experimentation

As It Was, So It Is: a failure to learn from

Alexis

 

 

This experiment on video follows from a previous trial video. I was interested to explore further the idea of lineage lost in time and distance by loss of resolution. I also wanted to increase the distance of travel of the line and so used chalk and large blackboard surfaces. I consider this video to be a failure and a success.

It is a failure because the form does not really say anything of itself. Wanting to see what would happen when using chalk on blackboard as a way of using a larger surface and reversing tonalities, the sense of line is lost by virtue of the thickness of line and therefore its loss of sharpness and resolution with distance. In addition, the lack of aesthetic consideration with this doodle also led to a meaningless design which does, however, contain some useful information encoded in its making. 

But what does this experiment tell me? 

The action encodes ideas that extend the first trial video and suggests further work. It also synthesises ideas I have talked about previously, notions of repeating patterns through time and how it is difficult to discern the nature of the reiterations.

The line itself become irrelevant as a device for demonstrating the loss of clarity with distance. However, it does connect the far with the near. The pattern drawn near the camera is arbitrary (and therein lies one of the problems with the experiment, lack of meaningful content). But it is largely discernible even though most is out of focus. It is like looking at the near past. When the distal pattern is drawn, I can only see the broad movements similar to the proximal drawing but the details of the pattern remain undisclosed and the broad nature of the pattern is a matter of inference. Lines connect the distal with the proximal, this is mere metaphor. 

When the whole design is seen at the end of the video, the sense of repeating patterns becomes evident. The distal pattern is a simple version of the proximal one. This is a metaphor for looking for patterns over time. There are clear correspondences in the forces that shape one period and another. Only that the further back in time one goes, the less certain one can be of the shape of things and what is putatively known can only be partially inferred from evidence. However, such evidence and inferences lead one to believe that things in the past bear a close relationship to the present. Perhaps not so complicatedly, as in the drawing. 

This exercise is a metaphorical, or analogous, demonstration. I do not consider it as an artwork but rather a thought experiment documented.

What to do next? I will return to the Rotring pen line which is less expressive, more precise and therefore able to convey more accurately and dispassionately that which I wish to imply. That resolution of form is lost with distance and time. The technical remedy to the extension of the line into the distance can be achieved using larger paper. Making these changes I think will raise the aesthetic element sufficiently to make a passably interesting film. In short, it needs more curation. 

I am also thinking of doing something similar with text, words change over time, meanings alter making hermeneutic methodology difficult to manage. The same could be done with symbols and pictograms. This is not taking me away from my major work but rather creating a conceptual underpinning and contributing to ideas for the Oracle, Shrine and Mythopoeia.

In summary, I feel that the conceptual framework needs to be supported by an affecting aesthetic work. To work purely conceptually may be interesting, fascinating and absorbing in its own right but it does leave me with a sense of depression and sterility as creative work. A work made purely from the head with no heart or guts leaves me feeling incomplete and dissatisfied. That is because the vehicle conveying the idea is not felt but only thought and after all, the artist that I am, I cannot work purely from the head. But such an experiment does lead me to finding new contributions to a conceptual framework without necessarily considering aesthetics, that can be absorbed into my practice. 

 

 

Today’s Skype chat and discussion of Lev Manovich’s essay was a timely event in view of the ideas I have been working on lately offering a way of placing them in the contemporary environment.

 

Mea Culpa Restored

Alexis

 

 

The final restored Graven Image. One of a series of contingent caprices foretelling the shadow world that follows. A world that encompasses some of what I talked about in the last tutorial with Jonathan; contingent because their restoration and rebirth arose out of an unpredictable and calamitous event that in part, catalysed the shadow world.

 

 

What am I doing here? I am experimenting much as early civilisations onwards experimented with composite creatures: an exploration of the imagination facilitated by the social juxtaposition of different life strategies in one concentrated space. Caprices, perhaps not, rather an expression of a deep seated modularity found in religion, science fiction, and myth. Here the myth is both biological and psychological; how could it be otherwise.

 

Learning New Things

Alexis

 

 

I have never done something like this before. I am finding it a challenge but not because I lack the skills of drawing, composing, digital or manual. It is more a case of sequencing and seeing how  detail fits with the overall. This might appear to me a matter of applying what I do in other domains to this, the graphic narrative or comic. However, the applicable principles are to be used in a completely different context; one in which the single image does not stand alone but is seen as part of a much larger narrative in images. In addition, the attention of the viewer has to be maintained throughout the process of sequential page turning: rhythm, sequencing (how one images corresponds to subsequent images), pacing of the script and consistency of vision are all part of the process. In short, it is about working with a carefully crafted script. Something I am going to have to do when working on the multiple screen video performance. So this is a way of introducing that process. 

Probably the way for me to break down what I have done is to look at the first page and see how the problems presented have necessitated shifts in how I view the overall work. The interesting part of the process is how the initial vision, feeling, has had to be changed in order to convey a more compelling narrative through visual means. 

