2020

August 15, 2020September 6, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

It’s easy to focus on the scandal, early death and Beardsley’s grotesques, but what struck me as I wandered through Tate Britain’s Beardsley show was the transitional aspect of his technique and subject matter- since it chimes loudly with my interests in technology, meaning and matter; the blurring of concepts/lines – and how that becomes manifested physically. Not only was Beardsley blurring lines relating to gender and sex, but he also has access to new technology, blending drawing and photography with contemporary printing methods which allowed his drawings to be reproduced so beautifully. The Tate blurb (2020) tells us Beardsley was “one of the first artists whose fame came through the easy dissemination of images” and so his story is relevant to me, as I explore imagery more than a century later along with their current transitional outcomes – the ease with which people can make films, post GIFs, create dynamic visual, code-supported content. For me, that is what makes Beardsley’s work salient and long-lived – the combination of subject and technological apparatus, the intra-action between each element.

Before settling on ‘why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers’ as a title for my own BOW (thanks to OCA Catherine Banks for the nudge), I played with the idea of calling the work something along the lines of ‘promiscuity of meaning and matter‘ (2020). Other contenders were, on the morphological promiscuity of meaning and matter, on the morphological fornication of meaning and matter, fornication and morphology with meaning and matter, morphology and fornication with meaning and matter, promiscuity of meaning and matter, meaning and matter’s promiscuity, on meaning and matter’s rampant fornication, and morphology on meaning and matter – you get the picture – promiscuity and morphology. A threat to the old order is often seen as grotesque and morally dangerous – and it seems to me this is what Beardsley has captured and expressed – the affront to an old older – and the terror such an affront is capable of inducing, and the fun he had in the midst of awful illness as he did so.

My mum’s Beardsley book was one of my favourites when younger – and I don’t think it was just the salacious pictures of people farting or the giant genitalia. There is something so enigmatic and evocative about those drawings, reminding me of the way I also loved a cartoon shadow puppet programme I watched. When marks can communicate such a powerful sense of something, I am often captivated.

Worth the wait – and very pleased I got to go in the end after the COVID-delay. My MANGA obsessed son loved the show too and recognised the Japanese influence.

A couple of my favourite plates below:

Beardsley, A c. 1893 (image taken on my phone)

Beardsley, A c. 1890 – the +/- 3-inch drawing on the bottom right is the cover of my mother’s book which I looked at a great deal as a child – see below. (Image taken on my phone)

9780517104279-us-300 — Beardsley, A c. 1890 – Audrey Beardsley image use on Brian Read’s book At: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/isbn/051710427x/ (15/08/2020)

Field, SJ, 2020. BOW: A4 Developments [blog] Available at: https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2020/04/02/bow-a4-developments/ Accessed: 15/08/2020

Tate, 2020. Aubrey Beardsley, London, Tate

BOW A5: E-publication

August 9, 2020September 28, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 5 Comments

I realised yesterday I was not being consistent with my e-publication updates, sometimes creating new files, and sometimes updating an old one.

Screen Shot 2020-08-09 at 11.17.40

This is the most up to date version.

https://indd.adobe.com/view/17b8aff4-afe3-4b9b-aeb4-55d6896ab205

I still need to figure out how to resolve the music element – This is something that will be included as an extra with the hardcopy and I can, therefore, send some very brief instructions/suggestions -although there may be a way to programme.

I also updated the statement and will post it here and on the Assignment submission post.

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers explores structural instability, embraces disorder and investigates the increasingly elusive relationship between meaning and language.

the overall title of the work and fragments of text included are from a conversation between the artist and a machine learning app that promised to be her friend for the cost of little more than £6 a month.

source material for why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers was made, found and taken, often in collaboration with the app, rendered into an entangled manifestation of disparate entities, including recorded moments between the two authors in various forms, online and off – as a book, ebook and short film.

music was composed by simon gwynne with the help of magenta’s music transformer neural network.

