Julia Bailey - MA Research

This blog has moved!

2010-02-18T20:39:00.000Z

I transferred the blog to Wordpress - CLICK HERE.

Dress turning

2010-02-09T22:26:00.006Z

Thought this might work, but I think a dress made of fabric swirling and projected onto the object might look better...

Thinking about the video projections

2010-02-09T19:16:00.009Z

So, following transcribing all the dreams yesterday, I really needed to knuckle down and think about the content of the videos themselves. I have been thinking that the objects are sort of relics or hard evidence of things from the dream, then the projections onto the objects would be the narrative content, but told through a mixture of film clips, as even to myself I seem to describe and reference scenes to films.

So far, the videos have been tests, either from a still image of an ajoining scene - the news studio - projected at the bottom of the staircase - but then this got confused and I made the image into a narrative by making it a clip with visual effects and adding a soundtrack, footsteps on the stairs to tell a story.

Here is the studio clip (without sound - that one was too big) and then it was projected onto the staircase:

Other 'tests' have been smoke, ink or simple moving visuals. (see projection tests post).

Thinking about the video projections 2

2010-02-09T19:14:00.001Z

The idea with the glossy black objects was for the video projections onto them to be the narrative of the dream, i.e. with the cat/carriage dream - this had similarities that I was having memories of / or from several films. A carriage scene in Black Beauty and the Amalfi coast in The Talented Mr Ripley.

So, I've been finding these clips today, importing them into Final Cut. Editing them, by trimming out scenes and audio I don't want, overlaying additional sound (heavier rain). Exporting to imovie to add further effects to distort the clip, make it look less definite, more dream like. Exporting to itunes, onto the iphone and streaming it to the portable projector.

Here is the clip I've hashed together this morning:

now god knows I've done this really badly! and just learnt how myself, but thats not really the point. The problem is a) I am just messing around and this is not my work (in its original format) and b) I think the tests from the still image were better.

The shapes of the objects already distort the video - I'm just making it indecipherable and you end up just concentrating on trying to watch the video. This isn't working.

Maybe the visuals need to just go back to something more abstract - but then how is this telling a story - is this necessary?

Try overlaying my sound recording of the dream - thats the story covered. I know I shy away from this as its my voice - ukk, but really, this is the raw material and you can hear the emotions more in my voice and hear the muffledness of some parts.

Maybe the projection needs to be more dynamic - moving, directed? over the piece.

Try a swivelling office chair over the office chair - or the horse legs galloping over the legs.

This has led to a bit of a breakthrough, as when I'm describing my project - the exciting bit to me is the video projections onto the objects. The objects are just static, definite, formed and this is what I'm trying to disrupt.

Prodigy > Sound

2010-02-09T10:40:00.000Z

Prodigy – Intro (Remastered)

Sound > Words

2010-02-08T22:13:00.002Z

Transcribed the dream sound recordings by hand. Stage two. Next, sketches...

Horse Ships

2010-02-08T12:00:00.000Z

Have now bisque fired. Ordered black glossy glazes have arrived but the firing range is lower than I thought - grrrr (1200-1250). I have put in 2 test bowls and one sample ship with the bought black glaze on. I had quite a 'debate' with Dennis to get these fired, which left me feeling shaken. I understand the rules but aren't I allowed to at least try things out? So eventually he relented and let me fire this one, surrounded by bricks, as it is a possibility for the legs to collapse as it fires up to temperature. More and more I want to buy another kiln and fire at home, then I don't have to have unnecessary battles about these things... couldn't fire the mast and sail at all, have to get kiln stilts from home, as these cannot be provided by the ceramics department, double grrrrr.

Glaze Tests

2010-02-08T11:00:00.000Z

When I did these, I was still thinking of white at the time and just did a few old stoneware ones for fun. 8 new recipes in total, some turned out lovely. For future reference I have this recipe box with a card for each glaze, recipe on one side and source of it on the back - sometimes with photo from the book. Then when I've done a test I print a photo of the result on the back so I remember how it came out - super anality!.

Interim Show planning

2010-02-05T18:19:00.001Z

Procession of objects on the floor, plus hopefully maybe the large cupboard one, dream inside a dream inside a dream, down the rabbit hole.

and maybe a video of a projection onto the objects...maybe.

Glaze tests will be out Monday, but I'm thinking of glossy black. Quite hard at stoneware without reduction firings available, only options to overload the recipe with oxides really, but finish becomes quite metallic. Hence ordered some ready mixed blacks from Potterycrafts - oh you cheater!

Other things from previous scribbles: think about making my own compartment that can be installed anywhere for the show as the space is not fixed yet, likely to be NO installation time after BAs.

Dreams hiding in dark corners, empty dresses, industrious workers.

Try and draw the most poignant transcribed dream. Continue much larger differentiations of scale to emphasise importance of elements.

Wax, what happened to that? combination? colour of objects?

Stuff assembling for the Interim Show

2010-02-05T18:15:00.000Z

Re-organised the desk and put all the bits on a shelf, most of these are material experiments so not usable in the show.

The cat / carriage, and crate / stairs. Both good for the show I hope, if they glaze ok. Thinking of glossy black, then video projection onto the objects looks good, plus they will be on the floor, tucked into the black space of the skirting board...

The Fleet

2010-02-05T18:00:00.000Z

This one is much smaller than the large one, I wanted to have a little herd of them following the big one, and the legs on the large one turned out to be quite static, mainly due to the weight of the hull.

So I wanted the smaller ones to be more playful, with more impulsion. But this one doesn't stand up...its a learning curve. and the sail is rubbish, but this is just an experiment anyway, because I expect it to bend under the weight of the sail so I can always snap it off easily after the bisque firing and make the mast/sails separately, like the mother ship.

This one is the best so far, because the legs are really galloping and the sail billowing out behind, again, oh actually the mast came off before I put it in the kiln so its firing separately already.

Heat resistant wax lamp

2010-02-04T10:07:00.001Z

Impossible Lamp by Jeeves Basu from jeeves basu on Vimeo.

Back to the Future - Projection & Music

2010-02-03T17:08:00.001Z

Went to this on Wednesday. Curious to see how the projection / music combo would work. I took a video on my phone but its not worth posting. Incidentally some of the films were by George Melies, who I referenced in my research paper as the pioneer of dream-like worlds in film from the early 19th century.

I didn't really rate the musical improvisation, as I couldn't see any correlation to the films at all, but occasionally there was a more atmospheric moment. I guess I was encouraged by the number of people who wanted to see this kind of thing, made me think there would be an audience for my work - some sort of projection onto objects / sound installation thing.

Glad I went.

Time and the Moon @ Dana Centre

2010-02-01T17:24:00.000Z

Went to this on Monday night with B. Quite apt since I bought this little piece of joy on Sunday:

THE most beautiful 60s Japanese made flip clock, pristine for £7 at the amazing Battersea boot sale.

As we were expecting it was for a bit more of a 'general' audience that the Wellcome ones, so therefore most of it was a bit boring / obvious. But this chappy, David Rooney made it all worth it. What a great speaker and enthusiast on everything about time. Learnt some interesting stuff about how ships used to navigate by the moon.

Oh and I snapped a pic of this model ship, for the little horse ships :)

The Mothership

2010-01-29T17:36:00.000Z

Following a bit of a crazy dream about these ships, propelled by horse legs, I have been building this one, probably one of the largest things I've made in a while, but although I kept it damp for a week, then I was ill, hence no more detail than the balconies at the back, no canon holes :(. Masts have been made separately, otherwise they would warp too much attached to the deck. They are already bisqued flat for adding after the glost firing.

and it stands up! *high five

Wax over porcelain

2010-01-18T13:27:00.004Z

The cat and carriage combo, awaiting firing.

This is a porcelain dress with wax dripped over, made an interesting contrast to the bronze dress.

Porcelain dipped repeatedly in wax. Nice soft finish but obviously not durable. I can probably get this effect with a thick smooth matt glaze.

Projection tests

2010-01-18T12:46:00.006Z

If You Could Collaborate

2010-01-14T15:22:00.000Z

Went to the PV. Packed with all the right people. My favourite piece was this system of currency by BCMH & SmithWightman - mainly for the exquisite presentation of the work, lovely text on the glass, added amazing value to the objects. If your going to be a designer, people expect, and rightly so, for you to design the whole shebang.

Also there was an interesting sculpture, that played sounds only when you were further away, the closer you tried to get to it, it doesn't play. Intriguing, and inspiring to see so many people were interested in seeing, perhaps wacky and off the wall collaborations.

Tamiko tutorial

2010-01-06T17:20:00.003Z

Presented: video projection onto globe, photos of work made so far, photos of work from before Masters.

We spoke about my proposal and how it was very heavy and serious and pulling down any of the practical work that I was making as it was impossible for the real work to live up to the ideas expressed in my proposal.

Tamiko's advice was to put the proposal to one side for the moment and concentrate on expanding some of the ideas I have started with my practical work. Take the most promising experiments and really push them in all directions to explore and develop making ideas.

Coming from a design background I have launched myself straight into a philosophical and scientific debate and although my ideas are interesting, it has the hallmarks of someone who has recently begun thinking as a fine artist. I need to acknowledge and appreciate my background and the fact that the work is still reflecting this more playful side and somehow merge this work with the key points in my theoretical debate to create a cohesive whole.