I was fixated with a particular ‘look’, a simplicity that quite frankly was getting somewhat boring. I tried to reduce detail to focus on the narrative but found that this had the opposite effect. It is the detail surrounding the central character that conveys the story, after all, there is only so much that can be done with a single creature in a barren landscape. So what I have done is spend a while looking at the great many solutions that others have used for both comics and graphic novels. This has helped me in seeing how I could do something more affective.

So what have I done? The following is a list of the changes that I have sketched out in my mind and tried out, not shown above:

  • Change the geographical transitions to convey a sense of the psychological journey of the creature. I had maintained this constant with the result of convey nothing more than repetitive monotony. Although this was the initial intention, it did not seem to hold the attention or even convey the meaning I was hoping to impart. I worked with process but there came a point where an intervention to change direction was needed to increase the affectiveness of what I was doing.
  • Introduced minor characters which heighten the creature’s isolation much as a lost person would feel in a forest full of unfamiliar animals and plants. This also personalises the character with the viewer creating a conversation between parties. This is a more intuitive direction, after all, most people’s experience is not that of living alone on the Moon or Mars. 
  • Not repeating stances and views, keeping the pace of the storyline going while relating each vignette to the others. This can be done using colour, line, composition and tone as well as the particular characterisation of a given scene. The direction of sight needs to move in a sequential narrative and lines of tension, repetition, reflection and so on, are all devices that can be used to achieve this visual journey.
  • Most importantly, elaborate the script so it includes details that help create interest in and engagement with the character and its story. The script, to my surprise, is perhaps the most important thing. It does not have to be about speech, it is also description of the scene, emotions, details, incidental action, time, season, terrain. All these are important to compose in an abstract sense so that the drawing phase is not always starting from the beginning when an impasse is encountered.
  • Work with what I am familiar. This is important in creating a believable situation and characterisation. It is much easier to work with elements of which I have experience rather than trying to set events in locations that I cannot relate to. For this reason I have chosen the Venezuelan savanna, land of tebuys and Conan Doyle’s Lost World. An appropriate setting for the story that unfolds.   
    But what is this narrative about? I have been thinking if it was about loneliness, or perhaps the dark side of companionship; about a search or about the indomitable spirit of survival. In the light of what I have been exploring in the past few day there is something else, the emergence of predation, not in the sense of a literal figuration of the strategy filling an ecological niche. It is more of a metaphorical account. If examined carefully, again it is not so much about predation but competition, territoriality or even status. There are multiple inferences in the storyline, that is the point of it, ambiguity, and the ambivalence of what is loneliness and what is solitude.  There are also technical elements which are can be worked out in the process. One thing I have found though, although I have spent some time on the project, I am amazed at how little work I have actually done. I can see that I need to do much more ground work. But now I am clearer as to what is needed, I can move on at a more productive and energised pace. What relation does this have to the main project proposal? Everything is still up in the air but there is a strong correspondence with other elements I am working with, metamorphosis, culture and the deep past as a counterpart to the contemporary.

 

Graven Image of Creature

Alexis

 

 

Once in a while a small disaster happens. This is the first time such a breakage has occurred in one of my firings. This particular casualty is not the culprit but one of the few pieces affected by the exploding work, to be seen in a later post. When such things happen, the thing to do is to not despair. When I heard the muffled thud in the kiln, a smothered explosion with following sounds of falling debris, it was a time for a calm in anticipation of seeing what survived, what happened and, what could be done: an opportunity to try something new.

The Japanese repair valuable ceramics with lacquer and gold. I came across kintsukuroi (golden repair) some time ago and this seemed an opportunity to try the technique. I have done some research and the traditional method using lacquer seems rather laborious. Today’s materials are equally, if not better, suited to the task. With some gold leaf, resin and size I have experimented with this piece. Understanding the principles involved goes a long way to adapting methodology to the materials and needs one has, and this is what I have done. 

In addition, the piece warped because of its different thicknesses causing uneven shrinkage. This posed another problem, not all feet touching the ground created an interesting situation to deal with. However, the more I have worked with this piece, the greater my understanding of techniques and refinement of solutions which might lead to new trajectories. 

More coming soon as I finish this work…

 

Start of a Graphic Narrative

Alexis

 

 

I have  been working on ideas arising from drawings I did earlier in the first term. I did not know where they were necessarily going but that is the nature of artistic experiments. However, it is not a case of not knowing what I am doing but rather allowing what I do to take me somewhere new in the spirit of experimentation.

Over the past days I have learnt a great deal about comics, their layouts and techniques which are helpful in creating narratives concerning my work and ideas. It is an interesting way to work; with hand drawing, computer graphics and photography. What I have in mind is a set of accessible works that sit alongside my mainstream pieces.

I decided to start with a principle character working it out through drawing. I used the seeds sown in a series of pages of sketches drawn earlier, particularly Drawing 4…. The  creature above is by no means definitive in morphology but it bears the fundamental elements of its making. Around this creature, I am writing a number of scripts in order to build an narrative structure for sequencing images. As I started this project I was also experimenting with the camera on my reflective walks. The context of these wanders over the same territory has become an important element in what I do, a setting for the imaginary world of the works and their interactions: perhaps the stage I mentioned in the symposium video at the beginning of term. 