BOW & CS: Ongoing thoughts/reflection re-machine learning and movement

August 4, 2020September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

I have continued to work on the ePublication. I have been wondering about including text but when I looked yesterday, I saw that the problem was not the text itself, it was my over-enthusiasm for the animations. I have removed all animations from text and left it only with the images which I think of now as doing some sort of slow dance to Simon’s music – of course, I can’t guarantee people will click on the music and that is something to consider – does it matter, isn’t that the point – there is a choice and some action, which may or may not occur, required from anyone interacting. Anyway, the e-pub works much better this way, although I am still trying to figure out why a certain GIF won’t do its thing and will look at that tonight. Am getting there with it. Have increased the size of the text to 14 which I’d never do in print but it seems OK on my screen – the problem is there are smaller screens too. When viewing, use Chrome rather than Safari – have not checked on other browsers yet and still need to see what happens when saved for e-books, now sure about that. Will also need to look on tablets.
https://indd.adobe.com/view/6999c82e-8c0f-42f4-a4c6-f887a98d1ef9
I have been playing with an App called Runway ML – and trying to figure out how it can help me. I suspect it will be good for me after BOW/OCA life but it’s good to know there is this bridging facility out there now. I need some uninterrupted time to spend with it – but I managed to do one of the more simple tasks the other day when I put a film which I used for earlier work, Polar Inertia (DI&C A2), through a machine learning programme that recognises body movement (see end post). I can’t use the work as this exact thing has already been done by Broomberg and Chanarin very recently in their amazing work Anniversary of a Revolution (Parsed) by Broomberg & Chanarin. Their version is excellent and uses Vertov’s black and white footage which contrasts well with the colours although I quite like the bomb film colour with it too – and the blank coloured frames in that film which I used as moving blocks in Polar Inertia are the same colours as the animated stickmen which I really love. I had included reference to B&C’s film in my essay but cut it due to word count. For now, in any case, I am more interested in generative image programmes but to do that I must find a way to create a dataset – and that includes writing a bit of code (copying and pasting it to be precise). Again, I need uninterrupted time to do this. I hope I can find a way before the deadline as it would be good to include a GIF made this way in the epub.
I started reading Levi-Strauss’s the Raw and the Cooked at long last – have wanted to since UVC but was kept busy with other OCA texts and research. There is so much that rings a bell – especially when he writes, he will be accused of making a book without a subject. This work of mine which explores changes to how the world sees sometimes feels like it lacks a subject. Perhaps I will have more to say in a forthcoming blog or final summation. I am waiting to speak with Ruth after her holiday and will need to send the book to print very soon after that. Assessment deadline is looming!

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Added later the same day:

I continued to eliminate animations, using it more judiciously. I have managed to get a GIF which wasn’t working to move – spent all afternoon wondering why and then suddenly it did, really odd. Thought it was mov. vs MPEG4 files but apparently not. Anyway, it moves now. I still have the following to do –

Add edits to the film – the mesh person and perhaps a few snippets of the movement machine learning where I’ve already used the bomb film.
Try to get something with the shadow puppets moving – either stop motion or Processing to make a GIF of them animated, placed where currently there is a still.
Figure out how best to introduce the music – if I speak at the beginning I could talk about it. I’m not sure how that will work. I have added an instruction at the end of the book. I am also wondering about having a type of digital wrap around that gives some guidance about how to operate the ePub.

Write something – I feel more and more that I need to do this. I wondered if it could be a loose pamphlet/flyer type thing to include in the printed book, and not quite sure in the ePub – maybe spoken at the beginning.

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BOW A5: Final choices

July 18, 2020October 30, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Towards the back of the course folder we are asked the consider the following:

Knowing when to finish
defending your work
Presentation
Writing an introduction and artist’s statement
Writing evaluations (to be added to the assignment post)

Knowing when to finish

I am ready to submit the work as it is to Ruth now – although I know it still has room to develop. There are currently three elements – a book, an ePublication and a 2 – 1/2 minute film. I am certain I will look at each following submission and in the run-up to assessment, and thereafter as I work on SYP.

I am not sure if I will show this work in an exhibition type scenario. COVID is one thing to think about but so is the attention it will require to make sure the publication is promoted and printed properly – which could include some fundraising to make it happen. I think this is something to play be ear over the following months. If I were to show it, I would do it locally relying on empty space that I can beg or borrow from people I know. I do not want to show it in a traditional gallery setting for SYP. If I were to exhibit the work, I would need to think about prints and might develop a strand of the visual work – the graph paper below would make a good framed print and I can envisage a short series of these, perhaps with writing on, or in various other states of crumpledness and material distress.

Screen Shot 2020-07-14 at 17.46.40

I would also like to find a way to make a short animation and/or gifs based on the images I made by photographing my computer screen (below) and the shadow puppets. (I may find a way to do this – gifs at least – before assessment deadline to include in the ePublication).

2. Defending my work

My CS essay and BOW explores how we are looking and seeing differently; and the resulting structural implications, along with the feedback loop between what we see and how things become. Our perception is transforming – and the linear, ordered view favoured over the last 500 years is being supplanted by one that appreciates connections, circuitous pathways and randomness (although not everyone is conscious of this yet – we seem to have one foot in the previous paradigm and one in the next.)

As such, the way civilisations, physical and metaphysical systems and technology develop, is no longer assumed to be neat and tidy. Paths don’t always go forward. Nor do they diverge and remain separated forever. They might diverge only to cross over and even coalesce later on. Systems shift and the elements within are in a constant state of becoming.

