granite-slab

[granite-slab]

eValuation

First I’ll just sum up where I’m at and what I’ve produced:

F O R E I G N _ Q U A R R Y

- STONES THROW - software - virtual pre-made stones in a limitless white void lie still and silent - at randomly determined intervals a stone will be given life, rise up silently and hovering above the ground, then suddenly and loudly be flung towards the viewer and make collision with the screen itself, shuddering

- VISIBLE WOUNDS - digitally manipulated photographs photocopied onto polarising film - rocks and shattered LCD screens are posed on a lightbox and photographed, then taken into photoshop and edited to appear like limitless asteroid collisions with science fiction psychedelic colours

- LIQUID Q - video - various images referencing cell division and microscopic life are flattened by Adobe’s preset emboss effect among footage of cracking screens and computer pieces suspended in water, sound is sampled from cracking ice

- IMPACT SITES - colour pencil drawings - scratchy shitty sketches of liquid crystal diffraction patterns, phone screen cracks and craters

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The work is an investigation into the materiality of technology, prompted by concerns of extinction, violence, material memory, trauma and labour exploitation, the dangers of understanding the world through science?

It’s pretty broad work inspired by far reaching concepts.

Aesthetically it’s taken on a science fiction flavour from some of my favourite films: Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as ofc 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are references also to the pagan landscapes of Dartmoor and the history of local stone. Granite mined from the moors in quarries managed by prisoners, used to build their own prison. 

The concepts toyed with some autobiographical content, on my personal feelings towards my relationship with/addiction to technology: but i dont think this is a very large part of the work - it is much wider than that.

The work started as a sort of one-note concept and material investigation (digging with a spoon), moved on to assemblage, then developed into this new body of work where sculptures are intermediated through video or photography and removed from physical space, becoming wholly digital and absent in their presence.

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PRESENTATION

Following feedback from the formative assessment I decided to present the works in a dark space - the hot and smelly dark space room in the studio. It is a disgusting and claustrophobic space. During the presentation, to avoid confusion I will not be reading a written script, but I will be somewhat performing, using the light from my phone’s flashlight to highlight work, as if I’m at a dig site or something.

The STONES THROW piece will be running through, disrupting my muttering with loud and glitchy machine gun noises of rocks colliding. I will run it on a resolution far too intense for my laptop to handle, and consequently the simulation will run at a very low framerate, appearing very broken and stuttery. My laptop will be whirring loudly and struggling to keep up with the workload I have given it. I want the technology to be struggling, rendering the video sort of incomprehensible. Hopefully, in the dark and hot space this will be distressing and intense for the viewer.

Otherwise, the dark space will force the viewer into an uncomfortable situation. In order to properly view the 2D work they will have to manoeuvre around, finding angles at which the light from the tv reflects off the surface of the images so that they can see them. the simulation will be working in many senses, then.

The polarised images will be rested, cluttered, on a fallen metal air vent. This is a sort of cop out of a presentation. I tested with lightboxes and enjoyed the effect, and wanted to try something similar but without light. They are rested horizontal on a surface equally as reflective as they are - creating visual confusion. My idea of nailing an image into the lightbox is still one I want to test, but when I have attempted to print a larger image on a larger piece of film - not before. Cluttering the prints onto a dark and reflective surface also helps to... prohibit the viewer from seeing how shit the actual quality of the prints is. They look sortof discarded, like how they will be when I spend this next module refining the process. They were just tests after all, done rogue on the photocopier.

I nailed the other 2D work - the drawing and the galaxy - into the wall. I stripped this down from the formative, just one drawing - a crater - to juxtapose with the galaxy/big bang explosion. A creation and a destruction. One handmade, one a photograph. These are further away from the screen and are lit better than the horizontal prints.

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PROPOSAL FOR 303

// new work? maybe // I’d like to experiment with video to make a companion for the software // two channel video in a dark and claustrophobic space [ one still and silent, occasionally loud and disruptive, the other constantly changing and ambient, trap the viewer between the two, constantly at the mercy of the work ] // new prints? maybe // new drawings? doubt it [ it’s not the right avenue for my work: i am not skilled and i won’t have time to improve ] //

//how will text fit in the work? // I’m not sure // I am reading Ed Atkins’ books atm, to analyse how his writing fits/doesn’t fit with his videos and installations // maybe an artists book? // or maybe I hold on to the urge to write and push it into something else… //

