MFA Thesis Journal for M.Read

Blog has moved

2010-09-12T16:49:00.000+10:00

This blog has moved to: http://onmyshore.tumblr.com/

MFA is scheduled to be completed Summer 2010/11

2009-09-21T07:25:00.002+10:00

The fetish of the image, the pleasure.

Intermediality - is the discourse. Temporality.

The real vs the spectral.

We have impatience for a duration. If the image does not explode, we will not wait for the explosion.

Take the image apart - what are the elements? Light, colour, space, objects. I want to control these elements, believe in them and make them mine. It is a powerless submission to an unknown known.

Is there an outcome? Am I centered a little more? Am I connected more? Sensations move from my eyes to my memory - to my body memory, the sensation of light on skin, the sound of water. My sensation is in that object; every hair that is moved by the wind is known.

How can we live without the unknown before us?

2009-09-21T07:17:00.004+10:00

On My Shore.

These landscapes exist where the dreams and imaginings of the individual meet the reality of a landscape. Imaginings such as the limitless depths of oceans with their reflective surfaces and the colour of light filtering through trees create a departure point to explore a known or unknown space.

On My Shore is a mystical meshing of the fathomless, infinite space of sky and sea and the grounding, physical expanse of land. Dreamlike topographies are revealed, explored and small rituals are performed. On My Shore manifests unknown realities.

I have used analogue and alternative photographic techniques combined with post production processing. Long exposures and a hand-held production approach enable me to move my body with my camera in the image making process.

On My Shore will culminate with a self-directed research trip to the United States. I will visit landscapes previously known to be through movies and books and collective knowledge. I plan to produce a video work of my “first encounters”, projecting my idealised imaginings onto a now real landscape.

2009-05-31T17:45:00.003+10:00

number one, I emerge from the darkness like a spaceship. I start with terror and then relief. The gates at my entrance have water spouts that are small gargoyles. I am a thing among things, and out of context.

number two, I am a line, a flat surface, I am an atmosphere of surfaces. I take on light and give out light. Light is contained within me, I give light to you. You only see between me.

Art and text - writing the exegesis

2009-05-31T17:22:00.007+10:00

I am coming to the point of my MFA where I am having to formulate the plan for the written exegesis. I do have a strong grasp on my visual elements, my photographs and lightscapes. As a narrative of elements I can read them well. They feel strong, they convey and speak how I want them to. How then - Do I adequately translate or describe these images via the use of text. The actual written element to my MFA has been giving me a certain amount of anxiety. I get terrified sitting and looking at the blank white void of a piece of paper or a word processing workbook. I am frustrated by the 1.5 spaced linework and the deep theoretical arrangement of my ideas. In my images, how I feel and what I want to say comes very naturally. However, the written part stand so far apart from my aesthetic. The text is bland, long, it meanders through syntaxes and discourses that are heavy and cold.

I have been thinking a lot about how to challenge my written element, how to approach it so that it complements and extends my visual research, not just stands beside it as a static and confusing essay. Speaking with my supervisor, I explained my hesitation, my fear that the images and the text would end up working against each other, not with each other.

She suggested that perhaps I wanted to approach my exegesis as an artists book. A visual/textual (intertextual) combination, that would aim to sew my ideas together, offer a mapping or topological tool to formulate a discussion that works with my visual elements. I think, in my head, I had this surge of relief. This was the permission I was after. It seems strange that you would need permission to explore your own practice, but sometimes the practicalities and expectation of an academic environment weight heavily. Marks, scholarships, applications, deadlines all scream for you to keep working with the establishment. But now I had someone saying that this course, indeed my research area almost craved an exploration using intertextual elements, maybe even a narrative story, meandering the colour and spaces of my images, throwing out questions only to pick them up on a later page, where ideas folded out into big maps, where there could be conversations and notes and diaries, a real examination of the research process, a real confrontation with the idea of writing and the idea of art (are they so different).

So now I am working on how to pull it all together. The visual (I can see) the text (I can hear) the meshing of synapses.

A map is, after all, just another kind of picture.

so.

What do you want to say?
How can many elements help to tell the same story?
Does this show a sense of immediacy or urgency?
Is it cohesive? Can it be cohesive?
Is it accessible, can it be read and understood?
How can my aesthetics be explored through text?
What is the language I want to use?
How do I read art, how do I read text?
how can writing then become an object?

Am I an interdisciplinary professional? Have I just realised how everything connects? How do I allow the text to contribute to my visual work? Is it an aside, or is it essential?

Quest for Hallucination

2009-03-17T21:59:00.000+11:00

Seeing the image, as described by Barthes, is so invested in time. Taking time, watching - and now we want still images to move, to give more, and at the same time we want the moving image to be arrested. Speed and stillness frustrate us equally.

A property of viewing is withdrawing from the image, the silence of the closed eyes, fixing on the lingering trace of the image, letting the most poignant aspect materialize inside of us.

Barthes says the photograph is a totality. It is complete and without future. Is this true? Does it need to have a future?