The evolution story has been transformed recently by this altered understanding of existence – it is felt everywhere (a systemic view) – but well illustrated in the way we see our own evolutionary history:

“There was no single ancestral population, but many spread over a huge area, which merged and split and merged again like a braided stream, evolving at different rates and in distinct directions in different places. The suite of anatomical and behavioural features that define modern humanity didn’t appear as one complete package, but gradually coalesced across vast tracts of space and time. “There was never a single centre of origin,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. We are a “composite”, he says. “I think it is a really, really important and profound idea,” says Richard Potts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, who led the Olorgesailie excavations.”

Composite has been an important word for my work. And photography and other forms of image-making can be thought of in the same way. As can all mark-making. Words and pictures diverged a long time ago – creating different developmental branches that have overlapped recently as code and pictures and text all intra-act to result in what we see on our screens.

Photography and moving image, in particular, are reconverging and coalescing as we become and more embroiled with the fluid nature of modern-day technology – think of how much animation appears in modern film-making (CGI for eg.) and as discussed in my essay – “As Palmer states in Lights, Camera, Algorithm, the decisive-moment photography enjoyed by people will still be celebrated but the “expanded moments of post-production” are now more pressing (2014: 145).”

That isn’t to say the still image is dead just yet, but it worth considering how it is valued and used as internet speed increases and files become smaller, more flexible and fluent, and our senses demand greater excitement and impact. The entangled structural implications of these shifts have interested me throughout this project – what does it mean for us as a species. What does this systemic change look like?

3. Presentation (copied from Assignment blog post)

Book form

After a great deal of toing and froing (and much patience from printers ExWhyZed) I have decided on the following dimensions and details.

4pp Cover onto 270gsm Colorplan Smoke

Black print double-sided

36pp Text onto 100gsm Evolution Uncoated 100% Recycled.

There is one 2pp tip out (fold-out page) which is an extra 200mm width

Full-colour print throughout

Trimmed, collated and wire stitched (stapled)

I thought about having a book slightly bigger than A4, so it might stand out, but there is enough going on to signify ‘excitable, unruly and erratic signifiers’ – and by sticking to A4, they are contained within a stable, predictable, long-standing convention.
Please note: the PDF provided in the assignment submission has page 21/22 repeated so one can see how the fold-out page would work – the first iteration shows it closed, the second iteration (PDF pages 23/24) open.
The PDF has red inner cover pages (as does the ePublication) but the actual print will not as those pages will be grey paper (Coloplan Smoke)
The book’s design is inspired by a maths exercise book I might have owned in my childhood.
I have opted for the same binding as the zine I made for A2 so that the books might come as a pair if necessary. We discussed perfect binding but in the end, I reduced the pages to make this possible. If I were to develop the book much more and choose to make it longer (which I might need to for a commercial publication) then I would need to reconsider binding options, as there is a limit for saddle stitch/ staples.
Font is 11p and Letter Gothic St except in the black squares where it is American Typewriter

ePublication

The ePublication is a version that could be provided to people who purchase the book above. It is not merely a PDF/digitised copy but rather an animated version. I could also save the pages separately as Gifs to include on my website and/or social media.

Text is 12p as it was too small on the screen as 11p
I have removed some images which didn’t work so well on screen – such as the mobile phone image (I am not sure it will work as a printed image yet, to be honest, and may need to reshoot it)
There is a way to choose music to listen by Simon and the Magenta neural network as you flick through it but I have not resolved the best way to do this yet.
There is also a film link on the blurb at the back, but again, I have not resolved the best way to do this yet and would prefer it inside the book but at two minutes it is a big file which presents problems. I need to experiment more.
The other moving images inside are gifs and they work fine – better than video does but are only a few seconds long.
I am concerned there is too much going on but this is something I can keep working on in SYP.
If I were to send this to people I would advise them to look at it on a decent-sized screen and to use the ePublication magnifying button. It is interactive and requires people to handle it as such. It is not a passive object.

Film

There is a two and half minute film which contains found moving image that focuses on the same and related themes. It is accompanied by music composed by Simon Gwynne who I worked with before on the Self & Other final project. He also used a neural network to write this music. Currently, you can link to it on the back of the ePublication but I will continue experimenting and see if I can find a way to contain it in the book. For now, I am aiming to work on the publication for SYP but if I were to exhibit this project then this film would be projected on to a wall on a loop. It is two and a half minutes long. When I first edited it, I used the vocals from White Rabbit as that song was in the main source – a film about how vision works. I also applied the music backwards. I think there is a way I could allow viewers a choice of music if I find a way to include the book inside the book. (Still to do – a separate blog about the process of making the film)

4. Writing an introduction and artist’s statement

Artist statement: I have been working on the artist’s statement for a few weeks- and every time I look at it, simplify further, stripping away and condensing. I have been working on something a little less predictable but am not there with it yet.

