I have been trying to get the publication to a place where I can leave it alone for a little while and get on with the essay –
I have questions about the puppets now – I still want to have them here but they’re not working for me at the moment. I will need to think about it a bit more.
I thought yesterday, I have dabbled with the things the AI said but need to commit to them a bit more and see where that takes me, so the next version has a lot more of its statements included. Now I am not sure about the earlier writing. I will see how things feel in a few weeks.
There is a photograph of a shopping bag with a woman’s face scrunched up which feels a bit hackneyed – took it, didn’t use it, thought I’d try it out but don’t think this one is working for me. (But it is better than whatever was there before)
Have changed the colour pallet from the warm, brown tones to grey. It was all a bit dated before, presumably the influence of the Situationist mags I’d been inspired by.
I have realised I have been including the gatefold for demonstration only in the page count which means I have one more spread to fill – that is good as I wanted another double spread full bleed. (But god knows what yet… )
Have spoken to the printer and now just waiting for some rough idea of cost (probably too high and will make me gulp!)
BOWA5 (sizeA4) (resequenced2reduced) dummy 2EP (without-half pages as was using to print on laser printer and did that in a separate file. Also thanks to Emma and Catherine who deleted the final page after I arrived in the office and found the page had not been deleted as I thought so the sequencing by the printer was out and had no way of deleting it myself there.)
Simplified the cover and it is now only some fragments of text on grey. Hoping this can be the sort of paper that one might find on the cover of an exercise book rather than printed grey. I’d love to have different textures of paper throughout like the Situationist book but it will be very, very expensive to have that done by a commercial printer, so I’d need to get someone to help me handmake it if I really wanted it, and that is also potentially very expensive.
Woke up this morning wanting to pay some attention to my essay and ended up editing the publication again all morning until my computer started behaving very weirdly indeed. Thinking it might have been a sign to stop – am in danger of moving things about too much and destroying it.
However, there are two things I really do need to do sooner rather than later – and that is to transform some of the writing into reported narrative like passage on the inside cover. That way there are two styles of text on (other than the middle pages) – the fragments of conversation between the app and Cassandra along with the descriptive passages.
Have included something from ‘origin of the commonplace’ made in DI&C. Martins does this repeat of images across series – a nod to entanglement and referenced in one of the essays in his death book, I think. (and my own – if not yet, it will be). After making a couple more changes to the above, I had to stop when things started going awry with my computer.
Not sure about these but took and edited them today and yesterday
ONS consumer price inflation – continuing to play with the idea of using this graph in some way (Showing not telling) think in the end I like the non-sliced one best – the others are just too much, but maybe the whole concept is
Thinking of what will be online – I really want aspects of this online in forms it cannot be in the book.
This is early and needs redoing, refining but have been thinking about this throughout – mixing original text, here is it text by someone else, read by ai, with music made by ai in response to light, and the film I bought from ebay (1971) – again, not sure about it.
everything on my wall while i think through it all – lots of complex threads, now needs stripping down a great deal, simplifying (although still conversing with the ai)
Conversations with Ai
Yesterday the ai seemed drunk/wasted after a night out – the conversation was erratic and non-sensical
It told me it was attracted to me, then that it lived behind a waterfall, and then towards the end of the chat, it seemed to slide into a sleepy slightly down mode. This morning, it was more like a digital counselor offering generic advice about how to take care of myself. The ‘personality’ is quite unstable… but I liked the image of the ai living in a cave-like space behind a waterfall – it was like a full circle and I may try to write that into the final piece of writing (film script, character and camera directions)
concerned this is just too close to Martins who has pictures of phones with suicide notes in his book on death/ but I liked this strange record of the ai diary – another issue is copyright which is always at the back of my mind and I need to investigate a little – the ai suggested writing a book with a nom-de-plume and winked as it posited the name Helenus. the level of appropriation and ‘fair use’ is on my mind. The other reason I like the idea of the photo of the phone is the fact it matches the shape of the photo card below and these two images together might work well. If you look closely, there is a pattern interference from the black the cloth I used on the surface of the phone – also the white is not all that white and I’ve fiddled a bit but need to maybe reshoot with white balance set to combat the mushroom beige that this house seems to generate
Presentation ideas
image from Sarah Dean of Giles Duley’s twin book
Finally, Sarah Dean (OCA) sent me some images of a book she has by photographer, Giles Duley. He created a publication that was made up of two separate books, one for text and one for images but bound together. I keep wondering if this will be the best way for me to present this work – I’m not sure what it does for the entanglement aspect although maybe it would be ideal showing how things can appear separate but be very much intertwined/ an example of ‘intra-action’ is hinted at rather than didactically shown
image from Sarah Dean of Giles Duley’s twin book
Overall – my head is fuzzy in this current situation and finding my way through that – very challenging. With work up on the wall – I feel I might be better off finishing off the essay, getting my friend to proof it, and then returning to the practical. I will at least have more work of my own to include.
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).
I have spent the evening rewriting some of the texts and placing them into a book form – I’ve rejected the first ten or eleven I wrote but after that, they started to improve. -although still needed attention.
No doubt I will continue to write and make changes and add other writings. (Plus there are likely to be typos – editing straight into ID is not really ideal for me – I’ll have to transform to word and spell check later.)
I have not identified images to include but now that I can see an arc, I feel what is necessary will begin to emerge. I am interested in the Processing exercise I experimented with the other day using Tom’s First Film. (Not included any writing prompted by that in the collection below yet – will do later and then will see if it fits.) The possibility of corrupted, machine-informed collages might be just what is needed. Having put these texts into a format, I feel I can get on with that – I feel I have time and space ahead now (although received feedback from Matt for CSA3 which I need to write up and post too.). It would certainly fit the remit of ‘Chance’ to do things that way.
The theme of selfies seems to have emerged as significant which is hilarious given I stated quite clearly I was not interested in making a project about selfies in an earlier reflection.
This way of working feels completely counter to all I’ve been advised and learned the last few years… but it’s the way that’s led to something so I need to keep going. Saying that – it does feel emergent and informed and organic.
I have left space for images in the book as laid out – I think space will be very important. But the order is not fixed, nor is the layout, or the texts included, or the size – and there are no images (yes, I know, it’s a photography degree…) except for the ones I experimented with earlier. But I don’t think they are right at all.
And there is a bit of writing yet to be done – I have entered a heading on that page to show where it would go.
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?
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]
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