Friday 20th February.

The landscape is devoid of people. It is not immediately recognizable. Truly a landscape speaks to a person on an individual level. I see, I construct.... a tenable connection is made. It is impersonal, hyper personal, easily inscribed with one's own reality. A reflective agent. i see now in the static image the vision of speed, the threat of blur.

The silent witness:
'Partly because of the muteness of the medium itself, the crowd is presented as a group of silent, static observers. They are witness to the spectacle of light and dark, a territory natural to the photograph. These are moments of temporal suspension that bring the distant events and their dislocated solitary observers together in a metaphorical community of silent witnesses' - Jim Harold. Harold also states 'virtual proximity has become more real than the physically local'.

re: TV. TV is so passive. The viewer's fears/desires are neutralized and there is no opportunity or space for challenge. On-line screens are less passive, perhaps hyper-active, still wanting to be told something, though needing to control the input/output in a passive receptive mode. Have we tricked our brains into thinking? No? We are still as ignorant but with the delusion of autonomy.

'[film is] a confined space, only a rectangle of white light' - Sugimoto. Zummer speaks of 'pre-existing inanimate things' and 'a radical change in form address, access and transmission.' Mulvey states 'presence of time itself can be discovered behind the mask of storytelling' (presumably the fiction-narrative of film).

Benjamin - it is through the instrumentality of the camera that: 'an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored.' (YES!)

March 17th

All sides are radiating from a shift in colour. The perception of reality operates outside, or rather, away from the totality of an image (in our minds). Counting, tracing, mapping, all elude to a certain amount of control (that our minds may have). Drawing forth from a shadow is a shift in existence through movement (a projection?). Yes it was, but then, also.

Colours are screens, further disorientating, taking the image further away from a sign that can be named. You cannot give everything away too fast. Lean over - do not show me your face. Your face is the easiest reflection of my own self, the easiest thing to see, without it I want to touch you instead - pull you into me. Who is that? What is that? An obsession.

We want the slow creep in the photograph, the pause and delay in cinema. We need time to process the image yet we demand the essence of movement. A total stillness indicates a lack of any possibility of engagement. It is the expanse between being told and having discovered.

2009-02-22T18:51:00.003+11:00

Why a landscape

The landscapes of my work form the passing impressions so similar to the figurative backgrounds that Zummer alludes to in describing ‘architectural projections’ [1]. They (both the natural landscapes and the digital architectural plains of the city) “operate in the marginal space of peripheral vision, as something almost already past, its import lying in having been, in enframing rather than engaging.” [2]

The buildings provide the necessary frame [3] for our compulsion to reside in image-spaces. Within a city, unconsciously, the four sides of a screen/photograph are perpetuated; in the reflections in windows, in signs, in advertising in scrolling textual forms. In the same sense, the trees and flowers and leaves and ground provide a psychological frame, a reflective agent so familiar to an individual, so utterly everyday as to not even be registered as individual elements.

In a way both the physical grounding in the city’s image-space and the memory-spurned movement into the languid fresh plant matter of the photograph speak of the idea of this has been [4] waiting, operating in a time distinct to our own, but nevertheless waiting, "always ready to be there" [5].

The change of the impersonal space (I do not see it in my own terms) into the personal space (so easily knowable, show me how) is observed through time; a slowing of pace and the still image can be consumed. As the pace slows, and distance is reduced, I am at the point of pause/delay, the flash of an image to the side; a reflexive marking engages my body. I see now through the spaces of the trees, the spot of sunlight reflected back to me, the potential space for my memories to reside. I become taken with the idea of drowning in an image, in my “quest for hallucination” [6].

[1] Zummer uses Times Square as an example of this formation of media, with its wrap around digital signage, flashing advertising walls and neon signs.
[2] Thomas Zummer; Variables: Notations on Stability, Permeability and Plurality in Media Artifacts, in Saving The Image Art After Film, ed. Tanya Leighton and Pavel Bucher, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, 2003.
[3] The frame can be the borders of a physical space, the rectangular containment of a cinema screen, the frame of a photograph, the exact physical dimensions of a picture, and of course a discourse frame giving the permissions, standards and context to an idea existing in the world.
[4] Roland Barthes, and discussed in the Bruise of Time chapter.
[5] Zummer 239
[6] Barthes, the cinema as consent of illusion, the photograph as quest for hallucination.

NOTES / IDEAS / PHRASES / IMAGES

2008-12-09T11:09:00.000+11:00

"Also if we are moved by a photograph it is because it is close to death" - Christian Boltanski

"Is the evolution of time (temporal dimension) denied to the photographic still any longer?" - David Green Marking Time

"This has been" - Roland Barthes (what does this become?)

The Becoming image:
Hesitating
Held back
Consumed before emerging...

The architecture of inter-activity (audio-visual structure), what to view and when? Narrative reorganisation. Who is a viewer, who is a user? Nothing happens without the user's initiation. Is this predetermined?

Photo - having been there
Film - being there
Becoming there
Blooming.