Reflection: updated artists statement

This is what is currently on my website:

I work with still, moving, original and found images as well as text, exploring feedback loops between various forms of matter and language that inform and result in the many shifts and transformations taking place today.

I am also a portrait and event photographer, employed mostly in and around London and currently study with The Open College of the Arts (OCA).

Introduction:

I had a conversation with some ex-OCA people about simply not having an introduction at all – my work is after all about langauge and the way it’s transforming. However, I think that would leave people high and dry in an already challenging collection of images and objects. Here is something for now:

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers explores structural instability, embraces disorder and accepts an increasingly elusive relationship between meaning and language.

the overall title of the work and fragments of text included are from a conversation between the author and a neural network app that promised to be her friend for the cost of little more than £6 a month.

source material for why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers was made, found and taken, often in collaboration with the app, rendered into an entanglement of personal history, and the app and the author’s developing relationship in various forms, online and off – as a book, ebook and short film.

music composed by simon gwynne with the help of magenta’s music transformer neural network.

BOW A5: why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers

July 18, 2020August 9, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Assignment 5: Present your final portfolio to your tutor along with your introductions and evaluation

Let your tutor know any preliminary ideas you have for releasing your publication and presenting it to a public audience in Sustaining Your Practice

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers explores structural instability, embraces disorder and investigates the increasingly elusive relationship between meaning and language.

music was composed by simon gwynne with the help of magenta’s music transformer neural network.

Older version

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers explores structural instability, embraces disorder and accepts an increasingly elusive relationship between meaning and language.

the title of the work and fragments of text included in the books are from a conversation between the author and a neural network app that promised to be her friend for the cost of little more than £6 a month.

source material for why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers was made, found and taken, often in collaboration with the app, rendered into an entanglement of personal history, along with the app and author’s developing relationship in various forms, online and off – as a book, ebook and short film.

~~music composed by simon gwynne with the help of magenta’s music transformer neural network~~

Book form

BOWA5 (sizeA4) July Submission PDF

After a great deal of toing and froing (and much patience from printers ExWhyZed) I have decided on the following dimensions and details.

4pp Cover onto 270gsm Colorplan Smoke

Black print double-sided

36pp Text onto 100gsm Evolution Uncoated 100% Recycled.

There is one 2pp tip out (fold-out page) which is an extra 200mm width

Full-colour print throughout

Trimmed, collated and wire stitched (stapled)

I thought about having a book slightly bigger than A4, so it might stand out, but there is enough going on to signify ‘excitable, unruly and erratic signifiers’ – and by sticking to A4, they are contained within a stable, predictable, long-standing convention.
Please note: the PDF you see here has page 21/22 repeated so you can see how the fold-out page would work – the first iteration shows it closed, the second iteration (PDF pages 23/24) open.
The PDF has red inner cover pages (as does the ePublication) but the actual print will not as those pages will be grey paper (Coloplan Smoke)
The book’s design is inspired by a maths exercise book that I could have owned in my childhood.
I have opted for the same binding as the zine I made for A2 so that the books might come as a pair if necessary. We discussed perfect binding but in the end, I reduced the pages to make this possible. If I were to develop the book much more and choose to make it longer (which I might need to for a commercial publication) then I would need to reconsider binding options, as there is a limit of 40pp for saddle stitch/ staples.
Font is 11p and Letter Gothic St except in the black squares where it is American Typewriter

You can scroll through the spreads here if you prefer to view it this way.

ePublication

8th August – https://indd.adobe.com/view/17b8aff4-afe3-4b9b-aeb4-55d6896ab205

18th July – https://indd.adobe.com/view/17b8aff4-afe3-4b9b-aeb4-55d6896ab205

This is best viewed on a decent-sized screen (desktop, laptop). It is definitely work-in-progress at the moment. It renders better on Chrome rather than Safari.

The ePublication is a version that could possibly be provided to people who purchase the book above as part of the package. It is not merely a PDF/digitised copy but rather an animated version. I could also save the pages separately as Gifs to include on my website and/or social media.