// continue to look into Katrina Palmer // perhaps the work should shift to be site-based, with a focus on a local area? // it is hard to tell how big I want the work to go in conceptual scale // I have a desire to make something all encompassing, as much about everything as it is about nothing //

// push specifically the conceptual and theoretical understanding of the work // try your best, Sam, to not get tired of it and move onto something else // make this as developed and complete as possible // look into materiality // investigate sculptors who write // try not to avoid sculpture, try it again //

// I want to focus on making the work emotionally engaging to the viewer, upsetting and unnerving // how to do so without being cheap or narrative // do I want a narrative? // no no no // not this time //

// materially? // I need to be big sheets of polarising film, and attempt to print onto them // large format inkjet or screen // work out the ink type I want to use, what finish, if I want them backlit or hung, glimmering // displayed in the dark? // the viewer has to use their phone torch to see the work // impossible to take photographs of = impossible to capture for Instagram = real work not virtual work //

// otherwise resources I would require would be, largest TV possible or video wall // I don’t know how likely this is // I would also need a high powered PC to run the stones at the best possible resolution //

[granite-slab]

i like the way Ed Atkins uses chroma key masking to remove the physical human presence: replace it with a texture - juxtaposed with the computer generated figure

i find the way he addresses the posthuman body to be very effecting and engaging.

i am having the urge to make a similar video to this: a figure, removed from the scene with effects, is perhaps bound - bound with cuffs and collar that electrocute them. ive been thinking a while about reintroducing bondage and electric violence to the work - connect it back to the human, the user, but im not sure if i should isolate those ideas to a separate work - if the rock stuff is stronger when the only human present is the viewer and the rest of the context is abandoned. it’s very hard to say

[granite-slab]

Foreign Quarry

here is the text from the formative assessment that caused such ire on my part, it explains a lot of my ideas more clearly than i have been writing on this blog, plus my decision for the title of the body of work:

The broad un un title of the body of the work, the wider body, is FOREIGN QUARRY, the body in meatspace swiped by greasy fingerprint pathways, the meaning, FOREIGN meaning OTHER, a politically loaded word, overburdened by meaning, in a country currently ruled by xenophobia. QUARRY as site of material, of production, of control, of labour, who died to find the silicon used in the chips in your pocket, on your lap, in your hand. QUARRY also as prey, an animal pursued by a hunter, a target pursued by police, predator and prey. From the latin word for SQUARE, four sides, a frame, a couple steps of atomic manipulation away from a QUARREL.

I think the work, the body, operates around a visual language recycled from film, from Kubrick, from science fiction, from the monolith, and inherits its anxiety from there also. The original concept of destroying technology with natural or with prehistoric material, of breaking free from shackles, of my anger, of my hatred towards my relationship to screens, has now been shed, the work feels wider.

The standings stones of Dartmoor like bones, like phones, like my phone melted into my hand, like missiles, like a full cycle.

I was thinking on blood. On lifeblood, on splatter, pure blood, the source code, the warm blood in my fingertip that activates my screen through my touch, through my outreach, my connection to the violent transfer of voltage happening invisible in the material within. Is it all built on violence? They’re not images on screens. I’ve reconstructed the screen. The light from behind the image felt more important than the material they were printed on so I’ve moved away from assemblage.

From the liquid crystal blood came imaginations of space, imaginations of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film SOLARIS. The work started to feel nihilistic, to feel lost, to feel deeply concerned with our pending extinction. My thoughts kept moving to space, to the microscope.

Where could I find hope? I looked into crystal diffraction patterns, when light is shone through and split into mathematical shapes. That’s where these drawings came from. Mathematics and patterns as the building blocks of life. Some cringeworthy thoughts on simulation theory I would never want my work to address head on. How do I reckon with these interests? I read a scientific essay theorising on liquid crystals as the primordial soup that life emerged from. Words broken down into subatomic form would be letters. But fuck. Letters still have meaning. Atoms represented as letters. Even atoms can be cut apart, split, collided, destroyed.

Ed Atkin’s videos work in ways I wish I could, through metaphor, visual allusions, structuralist tendencies like focus pulling and lens flares that make the viewer aware of the artifice of digital video. Would this be what the space inside a file would look like? Bare, white, dusty, a hole leaking light, a flicker, a tortured boy weeping. I became aware I was also interested in these ideas, the abject, the uncanny, the posthuman body.

Alicja Kwade’s sculptures are more effective than mine could ever be. At this point I knew the images had reached their natural conclusion. I might change my mind. I am in a constant state of doubt.

