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MFA is scheduled to be completed Summer 2010/11

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

"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).

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.