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Our first experiments on photoshop mixing together our different drawings for our PDF! Rabeea has amazing graphic design skills!!!

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Drawings from 10/10-17/10, three times a day

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Our moodboard for our PDF (images from pinterest)

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Progress on our PDF

Today our group all brought in our drawings from over the week! It was so interesting to see how everyone interpreted the task differently and had our own drawing styles. We had a brief reflection and discussion with Biljana about where our drawings are headed, and then scanned them all into files so we could play around with them on photoshop.

We would like to work with overlapping all our drawings and creating ~scenes~ where they all interact with each other as a complete image, rather than four separate drawings.

We then did some brainstorming regarding how we want our PDF to look, and created a moodboard with some images from pinterest. We definitely like the idea of a minimalist style, handwritten elements with some colour connecting all of the drawings.

Because we are working with the idea of “now” and glitching time, we want to add timestamps to each of the pages with our collective drawings for that time -- a moment experienced by all of us in different ways, in different places. The timestamps we hope will give the PDF a narrative imagination, the reader trying to ~connect the dots~ between the pages and create a story in their minds.

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now

Over the past week each member of my group have drawn 3 drawings throughout the day from their surroundings. This pause and reflection of our surroundings forces a still moment in todays constantly moving society to reflect of the ‘now’.

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Douglas Gordon: "24 Hour Psycho”

24 Hour Psycho is a video work by Douglas Gordon, 1993. Gordon slowed down Hitchcock’s Psycho so that the entire film takes 24 hours to play, or rather shows 2 frames a second, rather than the usual 24. 

This work relates to our group’s ideas about “now” and glitch because it’s about the slowing down of something in order to concentrate on single moments. When something is glitching we are forced to consider it more, to think about ~that moment~ rather than the future... 

We would like to incorporate these ideas of honing in on a single moment and trying to express that single moment in our PDF; slowing down, carefully considering “now”...

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for our studio activity (week 11) we chose a theme of documenting warm tones! these pictures were collated from the UNSW galleries, on the way there and at NAS. We thought that this task really reflected our concept of wanting to slow down time and pay attention to the moment

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We all remembered this artwork from ADAD1001 and love the concept! We would like to do something similar in our cataloguing of specific moments; having to stop our days to create something, and in doing so focus on that moment.

Tehching Hsieh - One Year Performance, 1980 - 1981

Tahching Hsieh’s work has influenced our initial idea process for our group assessment of the ‘NOW’. The focus on a specific moment and time which disrupts the chaotic movement of todays society.

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Group concept statement brainstorming

Stemming from the idea of glitch, it would be interesting to juxtapose this concept with The Now. When time is disrupted or glitched, an individuals perception of The Now is broken. Slowing down a moment in time is our groups focus, and exploring this using the medium of photography. 

Some other ideas for mediums we’ve had include:

collaging

drawn elements

film photography

and IM (instant messaging)

We want to create a time based art piece that creates a disruption in our Now. Our concept includes stopping time twice-thrice a day (12pm, 6pm and ?) to study an object in our field of view, (documented in drawing!) which will later go into the PDF as a collation combined with collage.

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Assessment 2 FINAL WORK: “What Is An Um?”

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Assessment 2 - Concept Statement

Um. Uh. Ummmm. Uhhh. Erm. Eh. Uh. Um. Um. Um. 

These are the sounds of our brain glitching. The sounds of language breaking down as the road between our brains and mouths is suddenly blocked. Of struggling to find what to say next. Of stumbling, hesitating, reconfiguring. Glitching.

Pay attention to these utterances in your conversations and you’ll realise we use them more than you think. But nobody wants that. Why would you want to sound like you don’t know what to say next in a conversation? Why would you want to verbally express your glitch? You can teach yourself to prevent it, to sound more eloquent, to eliminate the vocal glitch. One step closer to perfect, right?

But I don’t suggest you do that. Listen more closely to the ‘um’s, the ‘uh’s, and you’ll notice how important they are in our communication with each other. They convey emotion that words on a page or a screen cannot, that a perfectly thought out and carefully considered speech cannot. They convey that you are thinking. They convey that you are human.

In my video work “What Is An Um?” I archive the feeling of the ‘um’ and ‘uh.’ As Hal Foster writes in his 2004 article ‘An Archival Impulse,’ “archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaces, physically present.” And similarly, I want to make the lost and displaced importance and value of the ‘um’ physically present, using both sound and archival film.

My work seeks to simultaneously explain what the ‘um’ feels like inside our brains, a metaphor for the glitch in thought and language, while also referencing the archive. Just like the ‘um,’ the archive carries meaning. It asserts a certain history, ascribes value to something. It documents and preserves. The archive categorises and stores information for future generations. I wanted to reference this in my work by both using archival film footage, and also creating a work that playfully suggests a future where the glitch of the ‘um’ and ‘uh’ no longer exist. Although I’m quite sure the ‘um’ and ‘uh’ won’t be disappearing any time soon, I can imagine a future where we communicate purely through the digital, through computers, and the nuances of spoken language are a thing of the past.

This is why I chose the robotic voice of the computer to dictate the various ‘um’s and ‘uh’s in my work. It suggests the future, in which human voice is no longer used, and my artwork is thus an archive of the ‘um,’ explaining to future generations what the vocal phenomena of the ‘um’ was, visualised through a series of metaphors.