Getting blood from a stone, like trying to squeeze out information, like bjork’s song about relationship troubles stonemilker, you’re not as emotionally available as you used to be, like being stoned as a permanent state, as a coping mechanism, numbness, confusion, stoning, a cruel and unusual punishment. Kids in glass houses should not throw stones. Don’t talk politics. The stones in the screen space are given life by mathematics, this is a running simulation, but they can’t make an impact, a crater, a site of death, of destruction, rebirth, of particle collision, they can’t change anything. Me and colin, we’re still working on this, the sounds aren’t quite right, some paths the stones fly are wrong, are broken. I’m not sure about the way the stones are bleached out by distance, I want them more crisp, they will be higher definition, it’s a long process making software, these things will change.

I’m afraid of language being my crutch. I… when it doesn’t work a… a rock…and…  a general feeling of brokenness… I wrote this presentation deliberately awkwardly, deliberately cumbersome, deliberately avoiding talking about certain aspects of the work, deliberately avoiding talking about my feeling that something is seriously very wrong, with me, with the world. I have a tendency to not explain enough. I have a tendency to over explain. The small video here reduces my destruction to subatomic embossings. A lone rotating Q is the only piece of language present. A three dimensional Q turning like a stone, become an object, even as it is here overburdened by meaning, Q being the scientific symbol for heat, or the measure of electrical charge. The sound, of course, is of ice thawing. I said I’d never make work about plastic in the ocean. I want the textures to feel microscopic, the opposite of, the mirror to, the companion of the galaxy of dust and grease smears that came out not as clear or crisp when printed as I had wanted, as I had hoped, maybe from a distance it is ok.

I want to continue testing the presentation of these works. I’ve been a bit lazy about it so far. I want to nail the images into the lightboxes. Broken glass should be physically present, I feel, but working out how much assemblage plays a part is tricky. I also want to move into more allegorical, narrative video work. I feel the visual language developed across these works is accomplished, but it needs something to juxtapose it. I’m figuring this out at the moment, planning, writing, figuring out a film that would be shown with these pieces. I want the work to avoid the word, to avoid language. I feel this work, so far, is successful but a bit sterile. I want to make something truly affecting, upsetting, sad, scary, and I’m not there yet. That’s what I want the film to do, to add to the work, but I don’t want to talk about it until i’ve made some more progress and have something to show. Thanks.

[granite-slab]

post formative i just wanted to chill out for a bit. my usual thing is to rapidly change direction and start doing something else: ive been disciplined and consistent so far, so i deserve a treat. just drawing some craters and Qs!

[granite-slab]

feedback from the summative assessment:

rings close with what I’ve been feeling personally: cluttered presentation, the works need more space and the curation/layout needs thought.

it frustrates me somewhat that a lot of the feedback i received from the assessment was targeted towards what I said during the presentation. in order that my presentation was not boring, I wrote myself a script to read that covered most of what i was thinking. I wrote it in a semi-lyrical way, where words would loop or change etc, similar to the other text experiments ive been doing. this was IMO clearly NOT part of the work and not up for analysis, but it seemed to be everyone’s focus... so... i dont know maybe i need to think even more about whether or not text should be here. maybe people expect it/want it/feel the work is incomplete without it. maybe next time i dont write a special script for presentation. maybe my reading interuppted the rest of the work, but then, how do i deal with the technicalities of what i need to present in an assessment. i feel there is a double standard between what level of professional presentation of work we are expected, and the actual technicalities of what we need to be showing.

anyway: peer feedback was mostly like “make the video bigger” or “maybe you should try showing the work in a dark space”. both kinda good comments i suppose. frustrated i am still... making the video bigger, i see as an expression of “the video was not focal enough in presentation to feel overwhelming.” making it bigger might be impossible, i love the video wall in the reception of college but i highly doubt they’d let me use it. maybe showing the video in a dark space separate from other work will boost its overwhelming qualities. it would be conceptually wrong to display it by projection: tv screen is the only way, so maybe in 303 i can examine options....

so in a follow up tutorial anti gave me some feedback that actually prompted more thought: gave me some artists to follow up on. she suggested i take more time to examine the actual material quality of the work im producing and spend 303 focusing on production and synthesis of work.

[granite-slab]

set up for summative assessment.

1 - i want the video focal in the body. in this installation, in hindsight, i can see it’s all a bit cluttered. the screen is not big enough to draw attention away from everything else and so the stone simulation becomes background rather than intense and intrusive.