The photo recedes (it has already been there), the film proceeds (slow), caught between linear stretch back and forward in time. The delay. Delay of what? Time, a moment, an action, a thought, a realisation, an ending, a resolution?

The external present tense THIS (indexical). No tense - just factuality and something.

New temporalities - an image viewed on a screen as opposed to an image object (refreshing the screen).

Real-time (unreal-time?), the internet's lure of connectivity and availability, a "denial of mediation" - MaryAnn Doane - Real Time.

The visibility of time in visible time - David Green.

"Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the 'snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences." - Walter Benjamin, "Subject grows into picture".

Power in the unknowable - no speed, delivery of information (I can feel it moving). That is the pause and delay, longer exposure, focus not fixed, belonging to a narrative that is never revealed. What are the implications? "A small concussion" - Martin Arnold sp sp spaces of inscription.

WORKS:

Susan Hiller - Whispering Voices. In ‘Witness’, whispering voices can be heard coming out of hundreds of suspended speakers.

Hiroshi Sugimoto - Theatres. Long-time exposures run the length of the feature, the white glow of the screen is an entire narrative capture in stillness.

passage à l'acte - Martin Arnold. Four people at the breakfast table, an American family, locked in the beat of the cutting table. The short, pulsating sequence at the family table shows, in its original state, a classic, deceptive harmony. Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity. It catches on the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects, which, in reaction, become snagged on the continuity. The message, which lies deep under the surface of the family idyll, suppressed or lost, is exposed - that message is war.
"The first shock, the first flight, the fear at the beginning of the film: The son jumps up from the table and throws open the door, which sticks in an Arnoldian loop of hard, hammering rhythm. He is compelled to return to the table by a mechanically repeated paternal order, 'Sit down.' And at the end, when the two children spring up, finally released from their bondage, Arnold is again caught at the door; at the infernally hammering door, as if it were completely senseless to try to leave here - this location of childhood and two-faced cinema." - Stefan Grissemann.

Lori Hersberger - Sunset.

Seven Minutes before - Melik Ohanian.

Michael Snow - Breakfast (Table Top Dolly).

2008-10-19T12:45:00.002+11:00

The instability of water contained in fleshy ground. The ground is a container - a receptacle. We can feel the moment; the time in this image through the vision of water contained for a moment. The water in the image speaks of the rain that fell, and the ground that will soak it up. Leaves blow across the surface, and a small glow of light shines as the water collects together. Time lets like meld into like, across an uneven surface. The moment before a dam bursts, a creek flows or rain falls is a stillness of a body awaiting escape. The moment here is the containment. The moment gives us a sense of power. We can see here the glittering sun; the seeping water, full of promise to become something else, to become part of something else, swallowed up. After it came, before it goes.

Emerging specters. The known is obscured being light; shadows; information. Between here and there is a journey. So the cinema of moments shows us how ones gets to somewhere else. A figurative journey, or a physical one. We almost can feel being present here, wanting to crawl through the leaves, pull branches aside, get there, faster. But we are caught, suspended in an uneasy state. Our eyes have time to wander, occluded spaces are revealed, time slows and we can SEE, for a moment, a thousand paths we could take, where to from here? Are we passing by? What do I want here? To look, to see, or to be there, to be present in that space? In some instances objects in the foreground give a sense of retreat. I am leaving this house, I am covered again, clouded, surrounded by information I know nothing.

2008-10-02T19:34:00.000+10:00

June 2008 Images

2008-08-08T00:27:00.001+10:00

Before Focus is Fixed

2008-05-29T11:58:00.001+10:00

The purpose of this MFA study is to develop a contemporary understanding of and visual response to the photographic in relation to the moment, pause and delay. The study takes the knowledge expressed in historical and contemporary readings of photographic and cinematic time and seeks to readdress this knowledge in relation to a modern technological framework. My visual practice centres on a “point of convergence” between separate modes of creating and theoretically indexing the photographic moment. This revaluation of ‘the moment’ and the slippage between historical distinctions between cinematic and photographic time is manifested in the subject, object and content of the work produced.

A central concern of my visual investigation is with the contemporary blurring of the distinction between the photographic object’s inherent stillness, and the constant narrative sequence of cinema. New technologies such as the internet, DVD, home cinema, digital video and photography are staring to collapse the distinction between photographic stasis and cinematic fluidity. The ability for a person to pause, rewind, re-watch, stop and manipulate the narrative sequence of a film has disturbed the flow of narrative; an expectation of narrative and conclusion has now given way to a pause or delay, a glitch in the flow of cinematic time(1).

This delay has effectively exposed the separate still images in cinema and disturbed the continuity of narrative, resulting in a state, where, as Mulvey writes, a ‘film’s original moment of registration can suddenly burst through its narrative time … the now-ness of story time gives way to the then-ness of the time when the movie was made, and its images take on social, cultural or historical significance, reaching out into its surrounding world’(2). This now and then dichotomy is also explored by Barthes when describing the function of the punctum(3) in reading a photograph.