Maybe, after I have made some more pieces (that are photographed properly - valued by me - and in a way that the magical elements and qualities that can start to be seen in the flesh, are represented in the presentation of the work) I need to change the objectives of my proposal - perhaps to have the core idea to 'enrich my work through a study / exploration of fantasy and dreams'. Also writing about desirability of the objects and materials. Explained that confidence in my work had disappeared, I need to not be negative and see that I have made quite a lot of work and it is not all 'not working'.

Recommended book: On Longing by Susan Stewart.

End of Unit 1 Assessment

2010-01-05T13:40:00.004Z

what can I say? this was a bit of a shock. I felt that for many reasons things have not been handled that well about this, from both sides of the fence and I could list here loads of excuses as to why my practical work was not at the level I would have liked but its pointless now. I can only move forward and try to improve it.

I suppose it is easy for me to forget that people can't see into my head and understand what and why I have been researching what I have, and so here is what I wrote down:

Should have presented the sound recording work (which I did not) the voice recording library of the dreams and other sound experiments: the day recording, everyday activities. I also didn't show them the video tests I've done of miniature installations.

So I guess the main criticism was my lack of experimentation with installation environments - although Mike liked the glass globes and could see progression starting from this point.

Perhaps the drawings /text could be combined into the installation? I spoke about experiments with glaze, making it thick like snow to cover the objects and was also asked whether the objects would be coloured.

Most of the recent things I have made are too controlled again, they need to be more unreal, this is something I need to overcome.

I should have 100 versions of things, experiment, production etc etc etc.

I guess I knew from the start that this subject / my proposal is not easy at all and I think many people might not understand it. Also I think that this is has turned into a very personal project which is dear to my heart and I don't think that designers 'get' it, its bordering on a philosophical contribution and its hard for me to pull it back into 'objects'. I hope that tutorials in the new year will be more productive.

Immediate things to do:

Properly document all sound recordings
- transcribe
- drawings
Find a corner in the flat, install objects, lighting, sound - video and evaluate
Take one dream and with the drawing, map, narrative text and objects play around with making this into something.
Make 5 ambient sounds - and / or my voice sound tracks.
Unreal objects:
- shrinking
- clay patchy making technique
- dipping porcelain in wax
- smoke?
- video - ink in water

Day in the studio...finally

2009-12-23T12:00:00.004Z

Started to transcribe the dreams onto tissue, then the table underneath had been marked by the letters. Like the pattern.

Wrapped the dress in the dream.

Started to glaze the dresses. Solid white glaze - lets see.

Porcelain with wax dips.

Projection onto table

2009-12-23T11:13:00.001Z

Dissatisfaction quote

2009-12-22T16:44:00.001Z

“ Dissatisfaction is a significant key to quality. “Art,” said the American sculptor John Chamberlain, “is basically made by dissatisfied people who are willing to find some means to relieve the dissatisfaction.” In the midst of dissatisfaction ways are found. Without dissatisfaction it is swiftly possible to fall in love with your own mediocrity. Utter dissatisfaction can be liberating. “If the wine is not good,” said Michelangelo, “then throw it out.

Dissatisfaction (Robert Genn) - via Communicatrix on Twitter

Sep
200925

Quote tagged as: note_to_self

via fysigunk.us

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The Known Universe

2009-12-22T10:52:00.001Z

American Museum of Natural History

Like the zooming back in best.

Late Bloomers

2009-12-21T14:41:00.001Z

Article from the New Yorker

20th October 2008, Full Article

But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. "Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental," Galenson writes in "Old Masters and Young Geniuses," and he goes on:

The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Justification?

Get Cezanne's biography.

Benjamin Ducroz

2009-12-21T12:25:00.001Z

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booutiful!

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Smoke Experiments

2009-12-17T10:56:00.002Z

Messiah @ English National Opera

2009-12-15T15:58:00.001Z

My first opera. My flatmate was in it, so I had incentive! but the stage sets were fantastic. This is the only picture I can find which sort of shows the glass coffin shaped boxes, but the set in Act 1 was also amazing, with hundreds of bulbs descending from above, and a glossy black floor, which sitting so high up in the cheap seats, was really reflective. More of a moving installation of sculpture, singing, projections and dance. All the old buffers in the audience did not seem to like this very contemporary interpretation, but for me it was a piece of 3 hour magic.

Video Projection

2009-12-13T16:19:00.001Z

In Praise of Shadows: Change Observer: Design Observer

2009-12-11T15:39:00.001Z

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Repulsion by Roman Polanski

2009-12-07T13:49:00.001Z

Watched this week. Cool illusionary scenes where all the furniture is too big or too small when shes losing it. I did scream a little bit.

How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves - additional quotes

2009-12-07T12:36:00.003Z

pg. 22

The confidence generated by this remorseless expansion in scientific knowledge fostered the belief in its intrinsic superiority over the philosophic view, with the expectation that the universe and everything within it would ultimately be explicable in terms of its material properties alone. Science would become the 'only begetter of truth', its forms of knowledge not only more reliable but more valuable than those of the humanities. (Materialism).

pg.20

There is a powerful impression that science has been looking in the wrong place, seeking to resolve questions whose answers lie somehow outside its domain. This is not just a matter of science not yet knowing all the facts; rather that there is the sense that something of immense importance is 'missing' that might transform the bare bones of genes into the wondrous diversity of the living world, and the monotonous electrical firing of the neurons of the brain into the vast spectrum of sensations and ideas of the human mind.

pg.222

Michael Posner
The most striking feature of the neurosciences, 'unparalleled' in any other field of scientific enquiry, is how each of the phases of the progressive unravelling of the secrets of the brain has been marked by a further deepening of the perplexity of its links with the spiritual mind.

pg.224

Once again the seemingly irresoluble conundrum of the relationship of the physical brain to the spiritual mind has resurfaced, escaping the confines of science to become, as philosopher John Searle describes it, 'the most important problem: how do neurological processes of the brain cause those inner-first-person qualitative phenomena [of the mind]?'

Thomas Kuhn - paradigm shift

Entoptic Phenomena : William Hundley © 2009

2009-12-04T17:03:00.001Z

via williamhundley.com

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Stefan Sagmeister: Observer Media: Design Observer

2009-11-30T17:15:00.001Z

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Arthur Tress

2009-11-26T15:20:00.004Z

He decided to do a series of photographs exploring the dreams of children. He interviewed a number of children about their most memorable dreams and nightmares. Using the children as subjects, he tried to visualize their dreams. The result…a peculiar melange of semi-surreal imagery depicted in a rather documentary fashion…was a book entitled The Dream Collector, published in 1972. The singular genius of the series is that Tress approaches the fantastical notions of dreams through a straightforward documentary style. He treats dreams almost as another form of ethnography, as if examining dreams were no different than examining the circumcision rituals of the Dahomey tribe or the practices of Hindu ascetics.

The dreams explored by Tress are diverse, but common. Being buried alive. Flying. The humiliation of failure in the classroom. Monsters looking in the bedroom window. Being lost or separated from everybody you know through a natural disaster.

Tress described The Dream Collector like this: "The purpose of these dream photographs is to show how the child's creative imagination is constantly transforming his existence into magical symbols for unexpressed states of feeling or being." I have absolutely no idea what that means. It sounds suspiciously like the typical artist's meaningless blather. I don't think it tells us much about his work, but I do think it offers us some insight into Tress himself.

Tress seems to perceive the world through the eyes of a mystic. He apparently sees still photography as almost an arcane act. He has written that a photographer is "…a kind of magician, a being possessed of very special powers that enable him to control mysterious forces and energies outside himself….[who can] can foretell the potential movements of his subjects and perhaps even by mental intimidation and expansion actually causes them to happen." Although I'm personally inclined to see this as somewhat delusional, the fact remains that this view of the world has given Tress's work a sort of internal consistency. Even though his subjects and themes may range widely, there remains a stable, congruous emotion through it all. That emotion is a sort of familiar reverence, a sort of comfortable awe.

Tress has stated that for five thousand years art was created with the intent to inspire awe. That intent, he suggests, has been diluted. "Where are the photographs we can pray to, that will make us well again, or scare the hell out of us?" he asks. Tress has attempted to make that sort of photograph.

With the exception of his nudes, all of Tress's disparate work seems to retain a consistent subcontext: the world is awful and full of awe, life is temporary and beyond our understanding, so we must bring our own meaning to it. That meaning can be found in anything from sports to prayer to science.

In a very real way, Tress's inarticulate mysticism is imbued in his photographs, and one can see evidence of it throughout his work. He believe in the child as a sort of privileged witness. He believes in oppression as a constant condition against which everybody must struggle. He believes in the release from oppression, and that death is always the final resolution.

Via:http://www.utata.org/salon/20499.php Wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Tress

Richard Launder - tutorial

2009-11-26T09:14:00.001Z

Talked through proposal objectives:

RL comments in itals.

1. 1. Record dreams. Rhythm, system. Voice recordings. Transcribing not good enough so have diagrams, maps, drawings but even those don’t get emotions. Sound is best.

Transcriptions from voice as unedited, not made into literary content or more flowing words. Not rewritten. Direct is best to the memory of the experience of it.

Objects deal with the landscape and the situation – excited by the stream of them – but not getting across emotion – sound must be in final show. Neutrality of an unknown audience, maybe an actor to do the voice.

2.2. Encompassment and transportation to imaginary places – how I came to be doing this project in the first place – fascinated by the places (fictional) I was dreaming about – where do they come from etc.