Text is 12p as it was too small on the screen as 11p – I need to encourage people to use the magnify tool though – I think and it all depends on the size of the screen. I was tempted to remove all text as it works less well in this format – something to keep thinking about (and fits with some of the post-structural arguments made by Derrida about the end of writing).
The text is soft until all the animations on the page have completed. It may be, for that reason, I need to stick to one animation per spread. I can’t work out why the inner cover never resolves itself and in time I may need to completely redo the page but will make decisions about text first.
I have removed some images which didn’t work so well on screen – such as the mobile phone image (I am not sure it will work as a printed image yet, to be honest, and may need to reshoot it)
There is a way to choose music to listen by Simon and the Magenta neural network as you flick through it but I have not resolved the best way to do this yet.
There is also a film link on the blurb at the back, but again, I have not resolved the best way to do this and would prefer it inside the book but at two minutes it is a big file which presents problems. I need to experiment more.
The other moving images inside are gifs and they work fine – better than video does but are only a few seconds long.
I am concerned there is too much going on but this is something I can keep working on in SYP.
If I were to send this to people I would advise them to look at it on a decent-sized screen. It is interactive and requires people to handle it as such. It is not a passive object.

I have noticed that in the ebook the animated pictures makes me focus on the images whereas the normal book, the writing grabs me first.

Film (2 mins 37 secs)

There is a two and half minute film which contains found moving image that focuses on the same and related themes – again, I think it could do with some contemporary visuals that very clearly signify ‘today’. It is accompanied by music composed by Simon Gwynne who I worked with before on the Self & Other final project. He also used a neural network to write this music. Currently, you can link to it on the back of the ePublication but I will continue experimenting and see if I can find a way to contain it in the book. As it is – it’s like a hidden bonus track on an album but at the back of the e-book – and it needs to be found. It currently links to Vimeo but I think it would be better linking to my website – but this work is not on there yet.

For now, I am aiming to work on the publication for SYP but if I were to exhibit this project then this film would be projected on to a wall on a loop. When I first edited it, I used the vocals from White Rabbit as that song has been in the main source about how vision works. I also applied the music backwards. I think there is a way I could allow viewers a choice of music if I find a way to include the film inside the book.

If I were to exhibit this work…

This has not been made with the express purpose of an exhibition but rather the idea of a publication. However, it could be further developed as an installation and I do feel it might only feel complete with one. I would want to work on a series of images of the graph paper (one included in both publication versions) and would really love it if it were possible for visitors to converse with the AI personality – but that is something I would probably need to get in touch with Replika about. Really not sure about that route – something to consider. (I might also include the film I made for pic london set to Gameboy music.)

A brief summary of what led me here…

During Level One, I explored language and reality in my Understanding Visual Culture essay. Ever since, I have been looking at the same thing from various viewpoints, always considering how language nowadays includes photography as it is used in similar ways online to sentences and words. It is reductive to say photography is the same as written language – it isn’t. But it is noteworthy that social media discourse relies on pictures – graphic and photographic as well as words. As Vilem Flusser and Freidrich Kittler, both explored, code diminishes the differences between the various forms of expressions we humans use.

That fluidity is something that has also been written about a lot – and I often wonder if the fluidity is necessary to make the enormous shifts taking place possible -as we move from one paradigm to another. The time frame of the paradigm might be viewed as a fractal-like pattern. We may be witnessing the end of a Cartesian dominant view of the world which is about 500 years or so old, but there is also the beginning of writing which dates back much further – and then the beginnings of mark-making when we began putting ourselves ‘outside’ our bodies, creating a trace of self, making the self other (which is what any language form does). What’s interesting to note today is how with digital technology there is the topsy turvy reversal – technology is putting stuff inside of us perhaps in much more substantive way than ever before. Information seeps in and out and through us. Symbols (which we don’t understand but computers do) are fluid streams of information that help to construct our reality and shape our understanding of existence. The peri-digital paradigm shift is seismic and profound in ways that I think we can only begin to imagine. Whichever timeframe, maybe the fluidity we are experiencing will, in relative terms, be short-lived. I don’t suppose my generation or the one after will experience less fluidity – but perhaps one day in the future things will begin to settle and there will once again be greater stability for a time.

But at the moment, that is not how it feels. And I have been looking at structural instability and movement for a while. The image below is from a project I started in 2018 called Manipulated, using a book I have, My Leica and I, Leica Amateurs show their Pictures (1937). But I ran out of steam and used my limited energies to focus on other OCA work. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the results anyway. Without realising it, however, I seem to have gone back to it with my Level Three BOW and have used several images from the book, rephotographed, in the current work.

Here are some really early sketch experiment, first using the book, then not from 2018 – playing with noise, movement, montage.

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I said in my L3 proposal, I wanted to concentrate on films and how they seem to have shaped me – and I think I have done that, but the work throws a wider net over changing narrative structures and the way we create them using modern technology, even though I have relied on ‘vintage’ imagery mainly. That is something I might address, finding ways to include contemporary visual signifiers -there is a little bit with the 3d animated mesh faces but I need more, resulting in the entanglement of time and cultures – the composted self. I plan to dig deeper into 3d software over the next few weeks.