Effectively as cinema is slowed and paused, the resultant stills take on a photographic reading, and combined with their cinematic origins produce a new sense of time, where expectation is both muted and delayed, and a new relationship containing the real and unreal, still and moving and then and now is created. The narrative is now controlled by the viewer, who can slow time at will. The viewer divests new readings into the resultant still images, paused in an effective slumber, repetitive short moments on repeat, fixed upon, re-watched and re-contextualised. The cinematic still provides the viewer with the opportunity to categorise, memorise and reorder cinematic images far from the specific temporal confines of time past/future. The effect is very immediate.

My work, though use of still photography, narrative film sequence and time capture stills, seeks to examine this pause or break or ‘irrational interval’ before focus is fixed. Historical modes of reading the photograph will be taken into consideration and reinterpreted in relation to contemporary filmic and photographic modes of production and consumption. My research attempts to make sense of this delay and examine the power the delay has on the way images are produced. I will discuss how our contemporary relationship to the image is changing the way we interact with ideas of the moment and representation. My research aims to discover if the disruption is limiting or liberating, and, that by way of delay, if cinema becomes reliant on the photographic index as narrative shifts between movement and pause. What lonely spectres emerge from the repetitive pause? How do we read “movement and flow” when we have the power to delay the eventual ending? What does the photographic image(4) mean to us now when we have the power to delay time? Does this change our expectation of the moment contained in an image? What is revealed?

In this vision conscious contemporary world, there is a deep impulse to seek meaning and truth (recognition) from a photographic (still) image. The artists I will discuss in relation to my own practice explore issues of time, delay, blur, mnemonic register and repetition in the image, through process, object and output. They cover a historical and contemporary field of “vision” and seek to impart a sense of how spectatorship of the (still) image is informed by both photographic histories and ideas of the cinematic narrative (slowed). Particular attention will be paid to Douglas Gordon, Hioroshi Sugimoto, Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky with theoretical reinterpretation of the works of Laura Mulvey, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio and Jonathan Crary.

I aim to produce a lyrical essay reflecting on my own practice, and questions that arise from my own image creation. The function of the essay will be to strengthen my question asking capacity and situate my work in the now. A basic proposed structure is below, but of course is driven by the evolution of the artwork.

1. Maria Walsh, in ‘Against Fetishism: The Moving Quiescence of Life 24 Frames a Second’ refers to a Cinema of Moments, which seems to accurately describe the condition of the cinematic flow made still, the delay and rupture of filmic sequence. Further it could be said that a stilled image could now be read as belonging to the cinema of moments, wether captured from movement out of a cinematic sequence, or wether a standalone photographic image not related to an original narrative structure.
2. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image pg 30-31.
3. In my research Barthes’ Punctum refers not to the ‘detail’ of the image that draws you in, but of time, the duration of the image, the “that has been” - a call back to the true moment of representation.
4. Terms of distinction between the photographic and film still are still hazy, though I expect a more concrete term will emerge though research and practice. Perhaps just ‘the still’ will suffice prefixed as appropriate with cinematic or photographic. Combined they are as previously mentioned the Cinema of Moments.

Before Focus is Fixed - Chapter Outlines

The Bruise of Time
A re-reading of photographic and cinematic time – what is a “still”, what is contained in an image, what is the image’s duration? How do we read still images now – in light of new technologies and impulsive image viewing practices?

Coming Up for Air
Repetition and delay in contemporary visual practice.
If the distraction and flow is taken from cinema in the form of a delay, a pause, how does this affect our reflection, and, is the reflection and pensive and sometimes obsessive action of viewing the pause, consuming the delay – different from the photographic still? And if the delayed moment constant, repeated, duration is put on hold, then what does that moment become – is it contained, or does it break free from its stream of messaging?

I have nothing left to give; but you always want more
New modes of spectatorship.
What is discovered by the pause? How does this change the way we read a photographic still? Is the still now imbued with the power of the cinematic contained?

The Bloom of Recognition
Towards new interpretation on indexation and mnemonics in the cinema of stills.

But what does it mean for me now?
Afterthoughts of an image.

a visual reminder

2008-05-12T13:38:00.002+10:00

The duration of time - After Bergson, Barthes and Deluze

2008-04-18T12:48:00.001+10:00

“…looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose” - Roland Barthes

Expectation of movement

Repetition without difference (The Photograph) not without difference from the “original” object, but without difference from itself a moment ago -Geoffrey Rhodes

Repetition with difference (Cinema) Barthes considers the “distraction” of cinema, the constant flow of images.

The photo has no “durée” (Henri Bergson) but forces the viewer to impart their own “durée” (subjectivity), their own perception. Cinema occupies the mind, does not allow for contemplation, images are forced to be viewed in a sequence, unfolding a narrative.

Relationship to the photo image (per Deluze) is that we view our changing present and an unchanging point in the past.