Encompassment – related to research paper, illusion in an art installation and film – location.

Installation – either room size or mentally (because all my work is quite small). Small worlds – that you have to imagine being inside.

Wax scene – he interpreted waking life in the office then sucked off into the dream life in the jungle.

Increasing the oddity – what will give it this dream like state? If there is something wrong about the dimension. Its almost right but then a bit off. Weirdness is not everyday – play with it.

JB – I started to do that with the porcelain pieces. If sitting in the chair can’t get in the tent.

Alice in Wonderland – scale.

JB – stream 2 or 3 metres.

Work is kind of baroque. Getting nicely overloaded on the jungle side. The dream state is more confused. Have the chair positioned so you would fall directly through the computer.

Porcelain re-shrinking. Intensely detailed but tiny.

3. 3. Link the emotion based associations. If I make this big scene I want to link these scenes together based on the central emotion I have of each one. Naïve way – from angry dreams to calmer? Mimic the way you file things in your brain in an emotion based way – based on the way you might have felt an experience in the past rather than in any logical based reasoning behind that. Thought could achieve by listening to the voice recordings.

Yes, I support that because our intellect kicks in so rapidly upon waking. That’s what makes sense for you. EQ, Use it, look at systems of conveying EQ. Fascinating contra world, and its being given more recognition that it used to.

In terms of context. Find an equally tight and concise quote as that for the emotional side to counter that. Argue double case – both sides but then clarify and choose one.

General comments from RL.

Nice terminology, landscape of dreams. Capturing (active word not passive), bridge from the subconscious to the physical.

Must model the real world as well. Animated objects – the chairs. I felt the power in the wax scene centred around the chair. Desolate, like the person was just there, mark of a person. Abandonment.

Technical things – molocite might work better to stop warping and cracking and shrinking to stabilise. Can buy it down to dust size so can add to small porcelain pieces, not as rough texture as the paper clay method.

In industry if there is a nightmare shapes – will plate on a plate and have clay supports – then remove after. Or fire lying down – think about sagging.

The wax has a delicious quality. Try mixing wax and porcelain – either direct mix or dip things (both ways round to try). Then some will be permanent some transient material and set in a room. Film melting, show will be in summer… use a window? Then that’s another piece of work. Getting as many works out of a piece as possible.

IDEAS

Dipping either way round porcelain / wax.

Model real life – sucking into dream world (intense)

The flat? Bedrooms in the past?

Sound is real important for emotions.

Molocite – multiple shrinking. Make better support for structures – they are not throw away or tests now, try to treat better like final pieces.

Carriage-half and kiln

2009-11-25T18:23:00.003Z

The carriage has moved a bit now - maybe I need to make a few different ones. Wheels and axle stuff to be added on after (somehow) maybe glued but it could look crap!
Unfortunately this firing aborted so now its in again, fingers crossed for some (fairly) translucent objects on Friday.

Mia Fernandes

2009-11-25T09:18:00.000Z

BA 3d lecture

Drawing doesn’t need language. Its about communication, experience and memories. Solidifying these things.

Travelling lifestyle all her life – stimulating and comfortable for her.

Makes a visual diary.

Had a show with Anthony Gormley – that’s how abroad stuff came about.

Check out Bermonsey Gallery.

Collaborations with dance, sound, performance. A bridge to forming understanding.

Mistakes are an opportunity. Have a look / work then to unravel.

Repetition / series – what if I make 10 carriages??

Rosseau / Steiner – working from the heart.

Brain mapping. Expensive – have to do a phd at Royal College. Networks.

Anthropologie store on Regent Street

2009-11-24T18:19:00.000Z

New shop on Regent Street - Anthropologie.

Loved this grass/forest wall, its BIG:

CERN's first particle collisions

2009-11-24T14:42:00.001Z

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First images of particle collisions at Cern’s £6bn atom smasher. Two protons collide inside the giant Atlas detector at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. The image was recorded on 23rd November 2009 and shows the first low energy event recorded by the detector. Photograph: Cern.

Aaaand BOOM. That was fast. Even if it’s still low-impact stuff. We’ll have to wait a while for anything more big-bangy. Still, pretty cool, no?

No?

— In The Guardian, from London.

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Critique Presentation

2009-11-19T20:49:00.000Z

The Dark Pool (1996) is a multimedia installation piece by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. As described in the exhibition catalogue for A House of Books has no Windows, which was presented jointly by Fruitmarket Gallery and Modern Art Oxford in 2008, this room full of objects; ‘books, record players, speakers, models, notes, drawings and peculiar mechanical devices’, are seemingly abandoned. ‘Opening an old door, we feel we are trespassing on the workspace of some kind of mad scientist or investigative writer. As we move round, we trigger sounds – stories, conversations, music – that speak of the ‘dark pool’, a mysterious place where people disappear’.

I’ve always loved to escape, whether it was through walks, books, films or dreams, and it’s only now that I realise what I’ve been doing this past decade. I’ve been creating portholes into my other worlds.

(citied in Cardiff, Bures Miller, 2008, p11)

This sense of displacement from reality, by stepping into another world is exploited by their choice of objects and paraphernalia within the room. Many things are old or at least appear to be, perhaps Edwardian or Victorian – yet they are mixed with strange devices which seem to use modern technology. This sense of timelessness helps us to forget the here and now, as within this room, it is not possible to know where, precisely, we are in time.

Sound is also a key component to The Dark Pool. They were drawn to using this medium as it allows the possibility to mix up time and space. By layering sounds, they create different layers of reality as some of the recordings they use are from the ‘present’ i.e. Cardiff’s voice, but some (as described in an interview for the catalogue) are old recordings, hence they are layering together different periods in time. Enabling us to imagine ourselves in a third place – somewhere between the present and past.

Cardiff has been working with sound for many years. One of her most famous pieces is the ‘audio walk’ Her Long Black Hair (2004), in which we listen to her voice whilst on a walking tour of Central Park in New York. This complex work explores our notions of time as we are guided through the pathways, listening to the narrative, imagining what she sees in the past – following a mysterious woman with long black hair, whilst observing for ourselves what is happening in the present. Also, at points during the tour we are prompted to look at photographs, introducing another observable element to the work.

8. Cardiff (2005) Her Long Black Hair Central Park, New York

‘Many critics have observed that Cardiff’s audio-walks are cinematic, transforming the world into a film set with the viewer as its central protagonist’ (Bishop, 2005, p99).

Within The Dark Pool, our location is fixed but the layered soundtracks invoke an illusion of past and present. One of the most engaging parts of the installation is where, sitting in a chair placed between two speakers, we listen to Cardiff and Bures Miller discussing an imaginary scene taking place across the room: with a couple dancing in the shadows.

9. Cardiff, Bures Miller, (1995) The Dark Pool

As the observer / listener the conversation is hypothetical, we are listening to a dialogue that is purely fictional, and yet we can imagine the couple dancing, allowing a space to exist in our imagination where we can invent the scene.

The use of sound in the installation helps us to expand and enrich upon the story presented to us, attempting to displace our sense of reality, by confusing our sense of chronology and distorting our sense of location. Ultimately, this work immerses us as viewers and for a short space of time at least, presenting to us as described by Cardiff ‘parallel’ world, free from the constraints of reality.

Project Proposal - revision ~2

2009-11-17T21:41:00.005Z

Working Title:
The representation of my dreams in sculpture.

Aims & Objectives:
The most significant question / problem trying to tackle:-

By capturing the dreams I aim to gain a deeper insight into the ‘dual nature of reality’*, how life and memories are linked and dreams help to untangle/solve problems by linking things in an emotional based filing system, rather than chronologically or the same way our conscious brain would make associations.

*'the dual nature of reality', can be described as the ‘first order’ philosophic view, composed of a non-material realm, epitomised by the thoughts and perceptions of the mind, that includes not just how we perceive an object or experience through our senses, but also the memories, emotions and feelings with which we respond to it. The 'second order' scientific view is limited to the material methods, an objective material realm. (Le Fanu, 2009). Our experience of the world relies on both types of reality, they are interdependent.

For example, if this is hard to grasp, lets take an example of a tree, my subjective impressions of the trees outside are influenced by my memories and emotional feelings about trees in general. This view/experience is non material, individual and subjective, interpreted and comprehended by the powers of reason and imagination. And yet we can describe the tree in scientific terms of its physical structure, an objective, material view.

The brain can also be described in this way. Our subjective thoughts, memories and dreams versus the physical structure of neuronal circuits and synapses. Neither are fully adequate to describe a brain fully and yet it is so far impossible for science to combine these views effectively.

I am interested in this border or the edges of our conscious experience - interfacing between the ‘real’, material world and my subjective experiences. Therefore capturing these dreams, which are a direct representation of subconscious thought and transforming them into physical, material objects, I aim to combine these different experiences of reality.

OBJECTIVES:

Adequately record the dreams as raw material to work with.
Encompassment and transportation to imaginary places.
Portray my own emotion-based associations of scenarios by linking dream-scapes together not necessarily in a chronological order in the order that they were dreamt but more to do with the different feelings associated with each dream.
Encourage interpretation of my dreams by an audience, invitation to a normally private world.