Inspired by the art of David Gordon, Fiona MacDonald, and Anne Ferran, who all use archival images and footage in their works, I wanted the footage within my work to be cropped, edited, reversed, etc. Taking archival film footage, I cropped scenes, extended some, paused, rewound, and edited speed in order to transform this footage and render new meaning. My work is not only creating an archive, but editing another archive, glitching it to create my own version of the preserved.

Similarly, I was inspired by the sound art of Bruce Nauman, who employs repetition of human voices in his work. I recorded four sounds: two variations of ‘um’ and ‘uh’ spoken by my computer. I wanted to just use four repeated sounds so that they almost become meaningless and begin to sound completely alien. I played with the timing of these noises in relation to the actions within the videos, the utterances corresponding to a glitch in the video, sometimes layering and sometimes distant, but always anticipated and understood to be the verbal expression of the metaphorical glitches.

My artwork itself is an ‘um’: an attempt to explain, stumbling over thoughts, repeating, struggling to articulate meaning. It is an ‘um’ trying to make sense of something.

Bibliography

Herbert H. Clark and Jean E. Fox Tree, ‘On thee-yuh fillers uh and um,’ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15718

Richard Nordquist, ‘Filler Word Definition and Examples’, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-filler-word-1690859

Paul R. Timm and Sherron Bienvenu, ‘Straight Talk: Oral Communication for Career Success.’ Routledge, 2011

William Safire, ‘Watching My Language: Adventures in the Word Trade.’ Random House, 1997

Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’. The MIT Press, 2004.

Ben Borthwick, ‘Bruce Nauman: Raw Materials’, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1691/long-read/raw-material

Emily Lonie, ‘Artists and the Archives’, http://www.thingsimfondsof.com/artists-and-the-archives/

Jane Birkin, ‘Art, Work, and Archives: Performativity and the Techniques of Production’, http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/art-work-and-archives/

Sue Breakell, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/09/perspectives-negotiating-the-archive

Joan Kerr, ‘Universally Respected 1993’, http://www.fiona-macdonald.net/index.php/artwork/universally-respected-1993

Martyn Jolly, ’Big Archives and Small Collections: Remarks on the Archival Mode in Contemporary Australian Art and Visual Culture’, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/3823/4605

Guggenheim, ‘Douglas Gordon’, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Douglas-Gordon

All film footage accessed from archive.org

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Editing my final video

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Video Experiment 2

For this experiment I wanted to try and work out how I will incorporate sound into my final video. I tried using some of the original voice recordings I experimented with at the beginning of my project, but I didn’t really like the sound of my voice and how it worked with the film. I decided to go back to Terminal and properly record some of the computerised speech, and played around with slowing down the audio and creating nuances. I think for my final video I would like to have lots more clips and layer lots of the different “um” and “uh” sounds as much as possible to really create a sense of repetition, and also have it in time with the action in the various clips.

I was considering using text in the video, where between each clip the word “um” would appear on the screen against black, but I much preferred having all the clips together and moving along as more of a story.

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Video Experiment 1

This is my first experiment playing around with the film footage from archive.org. I wanted to play around with reversing, speeding up, slowing down, cropping, etc to see how it would turn out.

I’ve come across some really great clips that represent glitching/um that I’m excited to use.

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Exploring film archives

To find film archives (that have public use) for my video, I came across a really great website called archive.org

https://archive.org/details/movies

“This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.”

Really excited to have an explore through these archives. They have some really interesting collections like silent films, classic TV commercials, and even Nasa video clips.

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Experiment - assessment 2

I wanted to experiment with zooming in and cropping photos to express “um” like Anne Ferrer did in her photo series. I used photos from the archive of “istockphoto.com”. I honestly don’t really like it that much, but just wanted to experiment with it anyway to see if it would produce something interesting. I also want to incorporate the actual sound of the um and uh in my work, so just using images won’t be that useful. I’m definitely going to use film and sound for my final work.

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Research: archival artists

1. Douglas Gordon 

Douglas Gordon’s art relates to the archive in that he often uses old film and photography in his works, often using repetition in various forms. He uses material from the public realm as well as famous films and images, editing them, slowing them down, doubling/mirroring, reversing, removing certain features, etc.

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2. Fiona MacDonald

Universally Respected – How much of him is I? (1993)

From MacDonald’s website: “The Sepia collages... employed provincial sources: late nineteenth-century photographs of members of the eminently respectable Rockhampton Club in Queensland, the venue where the installation was first shown. Interwoven among and into these gentlemen were locals automatically excluded from membership: women, Aborigines, Kanakas and Chinese. In their Oxford frames, the new club members assert their equality with any boardroom portrait, while at the same time the technique converts the celebratory male photographs into 'native' crafts or women's quilts.”

I really love this idea of using archival photographs and turning them into something new, transforming the image in some way to create such a powerful meaning. In this way her artwork is an ‘interrogation’ of the archive that asks questions about history and power.

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3. Anne Ferran

1-38 (2003)

“in the 2003 Series 1-38, she cropped details out of a set of photographs she had found in an archive, which had originally been taken in 1948 of women inmates at the Gladesville psychiatric hospital. The metadata attached to the original photographs revealed little specific information about the lives these women were living, and Ferran’s crops into their ragged clothing, constrained body language and nervous gestures even less. But the copying and cropping emphasized their material, physical, actual presence.” -- Martyn Jolly

I love her use of cropping, editing the archive. There is so much meaning in these works yet they are so simple.

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