The spectator is actually stringing together pieces of duration into a whole, a present, a virtual. This launches the viewer into the film: lured in by his own perception, the viewer becomes a denizen of the cinemas durée, forgetting his own.

The photograph forces contemplation with the self (sublime, but an ideal of wanting to submit to the static form of the image (this causes a tension) there is no resolve.

Barthes “Photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does. Whatever grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see”

Mnemonics (transference) subjectively and physically, a connection through the impress of light and the impress of subjective thought, the duration of time for the bloom of a burn or light and the creation of a memory, the act of viewing, the bloom of the image awakened in their viewers mind.

Light -> duration -> image creation-> Image viewing -> memory formation -> recognition - > mnemonic referencing

Light -> Impression -> Recognition

More photos

2008-03-04T22:02:00.000+11:00

Image post - The Grotto

2008-02-15T16:10:00.003+11:00

2008-01-25T21:42:00.000+11:00

If we have seen it, we can never forget. The sight of the object forms the basis of the object in memory, the memory thing - its "thingness".. The awareness of first sight can never be removed from remembrance.

It's almost like semiotics. You know?

Shifting focus, shifting forms.

A conversation regarding this image

2007-12-03T11:13:00.000+11:00

N:
as if you were flying when you took this
i do not like the title.
cause i do not see the whatever "nothingness" in it.
its vibrant, luscious, in motion...the image in motion, my eyes sway.and for whatever feeling i am feeling it feels like nature symbolizing the digital age....????
i think you should do more of this.....

M:
the nothingness is the antithisis of this picture. the opposite, this image is the everything. its movement, colour, light, shape, it is tone and form, it buries us, overwhelms us.
It transmits, like a virus, all the feeling, and all the knowledge of a moment in time, staring, falling,
But never still, but always contained.

New work 2007

2007-12-03T11:10:00.000+11:00

Some new images from Nov 2007

A pictorial reflection on Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

2007-12-03T11:09:00.000+11:00

Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.- Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

Image from The Grotto October 2007 (I have my new Mamiya!)

2007-12-03T11:07:00.000+11:00

And her hair creeps over her shoulders like foliage...

A story - reflection from Berlin 2004

2007-12-03T11:06:00.000+11:00

For months, while living in the student dorms in Berlin, I would pass this window. I became obsessed with looking out of it. The view was the bramble branches of a tree, and one day I saw in the branches a nest. The nest had eggs, blue ones, grey ones, maybe blue-grey, and I would state at them each time I walked past, waiting for them to hatch. They never did, at least while I was there. Maybe the eggs just went away, like they were eaten or the wind blew them away. More likely I forgot if they just went away or I left before they changed. But I like the repetition in my head, when I think about it, the pause, the waiting, this internal stasis.

reflection on: A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin

2007-12-03T11:05:00.000+11:00

This is beautiful:

Sounds reveal a passage of time, an intensity, a timbre; colours a darkness, a clarity, a tone. Timbres and tones may possibly bear a resemblance to each other, but beyond these, sounds seem to fly away (reverberate) into the dimension of space, which contains them, whereas colours move through the dimension of time, which keeps or consumes them. We are pushed toward the colours of our memories as towards the resonances of places we have known. - A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin

This is kind of exactly what my entire practice is about. Colour, Light, Memory, and the psychology of these tones' physicality, the knowledge of their appearance and their use as mnemonic devices.

Its like pathology, and photography captures it so well. The drama of space that contains them, propels them, and the bodies that feel their pulse and perceive them. Its so quiet, so slow, so elongated, the feeling of describing them bloom of light/colour in the mind or on the body of a person. Like a memory or scar. A secret.

More Artists

2007-09-28T14:14:00.000+10:00

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding
House 2 The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania 2003
Video work: House II, a deluge pours endlessly from a Pennsylvanian Neo-Gothic house.

Tacita Dean
The Green Ray
2001
16mm colour, mute,
2 minutes 30 secondsHer

Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. It is pervaded by a sense of elusiveness, a search for something that exists as much in the imagination as anywhere else.

Lynn Davis
Iceberg III, Disko Bay, Greenland 2004

Ann Hamilton

At Hand

Myein

James Turrell
Ondoe Blue, 1967 (installation view at Albion, 2004)

James Turrell and his compatriot Robert Irwin were key figures in the "light and space school", a movement in which "perception" rather than the object is key to "experience" of the artwork, that is the "artwork" is a mere light conduit for experience.

list of references for the lyrical

2007-09-28T14:11:00.000+10:00

Bartusiak, Marcia, 2000, Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony. Listening to the sounds of Space –Time. Joseph Henry Press, Washington, D.C.

Bergson, Henri, trans. Paul, N. M and Palmer, W.S, 1991, Matter and Memory, Zone Books, New York.

Brusatin, Manlio, trans. Hopcke, Robert H and Schwartz, Paul, 1991, A History of Colors, Shambhala Publications, Boston, Massachusetts.

Cadava, Eduardo, 1997, Words of Light, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Cage, John, 1939, Silence, Lectures and Writings, Marion Boyars Redwood Books, Trowbridge, England.