METHODS/HOW TO ACHIEVE OBJECTIVES:

The metamorphosis from dream to sculpture (mind to hand) is extremely important, the first stage will be to collect snapshots of my dreams. I plan to record voice notes upon waking to better recollect the emotions and feelings involved in the dream. From the sound recordings I can make sketches of the scenario and narrative. These can then be developed into three dimensions.
Encompassment by creating an installation environment which the viewer can enter either physically (room size) or mentally (if the environment is made in miniature). I plan to use the following materials for their specific ethereal qualities: porcelain (fragile, translucent), wax (temporary, melting nature of the material), bronze (paradoxically crystallising the dream in something so permanent and solid) and possibly film (scope for more emotive qualities, sound, narrative, indefinite visual imagery).

By constructing these scenes in miniature, I could create a tiny parallel world, as it involves the viewer in an intense, focused way. A tiny work can seem to exist in a state of haunted isolation, a permanently vacated scene. Physically, the audience can only enter the scene through their imagination, a tiny parallel world, closer to an imaginative one.
Possible through listening to the qualities of my voice recordings? Sadness, lost etc
By displacing this content from another reality, one that is naturally forgotten and revealing/displaying the dream content, this encourages interpretation.

landscape/environments, narrative and emotional content captured.

CONTEXT:

All in? check reflective round up.

Historical:

Artists have been and still are fascinated by dreams. Since Freud’s important text at the turn of the century, which influenced artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and subsequently the Surrealists, artists have continued to use dreams as a starting point for their work. In a contemporary context I will be studying artists across a diverse range of media encompassing sculpture, film, video and drawing. For example: Susan Hiller, Joseph Cornell, Charles Avery, Keith Tyson and filmmakers Michel Gondry and Luis Buñuel.

Recent exhibitions in the UK such as Flights of Reality, Kettle’s Yard (2002), The Dreaming & Sleeping exhibition, Wellcome Trust (2006), Miniature Worlds, Jerwood Space (2006), Charles Avery, Parasol Unit (2008) Riddle Me, Danielle Arnaud (2008) are just a small sample showing that artistic interest in the themes of dreams, fantasy, illusion and imagined worlds is very much a current topic.

‘from the eighteenth century onwards scientific knowledge has been prioritised, through its ability to 'reduce' the seemingly inscrutable complexities of the natural world to their more readily explicable parts and mechanisms.’ (Le Fanu, 2009)

Unconscious is not a private region inside us but the underlying and unknown pattern of our relations with one another, mediated by language. (Lacan, 60s)

From a philosophic point of view, consciousness studies, which are closely aligned to neurological studies helps to put my project in context by looking at parallel theories in this field. Philosopher, Thomas Nagel perhaps being one of the best examples of my views: Taking intuition seriously, objectivity and science is not a test of reality, just one way of understanding reality. The brain is more than neurons, no universal theory can explain it all.

The 'Decade of the Brain' was adopted by US Congress 1/01/90, brought about many innovations, meetings and conventions which made consciousness studies fashionable. There was the first symposium about the science of consciousness - University of Arizona 1994, 1,000 delegates. Spawned numerous new journals and articles.

Contemporary / Scientific:

‘Our emotional brain [centred in the limbic system] is physiologically able to overwhelm the rationality of the cortex. We can conclude that emotions play an important role in our behaviour, perhaps a role even greater than that of reason.’ [Through studies of Synaesthesia]
(Cytowic, 1994)

Theoretical:

‘Superficially, one could claim that both art and physics have some similar areas of interest. Both explore the physical nature of materials but their reasons for doing so are different. Physics analyses; art makes, or manipulates in unusual ways. In respect of contemporary physics however - quantum theory, relativity and cosmology - there are potentially close connections because both are concerned with questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Both are concerned with how we see ourselves in relation to nature, whether as objective observers or as subjective participants.’
(Ede, ed. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2000)

‘[…] investigating these psychological borderlands where areas of unconscious intersect with what we think of as ordinary, everyday consciousness. Or another way of looking at it would be to describe these states of mind as altered states of consciousness, but whether they are consciousness or unconsciousness is not really something I want to debate; I am just interested in the fact that there are these very different ways of perceiving reality that many artists are interested in.’
(Hiller, 2000)

Why do you want to make the sculptures?

Excited to bring into the ‘real’ world, fragments of our subconscious thought.

Why exciting?

Displaced from another reality, one that is naturally forgotten to allow room for our everyday lives to continue?

The displacement and revealing/displaying of the dream content invites interpretation and encompassment of the audience in a normally private world, transportation to imaginary places.

I plan to continue using sketchbooks and theoretical written notes collated on my blog as my reflective journal. I will need access to the ceramics, 3D and sculpture workshops and the library. I plan to take full advantage of the exhibitions, talks and collections on offer in London. I will also need tutorial support through group discussions and one-to-one sessions.

OUTCOMES:

I imagine my final works to be miniature in scale and presented within an installation environment.

WORK PLAN:

tbc

your monkey called

2009-11-17T10:51:00.002Z

good blog

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Creative Photoshopping by Erik Johansson | Bored Panda

2009-11-17T10:45:00.001Z

via boredpanda.com

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Grizzly Bear // Allison Schulnik

2009-11-16T22:15:00.002Z

via itsnicethat.com

Incredible, wish i'd done this.

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BULLSHIT Quarterly // Jason Permenter

2009-11-16T11:34:00.001Z

via behance.net

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Robert Kusmirowski - Bunker

2009-11-15T22:26:00.003Z

The Curve webcam is down for maintenance. Please check back later.

via barbican.org.uk

Really reminded me of JC & GBM installations but the absence of any sound felt me feeling that it was lacking in atmospheric content. From blurb:
'Though illusion is a central tenet of his practice, Kusmirowski confounds notions of the past and present, complicating ideas of time and place and questioning reality and artifice. By digging up the ghosts of the recent past he forces the viewer to reflect upon the present.' = didn't I just say that in my research paper!

'[S]uperrealism is more than a tricking of the eye. It is a subterfuge against the real, an art pledged not only to pacify the real but to seal it behind surfaces, to embalm it in appearances.' Hal Foster, The Return of the Real

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My Photos:

Half Life bunker stylee

Anish Kapoor

2009-11-15T22:01:00.005Z

Anish Kapoor - amazing. Svayambh (2007) didn't realise it was actually moving through the galleries until I read about it, then went back and saw it was just really slowly. The smell reminded me of the fourth floor at Peckham Rd, lovely melted wax smell.

and Slug (2009)

Project Proposal - revision

2009-11-14T23:10:00.004Z

Today's desk:

bloody geeky to take a photo of this I know but its important. Now I have a laptop I can GO places, revolutionary, and I seem to be able to think so much better out of the house where I can't be distracted by a million other things or stare into space for hours. whoop.

So...the proposal....yes, er, well here are some random words cobbled together, its in progress people:

Working Title:

The representation of my dreams in sculpture.

Aims & Objectives:

The most significant question / problem trying to tackle:-

Capturing the dreams to enlighten/gain an insight into the way life events are linked to previous experiences and dreams help to untangle/solve problems by linking things in an emotional based filing system, not chronologically or the same way our conscious brain would make associations, quest for truth etc etc. quote – from gul book or maybe who we are? Or something about deeper truth – might be synesthestic bk.

Why do you want to make the sculptures?

Excited to bring into the ‘real’ world, fragments of our subconscious thought.

Why exciting?

Displaced from another reality, one that is naturally forgotten to allow room for our everyday lives to continue?

The displacement and revealing/displaying of the dream content invites interpretation and encompassment of the audience in a normally private world, transportation to imaginary places.

AIM: to capture the dreams to enlighten/gain an insight into how life and memories are linked in an emotional/un-logical way.

OBJECTIVES:

Encompassment and transportation to imaginary places.
Portray my own emotion-based associations of scenarios by linking dream-scapes together not necessarily in a chronological order in the order that they were dreamt but more to do with the different feelings associated with each dream.
Encourage interpretation of my dreams by an audience, invitation to a normally private world.

METHODS/HOW TO ACHIEVE OBJECTIVES:

Specifically in sculpting the dreams, the sheer physicality of the objects I plan to use the following materials for their specific ethereal qualities: porcelain (fragile, translucent), wax (temporary, melting nature of the material), bronze (paradoxically crystallising the dream in something so permanent and solid) and possibly film (scope for more emotive qualities, sound, narrative, indefinite visual imagery). Talk about miniature, quote into world but separated from it.
Possible through listening to the qualities of my voice recordings? Sadness, lost etc
By displacing this content from another reality, one that is naturally forgotten and revealing/displaying the dream content, this encourages interpretation.

landscape/environments, narrative and emotional content captured.

Felicity Aylieff

2009-11-14T22:57:00.003Z

waiting for someone on Percy St, errr need to go to this when its open (at CAA) considering worked with her, so decorative!?! where is the brick clay methinks

The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic

2009-11-14T21:25:00.005Z

Pg.56

Kandinsky’s conviction, was that art, if it was to portray reality, should not concentrate on rendering things but on an intuitive process that he exercised in abstract painting, and in which he believed the spiritual could be found.

‘lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and...stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?’

Cross modal associations – cross sensory? This is the foundation of language, i.e. naming of objects.

Pg.96

In non-humans, the only readily established sense-to-sense associations are those between an emotional stimulus, like pleasure, and a non-emotional one, like vision, touch or hearing. Only humans can make associations between two non-emotional stimuli; because of this we can assign names to objects.

Cross-modal associations occur at an unconscious level. A small number of the human population, called synesthetes, act as if there is a conscious mixing of some of these sensory channels, as if a normal perceptual process that is usually hidden has somehow become bared to their consciousness.

