Virtual Particles is the title given to the pop-up show that takes place today at Camberwell college at the digital studio. The poster and its accompanying gif, designed by Dannii, uses all of the images sent in by those taking part. We were notified of the show only about a week ago by Jonathan. This keeps us on our toes and is a good test for being able to respond to tight deadlines. I have found it has concentrated my mind, not on future work but on using what I already have and reworking it: an impending show is a good catalyst for synthesis.
The first term has ended and with it comes the continuation of what has gone before. I do not see it as the completion of a phase but rather as the beginning of what is to come. The term has been a time orientation, revisiting and rebeginning, looking at things afresh: all I do seems to ascend in a cycle.
A popup exhibition entitled Virtual Particles has been organised at Camberwell and rather than making a completely new piece, I decided to work on post-truth-hurtling, the kernel of a sketch done earlier in October and take it a little further. With the direction for the mid-term coming into clearer focus through the elaboration of the project proposal, I thought I would try to reflect this in the work. In so doing, I discovered that which I had suspected. That the themes that have emerged, were embedded within the process only to be unveiled by the elaboration of the project proposal. The title tells me everything I need to know; it encodes a number of elements that I had identified in the PP as my way forward for now:
Mythopoeia – the making of a myth.
I – that this is only a beginning of a cycle
post-truth – dealing with current socio-political concerns
hurtling – my sense of physical things and time being expressed in many different ways, hurtling being one of them
Combining elements of my research in one piece I turned the video sketch into something more layered. The sound track incorporates elements other that Storm Callum . I have begun compiling a fresh archive of sound files and engineered tracks that will serve me in the future. This follows my thoughts in the recent post, Breakthrough from the Simplest Source. It also ties in with what I will talk about in a latter post relevant to my process: that of making a ritual of the recordings.
The video incorporates shadows and moving light sources giving which initiates an idea I have had for a while. Animation, of sorts, in an installation that I would grudgingly call for now, Plato’s Cave. My difficulty with this name, although convenient as a temporary place holder, is that Plato’s metaphysical explanation for the illusion of reality was based on people not seeing the true actors and props but only their projections. My idea, on the other hand, is to have three layers of perception in which the actual scenario that creates the illusion is clearly visible and exposed and perhaps even open to interaction.
The text in the video, is a reworking of the original, a selection, distillation, concentration. I aimed at something more incisive and yet ambivalent by taking out the superfluous. As the video unfolds, each word or phrase subsequent to the preceding ones changes the overall inferences. I want the words to remain maleable. Only at the end is the context alluded to.
The Lime Tree that looks over the studio: one of the elementals contributing to the making of the video
The elemental characters that went into the making of the video remind me of creation myths in an almost Miltonian sense. I avoid icons of or references to the human world. All that I leave is a sense of imputed volition. It is my way of saying that anthropomorphism is a emergent property of who and what we are, seeing the world in our own image. This is a key element of creation myths in contrast with evolutionary theory. Even in the case of the latter, scientists use teleological language as shortcuts for what would otherwise be very lengthy explanations. A simple example is the phrase, ‘evolving towards’. This assumes a direction or goal, something that is counter to the contingent nature of evolutionary processes; a trap we fall into when describing non goal orientated natural phenomena, because we see things with hind sight as though they were leading to some predetermined goal.
Another notion I wanted to imbue the video with is the sense of things continuing ad infinitum even when one is no longer there: an intimation of eternity. This is something I may work on in the future although it has been done numerous times in different ways. The relentlessness I wanted to give the work is part of its possibly dark interpretation; the soundtrack plays an important role in this. At the end I counterpoise this sense of unrelenting descent with the partial revealing of the context at the end: the open, fresh, natural phenomena used to create spontaneously a dark vision. Sun, wind, tree, clay and water: elements often appearing in creation myths conspiring to weave the ‘horror of creation’, as Ted Hughes might put it, or the dissolution of paradise in a Miltonian world where truth is subverted by lies. 1
Distorted, by the unseen cause of its motion: it is cast down by light towards innocent surfaces bearing the scars of altered perspectives, reasoned at distances by the movement of multitudes whose affect is close, so close. It only looks down and away from where it has come and in small instants vanishes entwined with the light that gave it shape. It dare not look at the source of its making as it hurtles into the silence [silent frozen circle] of its own darkness.