Cassiman, Bart & Ramael, Greet & Vande Veire, Frank, eds., 1993, The Sublime Void (On the memory of the Imagination), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Anterwp.

Crary, Johnathon, 1990, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, October Books MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London England.

Deleuze, Gilles, 1986, Cinema 1:The Movement Image, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, USA.

Derrida, Jacques, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. 1993, Memoirs of the Blind. The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, The University of Chicargo press, Chicargo and London.

Foster, Hal, 1993, Compulsive Beauty, October Books MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London England.
Herbert, Lynn M. & Ottmann, Klaus & Schjeldahl, Peter, (essays by), 2001, The Inward Eye. Transcendence in Contemporary Art, Exhibition catalogue, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

Kaprow, Allan, ed. Jeff Kelly, 1993, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London.

Kant, Immanual, trans. Goldthwait, John T, 1960, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles.

Lyotard, Jean–Francois, trans. Rottenberg, Elizabeth, 1994, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis, 1968, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, USA.

Parry, Eugenia, 1997, Adam Fuss, Arena Editions, New Mexico.

Rinder, Lawerence ed., 1999, Search light: Consciousness at the Millenium, Thames & Hudson, London.

Stoichita, Victor I., 1997, trans. Glasheen, Anne-Marie, A Short History of the Shadow, Reaktion Books Ltd, London with the contribution of the Council of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland

2007-06-22T12:01:00.000+10:00

Apparitions at twilight
Night storms, darkness, hidden existence. An electric clap and the hidden is made visible. A drama of space between the negative and the positive, light and dark. Knowable forms give way to blooming apparitions. We see a change, a shift, an uncomfortable awakening. For a moment I must recognise: what I hear, see, and feel; this forms what I know. These are the senses that make me, and my knowledge of this space. Then, seen slightly, as if in a dream state, a flash, the sky opens, a temporary emergence of the hidden, an illumination in the half-light. In a quickening of optical impulses I see the leaves, the tree. Then it is gone. The photograph slows the apparition. An eternal moment.

“In either case, what is seen fills the field of vision, but the field of vision is never taken as all there is to see.”- Marilyn Strathern After Nature

I am thinking about here, to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin, the body as darkroom. The body itself as a house of images. Light impressions pressed into the skin, literally burnt on our bodies. A participation in an organic process. The water creates rivulets on her back, her hair is like a foliage creeping over, moving towards the light. Outside, in the darkness, light floods through branches. There is a slow awakening, a blooming as the trees take their shape, other organic apparitions. Once before the trees were hidden from themselves, or hidden from my own self. I am seared through with light. Becoming an apparition.

I am experimenting with photographing as I walk, as I interact. The photographic act is integral, the camera is my third eye, it uncovers what I can not see alone. There are twilight forces; storms, the sea, wind, lights, and also, apparitions of the day. Full sunlight, shimmering iridescence, blindness by light. I am reading Words of Light I am reading Fear of Freedom, I am reading Invisible Cities and Warped Space. I recognise that my images are informed by the junction, or in some ways, collision of the natural organic world, and the constructed human world. In images such as the above I want to have an absence of the perceptible (the street) but recognise that the natural is still bound to the constructed world it pushes against. The hidden world exists in the one I live within. It is not a metaphoric or idealised natural landscape or the country-side where nature exists as intended. It does exist both outside of me and inside of me. It is my physiology. It is nature slipping between and beneath buildings. It is oil slick. It is the water parting over concrete, it is a body and a skin, existing on the edge between sight and touch, measured in the time a word is spoken, a memory recalled, a flash of lightning, a sunburn to form.

Transformations of the landscape affect the definition of the subject regarding them. I am interested in the meteorological nature of my work. A leaf falls against a gutter, clinging for a moment before being swept along.

I think of the work of Bill Viola - Departing Angel and The Reflective Pool. My own physiology dwells in contrast to the immediate constant flow of water, and its ebbs and cycles. I am still, and a participant only in stages. I wonder about wandering in a fog, and how different things would seem there. Known things, a road, a sign, a path, a puddle. I think about technology, how I could know all things, maybe. I could know everything, but I know nothing. I comprehend cyberspace but barely know my own geography. I am a stranger in the dark. The tree resembles a human limb, my limb, my phantom limb.

My Ghost

2007-04-11T14:31:00.000+10:00

3 words:

Mapping
Physiology
Perception

of a site, by a person.
It is the perception of the usual and knowable aspects of a site, and how we use ideas of mapping to understand a site :

- I go here, this goes there, I move here, this follows this path, A is next to B
- This is how one perceives it, this is how one sees and hears and touches a site, this is the way we believe a site to be
- This is how I feel when I see this, this is my belief, this is my emotion, this is my though process
- This is how I move, this is my body operating in this space/site, this is what my senses see

But then, the unusal, the unknowable, the hidden, in these sites, how do we perceive them, how do they make us feel, how do we "know" them, what do they make us think of, what are our reactions, fear, flight, anxiety, unease, sadness?