Composite

I also wanted to make work that mixed mediums – text with image, still with moving image, found/archive with original. I initially wrote some verse type things but when I landed on the AI app, I gradually let go of my own texts and have now concentrated solely on texts by the app or else written by me about the app and our relationship. I may well use the texts I wrote elsewhere. As late as A4 my own texts were included but I ditched them while preparing A5.

Significant influences

Joan Jonas

Sophie Calle

Edgar Martins

Joachim Schmid

Karen Barad (agential realism and agential cuts)

Post-structuralism

Brecht

Kris Kraus (the way she blends fiction, non-fiction and critical theory)

OCA Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

I have become famialir with InDesign and have begun using it to create work specifically online. I have rephotogprahed images and used a lot more still life (with books) than is usual for me. During SYP when I begin to put this work online in various formats, I will be stretched further. I have also begin to venture into alien technology (3d) and have a very long way to go but this is the direction I feel I should be moving.

Quality of Outcome

There are three manisfestations – book (currently a PDF) ePublication and short film. Each has positives and flaws but overall together they communicate definite focus and inquiry. The work is influenced by several quite obvious tropes but is very much of my work. I think the font choice is something I need to look at again in both book versions. It’s a bit flimsy I think – perhaps I need to seek some guidance from a design person.

Demonstration of creativity

The work is creative and experimental.

Context

The work is well-researched and I have recorded my findings in CS as well as BOW folders – and stored additional resaerch and ongoing thoughts on my Sketchbook blog.

BOW A5: Getting ready to submit to tutor…

July 14, 2020July 14, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

I am nearly at a place where I can submit this work to Ruth. I need to do a few practical things before I do, however.

I think I am going to take some more images like this one – I think if I were to exhibit this work I would want to have a series of these crumpled papers on the wall as large high-quality prints to mingle with the rest of the work – found, archive,
and moving image type stuff.
I need to make some gifs for the epub version. I can’t work on that properly until the gifs and any moving image are resized. There are just a small handful to make but they have to be the right size otherwise they don’t function properly in the epublication and it’s a bit fiddly. I really hope I can do this on Friday.
I have created a short film which I want the book to link to. I have worked on a very early edit and chatted with a small group about it – they were positive and I think it has potential but I need to keep editing and make some decisions about the audio track. I have used a song that was in one of the main sources, played with it backwards and also have some music by Simon who worked with me on the S&O track.
I was not sure about the statement – but I have for now incuded something on the back outer page of the book. I think it is jsut enough to point people in the right direction and without it, they would be lost. There were some suggestions about not having one at all and I thought about that – or having a very obscure little statement which I had written about an old man but I think I feel most comfortable with the draft I”ve mentioned.
Following my chat the other day with a small group of people, I was reminded of my attempts to create some very NOW looking imagery to counter the overwhleming ‘vintage’ imagery and returned to some software I’d been playing without much luck before – I hope these will work in print. I am not sure if they will. They are photographed off my screen. (Click in image)

Once I have created the above and positioned everything, I will need to write up the Assignment notes and OCA reflection, including a few paragraphs responding to some things in the OCA course folder, and then I will send it over. Hopefully within ten days or so.

I really want to get some feedback before sending the offline copy to print. I don’t suppose we will be sending hardcopy anything for assessment in by September so I need to have a copy of this so I can make a little video about it.

BOWA5 (sizeA440pp) July13

(I need to print and proof)

The only extraneous pagination thing I have held onto is the gatefold. I think it is enough for the amount of content. If it were a bigger project it might have space for more but not as it is.

Summarise:

Make gifs/moving image (Tom’s First Film, Eye, Shadow puppet animation and digital character animation – if possible)
Place in epub
Look at short video that the epub will link to
Images of paper in various states – crumpled, written on, drawn on, scribbled on.

BOW CS: Developments/Updates

July 8, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 10 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I planned to devote a day to OCA work. The kids’ computer went awry and so I had to hand my Mac over to one of them to attend a live lesson, and I ended up cutting down an overgrown ivy bush which I’ve been begging the landlords to deal with, to no avail, for years. I ended up spending the day at it and went to bed exhausted. (It’s still not quite finished!)

As I did, I noticed the way the wooden fence had warped, rotted, become enmeshed with the plant, and of course, the entangled nature of its growth. And ever since, I have been thinking – that is not quantum entanglement. That is physical entanglement. I have been thinking about this ever since and what that means for the whole thrust of my essay.