Pg.109

[On the question of whether Synesthesia is a sensation]. Dreaming is the most obvious example of one facet. Where, for example, does the ‘I’, the person you think you are, go when you dream? You live a whole other life while dreaming; but you wake up with a sense of continuity to conditions in your waking life, as if your mind never went away.

Pg.110

[Important comparison between the mind and duality principle of light]. The duality principle states that while each photon is an individual particle of light, called a quantum, it is also a continuous wave at the same time. Modern physics has proven that something which is totally individual (a photon) can also be something continuous (a wave). The wave and the particle are both true and valid descriptions of what light is, and an analogy can be made to the human mind, which can also be different things at different times, or even different things at the same time.

Pg.115

Schoenberg Die Gluckliche Hand – (opera) eliminate any distinction between waking reality and dreaming.

Pg.161

The hippocampus is a point where everything converges. All sensory inputs, external as well as those from our visceral (blood), internal milieu, must pass through the emotional limbic brain before being redistributed to the cortex for analysis, after which they are returned to the limbic system for a determination whether the highly processed, multi-sensory information is salient or not (true / relevant).

[Basically, there are far more inputs from the limbic system to the cortex than the other way around, showing how important our emotional judgement is, its influence is greater.]

In discussing temporal lobe seizures that originate in the limbic system, I mentioned that they can produce involuntary actions (automatisms) that seem purposeful but for which the person has no awareness or recollection. TLE can also cause compulsive thinking, florid psychosis, and episodes in which one cannot distinguish between dreaming and reality. The overlap between the behaviour of TLE and that of psychiatric disorders is striking: 50% of those with temporal lobe seizures show psychiatric symptoms compared to only 10% in other types of epilepsy. Thus the emotional brain is physiologically able to overwhelm the rationality of the cortex. We can conclude that emotions play an important role in our behaviour, perhaps a role even greater than that of reason.

Pg.167

We know more than we think we know. The multisensory, synesthetic view of reality is only one thing that we are sure has been lost from consciousness. There could be a lot more. If you want to try to reclaim some of this deeper knowledge, I suggest that you start with emotion, which to me seems to reside at the interface between that part of our self which is accessible to awareness and that part which is not.

Pg.176

Synesthesia does seem to have a lot in common with the eureka moment of insight, mystic experiences and religious rapture, what we call noёtic experiences. Its an old argument in philosophy and religion that reason is not the only way to truth. Reality is not restricted solely to what is given by sense experience.

Pg.202

‘Science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding.’ Joseph Weizenbaum – MIT Professor of Computer Science.

Alternate values have been cast side. Attributing absolute certainty to the scientific method has ‘delegitimatised all other ways of understanding. Once people viewed the arts, especially literature, as sources of intellectual nourishment and understanding, but today they are largely perceived as entertainments.”

Pg.212

That the logic of emotion is dissociated from reason is most readily evident when it operates in creative and spiritual realms.

Pg.217

Satisfying art is a product of deep knowledge and understanding within the artist. It is true that art is informed by the intellect and with acquired technique. But the function of the artist is to penetrate the visible world to illuminate the mystery behind it. That mystery is a ground of universal truth that supports the human condition. If successful, the artist’s expression resonates within the inner life of the reader, viewer, or listener who experiences what I have called an intuitive recognition. Ultimately, the art of fiction is not an intellectual achievement, but an emotional one in which intellect serves only to articulate the human truth, not to explain it.

Pg.220

Because metaphor joins reason and imagination, the conceptual system on which reality is based is in part imaginative. Likewise, creative ideas are partly rational in nature. Objectivity fails to see that our system of concepts is metaphoric, involving an imaginative understanding of one thing in terms of another.

[Analogy between imagination (dreams) and reason (reality/physicality) being linked by metaphor, like me trying to make imagination into reason - sculpture].

Pg.221

We are grasping for a sense of unity because modern life does not fulfil the needs of the human spirit. By embracing subjectivity, the Romantic tradition carved out a niche for itself in the realms of art and religion. In terms of real power, however, modern life is driven by technology, politics, and economics, surface issues that worry the rational mind. Precisely because these superficial drives are so strong, we habitually ignore the depth at which we really live.

It is a curious fact of modern life that we live on the surface and deny the force and reality of our inner experiences. [...]To follow the dictates of society, even though it leads to a type of prescribed happiness (that which society considers good), is to live an inauthentic life.

Dezeen » Blog Archive » Ghost Stories, New Designs from Nendo at MAD

2009-11-13T16:07:00.001Z

via dezeen.com

floatingness

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Porcelain objects - progress (slow)

2009-11-12T23:01:00.001Z

Palm tree paper porcelain hell...these need proper care and attention, more sponge

stairs, some tents, the office, bit of jungle

paper in the porcelain definitely making a difference, this one was breaking off but the fibres enabled me to fix it but still weak, might collapse in firing of course as the paper burns out, we'll see. Noticeable difference between the pure porcelain and paper clay type. Former is SO unforgiving but yet so smooth and gorgeous!, expecting the paper clay to be so much lighter after firing, i hope they don't look too different as the whole scene is a mixture of both.

The paper porcelain was so god damn long winded to make, trying not to use it only for essential structural elements which i think need the support, otherwise just using the original porcelain.

Keith Tyson @ Parasol Unit

2009-10-22T22:48:00.000+01:00

As I was going to the Grayson exhibition, thought it was worth popping next door to see Keith Tyson's latest show. Slightly disappointing, had not so great reviews anyway. Still some good diagrams worth noting but not the excitement for me as Large Field Array.

Grayson Perry @ Victoria Miro

2009-10-22T22:29:00.004+01:00

Update: 22/12/09 - I'm still fascinated with Grayson's maps. Here is a link to the biggest one I could find on tinternet.

uni trip with Amanda Fielding.

really glad I decided to go because the quality of Grayson's work was incredible, layering of glazes fantastic but my favourites were the diagrams, wonderful.

Sophie Calle & wandering...

2009-10-18T23:50:00.002+01:00

New exhibition, first major one by Sophie Calle at Whitechapel opened on Friday. Of course by Sunday it was packed but I really wanted to go based on the description:

The exhibition premieres the English language version of Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), a highlight of the 2007 Venice Biennale. Calle invited 107 women from a ballerina to a lawyer to use their professional skills to interpret an email in which her partner breaks up with her. The poignant, amusing and poetic result forms a large-scale installation that transcends the personal to provide a monument to the women involved.

Really excellent review of her work I felt, elegantly curated (although I hate the layout of the Whitechapel). Bought a book of texts about her work as the exhibition catalogue was £56!!! ridiculous. This was the only photo I took as I love the fact that the text is slowly faded out by the sandblown glass, a perfect metaphor for someone not listening to the story or it being obscured, such a lovely idea to represent this concept.

oh and then I was awalking, so bloody cold but stumbled across my favourite building, nice to see it close up, very green.

Strange and Charmed - Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts

2009-10-18T13:13:00.008+01:00

by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

bought this in Portugal

research:
Martin Kemp - column in Nature: Structural Institutions: The 'Nature' book of art and science (Oxford Uni Press, 2000)
Arthur I Miller: Insights of Genius: Imagery and creativity in science and art (NY, Copernicus,1996)

Arts Catalyst
The Laboratory - Ruskin
Interalia
Wellcome Trust
Gulbenkian - Two cultures programme

pg.55
Good open assessment about art can show how a continually renewed vision of the world leads to new metaphorical forms of expression to assist us in the continuing human struggle to understand, explain and improve our lives. If we see differently, we might think differently and act differently.

pg.64
The complete freedom enjoyed by artists to make what they wish of any subject is a curse as much as an opportunity. Solely responsible for their work, they can fail miserably and have to harden themselves in the face of flippant or casual judgements. Scientists have to get used to a highly charged competitive ethos but they work in teams and they are less vulnerable as individuals, even though they face the risk that years of research may be rendered useless if another team publishes its results first.

pg.75
Thinking and visualising are not mutually exclusive activities and the term 'visual thinking' has been coined to represent a mode of perception and understanding which is quintessentially beyond logic and words. The significance and weight of 'visual thought' can be gauged by the number of instances in science where a set of images derived from the world of sense perception has been replaced by 'artificial' visual images, and even more so by models, which go on to generate their own reality. Thus geological maps, at a macroscopic level, and models of the atom, at the opposite end of the scale, have come to exert extraordinary explanatory power precisely because they are easier to deal with than nature itself. Some might even claim that visual thinking is the most important form of understanding, so that science's crowning achievement - the formulation of explanatory theories - becomes an exercise far more akin to the process of making a picture than formulating a sentence with rational language.

pg.108
A content-addressable memory allows us to recall our knowledge of a recognised item, it allows us to recollect, literally to collect again, the information we possess regarding the object before us. Importantly for art, this information includes any emotional associations that we carry with us. [...] All these associations are learned by experience, encoded in some of the million billion connections, known as synapses, that join together our 100 billion brain cells. It is because our knowledge is stored in the pattern of connections between cells that the study of such highly interconnected brain systems is called 'connectionism'.

pg.120
Superficially, one could claim that both art and physics have some similar areas of interest. Both explore the physical nature of materials but their reasons for doing so are different. Physics analyses; art makes, or manipulates in unusual ways. In respect of contemporary physics however - quantum theory, relativity and cosmology - there are potentially close connections because both are concerned with questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Both are concerned with how we see ourselves in relation to nature, whether as objective observers or as subjective participants.