Mapping the hidden (or not immediately apparent, not percieved, seen slightly, seen in a dream-like state) physiology of space and how these hidden aspects make us feel/react/question our usual relationship to a space/site and our role in it.

'We cover the universe with drawings we have lived.'
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (1958), tr. Maria Jolas, (Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1994) p. 12

Resources - Slow time and Craigie Horsfield

2007-04-03T12:43:00.000+10:00

Laidlaw, Marc, Great Breakthroughs In Darkness (Being, Early Entries From the Secret Encyclopaedia Of Photography) Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 1, September 1992

Young, Lisa, Spiritual Minimalism PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 53 (Volume 18, Number 2), May 1996, pp. 44-52

Armstrong, C, The Dilation of Attention: The Photography of Craigie Horsfield, ARTFORUM, 2004, VOL 42; PART 5, pages 116-121

Artists working with spacial concepts

2007-03-05T13:00:00.000+11:00

If anyone is aware of any artists that are investigating space in interesting ways, I would love to hear about them.

This may involve artists who are:

Exploring space as navigatable, knowable and defined, i.e. with maps, trails, directional work, data mapping, survailance, reconstructions.

Space as uncertain or spaces dealing with dualities; reconfigured spaces, anxious spaces, looking at space from dimensions such as height, lightness/darkness, weight, spaces that change.

Durational space, space where events occur, spaces that operate as a site for action and reaction, spaces that deal with time, site specific spaces, performance.

Spaces as sights of memory, forgetting, monumental spaces, informational spaces, museums, offices.

Images

2007-03-01T12:44:00.000+11:00

The images untitled8-2006 and untitled9-2006 are part of an untitled projection series that was shown on built surfaces. This series explores the dialogue between internal and external emotional states and physical spaces. The hidden interior of human thought is contrasted with the x-ray image of a breast, symbolising the ‘bloom’ as referred to in another image. The internal secret bloom is then projected externally, impersonally, for all to see. The two images speak of both physical and emotional darkness.

Discussion Points

2007-03-01T12:06:00.000+11:00

How does one identify an anxious state, an anxious place or an anxious act? How can a state of anxiety be created or represented through an artwork? What are the triggers of an anxious state? Do we hide from these triggers, or do we cultivate them through the way we act and subsequently, through the way we make art?

--

I want to:

examine how the viewer's own subtle self-references of memory, guilt and culpability condition them to be influenced and affected by certain imagery, be it of a person or a specific space.

explore how anxiety manifests (influenced by internal and external sources) and explore the performance of these manifestation or apparitions in my work, through way of gesture, gaze, construction and intent.

elucidate ideas of duration, permission, exposure, tension, intimacy and claustrophobia.

focus on the psychological manifestations of a space and our preconceived notions of how a space must occur and behave (and in turn, us within such a space).

Currently:

I have been thinking a lot about images of the landscape, particularly urban landscapes, reconfigured as menacing, collapsing and containing, or in opposite, landscapes that are completely autonomous and impersonal.

I am interested in explorations using the gestures and physical movements of the human body, and their source from and effect on an anxious state, and how one can explore these movements within the photograph.

Some Ideas of why?

These concepts are relevant in view of the hyper-real and super-connected channels of communication existing in contemporary culture, such as language barrier breakdown, mutable geography, the Internet, and the slow corrosion (or superseding) of “normal” cultural practices in favour of an ideal or acceptable way of acting.

Book post 3

2007-02-23T16:49:00.000+11:00

Bombs, Birth, and Trauma: Henry Moore's and D. W. Winnicott's Prehistory Figments, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Cultural Critique, No. 46, Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects (Autumn, 2000), pp. 80-101

Surviving History: a Situationist archive, Stracey, Frances, Art History, Volume 26, Number 1, February 2003, pp. 56-77(22)

Spaces in European Cinema, Myrto Konstantarakos, Chapter Anxious Spaces in German Expressionist Films

http://static.londonconsortium.com/issue01/strukov_performativity.pdf Play and Violence

http://static.londonconsortium.com/
http://www.londonconsortium.com/ Contribute!!

2007-02-23T12:28:00.000+11:00

You can see an online version of my Honours Thesis Starting Points and Destinations here: http://www.invisiblecity.org/essay/.

The thesis explores concepts of memory, travel, space and place, including musings on the operation of monuments, cities of the gigantic, and non-places such as airports. The thesis then examines photography as a tool to join fractured narritives and explorations.

A criticism I give it now is its fusion of two disperate ideas: "non-places" and "fractured memory" which I tried, somewhat unsucessfully, to argue as related concepts in relation to ideas of travel and spacial and placial awareness. I feel I had too much going on, and my photographs, instead of being a collection of different images highlighting and exploring these concepts, operated more in a reconnected narrative sense which was at times confusing.