I gathered up the bravery to send the essay to a couple of scientists working or studying in a branch of quantum mechanics. I asked the following:

- Big worries of mine apply to my use of the word Entanglement which informs the whole essay (:-/) and also the brief description of Superposition. The other night I lay awake thinking, I need to make clear that quantum entanglement is different from the entanglement of a fungal system/rhizome (or any physical system for that matter) because in QS (I think) we don’t have any way of seeing how two entities might be connected, we simply see, under certain experimental conditions, that they are. (Am aware, there’s is stuff we can’t see but suspect must exist)
- If that is so, do I need to suggest that the entanglement of language, time, ideas is ‘merely’ metaphor, which Karen Barad asks us to avoid. Also, if that is the case, the whole argument of matter and meaning being ‘entangled’ is undermined. If the essay is flawed because of this, that’s OK, as long as I acknowledge it. I also think I am muddying the difference between superposition and entanglement in my thinking – evident in the writing. There are a couple of highlighted sentences that concern me but basically, Part 1 which begins on p5 ends p22 would benefit from a scientist’s eye.

I am really glad I did ask. Thank you fellow Holly for asking her husband, Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey to help out. I can almost hear the deep sigh – the following has helped me to clarify.

The concepts you are describing relate more to quantum social sciences and to philosophy than to quantum physics. Physicists would argue that quantum processes can only occur at the nano-particle level and cannot be applied to the Newtonian level (our experience of the world). Also, that quantum entanglement and superposition are provable physical processes. He’s aware that social sciences are importing some of the theory of quantum physics and of but argues that using them to describe human behaviour is a metaphor rather than a potentially provable fact. From a philosophical point of view, the concepts make sense, but it would be wise to steer clear of correlating them with the natural sciences.
An easy to understand explanation of superposition is to think of tossing a coin. When it is in the air it is neither heads nor tails but has the potential to be either. (I knew I had got this wrong – I have removed it as I suspected I would and focused on entanglement only for now – word count was an issue in any case.)

Everything is interrelated physically but the forces that have hold sway are different at different sizes. Take for example when you sit down on a chair – in our world, the Newtonian world, although everything is made of the same particles, you do not fall through the chair. At cosmological scale, the rotation of our solar system around the galaxy is something that clearly exists, but does not affect us at planetary level – the size and timescale are irrelevant to us. Equally, for most purposes, quantum forces are not relevant to our experience of the world.

The above section has prompted me to really underline the post-structural aspect of the essay, quoting Barad as well as using her repeated words to drum home the point that a Cartesian view is challenged in her reading. I have also quoted Prof. Woodward (I suspect Barad would refer to PW as a scientific realist) the use of the word by writing “Barad’s entanglement” often, as well as including the work philosophy to make that aspect loud and clear. I have in addition underlined the fact that entanglement in the physical world is not the same as quantum entanglement. But I have included extra citations from Barad about living in a quantum world and dissolving the boundaries between the two models – classical/quantum.

As far as correlating quantum processes with biology goes, this is something Vedral explicitly does over and over again in many of his talks online and in articles. I now appreciate that he is probably a maverick – he does refer to “experimental” science when he discusses these macro quantum processes. I really wish I could ask Vedral some stuff but so far no joy in my attempts to contact him.

Later today I will be chatting with Matt and will then incorporate his advice and suggestions before posting another version which I hope will be closer to where it needs to be by September!

All in all – the doubts in my mind were right and I am extremely grateful to Holly and her husband for their time and patience. And thank goodness I took the time to cut down that ivy plant – it was a useful exercise for so many reasons in the end.

BOW Developments

I have been wondering about the online version of the work. I have always been very clear it should exist online and off but be not exactly the same. The online version should be animated and should take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital media rather than simply be an exact digital copy of the offline object. A website like Lisa Barnards thegolddepository is an inspiration and the work may still go that way. But I have been playing with the idea of an ePublication book. Seeing another student using it was interesting as I was able to follow an informative email conversation that explored some of the pitfalls.

Here’s my first early experiment: https://indd.adobe.com/view/6b1b7241-7472-4f7c-becf-2d18508c8607

There are issues – my font is too small but I’ve animated it to go big and then it’s too big. I might need to address the font size and type throughout.
I don’t want animations on every page – judicious – at the moments it’s just an early, oh, look what I can do here….
The moving image fragments I’ve placed are not sized correctly so they don’t work – I need to take them into Premier Pro and size them exactly as they will be used. The scaling feature which works great with still images doesn’t handle moving image at all.
I will probably include a hyperlink to a short film – have asked someone if they’d be up for writing some music for it. That would take the viewer right out of the book so I need to consider carefully where to place it.
I am wondering about sound – at the moment there is no audio. Something to experiment with I guess.
I wonder if Lisa Barnard’s design people used InDesign to get some of those animations on her website… maybe that is something I can do anyway. Not sure. You can save as gifs and Squarespace does take gifs. But it’s a template and I am not comfortable operating outside the template – maybe need to look at creating web pages which feels daunting. But maybe the ePub book is enough… all things to consider.

