ve been considering and pull an edit together in the next ten days or so  – plus print something because I can take it along to a study visit this weekend.  And finish off the Part 3 coursework (which won’t take long but needs doing) What a lot to do. Cuttings 1Screen Shot 2020-01-14 at 21.20.23
  • Oh yes, for now, a working title but perhaps it will stick – not sure of the subtitle but the main one seems to encapsulate the project and has a multitude of relevant meanings. Cuttings: manifesto for a digitised life

Some screenshots of combinations I liked when playing around with versions last night.

 

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