I like the chapters individually where I concentrate on different ideas, places and actions, and then explain why I photograph them and how the act of photography itself as a participation in those... but I feel I fall down when I try to explain this idea of "rebuilding narratives". I should have really got rid of the entire reference to non-places, which would have given my argument a greater degree of synthesis.

Also I do not touch enough on the subjectivity of such processes in my essay, which was difficult because my images were so subjective. I think I tried to intellectualise my idea too much (I was trying to legitimise) where I should have been challanging, addressing and teasing out the subjectivity of my work a bit more.

Anyway, I love the ideas I addressed, and would love to expand on it in the future.

Connie Samaras - Angelic States

2007-02-06T16:24:00.000+11:00

http://www.sfai-art.com/Event/Event.aspx?eventID=620
http://www.sfai-art.com/News/NewsDetail.aspx?newsID=710

"Few people appear in Samaras' pictures, as if the terrain of mass society that she documents -- tall buildings, highways streaming with headlights, vast, hotly lit plazas and parking lots -- made no place for the individual. Steeped in the colors of intense artificial light and shadow, Samaras' images evoke a world in which surveillance and the engineering of audiences have become pervasive"

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

2007-01-11T15:04:00.000+11:00

Philip-Lorca diCorcia. http://www.artnet.com/Artists/ArtistHomePage.aspx?artist_id=5238&page_tab=Artworks_for_sale
Book: The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
Book: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works by Stephen Shore

Ideas post 2

2007-01-02T13:04:00.000+11:00

Architecture - tall buildings, walls, sounds in room like water
Dual channel video, backlit projections, sculptural forms of light

see Monika Tichacek The Shadowers

Anxious Spaces: Charles Ray recounts his sculptural journey from Minimalism to mannequins,
Storr, R. ART IN AMERICA, 1998, VOL 86; NUMBER 11, pages 101-105

Environmental architecture & sculptural forms
images of same in context of a photographic image, props.

Journal Post 3

2006-11-03T22:27:00.000+11:00

Mottahedeh, Negar "After-Images of a Revolution"
Radical History Review - Issue 86, Spring 2003, pp. 183-192

2006-10-30T14:07:00.000+11:00

Ingar Krauss

Dominic Rouse

Michael Borremans

Doug Aitken - http://www.regenprojects.com/artists/doug-aitken/biblio/

Bill Viola

Thomas Ruff

When Faith Moves Mountains by Alys

Thomas Demand

Ideas Post 1

2006-10-30T13:38:00.000+11:00

Anxious Landscapes

Anxious Spaces
Actions of Anxiety
What is an anxious state?
How do they manifest/operate?
What is a cause, and how do I perform it?
Photograph -> Performance -> Video -> Installation

Mirrors
Exercise
Rain

Artists

2006-10-20T21:48:00.000+10:00

Ingar Krauss - http://www.marvelligallery.com/Kra2.html
Dominic Rouse - http://www.dominicrouse.com/
Michael Borremans - http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/11/

also of interest:

Doug Aitkin
Bill Viola
Thomas Demand
Thomas Ruff

Book post 2

2006-10-20T21:38:00.000+10:00

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm 1997

Sara Angelucci

2006-10-17T12:54:00.000+10:00

http://www.sara-angelucci.ca/
http://www.aceart.org/archives/cd/cd00/CD_00_mark.html

http://www.ccca.ca/artists/artist_info.html?languagePref=en&link_id=5772

Journal Articles 1

2006-10-12T10:21:00.000+10:00

Photography and Fetish, Christian Metz, October, Vol. 34, Autumn, 1985 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90
Photography as an Extension of the Ego, Colson, D.B. (1979). International Review of Psycho-Analysis., 6:273-282.
Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990: A Critical Anthology, by Jordan Smith, Afterimage, Vol. 23, 1996
The Anxiety of the Image, Adrian Kear, Parallax, Volume 11, Number 3 / July-September 2005
Photography, Vision, and Representation, Joel Snyder, Neil Walsh Allen, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 143-169
Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust, Antoine Picon, Karen Bates, Greyroom, Fall 2000, No. 01, Pages 64-83, MIT Press
Disembodied Spirits: Spirit Photography and Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, Journal article by Alison Ferris; Art Journal, Vol. 62, 2003

Books post 1

2006-10-11T16:46:00.000+10:00

-The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography by Patrick Maynard
-Words of Light by Eduardo Cadava
-The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space by Mary Price
-Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography By Linda Haverty Rugg
-Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography edited by Leslie Devereaux, Roger Hillman
-Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) by Vivian Patraka
-Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity By Cecilia Lury
-Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture by Anthony Vidler
-Fear of Freedom & Art of Being both by Eric Fromm
-Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

The basics

2006-10-10T13:54:00.000+10:00

I'll be using this space to log articles and books, quotes, images, artists relevant to my MFA thesis. The premise of my these is, at this stage, to examine the concept of anxiety and the performative act as highlighted, exlored and presented in the photographic image.

I will also be using this blog to track ideas, keywords, throught processes, connections and non academic musings on my topic. It will probably be a rather haphazard collection. And that's fine.