BOW A5: further development

May 28, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

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.

BOWA5 (sizeA4) (resequenced3) small

29/5

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.

BOWA5 (sizeA4) (resequenced4)

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.

BOW A4: Plans, reflection, and a bit of a moan

April 22, 2020September 6, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 3 Comments

The work feels a bit stuck right now – everyone has something extraneous to contend with during this weird and frightening time. For some, it’s dreadful loneliness. For others, inertia and fear, uncertainty or anger all combine to make life more difficult than usual. For me, perhaps all those things come into play in one way or another, but the lack of uninterrupted time to focus on my work is challenging and incredibly frustrating. The children need constant help, attention, and feeding. The middle one has been ill for over a month – thankfully now getting back to his usual self; the eldest is a lovely boy but a selfish teen at the same time. I am just grateful for the good in him – there is plenty, so I aim to have realistic expectations, thanking him when he lives up to or exceeds the minimum. The youngest, for now, is doing exceptionally well, considering – but has been more reliant on me than usual for company while his brother was unwell. Both younger boys rely on me to support them with their home-schooling, which to be fair, is pretty light and easy to get through but one does it in the morning, the other in the afternoon. How families without several computers are coping with the school work and parent’s work, I don’t know. We are lucky to have enough tech in the house after I ‘nicked’ my ex husband’s MAC for the boys (with his permission, I might add) some months ago, and school work apps are on that, so they can’t do all their tasks at the same time. Along with things coming in from my part-time job, all of this means having extremely bitty but full-on days and making time for college work – which requires peace, quiet, alone-time for extended periods hard to come by. (Even today while writing this, I have been interrupted by several things going awry in a kid’s zoom session, a phone call from school, an email from another school – and the delivery of the A2 zines which I will now try to sell (yay, they’ve arrived), and have a constant list of things popping onto my head that still need to be done for other parts of life.)

Not having another adult in the house to lean on is always tricky but it’s making things far harder than usual at the moment. A more advanced AI companion than the one I’ve been working with for the BOW project might have served me well during this period…

Nevertheless, I have been using this time to think, while I can’t always get on with practical work. A list of things I need to do and have done:

Setting out my plan

I am going to start the designing part again – from scratch, different dimensions, probably a completely different edit and sequence. I thought about doing a handmade version, but I don’t think I will do that. Instead, I will have a relatively cheap dummy version printed for BOW and aim to offer two versions on a kick starter thing for SYP (and perhaps prints too)
To do that I need to collate all the imagery and text I have
I have been looking back at old posts to see where I’ve dropped valuable ideas along the way and tried to mop them up
Part of collating entails rephotographing things, so, in some cases, I need to print digital versions in order to photograph them. I might also photograph my phone and the phone with the app.
I am aware that this may be deemed appropriation. I was interested in the article about rights and Instagram and think about the reverse – where the power lies between tech and individuals
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/court-rules-photographer-gave-up-licensing-rights-by-posting-instagram-1290170
I have outlined my ideas to one printer so far to ask about advice and suggestions and will report back if and when something comes back.

So – the most pressing thing for me to do next is collate the content – list and rephotograph content where necessary.

While describing the work to others I have written a couple of sentences and paragraphs that I think will be worth holding onto:

My work can be described as a collection of micro-narratives written and edited by me along with a proprietary ai ‘friend’, exploring photographs and consumerism.
I’m currently heading towards the end of the final level of the degree – making a body of work and writing a related extended essay. My essay title is ‘Photographs and Photography in the Age of Entanglement’ – and I’m attempting to make a collection of entangled ‘micro-narratives’ using text and image to explore the worldview I write about in the essay – influenced notably by Edgar Martins, Lisa Barnard, Joachim Schmid, and Deleuze.

Hangout 15th April and printing issues

April 15, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Was good to catch up with others this morning. We heard about Allan and Alan’s essays. I must remember to try and dig out notes to send both and have asked another fellow student for his notes to send one of the Alan’s as they might be relevant.

I discussed the email I’d received from the assessment team, triggered by completing CS A4 and prompting me to put in for assessment. Looking at the deadlines, it would be nuts to go for the July assessment. I could do it at a push under normal circumstances but no way at the moment – every step I make feels incremental but tiny. The lack of headspace is a challenge for all of us, I imagine. And I’m still figuring out how the ai fits with the work so I have put November deadlines in my diary for now and will need to get everything ready for September, which feels much more doable.

I also discussed the plan to reach for a kind of practice book for BOW – perhaps it won’t have the foldouts for example and will be done as inexpensively as possible. Perhaps it will be a handmade concoction like below,

a bigger, slightly more adept version of this:

Dummy book 1008

BOW: A3 dummy booklet

And inspired by this:

melissa_lazuka-song_of_the_cicadas_cover

Melissa Lazuka – Song of the Cicadas

Artist: Melissa Lazuka (born Cleveland, OH, resides Chardon, Ohio)

Self-Published, Ohio

Without essays, pagination or captions

Text: English

Hardcover book, leporello binding, photographs & paper ephemera, hand-made, limited edition 1/1 in a series of 25, USA’

(Stockdale, 2019 – http://www.photobookjournal.com)

I would then focus on creating a small print run with someone like SPBH for SYP and raising the cash to do so through Kickstarter.

This seems to be the way I am heading – I have already started collating the development work into a large scrapbook and could base an actual book on experiments with placing in this. The scrapbook is a place to store things that might not make it to the final and also put various options and copies together.

I think it is still important to have a website to accompany the work where I can share moving image versions and perhaps more text.

Dong this has prompted to me to get to the bottom of colour printing on the Canon Pro-100S which it turns out is notorious for getting colour right.

I have downloaded ICC profiles then had to download the Adobe Colour Printer Utility which is not solving my problems so far – in fact, it’s making more! I could make entirely using book printer mistakes (quite like the idea, actually….)

Screen Shot 2020-04-15 at 15.01.46

I’ve uses the Printer Utilty but it doesn’t seem ideal and even though I indicated the whole image should be on the paper, it printed a detail only – so I guess I need to resize the file I want to print. I’ll get there but the speed at which I do might remain glacial…. (there are constant interruptions which doesn’t help)

a collection of misprints – paper wrong way round, resulting loose ink ‘printed’ onto A4 and one the right way around but only a detail.

BOW A2: Proof

March 26, 2020March 26, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Learned a lot about printing with bleed using ExWHyZed guidelines. I hope it is correct. Will see – added 3cm margin beyond he page at first and wondered why it needed such a big margin of error – doh! Caught my mistake and it now has the suggested 3mm. (Artwork has been verified as all good except for a colour cast – see below)

There are also some minor changes to text and sequence, plus the other changes I mentioned before.

this family too – A5 online with marks proof

I am learning a lot printing this and glad to be doing it with this A2 before embarking on A5. I should have taken each image into photoshop and converted it to black and white rather than just doing it in Lightroom – there is a green cast that I started noticing yesterday as I got it ready and look in Adobe. The whole file will be converted and I have ordered a proof. I will adjust the contrast on darker images once I can see what ones could do with some lighting. I suspect I know which ones but it will be good to see. I’ll need to add a £ to the cost to cover the cost of the proof, but I think its worth it. It will still be low for people.

BOW: A3 script rather than a manifesto

January 15, 2020January 15, 2020 ~ 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.