Working this way has opened out many ways for the unification and expansion of my practice. I still have a long way to go as I work in parallel with other projects but it is rapidly becoming part of a scenario for originary things, a mythopoeitic process.

 

The Ritual of Walking

Alexis

 

Along the walk looking East at sunset, 10 December 2018

 

I have been going out for same walk at least once a week since the beginning of the term in October. I realise that this has become a ritual, one in which I meet with the sky and earth. I let the clouds bring in ideas from another place and the earth to ground me. Two scales: the untouchable above and the tiny world of the soil with its plants, beasts, fungi and detritus. I look up and I look down and see for three hundred and sixty degrees all around a horizon that changes with the weather and time of day, subject to what the clouds might bring from who knows where. I see beyond and see inside.

Ritual is an essential way of regulating the everyday into the long term. Rituals can govern how we respond to things. This is why it is important to know when something becomes a ritual, to understand its essence, its meaning, and how it affects us: whether a ritual is creative, constructive or damaging and subtractive. The walk takes time, but it is not time taken away from what I do but rather it allows what I do to come in and rearrange itself creatively, without me necessarily knowing. I may participate consciously in this process, or allow it to proceed independently while I engage in some other activity. I have already hinted at how the reshaping of content can happen subconsciously in an earlier post .

Today, the clouds in the East looked like mountains as they do on the edge of a plain. An illusory boundary which for an instant alters my view of the world: geography shapes who we are and how we respond to the vagaries of life. Humboldt observed this in how similar geographical locations gave rise to surprisingly similar ecosystems with comparable niches despite having completely different species. There are fundamental laws that govern every detail of existence and so it is with us whether we are aware of them or not. The role of the artist is to sense how we are moved by the unseen and make it visible, make it known in some way. 

Richard Long has made a public-private ritual of walking turning it into an art document, exposing the significance of a simple act. It is about the human rhythm that leaves a wake subject to the passing of time; leaving a trace waiting to be covered over by the waves of passing with only a resonating memory: a very human thing. I have come to see this current walk as a conscious act in my practice and I am documenting it photographically. As I do so what I see and observe, what I think and do, changes over time. My intention has not been for it to be an artwork, let alone part of the current project but to be part of the process. This may change over time but for now I see the record of these walks a possible collection of works which, however, run parallel to the project rather than a contiguous element. Why? Simply put, the paradigm by which I am recording the walks is, at least for now, inconsistent with the project proposal… but this may change.

 

Mythopoeia I: post-truth-hurtling

Alexis

 

 

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:

  1. Mythopoeia – the making of a myth.
  2. I – that this is only a beginning of a cycle
  3. post-truth – dealing with current socio-political concerns
  4. 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

  1. from Crow Alights[↩]

Breakthrough from the Simplest Source

Alexis

 

Today I started working on another branch of my project using old sound files I have recorded over the years. This proved rather frustrating and the results were disappointing. I took a walk with Janet where we discussed this temporary impasse. The problem seems to come down to using pre-existing files for new work. It is like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, to use an overused metaphor. But why should this be? Perhaps it is because the old files were created in different contexts and with end points in mind that do not correspond with my current aims. These two reasons seem true enough. However, I also felt that what I was doing was tiresome, jaded. It emerges that simply put, the sound files are not fresh. They have to be recorded or made in process, why? Because that way I am close to the source, in its own environment, sensible to its meaning, affected by what I see, hear, smell, feel and touch. 

I recorded a sample from a simple domestic source and low and behold, I was able to work effortlessly, manipulate the sound waves, and create with the utmost simplicity something that I can work with. The result is something I can build on; create an archive of sounds with which to compose. There is also another important principle at work here that is relevant to the project. From simple, everyday phenomena, readily at hand, an entire world can be created without sophisticated processes. Myths are created not just from the unusual and spectacular but from the everyday, humble things that surround us. So this is what I will be working on over the next few days amongst other things: build a narrative in sound that runs parallel with the more tactile and visual processes. Whether the two modalities come together is still an open question. This I suspect will be the direction of the Research Statement assignment later next year: the relationship between sound and sculpture.

 

Oracle: Maquette 3 – End of a Phase

Alexis
Studies: graphite on paper, 316 x 237 mm. From the maquette

When evolving an idea, there comes a time for leaving the process to the subconscious; to open it out to other influences and make new connections: this takes time. I remember when taking my physics A level at school, the best strategy for solving a particularly difficult problem was to read what was needed, identify the equations and methodology, understand the variables, try a few things out and then sleep on it. Perhaps the next day or a little later, the solution would present itself as though the most natural of outcomes. I am not saying that solving a physics question is comparable to producing a work of art. I only mention this because the mind continues working in the most wonderful ways while we are distracted elsewhere. By going to sleep on a problem, we dream and see things from different perspectives in different contexts. This enables solutions to arise that would otherwise be constrained by fixed thinking. My attention is now turning to sound, relics, shadows and other things. I leave this particular part of the project in a place where, of its own account, it can respond to different ideas and methodologies and await a refreshed return.