Tutorial with Rosa #2

2009-10-15T15:59:00.004+01:00

Again, brief discussion of remaking the wax scene in porcelain, and why it was important to remake. Explained I wanted to expand upon the wax one as it now wasn't going any further, whereas the porcelain one would be permanent. Started off last weekend making some individual objects, as tackling the trees and base showed how impossible it was to make out of such a fragile material.

Rosa suggested adding some paper to the clay to improve its handbuilding qualities and make it more robust for the tree trunks and other structures, as the fibres (although burnt out in firing) would support these forms better. So I will make some at the weekend.

Also discussed the fact that the objects / scene will shrink by up to 20% in firing which is quite a nice concept for the thing to get even smaller / remote / further from reality. Maybe I can play around with this and fire some multiple times to get different, slightly odd and unnerving scales. Explained I was making the next part of the scene, the camping tents, slightly too small for someone who was sitting in the office chair to enter. Definite Alice in Wonderland, drink me, eat me thing going on here. Really feel that she has some good wisdom to impart and hopefully has solved my fragility problem.

Frieze 2009

2009-10-14T23:49:00.001+01:00

Decidedly flat this year. Went in a tiny comedy club installation, and took some digital camera photos with Luisa in the dark (sounds dodgy but it wasn't!) but these were my favourite. Marble, and another type of stone - not sure, can't see on the photos but the thickness of the stone made it possible to discern the lady's face underneath the vale. Very illusionary.

Icelandic Diagram

2009-10-13T11:34:00.001+01:00

god i love diagrams. geeky. thanks

Alastair Levy

2009-10-13T10:22:00.001+01:00

word of the week. nice. rca graduate. favourite photograph.

'polycup' archival print, 2008.

First porcelain chair

2009-10-10T23:45:00.001+01:00

Bloody difficult stuff, made a perfect spiral staircase but I breathed on it and it disintegrated before my very eyes...

Tutorial with Rosa

2009-10-08T23:47:00.003+01:00

Just presented my work to Rosa really quickly as mine was at the end of the session and me and Wendy had to go to the Neurophilosophy lecture, but I felt she understood well my project.

Briefly discussed how the wax landscape had now melted down, out of my control so here are some photos of it. Lovely thought about: although I am now trying to recreate this in porcelain, it could also have wax parts (poss. representing difficult to remember/hazy areas) and bronze parts (definite) or degenerate from bronze to porcelain to wax...melt. Although I think this might look too bitty.

Exchanges at the Frontier: Patricia Churchland

2009-10-08T13:11:00.000+01:00

@ Wellcome Trust. She is Prof. of Philosophy at University of California, with A C Grayling.

Describes herself as a Neurophilosopher. Discussed the nature of consciousness amongst lots of other topics.
coma/awake
deep sleep/awake
paying attention/not

Integration across cortex and sub-cortex.

Explained an experiment that proves that non-conscious decision making is better than conscious:

three groups of people, choice of 8 apartment descriptions to choose from: 1 is obviously the best, like close to work, cheap etc.

first group have to decide immediately, second group have 10 minutes and third group allowed to look at choices then distracted by a menial task. third group picked best, as your conscious part of the brain is distracted with another task so your subconscious takes over making the decision. She described it as accessing the 'broadband' most powerful part of your brain. sub-conscious is more intuitive and able to make better decisions without the conscious elements maybe of what people might think and other peripheral considerations.

links to my thoughts about dreams and how they can provide the best decisions or reveal a more comprehensive way to look at a situation.

Chris Frith (from the audience!) asked her about the way forward with thinking about consciousness and other problems and maybe we need to look more at how brains interact together, integrated brain studies to help us to understand the intensely complicated way our brains store and process information.

V&A new ceramics galleries

2009-10-03T23:36:00.002+01:00

lots of lovely things and massively comprehensive new ceramics galleries. wow. I just picked these out as some favourites but quite honestly by the second room I was overwhelmed with the amount of objects and kind of skimmed the other rooms. Could go back and live here indefinitely I think. Oh and the lady, for the sculpted porcelainness.

Research Paper

2009-09-30T11:18:00.000+01:00

Wanted to post the whole thing with images etc but would probably go over several pages and not be easy to read. Word doc here. so just put up the title/abstract.

By exploring how we perceive illusion in art installations and contemporary film, this paper will compare The Dark Pool by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller with the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, looking at the nature of the viewer’s interaction and how imagination can be manipulated.

Abstract

This paper discusses firstly, a brief background of contemporary installation art, sound art and illusion in film, followed by a discussion of The Dark Pool and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the parallels between these two immersive experiences. Multiple techniques are used by both the art installation and the film in different ways to distort our sense of reality and provide us with an illusionary experience.

Both media use sound, and it is argued that this enables our imagination to enrich our encounters of the works. In the installation, the multiple layers of sound, presented as an overlapping narrative, helps us to visualise the stories presented as part of the work. In the film, the soundtrack helps to engage us emotionally and presents dual layers of reality as the plot jumps through time and across parallel storylines.

Also, both are presented with a disorganised chronology that affects our sense of ‘being in the present’ and invites the question: what is fiction or reality? The difference between them is that within the installation, as a viewer, you are free to explore the space and discover elements of the story in a self defined order, whereas the film already has the jumbled chronology decided for us.

Lastly, objects are used in The Dark Pool, some familiar to us to invoke a feeling of nostalgia for the past, combined with strange inventions only technologically possible in the present to confuse our sense of time and in Eternal objects are used in forced perspective to create a visual illusion.

Ultimately, both have a similar aim to immerse us as viewers and for a short space of time at least, present to us a different or as described by Cardiff ‘parallel’ world, free from the constraints of reality.

Key Words

Illusion, dream, installation, film, sound

Telling Tales @ V&A

2009-09-29T12:18:00.002+01:00

well, unfortunately I have been waiting for this exhibition for months and it wasn't worth waiting for! The selection of work was really dull and considering that on this topic there are so many amazing makers in London alone, they managed to pick such a short sighted collection - often having the same designers present more than one work which could have made room for some much more interesting work. I think these were the only two pieces I found interesting:

'Bathboat'

Wieki Somers

'Lathe Chair VIII'

Sebastian Brajkovic

The 'Lathe Chair' series was conceived by rotating 19th-century chair shapes around a central axis to stretch them. The finished chairs were cast in bronze, like sculpture, but remain functional as furniture. The upholstery was digitally designed. The result is a marriage of tradition and modernity.

In the interpretation material there were a few quotes:
'Design should indeed play the role of art in people's homes, offices and public spaces, be a material for thinking, self-searching, reflecting and not just for passive enjoyment. That opens the door for non-functional objects in design. Or should we say that the function itself should be re-defined?' Constantin Boym

[What are your objects trying to tell me?]
'They try to show you a different truth. They will always refer to things you already know from your past, like a material use, or a pattern, or a decoration, or a function or use. But they will give you something new as well. They cause a pleasant confusion and change your perspective on things. They challenge you to look in a different way at the world around you.' Niels Van Eijk and Miriam Van Der Lubbe

pants.

Exchanges at the Frontier: Lawrence Krauss

2009-09-17T23:00:00.001+01:00

@ Wellcome Trust. Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck interviewing Lawrence Krauss, Director, Origins Initiative, Arizona State University.

Can't quite describe how amazing this talk was. The first of four to be organised by Anthony Grayling to explain further to the public the latest advances at the forefront of various disciplines, and making connections between science, philosophy, art etc. I didn't make loads of notes as I had to concentrate to understand all the theories we went through!

Lawrence Krauss started as a particle physicist and became interested in all the big stuff i.e. the universe as it is all essentially described by particle physics, can read about the rest of his career here.

Open, Flat, Closed universe:

Spoke about Neutrinos, supersymmetry, inflationary cosmology, dark energy, dark matter

There is an argument for the universe being flat, as + and - gravity = 0 energy, so something that has come from nothing (big bang, and as in Quantum Mechanics where flucuations cause particles to come into and out of existence all the time). (ps probably no space or time existed before that).

Universe is just over 14 billion years old and during the inflation there was a phase transition and there could be another one where the symmetry of the universe will change and although the rules of physics will remain the properties governing elementary particles might change. i.e. water to ice, different rule if it is supercooled.

Dark energy could be responsible for the universe expanding as it is repulsive in empty space, negative pressure. So the matter has to do work on the dark energy and that work causes energy, which cause the universe to expand - I think this is right, got a bit lost in the explanation!

Anthropic Principle, Multiverse - Metauniverse.

ooo and just found this about the dream argument.

Nana

2009-09-15T23:40:00.001+01:00

design / art gallery

2009-09-14T15:41:00.001+01:00

http://carpentersworkshopgallery.com/

READ THIS

2009-09-12T12:39:00.001+01:00

http://whileyouweresleeping.tumblr.com/

art direction link

2009-09-11T16:46:00.001+01:00

http://www.anagrama.com/portafolio/41-anagrama-night-out

Aluminium landscape

2009-09-10T23:41:00.002+01:00

found this offcut of scrap aluminium in the foundry. looking through it reminds me of Flash Gordon landscape. worth a photo? miniatureness.

WebTrend Maps

2009-09-08T14:25:00.001+01:00

In the spirit of the previous post:

http://webtrendmap.com/

awesome, if I had $49 lying around I would buy the poster and start makin me own!