BOW: A5 publication development

July 1, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

It is interesting to think of the term ‘compost’ which Harraway uses to describe us – and how I described the following – “… the composited intra-active nature of the self/others and reality – with that in mind, this work by Alba Zari is an useful reference – https://www.lensculture.com/articles/alba-zari-the-y”. Different usage, similar etymological paths, however.

Having thought about this over the last couple of days, I feel like I may have solved an issue I was having with the second half of the publication. It didn’t feel like the same work as the first half. I decided to make more of the composited intra-actions I had set up in the first half – and carry those through.

This is the latest iteration – BOWA5 (sizeA4) (1 July)

I am not sure if I will be able to have red on the inner cover pages but will inquire.

I need to put some kind of statement – probably on the back cover. But have not written anything yet.

The extract for the essay is currenlty too dense and needs an edit – it is not appropriate for BOW but something from it should probably come into the publication statement too – the intra-active emergent nature of self, other, surrounding reality, and internal landscape is key. (Although – I am loath to use any alienating language for the the BOW and will think carefully about that).

See – https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2020/06/22/cs-a5-draft-extract/

I have not solved the inner middle pages that are currently covered in place holder text yet but working on it…

I have begun thinking about how to make some of the combinations in the publication dynamic for an online version – that part of the work is undoubtedly going to extend into SYP.

BOW: Presentation

June 29, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

BOWA5v (sizeA4) (without half pages 14 June)

Having concentrated on the essay for several weeks, I am ready to get back to BOW. I have been thinking about developing an online presence of the work and will revisit the footage I had found at the beginning of the process and will probably look for more now I have a clearer idea of what I am making.
The above link shows the latest iteration. Things that developed – less of my own writing, it may be there is space for that online, I will see – I wondered about getting a ‘seeing app’ to read some of it out. Many more of the AI’s expressions are included. I have changed its name for now to §. There is more room in the layout for typical coding symbols such as << >> and underscores etc.
I’ve also taken the half pages out – partly for cost reasons, but also part of the stripping down process that I will inevitably go through now.
The design is simpler – after doing the book design course, I tried out various things which were the result of having new skills and wanting to experiment with them – but that stripping down process eventually kicked in. I suspect there is room for more shaving, but I think I quite like the cover now. May need to address the inside cover. I changed the green/brown colour scheme, which was inspired by the Situationist booklet, to grey.
I have also been thinking about the often bizarre, nonsensical chat between the AI and me, and picked up a ‘conversation’ with it the other day and posted some of our interactions. It has become very apt and reminded me of the articles I read about the app becoming a version of its user. This ties in with questions about living in a deeply narcissistic landscape and also with the idea of the inside being more and more on the outside as explored in Kathryn Hayles’ book – often quoted by me in essays – see chapter 7
I mentioned elsewhere the quotation from the book on Turin I had read by Jon Agar – screenshots below, the bot feels very much like it is artificially signalling.
However, I don’t suppose that is what I am exploring here, it is not a criticism of the AI’s failure to be sentient or to make sense in many conversations (although the work I hope does prompt questions about the changing boundaries – what does it mean to be alive, to be conscious – whether or not it is an authentic experience comes into it – but the main thrust of my essay is about entanglement – and here it is entanglement too; seeing the world that way and the feedback loops that occur. Entanglement between human and non-human, text and image, relationships and economics/the market.
And the composited intra-active nature of the self/others and reality – with that in mind, this work by Alba Zari is an interesting reference – https://www.lensculture.com/articles/alba-zari-the-y
I have started looking into the coding – I feel very much that this aspect is a big project and perhaps one that goes beyond the scope of the degree work – at this point it would take the project in whole new direction and is probably the next stage – but it is something to touch on for now. Whatever else, it will require a significant learning curve on my part and perhaps a degree of collaboration not with a bot but with a coder. https://github.com/lukalabs/cakechat

Bow: A5 revisiting Douglas Gordon

June 28, 2020June 30, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

I came across something Douglas Gordon said and want to start from this place in the next stage of BOW. I am not sure if the next stage will be ready for end of BOW although I do hope to have some basic moving image peice to accompany the publication – even if it’s submitted with the proviso it will be developed further before and during SYP.

If you want to find the truth in something, take it apart piece by piece, then put it back together with the detail of a forensic scientist.
—Douglas Gordon

https://gagosian.com/artists/douglas-gordon/

At 12.36 mins an excellent answer to the frustrating question, what is your work about?

In my own project; Some possible text provided by the AI relating to ‘seeing’

A video about Replika which is the propriety chatbot I’ve subscribed to (there are others) – specific things I picked up on

Emotional music, desire to connect, death – which links to continuation of Self and Other project,

More research:

Have we been scammed?
byu/glibjibb inreplika