2 - the quality of the large print is ok when viewed from a distance but putting the drawings next to it encourages the viewer to get close, therefore counteracting and highlighting the low quality.

3 - the prints on the lightboxes work really great i think! i like overlapping them and displaying them on a table like this, like in the Nkanga show. i was thinking about displaying prints on lightboxes by nailing them into the surface of the glass, cracking the glass, and hanging on a wall. i want broken glass to be present in the work to bring a physical violence, and a fragility,

4 - overall tho, definitely too cluttered. the work needs space and the relationships between the pieces in concept and aesthetic need to be explored in the physical space...

[granite-slab]

[granite-slab]

https://alicjakwade.com/exhibitions

looking a lot here at Alicja Kwade’s understanding of stone as material - touching on very similar concepts and ideas that I am attempting.

her understanding of the material is clearly far more intelligent than mine

how does she manage to do it with such minimalism? i feel embarrassed and ashamed about my lack of understanding of material. i feel my work can’t reach this kind of ecstatic simplicity that’s hiding a trove of depth. i dont know how i can do it.

[granite-slab]

some more photography

This is my laptop screen, captured in a dark room with the flash from my phone. the dust, pubes, and fingerprint smears on the surface and reflection of the flash come together to create an image of a galaxy or nebula. honestly i was shocked when this happened, i was anticipating a black screen with a small white dot, but then... this image just appeared. it’s not even like a stretch to read it in this way, the visual connections are overwhelming.

i think this work successfully brings in notions of identity and the body into the rest, as well. dust being skin flakes. my fingerprints represent my identity reduced to biometric data, smeared on my window like im trying to escape, lit this way become planets or comets.

it successfully brings the scale outwards, after my microscopic stuff. the big bang - asteroid apocalypse. the expression of fear of extinction is broad and narrow at once. there is a full cycle at work in the body of work now.

however, the image is low resolution, printing it large, as i will do, will surely just kill the quality of the image here. im not sure it would even be possible to take a better wquality picture but, we’ll see

[granite-slab]

my dust white shoes are too small for my leaky feet toe dust squeeze blisters as I wretched walk my pavement home, the stones i own that go. Crack. Crack. Two steps, one, the slabs scry cracked and wobble bend back as balance shifts, topple, lean, my forward motion, two steps forward, my onward motion, my seesaw expulsion, two steps, I’m moving forwards and you’re a blur to me, I’m moving towards you but your face is a stream, your arms are glass, your hands are cut by shards of glass, your lungs are filled with dust and glass. It’s a violent act, this transfer of voltage, this outreach, this touch. The whipping air stings my lungs I wish I hadn’t ruined by smoking all day for these old crooked fifty million years, rotten tar after two decades, replaced every two years, I want a new one, give me fresh pears to bite through my womb in one clear bite. The wind on my face, haptic vibrations, whips tears from my eyes, my phone prods my thigh, radio waves through my testicles. I want to say I don’t care about death or Pangea’s grief or a pelican vomiting sludge or tar i scream about it loud i dont care about the plastic. I want to say this to you but your ears are made of glass and I can’t… can’t hear... Two steps pounded, two shins snapped, batons to the back, of the neck, don’t step on the cracks, don’t step on the line of blame, the fault line, the working class’ captured howls rebounding from the stone when struck, reverberate, from other continents, other shrinking orbits approaching collision or earthquake or cowering under the desk or doorframe, the asteroid’s polemic tilting embrace. The crater is wide and deep and glacial, spiked the sky pillars of glass, crystalline, melted, liquified glass spires pierce the stinking maw, where the hot rocks hit and melt the sand away down time’s diagonal drip. Two steps it takes to walk the circumference. The wireframe hills fall far away forever. I am walking towards you and shouting against the wind. The wind pricks my glassy lungs. My ankles break when my feet fall wrong on the stones, bones unfit to roll, each one lit to remove all shadows, four lights from each of the cardinal directions and one heavenly from above, the surface is smooth, reflective, smeared with greasy fingerprint residue, snot, shit, saliva, cum. My fingers bleed from the shards of glass and mark the stone with forgotten runes. I am moving towards you and rolling back my arm for the throw. I want you to tell me what you know. I already know what you know. I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you bleed across this glowing tidal shockwave, heatmap bitmap, the visualisation of the math it takes to throw this message from me to you, the ancient spiral that connects the fall, the parabolic crater, I am worried about the disease I inhaled last week when I took two steps. The beaches are made of glass. I am wearing an inherited skin. Im wearing It’s all too small for me. My callused shoulders shrunk width of this jacket, the scarf, it’s too hot, the hat, my jeans, all black,