How to....try and keep up with everything

2009-09-01T15:39:00.002+01:00

Thanks: Wal

Iain Tait from Poke

HI: What do you think about all the new trends and technologies that are popping up daily? How do you keep yourself in the look and how are you able to keep up with everything? Do you have any tips on how to filter the important stuff out?

Iain: That's a great question. And it's actually at least 2 questions.
Keeping up with everything is impossible. You need to give up now or your brain will explode. It's always been impossible to keep up. The problem is that we've now been sold a lie. We've been told that thanks to wonderful software and gadgets it's possible to stay in the loop with everything. It's not.

Here's my tip for everyone. *Fish in different ponds from everyone else*. Of course you should make sure you know about the big important stuff. But don't just read the same blogs as everyone else. Find some niche stuff. Find some crazy MIT department that specialises in quantum storage theory and subscribe to their RSS feed. Join a Russian techno forum. See how oddballs are using technology. Then start making connections. Interesting stuff happens when you make connections.

Knowing how to filter the good stuff from the bad is tough. It's just a case of watching things over and over again, then you start to spot what works and what doesn't. You'll never get it right all the time, but you'll start to spot patterns and develop instincts. It's the same as anything really, the more you do it, the quicker and better you become.

Felt Cloud

2009-09-01T10:58:00.002+01:00

Thanks to butdoesitfloat use kitsunenoir to link to daily blogs to view

Back on the band-wagon

2009-08-31T10:27:00.007+01:00

Well hello there lovely blog. Its been a while. I've been away, thinking...

I (finally) found the Bold Tendencies exhibition on top of the car park in Peckham. Was a beautiful sunny morning with no one there, excellent photo opportunities - I even started feeling like a photographer! Mixed work, my favourite was this:

as it actually related very well to the space.

Rings at the V&A

2009-08-29T23:43:00.001+01:00

Can't see but there were tiny tiny landscapes inside the tops of these rings, in an Indian? temporary exhibition on the ground floor. oh and a hand cut screen.

The Provisional Texture of Reality - Susan Hiller

2009-07-08T13:21:00.007+01:00

Installation shot of Psi Girls by Susan Hiller, I saw this at Tate Modern. Just wanted to put it in as uses excerpts from films.

Automatic drawing by Masson.

pg.10

'If talking and thinking were sufficient, and working with ideas was enough, why make art?'

pg.25

[...]about the relationship between science and art. I can only approach this elliptically. I'm a big worrier and one of the things I tend to worry about periodically is the problem for artists, in particular, of pinning down thoughts and intuitions in ways that have nothing to do with the fluid movement of awareness. The emerging category science-art (lecture given in 1999) troubles me along these lines. I don't want to use up things by prematurely 'understanding' them, and thereby blocking the potential for creating unpredictable new things. I definitely don't want to make work that illustrates what's already known and in place.

pg. 28

One of the world's leading experts on Leonardo [da Vinci] [...] Paintings interested him as depictions of mental images, feelings, states of mind. In other words, what interested him was beyond representation, what could not be conventionally annotated or illustrated. He admonished the true thinker not 'to boast of knowing the laws of nature but to find satisfaction in understanding the new things he invents within his own mind'.

The conditions of consciousness mean that humans desire periodically to exit from language. We seek release from the representational networks which constitute the ego at any given moment. Biologically and existentially the exits from language work to relieve 'the overload of memory' (which Freud named the unconscious) 'by which consciousness is constantly threatened' [...] The great absences where language stops, of course, are death, ecstasy and unconsciousness, but absence in this sense is experienced every day in sleep [...] The scientific account [of dreaming] is at odds with what we feel 'really' happens when we dream.

I suppose I would position artistic practice just here on the borders or edges of conscious experience - interfacing between the social/cultural world and the individual's subjectivity, formed by her experiences in that world. The lucidity of dreamers is the lucidity of artists.

pg. 55

[Yves] Klein's practice shows that there need be no contradiction between objects and events, since objects are just the manifestation of events, falling apart or disappearing at a slower pace.

pg.156

(Question in an interview - noted simply for the phrasing of the question)
The aspects of memory and forgetting we are discussing seem not so far removed from another element of consequence in your work, namely your attention to those things that lie outside of consciousness - what might be called gaps in the cover of the rational, a kind of shifting ground between the conscious, the unconscious, the rational, the irrational. In other pieces you've worked directly with unconscious elements of subjectivity in your explorations of dream mapping and automatic writing, for instance. Extending our discussion of memory and forgetting, it seems that a consideration of unconscious elements is also relevant to this work, though in a different way. (talking about the J street project).

pg. 176
The Dreamachine.

In an Interview about the exhibition Dream Machines:

One of the things that really interested me in putting together this show was to look at the ways that artists investigate these psychological borderlands where areas of unconscious intersect with what we think of as ordinary, everyday consciousness. Or another way of looking at it woul be to describe these states of mind as altered states of consciousness, but whether they are consciousness or unconsciousness is not really something I want to debate; I am just interested in the fact that there are these very different ways of perceiving reality that many artist are interested in.

NEED to do a whole separate post on the Dream Machines touring exhibition, have the catalogue - where to start...

Acoustic Images @ BFI

2009-07-07T12:23:00.000+01:00

Group of 10 postgraduate students from RCA - encapsulate experimental and commercial application of the most innovative sonic and visual arts. Provocative audiovisual surprises. Well, all the blurb sounded very exciting....ummm - was this just a dark cinema with people listening politely to 2.5 hours of mostly...very annoying sounds, combined with video of water, sea, lakes - oh yes and more water. yes. but, at least one or two were interesting and I thought of the following:

Based on the film by Karen Mirza & Brad Butler - The Space Between. There was a section of 16mm films superimposed on top of each other and one section was of a mountain. I liked the thought of the partly visible slice of mountain in between, unsureness.

Then I need to make an object - maybe 4 of them and then try and slice them up and make again into one object that looks the same from different angles - although this sounds a bit Futurist.

Alex Hulme

2009-07-07T09:52:00.001+01:00

The name of a famous designer already.

http://www.alexhulme.com/studies/all-the-things-i-use-in-one-day/

Travelling boat

2009-07-02T20:32:00.002+01:00

Wax boat with suitcases.

Quote from The Glass Menagerie

2009-07-01T21:15:00.002+01:00

The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

Scene One, Tom:

'Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.'

Walking in my mind - Hayward

2009-06-24T15:16:00.000+01:00

Went to the PV of the summer show at Hayward Gallery. From the catalogue:

'The complex physicality of the brain is both pictured and given material presence, and the immateriality of thought finds physical form; dreams and hallucinations become immersive environments; new worlds are fabricated from the imagination; memory and childhood are evoked; the artist's self - their conciousness - is portrayed; and the studio is evinced as the focus and location off creativity.'

Keith Tyson:

I felt Charles Avery's work was stronger when I saw it at Parasol Unit but it was good to see some new pieces.

Thomas Hirschhorn:

The caves made of parcel tape were amazing, very strong environment inside them, totally artificial with the strip lighting, the four main chambers relating to the four major lobes of the brain.

Mark Manders:

Fox / Mouse / Belt (1992)
This was my favourite piece in the exhibition, just lying in the middle of the floor.
'[...]Manders realised that he wanted to work with something more abstract than words, and concluded that it would be better to use objects. 'Viewers - or readers - of the objects construct their own new thoughts,' he points out,' and the result is a self-portrait that is suspended between the maker and the viewers'.

Yayoi Kusama

Chiharu Shiota

This isn't the piece in the exhibition, but shows some of the thread work. I already posted about Chiharu's work from the Contemporary Japanese lecture I went to at Chelsea last year so it was great to see some of the work in the flesh and appreciate the amazing webbed/threaded environments created.

Wellcome Trust - archive visit

2009-06-24T11:35:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately we're not allowed to post any photos we took from this visit. Went to the huge archive of the Wellcome Collection, Science Museum and (I think) the V&A is stored in the same building. It was the first commercial office building in the UK for National Savings and Investments, beautiful high ceilings and great feel inside the space. We went down to the basement to a whole catacomb of rooms (looked a bit like a mental institution!) to see all the medical equipment and instruments collected.

Everyone got very excited about individual objects, but I didn't feel quite the same excitement and it made me realise more that installations of objects inside a space are more important to me I think. I found it hard to engage with individual things, also the following day I helped Susana prepare her space in the basement for the MA show and I found the experience of thinking about her installation and how to create an ENVIRONMENT for the work so inspiring. Not to say I didn't appreciate visiting the archive, certainly a privileged experience and if I was looking for a certain type of medical object they might have - a great resource to know about.

Jen Stark

2009-06-22T12:21:00.003+01:00

Thanks again to Itsnicethat for this. Favourite pictured from Jen Stark. Nice 2d to 3d thoughts, doorways....

Jerwood Contemporary Makers visit

2009-06-18T11:07:00.001+01:00

So, now the prize is all the materials in one competition. I was a bit disappointed that there were only 7 exhibitors as I feel there is so much more going on in contemporary 'craft' (eukkk hate that word!) than was shown.

My favourite pieces by far were by Committee product design - considering the question of 'what is worth making in the consumer age when we already have (and waste) so much?' and they answer that by making projects out of discarded objects. Very inspiring selection.

Also the work by Geoffrey Mann was interesting, 3d sculptures of 'solid air' a pigeon's flight and a moth attracted to a light, I like the concept but I'm not sure about the final works.

Latest dream research from Time magazine

2009-06-16T10:19:00.003+01:00

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams Do Have Meaning

By Tiffany Sharples Monday, Jun. 15, 2009

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams — and, more so, sleep — are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotions.

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

[Whole Article]

Junichiro Tanizaki - In praise of shadows

2009-06-11T11:05:00.002+01:00

About the author: Junichiro Tanizaki was an eminent Japanese novelist (1886-1965), and this is an essay on aesthetics within the context of traditional Japanese culture. Must try and read some of his other translated novels...

Just a quote I like from the foreword by Charles Moore, School of Architecture, UCLA:

"...there comes to us the excitement of realising that musicians everywhere make their sounds to capture silence of that architects develop complex shapes just to envelop empty space."

NICE

pg. 46

We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

-

I couldn't quote anymore parts from this as it really needs to be read as a whole essay. I want to go to Japan!

Nicolas Bourriaud - PostProduction - GAPS

2009-06-11T10:15:00.002+01:00

Oh Nicolas, Nicolas - how I love your writing style - so eloquent and concise! Now I know this book is about the reuse of existing materials in artists work and therefore doesn't directly relate to my project but I can't help finding relevant information everywhere these days!

pg.17
How can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life? Artists today program forms more that they compose them: rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay etc) they remix available forms and make use of data [to manipulate and present].
Ludwig Wittgenstein - "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use."

pg.53
Pierre Huyghe - In the 1996 exhibition, Traffic, video, a bus ride toward the docks of Bordeaux. Throughout their trip travellers could view a video that showing the image of the route in the daytime. This shift between night and day, as well as the slight delay due to red lights and traffic, introduced an uncertainty concerning the reality of the experience: the superimposition of real time and the mise-en-scene produced a potential narrative. While the image becomes a tenuous link that connects us to reality, a splintered guide to the lived experience, the meaning of the work has to do with a system of differences: the difference between the direct and the deferred [..] It is in this difference that human experience occurs. Art is the product of a gap.

pg. 73
Joseph Grigely - He reorganises human words, fragments of speech, and written traces of conversations, in a sort of intimate sampling, a domestic ecology.

Thinking about gaps again as I'm transcribing the sound notes of the dreams, there are words I can't distinguish, maybe I should edit those together into something? I need to look into the gaps!

Institute of Psychiatry - Creativity/Madness debate

2009-06-10T09:09:00.003+01:00

There would be no genius without madness
This house believes that mental disorder is the price we pay for exceptional creativity

Amazing debate (like Jeremy Paxman!) at the beautiful 50s lecture theatre at the Institute just round the corner for me. It was absolutely packed with people - great to see artists and psychiatrists interested in the same thing. They did a vote beforehand with the audience, and I voted for, then each of the four speakers had 8 mins to present their case. Such a treat to see people like the world's leading expert on Neurotheology - amazingly sharp.

Notes I managed to scribble:
There is a paradox between creativity (an expansive thinking style which requires focus, clarity of thought) and madness (inability, incompetance).

There are obviously main dimensions of madness - degrees of illness and there are healthy 'mad' traits and only when they get to extremes would you consider the person to be mad. He mentioned an over inclusive cognative style - me?!

In the end I changed my mind to against - that you don't have to be mad to be creative - overall in some ways the terminology was confused so it was also a debate about exactly what we are defining. Fantastic idea and I hope they have more debates in relation to the arts/sciences.

Foundry Fellowships talk @ Chelsea

2009-06-09T08:24:00.004+01:00

Paul Coldwell

Presentations by Foundry Fellows who have been working at different periods in the Chelsea college foundry since 2006. There have been three fellows so far: artists, Paul Coldwell, Bruce Gernand and Robson Cezar.

As well as the presentations there will also be discussion by fellows about their thoughts and reflections on their time and experience while working in the foundry. The Foundry Fellowship is a scheme where periodically an artist is invited to work in the Chelsea College Foundry in order to develop their practice through an agreed project involving the processes of Fine Art Bronze Casting. While the primary aim is to support the Fellow in their work, we would anticipate that the presence of this artist working alongside students and staff in the workshop will also engender discussion, discourse and debate.

Paul is part of FADE - Fine Art Digital Environment. Tries several wax scales before gets it right.

Robson - temporary to permanent, giving something strength both physically and in relation to the perceived value of the material.

Useful to go to this to see about how to maybe apply for the fellowship after the MA, needs to be for a specific project to use the processes which will hopefully have an outcome (exhibition etc). Also met Jane Atkinson who is doing a PGCert course with John (who partly organised the fellowship). Had the chance to explain my project to her as she is a voice coach, interested in making visual representations of sound - she seemed interested!!

First Thursdays

2009-06-05T22:49:00.002+01:00

Went to take a peek last night at the latest offerings from Vyner Street - mixed, very mixed. My favourite gallery I think was Nettie Horn - nice finishing.

The Hidden Land

1 MAY - 14 JUNE 2009

Antique philosophy is at the origin of numerous reflections on the nature of our world as well as the existence of universes parallel to our reality. These thoughts were “materialised” in the concept of infinity - described by the indefinite and complex nature of the physical world - as well as in the suggestion that a constant and eternal movement pre-exists in all things.
The Hidden Land (1) is an invitation to reflect on these theories of multiple worlds and the unidentified zones situated between fiction and reality. Transcending universal understanding, these remarkable theories symbolise acts of intellectual humility as the world is indubitably more vast and complex, more unpredictable and colourful, than what our comprehension, here and now, would want to let us know. (2)

The works presented in the exhibition address issues surrounding the spatiotemporal process, questioning our perception of things through varied mediums and materials as well as the idea that each piece is the comprehensive result of an experimental approach. Each work emphasizes the idea that movement is an intrinsic and permanent flux existing in all things, as well as being the sign and measure of space and time.

Why WHY WHY is everything I come across - whats that saying - collective consciousness 'zeitgeist'.

Oh, the poor bunnies!

2009-06-05T12:44:00.001+01:00

Different ways to transcribe the dreams

2009-06-03T22:40:00.002+01:00

Manifestos

2009-06-02T11:57:00.002+01:00

How, what, when, where, who, why?

Sound recording(s) of the day - spliced with the spoken dream? This could aid making the DIAGRAM. Diagram of sound?

Maybe the inventories of objects could have codes/emblems on so that I know what they are related to - which period/section in my life.

Maybe I need a manifesto for myself. Pulling together everything for this presentation to the BAs makes me think I need to remember and perhaps discover still exactly why?

Here is one my Michael Betancourt: Maybe i'll try and fill it in....

MANIFESTO*

Today, itself is obsolete. In documenting art
on the basis of : we are human and true
for the sake of , , and
. At the crossroads of the lights, alert,
attentively awaiting .

If you find it futile and don't want to waste your time on a
that means nothing, consider that here we
cast on fertile ground. Here we have a right
to do some prospecting, for we have .
We are ghosts drunk on energy, we dig into .

We are a as tropically abundant as
, which is the art of making
established as on a
canvas before our eyes,yet today the striving for
in a work of art seems
to art. Art is a concept, exalted as
, inexplicable as life, indefinable and
. The work of art comes into being through
the of the elements.

The medium is as as the artist. Essential only
is the forming, and because the medium is ,
any whatsoever will .

is the name for such art.
stands for freedom.
changes meaning with the change in the insight of those who view
it. Every artist must be allowed to mold a picture out of
. The of natural
elements is to a work of art. Instead, it is the
artist who to produce ,
in order to make a better art.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

2009-05-28T14:03:00.003+01:00

One of my favourite cities:

pg. 75
Thin Cities

If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; father down you can glimpse the chasm's bed.

This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as a passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children's games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

pg. 44
'With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus [A rebus (Latin: "by things") is a kind of word puzzle that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words] that conceals a desire or, it reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.'

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco

2009-05-28T09:47:00.002+01:00

pg. 86 Two students from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris recently came to show me a photograph album in which they had reconstructed the entire route taken by my character Casaubon, having photographed, at the same time of night, each of places I had mentioned. [...] They wanted to transform the 'real' Paris into a place in my book. [...] To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories and it has always been the paramount function of myth: to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience.

Although I have edited this down quite heavily I identified with the idea of building a visual collage of a place that - when written - did not exist but has been 'found' through a library of visual images. Eco admits that he did not describe a particular bar in Paris but the students subsequently found the imaginary one he was describing. Sort of like dreaming, when you are describing a place which could later be 'found', slightly redefined or remembered/salvaged by an image.

Martino Gamper

2009-05-28T09:01:00.002+01:00

1oo chairs project

http://www.gampermartino.com/
Two hour talk by designer Martino Gamper. Brief sum up:
Apprenticeship at 14 to a furniture maker, studied in Vienna, 1994 worked in an industrial design studio in Milan, 2000 RCA graduate (same course as Maiko), shows since then.

Nice the way he was honest about just trying things out and playing around to create good designs.

Tutorial with Maiko

2009-05-27T11:55:00.002+01:00

Research paper ideas (very vague):

Heather & Ivan Morison
Flights of Reality exhibition at Kettles Yard:
Keith Tyson
Charles Avery

To do:

Consolidate the group of objects I have made, lay out and look at
Emotional inventory - relisten to the dream sound recordings and identify some
Try to draw a diagram linking the dream to the previous days activities (Do I need to start a day journal again or more factual? Diary/documentation of activities/movement/conversation/media(TV etc) encountered.
Record the sound from a day - get sound recorder from loan store