Low Residency Week 1

16.2.16

Collaborative animation 

I arrived late for this because of travelling down but slotted in to work with some of the first year students on an animation using Adobe Premier.

As a Final Cut girl it took a bit of getting used to but Celine guided us through some of the effects and we used them on some footage that had been shot before I arrived.

We used the chroma key to add Donald Trump’s face to a roll of paper that Celine was wearing and added a drawn ( in Photoshop) slice of Pizza to the video as well, moving it around to where we wanted it to be so it landed on DT’s face.

We played around with the edges and other facets of the chroma key to make a strange surreal clip. When the other members our group had finished editing DT’s face by adding facial features from other sources ( lips, eyes and eyebrows) we imported that version instead.

Then we moving into the Stop Frame animation studio where we played around with a short video that the previous group had made.

We added our section on, working in a sequentially collaborative way. Each of us took responsibility for an object within the piece and we all move our piece, in turn.

I added some green PlayDoh to a figure I had brought in, Betty Boop, making her disappear (ish) into the background..

Then we added some sound in Cubase using a keyboard and sound effects.

In the end we produced a simple, short amusing clip.

It was good fun, if rather a slow painstaking process and reminded me of my son’s stop frame experiments.

All the clips were put together and we had a show at the end. The workshops from the morning were also combined together and the clip we had made looked good with the others.

It was cool way to get to know some of the other first year students, how they work, what their skills are and practice at collaborative working. Always a good thing I think, for future practice.

Celine added some drawings towards the end and operated the camera, as well as recording us all in the process. Probably very interesting from the pov of Group Dynamics

I’m now slightly less nervous of Adobe Premier… ( I’ve done bits of straight forward filming with it in the past) and a bit more affair with the chroma key possibilities in case I choose to use them.

I was pretty excited by Cubase and  will play around with it and my son’s guitar….I know he does.

Again , I know some of the ( simple) possibilities and so can think of using them in future if not present work, if only through collaboration…..

The animations will be on the FAD wiki, I think

17.2.16

V&A Open studios visit 

The first artist studio we visited was Jamie Jenkinson.

I was interested in his work as he uses abstracted iPhone images and video primarily.

He likes the fact that it is hand held and he often uses other people’s footage ( this latter is something that I have done in the past… it’s reminded me why and I will do again!

Here’s a comment from  Elephant.mag which resonates with my thinkingYou’ve spoken quite a bit about the reception of video being a central part of the work.

“Yes, I remember overhearing some girls talking about The Only Way is Essex or Made in Chelsea, and one of them said; ‘That only happened because the producer wanted it to happen’. Originally, the artists were put into the place of the camera and then as people began to film things like Blair Witch Project, the audience were put in the place of camera. But then where does that put you if you think about the producer having a place in it? Where is the audience in that process?”

For me, its about the process of ‘witnessing’ and versions of Truth.

It made me think of using lots of different periscope Broadcasts of the same event and others chats.

However, I need to think about how I can find the Broadcasts and the replies.

Since I visited this I have been following this musician, Jon Harald Gjesdal on Periscope who is setting up a concert with simultaneous Broadcasts. I’ll investigate this further…his piano playing is relaxing too!

Here also is an image of his work in the residency about the effect of the background fabric which makes the plant seem like virtual image..? ( I can’t really remember this bit, though it was cool at the time… as I was more interesting in the other ideas)

The other artist was Yiyun Kang who works with site-specific projection mapping.

Her presentation was very professional and interesting as she was talking about projection mapping within the cast Room of the V&A

She referenced artists Lawrence Lek and Simon Payne

She sees light as having physicality not as immaterial ( interesting perspective)

I wasn’t so keen once projection work…not very ‘exciting’…? this is where sometimes the clever technique removes something from the work for me….

Her PhD also involves investigation into the documentation of site-specific work… this i where it got interesting… and the making of models of projections, as positive and negative space.

I found the models were intriguing and ‘beautiful’ Here’s a video of her investigations into negative space

Lecture : Samson Kimbalu

I got very excited by this lecture ” Why Situationism” for all sorts of reasons which I’ll try to summarise.

He is a Malawian born- artist living in London and the culture of Malawi is important in his work. His channel is NYAU where he posts very short videos which mess around with time.

His talk in some ways was rather rambling and so are my notes so here are some bullet points for reference

• He talked about his work at the Venice Biennale

and the importance of playing..in his case with archive and the white cube

• He spreads his work on social media via Facebook and Youtube
• He discussed the concept of the Gift which is given and which returns, in endlessness…. and its relationship to Situationism, Potlatch, Atonement, Psychogeogrpahy,  ? Urbanism ( can’t read my writing?) and Capitalism, Nyau, determent, derive.
• He also discussed the Malawian use of Masks in culture and Nyau Society and Psycho-geographical Nyau Cinema, one of his works

Nyau dancers at the 2012 Kulamba Traditional Ceremony, Katete.

• The idea of “a whisper diffusing out through the world” was an attractive one.
• He talked of the concept of Time within Play being different, experienced differently as non-linear- like flipping pages.
• He discussed how his films only last a few seconds and often reverse the film. He sets a timer to film. and films I think , once per day?
• He discussed how Instagram uses Universal Time in the present….
• In his future people never walk in a straight line as they regard it as a waste of time!
• How masks create meaning out of nothing ?
•  He mentioned the concept of Beholden and Morris men,
• Time is experienced as a rupture
• He mentioned an attempt to print film…? Cherche Le Jeu du Point?

All of this felt very relevant to my work and ideas I have worked with before (exchange and beholden) and non-linear time and play.

Very significant and enjoyable.

Visit to three Galleries:

We visited South London Gallery and saw Heman Chong An Arm, a Leg and other stories, with a million blacked out business cards. There was performance but we didn’t see it which is a shame. It looked interesting… about remembering a story and then reciting it.

Following that to Peckham Platform. I was interested in this because of my community -based practice and working with older people and schools. It was interesting to see how they worked and had developed.

Janette Parris’s Peckham Promenade, based on small local businesses in the area reminded me of the Banbury Old Town Association, that I run family workshops for. Maybe a project that we could work on in the future….

Then to Assembly Point where they have shows and artist studios for a variety of artists.

That was very interesting looking at how artists share a common space though with such differing practices.

The studios were very reasonably priced… for anywhere let alone London.

I wondered a lot about how it was funded. It is run by two artists, one who runs the Letterpress workshop at Camberwell but is an artist in his own right.

Here are some images of their show…. Is it Heavy or is it Light.

Mainly  Royal Academy MA  graduates.

I was particularly impressed with the working the foreground, by Rebecca Ackroyd, whose work looked familiar. She was a student at Byam Shaw when I was at CSm so I would have seen her work in 2010 degree show.

The following day was the Jonny Briggs tutorial and then a trip to Electronic SupperHighway which I wrote about ( a little)  in the James Bridle Post 

Conversations:

As we walked from gallery to gallery it was a chance to talk to Yr1 MAFAD students and learn more about their practice.

Its strange to make friends with people and then now that we will disappear and only be in contact online in the future.

Great, too, to see on-line friends and meet them again. We have grown close over the past 18 months and conversation tended to flow around family and life, as much as our practice.

I wasn’t able to join in with the evening events but went back to Paddington to stay with a colleague. We discussed her on-going MA applications and her work – portraiture and my experiences of the Low Res. Good to have that separation but it would have been good to merge with the group for a bit longer.

Big Bang Data  @Somerset House

Stupid really… I was far too tired to take it in… I’ll insert some images but the thing that really made a lasting impression on me was… (there was no catalogue and my phone ran out of battery so no notes)

Works relating to Data Surveillance in the US

Different ways of Visual R.epresentation of  data and how it changes perception of the content (of course this is obvious but it was impressive to see some of the examples)

The phenomenon of Data  Journalism i.e creating a narrative from data rather than personal witness- this made me think of our discussions about the ideology underlying code and the message it writes: how the stories are determined by the coding which collects the data……and this is presented as fact- Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.

Also the concept of use of data for ‘the common good’ as it is described in the blurb   with  Fix my Street

The images show some of the work which was fun… and include a man fiddling around with a cable cover under one of the floor pieces.. Just made me laugh that’s all…Long Day

 

 

59. ‘Big Bang Data’ & Peter Lanyon

This is a Reblog of and quotes from Paul O’Kanes original article on  750wordsaweek, his art criticism blog.

I was particularly interested in this quote from Paul O’Kane below, which took me back to Tim Ingold’s ideas on the interface between  earth and air discussed in the  link above  and other of his writings.

I considered this when writing my research paper.

Fortuitously Lanyon also explicitly referred to his own idiosyncratic activities as a kind of scientific as well as artistic enterprise, often referring to the air, the (yes real, actual) clouds, the sky and the crucial behavior of ‘thermals’ as a kind of ‘Data’ that needs to be understood and appreciated in order to enjoy the delights of this slightly dare devil sport.

He discusses the nature of ‘Information’ and compares the two exhibitions finishing with the following:

Lanyon’s show, and the best things in ‘Big Bang Data’, involve humanity always showing that it is ‘bigger’ than the data it collects and works with, as we each share our very own new discoveries with a thus revived and enlightened audience.

Source: 59. ‘Big Bang Data’ & Peter Lanyon