In my last post I started to talk about the shadows projected by sculptures. I also talked about the shadows projected into the studio from the lime tree. It brings together many aspects of interest and this is the beginning of a project.
The shadows of objects in the studio are projected onto surfaces. They move as the light constantly changes by virtue of the movement of the leaves in the lime tree. The leaves move because of the wind. The wind is unseen. The shadows move yet the cause of their movement is unseen.
The leaves obscure the light and let the light through intermittently. This causes a change in the apparent direction of light altering the objects projected shadow. These changes superimpose one another in succession. The surface is set in motion, animated. The shadows moved by an unseen cause and I am set in motion and transported to another world for an unseen reason.
The projection from three dimensions onto two is a transformation of the world. I saw this in Chaos Contained, I see this everyday. The flattening creates multitudes in the mind with its own reduction. These multitudes inhabit the imagination and give rise to abstract thought. Shadows cannot be touched, smelt or heard. They cannot be walked around or picked up. They are only seen, ghosts of another world.
An unseen wind moves the shadows, what if Storm Callum recording were to be attached to such shadows? Next Post.
One of the aims of this blog is to bring ideas together and forge new works and trajectories. As this process moves on, the bewildering breadth of possibilities presented before me makes it clear that I have to know where to dig deep and what to leave behind. Along the way I will make mistakes: this is the essence of selection.
Despite the title, this blog is not going to be about Plato’s Cave. His is a fable told to demonstrate that our reality is restricted by our bodily senses and willingness to think beyond them. Its elegance far outstrips what it has to tell us about reality. Nevertheless, although Plato got a lot of things wrong and was responsible for much of the wrong headed thinking that followed, particularly since the advent of Christianity, he does present a paradigm to push against.
Logic is not always the friend of an artist. Absurd juxtapositions and non-sequiturs, intuitive thinking and metaphorical rhetoric often lead to far more affective productions than through logic and reasoned argument alone: that can be left for building an argument between stages or after the fact. Plato has inspired far more artists than Aristotle who did not consider it much at all other than the moral benefits of drama theatre. There I go again, talking about the very thing that I said I was going to avoid. However, I do so because it is relevant to what I saw yesterday.
During the period of Chaos Contained I noticed that the shadows projected by the sculptures, as part of the installations, held a fascination that went beyond the curious and had the potential for future work. I have held onto this idea and played with it in my mind until now: I have started to experiment… I will talk more about this in the next post.
Yesterday the lime tree that oversees our studio, keeps us cool in summer and accompanies us in the winter; the tree that invites birdsong and marks time in its slow arboreal way; this tree was trimmed. Cutting away dead wood and suckers, opened it out to sunlight, letting it flood past the leaves as they are pushed aside by the wind. Shadows cast into the studio bring surfaces to life and everywhere a frantic dance is choreographed in light. To walk amongst these flickering pools is truly magical.
The spectacle showed in many places was on the constant move. I videoed the vignettes, each one a jewel. As I did so, Armenian folk music played in the background. It was then I realised there was a connection. The music was as though synchronised with the visual movements, a dance that had a deeply hidden meaning.
We perceive the world on our scale. From a fraction of a millimetre to several miles we can encompass its size and meter on our terms. Time is measured with the heartbeat and the seasons. It is these things by which music is made. Rhythm is not that of the fly’s or mountains’ but the beat of the heart. Pitch is not that of the bat, the whale or a galaxy but that which we can hear in the voices of those around us. Colour is not that of the infrared and ultraviolet and beyond but of what we need to know without confusion.
I saw the dancing, for that is what it was, of the shadows cast around and the meter and cadence of the dance matched that of the music. Music that draws from what is around it and nature, that is the essence of folk music. There was a synchronicity between the two and it seemed wondrous and yet natural: not a trick of coincidence but a natural consequence. It now seems as though the two are matched because what causes them is matched in scale and breadth. The wind, sunlight, perceived time and a mind that can see them as one. And if what I tell myself is only a confection, it seems as true as any other truth I can be sure of.
What I shall do is build on these videos and they may add to the Sculpture Waiting for a Meaning or stand alone as projections. They are verbs to be placed in a sentence. All at the moment is latent and expectant.