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This piece is an experiment to see how it would be to try and incorporate text into this piece. the writing cycles around familiar themes, orbitting them but never addressing what it speaks of, and is grounded in a narrator’s perception of violence and personal aggression. the words keep flowing and rearranging, reorganising what they have just said. i was trying to write in the way of throwing a rock - starting something and letting the arc dictate what happens, then smash at the end and produce rubble. i have no idea, however, how this owuld fit into the rest of the work

i tried recording this piece as narration a few different ways: one where i read one word a second, and one where i performed it very quickly. both as ways of changing the viewer’s relationship to the flow of text, both ultimately unsuccessful i feel.

my use of my voice and sound last year was important because that work was highly autobiographical and about sincerity/self expression - this work is not and so trying to include this feels ugly and messy

[granite-slab]

[granite-slab]

Q    Q    Q

here’s the resulting small video experiment from my messings around with the adobe preset emboss effect.

footage used includes: royalty free footage of a cell nucleus + cellular mitosis, liquid crystals cracking, water flowing over screen, keyboard and computer pieces suspended in water.

i wanted the video to reference these ideas of microscopic life i have been touching on and mentioning. to compress footage i have taken and footage i have sourced into the same language. this works varyingly, visually the circles and cells have a consistent language and all appear like microscopic creatures, etc, which is effective, however some footage is not good - handheld captured on my phone camera, the frame wobbles and stands out as amateur video, breaking immersion.

sound wise i used sounds of the screens cracking i recorded myself, and sounds of an ice lake thawing that i sourced from online. the soundscape i think works v well, its intense and close to the ears and oppressive: laborious. it sounds like stones and ice and like destruction. 

then partway through the video a 3d computer generated Q appears and spins in place. i virtually lit the Q from three angles: red, green and blue - the three separated colours of light. I wanted to juxtapose the microscope embossed images with a piece of language, also broken down to its atomic level. the Q is eerie and isolated, meaningless on its own, or begging the assumption of meaning. perhaps Q represents the quantity of change of heat, as it stands for in science, or perhaps it is a Coulomb measuring electric charge, or an unanswered question. there is abundant meaning even in language’s most reduced form. It is also stands out juxtaposed from the video as being entirely virtual and fabricated where the background was once real and has been rendered virtual after the fact.

i like the Q. i think there’s room to explore this. it nicely compliments the rest of the work and themes

[granite-slab]

Second visit in St Ives: to the Tate for Otobong Nkanga. absolutely stunning and inspiring show - truly incredible.

there’s a consistency of vision and purpose across all the works that span many media: video/performance, photography, tapestry, sculpture, painting. the visual language of geometric shapes, pastel landscapes, raw material, atomic lettering, is unified and brings all the work together to one point. the curation helps this as well : there is perhaps less of a narrative when u walk around as there is a development of Nkanga’s language. as i moved through the show I felt each piece added something new to compare against the previous: constantly introducing new ideas or aesthetic features to recontextualise all the other work.

the lightbox table installed as part of a sculptural piece is a genius way of showing photographs: overlapping the photographs and letting the images bleed and mingle into each other.

the presence of geometric shapes and letters representing atoms hints towards a scientific understanding/reading of material, and one that matches what i seem to be moving towards - but it accomplishes it without detracting either from the pure physical beauty of the work...

given me a lot to think about for sure. how do i create consistency within my disparate works? how much do i leave to the viewer?

[granite-slab]

atomic material - individual glyph painted onto the wireframe

[granite-slab]

Barbara Hepworth museum visit ---

I’ve been here before but never found it so inspiring. Finally I feel some kind of understanding developing about sculpture and material. I love the way she creates shapes, especially holes or indents in surfaces of stone and metal. it’s some kind of magic, the mastery and control over material that in my experience is cruel and stubborn.

the standing stones of the local landscape and the evolution of material in tech was flowing through my mind - i could see it everywhere. geometric shapes and pillars, arranged like disciples, loners, lovers. her studio cluttered with gorgeous slabs of marble or whoever, in perfect proportions, beautiful stained with mildew. the greenhouse. maybe i should install this work outside... i keep coming back to it

i did try that in first year - i remember making this, i thought i was really cool. certainly interesting shapes and colours and composition, maybe i should revisit that. bring the screens back to the earth - become sand again