Monday 15 December 2014

Lost work from Biology Dept

I arranged to spend a morning at the biology dept using their microscopes and I took lots of stills and made videos. Have now lost a memory stick with this work on. Shall I rearrange and do again? As the microscopes were fixed I could only do my fingers but the quality of resolution was better than my microscope can do. This would be fine if I only wanted to use these images but I'm not sure whether the quality would be too different to show together.
I also photographed slides of fleas and lice.

I decided not to repeat the work as I wouldn't use any of it for the above reason. However I actually gained from the experience of being in a biology lab; a completely alien environment full of white lab coated students growing ecoli on warm raw chicken. The air smelt of chemicals and bunsen burners were alight making a complete contrast to the art studio and indeed the world of art. Reminded me of how enclosed and tunnel visioned and reductive this art business can get. Always a good idea to step back and take a look around at the rest of the world.

Wednesday 10 December 2014

Microphone and John Cage interview on the sound of silence.

Would like to add audio to video of body parts moving. Highly amplified sound of fingers touching, lips smacking. Imagine it as deep drum like sonorous slow  sounds, maybe not quite in sync with the movement.  Using rode rec microphone app with premiere to add to video.

First experiments not very successful; I need to fine tune the sound and get rid of all background noise.


John Cage talking about silence; he says the sound of silence is now the sound of traffic noise.
I'm also thinking about the sound of space, 



Tuesday 9 December 2014

More body thoughts, Delacroix and Merleau-Ponty's chiasm


"I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. "- Eugene Delacroix
(1798-1863 French Romantic painter)Into the optical effects of colour among other things which had a profound effect on the Impressionists.

I'm not enamoured of his work however I do like the quote. Again sense of split , of duality between mind and body, rational and physical.

http://www.eugenedelacroix.org/


Merleau-Ponty's ideas of chiasm: of the invisible and the visible twining. Ponty broke with the established philosophical convention that consciousness is the only originator of knowledge. Instead he prioritised the body as the immediate and principal way of understanding our environment. 
Does this include the thinking and foreknowledge that has already occurred while we learn about the world? 

Wednesday 3 December 2014

Jeanne Dunning




Hidden, inner, unclear, ambiguous, sensuous yet odd. This is what I am aiming for in my practice. 


http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/184185
"In many of her works, she initially fosters moments of misrecognition, leading us to think that we are looking at something other than what is actually represented. The artist also often develops a degree of tension between the grotesque on the one hand and the sensual or erotic on the other."

Nancy Burson

You can actually see a thought..........and it seems like a negative thought shines more brightly; uses more energy. I'm fascinated by the idea of seeing thoughts and ideas within the brain.






http://nancyburson.com/

The Difference between Positive and Negative Thought, 2000, Gas Discharge Visualization Camera images

Composite prints.

Christian Marclay: making sound physical also John Cage

http://whitecube.com/artists/christian_marclay/
Sound Art: recycled records that were fragmented then reassembled and could be played with leaps and gaps.....

The Clock 24hr video

"Theatre of found sound"

In his work the sound is the primary part. In mine it wouldn't be......it would be an equal part.

I'm thinking about what sort of audio to use with my work. I have audio of the sounds made by the wind "playing" an art installation at Portland.
Or audio of a murder of crows settling down for the night and talking to each other that I made in the late afternoon at Roche Court Sculpture Park.

Neither seems appropriate.



Idris Khan: and my attempt at layering

















Lovely depth and movement. How to layer my work. Stills and video. with video, run two at once and fade sections in and out.


.
First attempt at layering two videos: changed opacity to fade them over each other. Not too successful: having issues lining up the images at the bottom, don't know why. The frames aren't the same size, I'm not happy with this, it looks too messy and the images lose their strength.

Ann Hamilton and embodiment

http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/

Ann Hamilton - video/sound

Short videos; close up visuals and amplified sound: stone marbles in mouth and the grinding sound as they move against each other; can't easily correlate the sound to the movement because it is so strange; so much louder than you know it should be: it becomes the sound of tectonic plates shifting. Bigger and deeper than a mouthful of marbles. The audio adds such depth; engages other senses than visual.
Needle pulling thread through fabric; amazing swishing almost harsh noise of the thread against the fabric; the sound of a pencil drawing on paper; swishing, scraping, overwhelmingly loud; not what I expected. I'm being instantaneously shrunk down to minute size in comparison to these objects; they  take on a different aspect while still being immediately identifiable. The familiar becomes warped; how to attain this oddness with my own practice.

"In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances for greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world?" Ann Hamilton's website. 

Embodiment:The distinction between the objective and phenomenal body is central to understanding the phenomenological treatment of embodiment. Embodiment is not a concept that pertains to the body grasped as a physiological entity. Rather it pertains to the phenomenal body and to the role it plays in our object-directed experiences. (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy)