emilyontime

[emilyontime]

A new link to my film for easy access!

The film began as a walk from my South London home to the Greenwich Meridian Line, on which I asked everybody I passed “Do You Have The Time?”. I recorded each response in a reporters notebook as I walked.

In the film I recite these collected dialogues every minute, on the minute.

These regular intervals distort my experience of the walk and the chance nature of seeing people at random times.

On the walk, I left home at 14:29, which is the same time I began recording the film, and the same time I screened the film at The Park Brewery exhibition this past weekend ... (6/7/21❤️)

The complications of formatting chance happenings to clock time mean that the film gradually falls out of real time for viewers. Slowly, the duration of the five hour walk is compressed to the duration of the film; just an hour and forty six minutes.

The space is intended to be as clinical and nondescript as the face of a clock, and to pull focus to the words spoken, the ticking of the clock, and my presence, as a ‘translator’ between the timings of the walk, and those in the space it is screened.

The film is an investigation into the disparity between our varied and inconsistent experiences of time and the ways that we measure and record it... It is intended to be passed by, small sections encountered at random by different audiences. In this way, it begins and ends with chance based encounters between myself and others...

Please scroll down for more info and other other works made during my final major project at Ksa and if anyone has any artist/ otherwise recs plz dm me! @se.eemilyplay

Finally- here are some notes I made a while ago about the entire project and my interest in time:

I am obsessed with this play between the controlled aspect of working with time- and the multifaceted (or just many faceted) endlessly varied understanding that we have of such an abstract thing-

(And of such a rigid mechanical thing-

- and of such an invisible, inaccessible, and then inaudible thing)

I want to work with intervals that are really precise and to hold the work to this expectation of perfection which it can’t really achieve- I like the mistakes and the breaks in rigidity; I think they reflect this magnetic and constant argument between the way we exist and the systems which we use to guide our lives. The works should suggest my broader interest in contrast- visually, with audio, and conceptually; overlaying contrasting understandings of the same subject matter...

[emilyontime]

Managed to access a Camera and so I went back to take better photos of Do You Have The Time? installed- I have less reservations now about the Infinity wall and ended up using it again- this time with some interaction with the work from two peers- a kind of mock up of how I would like to ideally install it; somewhere it might be passed by, different sections and different durations seen by different audiences at random.

What I wrote about the installation in my supporting statement:

I projected the film against an infinity walI. I originally felt opposed to installing it somewhere that reminded me so much of the clean, clinical environment where it was filmed, but, conversely, I felt the simplicity of the film seemed more resonant than a busier environment might have allowed.

I am happy with my documentation of people in the space; walking in front of the film and intermittently watching it. With more time, I would install the film somewhere that people might pass by it naturally. Born out of a walk, and chance interactions with the public, I think it should be installed where it might be seen at random.

[emilyontime]

In a tutorial with Jala we spoke about installation... I’ve been making some notes on how I want to install my film with a focus on finding somewhere that it might be passed by, cut in on, and only seen in parts by a ‘chance’ audience.

I did try out using a projector on an infinity wall in the Tower Block... but I felt that this environment was too clean and clinical - in other words, too similar to the space I shot in. Ideally I would like to take the film to the meridian line- as with my Time Walk film (recording and performing sounds back in the same place) - I like the idea that I asked people for the time at random, and that the audience would also be a group of people passing by chance.

I was considering doing a viewing of the first half from my front garden or outside my house, and then travelling to Greenwich and showing the other half outside the meridian line- unfortunately this comes with difficulties-  the film is very long and my laptop is likely to die- and finding a ‘chance audience’ after dark in a locked park seems unrealistic.....

Rather than focusing on the route to Greenwich I think I should prioritise installing the work somewhere where it will be seen at random by passersby- a hallway in the tower block seems ideal- an indoor space that I can access and use a plug socket...I’ll have to check if there are plugs today...

Also- I’d ideally like to play the film at the same time that I left my house on my walk, which is also the same time I started my film (14:29)

Should I be sat beside it, asking people the time ?

Recording and performing at once .....



[emilyontime]

Something I forgot to add here!

When I was deciding how to present my walk to Greenwich I wanted to experiment with visually mapping the day, using the dialogues collected when I asked people “Do you have the time?”

The line on the far right represents the Meridian line- visually, I wanted the ‘line’ or jagged edge of the words as they extended to the bottom right corner to represent a hazier, more chaotic line... a palimpsest of peoples words and phrases (maybe I should have even tried layering these?).... a line that jumped back and forth and was longer in different places according to what was said .... a contrast to the Meridian Line, as an abstract concept that is tied to a straight line or equator.

I planned it according to measurements decided by the size of the wall- making ratios based on how many entries there were in the book and how much time was covered overall.

I used charcoal because I felt that it was a nice visual step away from the precision of the measurements between each phrase.

I liked that the charcoal smudged, ran together and changed in size- I think it gave more information about my role in the work than a pen would have.

My mother also had some ideas:

As can be seen- I didn’t get much of it done- I planned it for a studio day dedicated to installation, a massive (ironic?) miscalculation in how long it would take me to get the phrases on the wall.

I would have liked to complete it- but in the end I felt that it wasn’t the best way to ‘transcribe’ the responses to my question was using performance/ moving image, so that I could work with measurements in time- intervals of different durations- between the words, rather than physical measurements.

I still like what I managed to get done- an experiment in visualising time that feels the opposite of my You Are Now work- In this case, visualising or presenting a mass of chance encounters spaced in controlled, measured ways, where You Are Now involved darts thrown according to random factors of chance- but each dart and encounter spaced at strict 5 minute intervals. I think it is this play between controlled, rigid increments of time, and trying to create environments and work that promotes random actions, reactions and encounters is what is really driving a lot of my work.

I did get some feedback:

The work made certain things really obvious- for instance: The length of the phrases that people said... but other things were unclear (although I quite like that who said what/ when things were said is not obvious)

The heading at the top (DO YOU HAVE THE TIME?) was a nice title but unnecessary physically and changed or confused the format of the work- I.e: made it resemblant to text with a subheading

The idea of a ‘talking map’, or a record of a journey built from speech was an interesting way of showing time pass...

The scale of the work was praised 

If finishing this- I would record myself undertaking the task- I think the process of me making it should have been filmed in it’s entirety (and timed!) as a process paralleled to the walk itself ...

[emilyontime]

My Final film: Do You Have The Time?

I’ve already discussed this film in previous posts! - Here it is in its final form...

It’s length required going into the editing suite to get it onto the KSA server before I could upload it! Some notes I made in the editing suite whilst deciding whether I should trim the start and end of the film at all:

In the end I decided not to edit it at all ....

[emilyontime]

Janine Antoni- Touch, 2002

I like this idea of the impossible task- and trying to achieve something with the body but not being quite capable-

It reminds me of my film (being edited) Do You Have the Time? - trying to speak the voices of other people was a similarly difficult task- one that meant I tried to vary my tone of voice or mimic as best possible any voices or tones of voice that I remembered, though this often proved near impossible... 

[emilyontime]

Final crit feedback on Time Walk: Recording And Performing Ten Seconds for Every Ten Minutes

[emilyontime]

Printing in the darkroom!

I finally got around to printing my 35mm film of my mothers old sketches- as already described, I was keen to mess with the outlines of the sketches, working circles into the images to see where these would fit- or often where they wouldn’t, and would disrupt the outline. I asked her to wait with me for the duration of a minute and tell me when it was up -  “her minute” lasted a minute and 14 seconds.

My plan was to change the darkroom timings to fit her timings- I.e: to work with her minute and dissect from this duration what a second would be to her. This play between her time and how time exists in 60 second minutes would be similar to the conversation between her outlines and my  carefully drawn circles- an ambiguous suggestion of the circles of clocks as clock time meeting hers....

Unfortunately, with limited time in workshops, I haven’t been able to realise this- but I enjoyed experimenting with different exposure times (above) and seeing what an image ‘on her time’ might have looked like.... 

[emilyontime]

Parts of interest from an Article on Francis Alys’ work - I particularly liked the sound of the work Guards- In which groups of the Coldstream Guards were dropped in locations around London, and directed to find each other by walking. I really like this idea of chance encounters. During my walk through Greenwich, where I asked everybody I passed for the time, I became really interested in where intervals in time (in this case: intervals or recorded points in a walk) are the product of random timings, out of the control by the artist... I think these chance events structure a work and become its backbone- just as with The Green Line I like that the duration of the work is according to these varying factors

[emilyontime]

Francis Alys film!

I couldn’t add any more images to my Time for Tea/ Tea for Time post- so here are some stills from the Francis Alys Film: The Green Line, that I discussed:

[emilyontime]

Time Walk: Recording and performing 10 seconds for every ten minutes

https://youtu.be/v3DiUDK-xo4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ZrWxo1b_4

Conducted over two walks on Friday 7th and Saturday 8th of May, this is my ‘Time Walk’ Film! It’s been split into two parts for the Youtube upload.

On the Friday, I walked again from my house to the Greenwich Meridian Line, which has become a point of fascination to me! I think of it as a redundant symbol of time, but also as a way of looking at or understanding time as having a locational or visual form... 

During the walk, I recorded 10 second audios on my phone, at intervals of 10 minutes (using alarms set every 10 minutes from the time that I organised to set off).

My mother kindly filmed the whole walk- as we didn’t know where I would stop according to the timers. She filmed me from across the road wherever possible, so that I could be clearly seen amidst my environment. This was perhaps a misjudged opinion as we passed through this road: 

... where I became submerged in the traffic that was between us.... but we both ended up enjoying the complexities of this, and the ways that the film reflected the changes in environment... One frustration is that the distance between us made it hard to see what I was doing when I recorded the sounds on my phone... This was pointed out in a crit- In the end, I’m not sure how well the premise translates into film, but alternatively, I like the idea that the concept becomes clearer over the duration of the film...

From my recordings, I  transcribed the sounds phonetically, each audio represented by a printed page that stated the time of recording.... 

The texts appear poetic as I’ve moved to another line where breaks between the sounds occurred, though sometimes the sounds moved into each other fluidly, and appear as long sections of text (I.e: traffic sounds or wind)

Where sounds overlapped, I had freedom to splice them together in different orders as letters on the page (I.e: the sound of wind alongside the sound of a car or a child shouting)... for this reason, the texts reccolect the sounds ‘at a distance’ from what was originally heard, and bring my own hand (and my ears..?) into the process of transcribing them- A breeze might have been visualised as a HOOOOO/ HUUUUU/ HAAAAOOOOOO sound by me, but a VAAAAAAOOOO sound by somebody else. I listened for the patterns, but also found that similar sounds (I.e: traffic sounds) often looked totally disparate from each other when I recorded them in writing.... 

I like where I came into this process: A vessel for the subjective translations.... 

On the Saturday, I took my translations, a roll of tape and a megaphone, and re-walked my walk to the Meridian Line point in Greenwich, stopping at the locations where I had recorded the sounds a day earlier...

This meant that I had to memorise these points by interrogating the footage from the day before, which really made me feel like I was learning the 10 second intervals, just as I was learning the sounds through writing, a step between experiencing and replicating what could be heard and where that had to be done on the Friday night and Saturday morning/ afternoon... 

I taped the phonetic translations up at the locations, choosing different surfaces each time... and then read aloud each one using a megaphone. The performances, which rarely lasted exactly 10 seconds, play out as surreal and comical nonsense ‘announcements’, exaggerated by the volume and presence of the megaphone. I like this effect, and the way that it is naturally connected to giving a speech at a protest or making an announcement in case of fire.... a formal, emotive, and yet wordless speech that acts almost as a dedication to the ten second recordings, but is also a reaction to these sounds that is at a disconnect from what was actually heard. 

Clips of the recordings were put together with the readings for each individual location, the film slowly following the length of both walks. Proceeding this footage, is a 10 second video per location- Taken of the posters during the second walk, to which I added the original recorded sound from the same space on Friday:

A symphony of Friday’s sound, Saturday’s space and the transcription that exists between them, collated times...

(Or an unnecessary complication?)

The initial walk took over 70 minutes. An eighth set of recording/performance videos show my arrival at the meridian line on both days. The walk on the second day took 109mins

[emilyontime]

Another work by Heather Ross- Domestic Dawn Chorus-

Ross recreated the sounds of the dawn chorus that she recorded, using household objects- I love this idea of attempting to recreate a certain duration in time, or symphony of sounds...

She said about the work:

The accounts/descriptions read in search of identifying a particular species of bird can prove problematic: the words used in written description, are, at times, incompatible with what is heard or what is experienced. The proposed work attempts to find a more concrete way of capturing and scrutinising these sounds, providing everyday objects as visual equivalents to written translations of sound. The written descriptions are points of departure to consider the discrepancies between what is heard and how this is transcribed.

I really like this idea that a transcription or written Descriptions of sounds like birdsong, might be ‘incompatible’ with what can be heard audibly- the idea that there is a discrepancy between hearing and reading aloud and that these written sounds are ‘points of departure’ from the sounds, rather than precise copies of what is heard...



[emilyontime]

An example of translating sounds.... 

The film includes people saying Jack in their varying accents. For each sound, Ross appears to make a hand gesture  (i.e: there is one for ‘ck’)

These reappear but vary based on pronunciation.... the sounds take a visual form a bit like making a document based on audios, and I liked Ross’ use of her own body to recreate things said by other people- this reminded me of my film-in-the-making, where I recite phrases people said to me when I asked them for the time; trying to be a vessel for other people’s words or sounds as one person has interesting boundaries I think...

[emilyontime]

Tutorial and artist research...

I spoke to Claire about my ideas for making a film- She has mentioned that it could be of interest to look at scores or ways that sound has been translated into text... I’ve done some research into different artists working with documentation of sound and I would like to translate sounds heard during the walk I plan to do into text, before performing them using my voice... 

I think the idea of having an intermediary like this: a document that would help to record the sounds but also translate and perhaps change them- like a vessel through which they would pass... would be a lovely way to show the process between hearing a sound and performing it, and a lovely visual aid or accompaniment to the work...

Above: Piano Sonata #2 by Dick Higgins and Fear of Drowning by Michael Plourde-

Both works use scores- I liked the idea that Higgins’ work invites viewers to place his transparent sheets over their own music, arrows redirecting the pianist to different notes... I think this idea of applying a “script” or document to a space, or, in this case, a song is really fascinating - overlaying the two sounds!

I wasn’t able to find much information on Fear of Drowning which I came across whilst researching concrete poetry that takes an audible or musical form- but I really like the idea of different sketches, symbols etc, representing the sound of a hairdryer or the sound of water moving in a bathtub....

[emilyontime]

Ideas for a film...

Based on Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair, I am thinking of creating a film that records a walk- with the intention of recording sounds heard at certain intervals on the walk and then re-walking my route and performing the sounds in some way.

My intention with this is to play around with the framework of intervals in time. Similar to my walk to the Greenwich Meridian Line, where I encountered people at random, I like that regular intervals pinoint these timings and locate them physically in different places along my journey...

Replaying the walk, and mimicing the sounds heard, would be almost a dedication to the audios, made up of sounds- traffic, voices, wind, etc- all heard by chance.... 

I think this contrast between the rigidity of set intervals in time and the random nature of playing along with intervals (I.e: Where a dart is thrown in my You are Now Piece or who I encountered during my walk to Greenwich... is something that continually fascinates me....

I guess, as time is a kind of ‘empty’ subject matter, following intervals or set timings to the letter creates visual (or audible...) creations that seem to come from nowhere... 

I like that Time can act as a ‘control variable’ in this way, as a curator of images or sounds that are isolated or removed from their contexts. This is like map pins might show the structure of a journey....

[emilyontime]

Looking at Her Long Black Hair by Janet Cardiff, 2004.

Cardiff’s voice directs viewers along a walk that she has previously undertaken, mysterious photographs and her sultry voice guiding listeners as they follow a woman with “long black hair”. Photographs accompany the recording - a sense of:

Here’s what this woman did in this space-

what are you doing in the same location?

I like that they stop where she stopped once - or that the creation of the work is somehow tied to it’s engagement with an audience...

Also- using audio tied to certain locations- a way of mapping a certain period in time (a walk, journey, somebody’s past..) by listening to the artist’s voice?

However - I don’t feel like the narrative resonated with me as I might have hoped, and I didn’t think the sense of nostalgia had any clear direction ....

[emilyontime]

Time for tea / tea for time

With the help of a friend, I’ve worked to construct spaces where tea could be drunk using concrete blocks from a local construction site. Each space was made in five minutes, and after each construction, the pair of us drank a sip of tea in the space- recording (using timer photos) ourselves sipping the tea. We also took photos from above to document the mugs of tea, showing the tea gradually receding….

A play on the words: T for time, the idea behind the work is that the tea in both mugs decides the duration of the work; the work is finished when all the tea has been drunk. I was inspired by Francis Alys’ work The Green Line, 2004,in which the artist walks through various towns and rural spaces in …, paint dripping from a pierced can creating a green line that extends behind him- after two days, the walk ends when all of the paint has been emptied from the can.

Alys says:

I think my interest in this work and allowing a material to decide the amount of time spent doing something reflects what I enjoyed about the random nature of my walk to the Greenwich Meridian Line (seeing people at irregular intervals and thus timings being left to chance and human interaction). Making my recent film about the Greenwich walk was an exercise in control and precision, ‘fitting’ these irregularities to clock time, just as working within controlled five minute slots in Time for tea / tea for time plays our decision making and tea drinking in within a rigid time based structure.  

In terms of the decision making behind each fast paced creation- my friend and I moved the blocks often in random and separate movements, before we would trial how we position ourselves in the space-

Time was spent:

Sitting, standing, lying down or perching on something

Talking- What do you have in mind? Should we face each other? Is that stable? - And often discussions of how we visually understood the space as something that we had seen before-

Imagery of an olympic podium, bridge, sitting at a table or bus stop, riding a horse and skiing came to mind during different movements…

We had to work together to move the blocks because of their weight, so we spent a lot of time figuring out logistics, and talking through ideas before doing them- Some of the changes are more subtle, where we turned a block on it’s side or sat facing a different direction- which I think reflects how the time was split between discussion, interaction with the space, and actually moving the blocks, in different ways each time…

I think it’s also interesting to note that all of the physical interaction with the blocks- moving them and sitting or lying on them were very slow processes - the blocks were hard (tough) to move and hard (hard) to lie down or sit on …