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'In a further radicalization of the geopolitics of resolution, US satellite image providers make an exception to the 50-cm rule in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies. An amendment to the US Land Remote Sensing Policy Act, which sets the permitted resolution of commercial US image satellites, dictates that these areas are shown only in a resolution of 2.5 meters (later effectively eased to 1 meter per pixel) in which a car is made of two pixels and a roof- another common target-is depicted by 6-9 pixels. The snow screen placed over Israel's violation of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza contributed to Turkey's decision, after the Gaza Flotilla incidents to send its own image satellite into space and make available 50 cm/pixel images of Palestine/lsrael.

from: William Fenton, "Why Google Earth Pixelates Israel," PCMag, June 14 2011; Maayan Amir, "'Gaza Flotilla,' www.forensic-architecture.org/file/gaza-flotille

Footnote from 'Drone warfare at the threshold of detectability' by Eyal Weizman in Çelikaslan, Özge, Alper Sen, and Pelin Tam. Autonomous Archiving. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2020.

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Grenfell Tower, 2017

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Le Diable, Probablement, 1977 dir. Robert Bresson

screen captures

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Design stages of fountain model

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Archibald memorial fountain archival images with redesign superimposed

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Archibald Memorial Fountain, Hyde Park, completed in 1932 by Francoise Sicard. Images from multiple archives.

Featuring Apollo in the center, surrounded by Diana, Pan, Theseus with a Minotaur, and turtles.

Commissioned by the bequest of Jules-Francois Archibald (born John Felton Archibald), co-founder of Australian Nationalist paper The Bulletin, responsible for the Archibald Portrait Prize.

Birmingham Palace dyed red

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Seizure, 2008, Roger Hiorns

Empty council flats in South London, crystallized with copper sulphate, later restaged in 2013 for Yorkshire sculpture park.

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I make money I'm a star star star star star star star, I get money I'm a star star star star star star star (memorial for nightlife; drifting into work on Saturday morning, crossing the rainbow crossing)

For 'Subtexts'

Subtexts unites four artists whose works demonstrate the complexities of queer identity, each considering their own personal relationship with queerness. The show offers alternative narratives and styles that challenge notions of queer uniformity, opting to explore the undertones and implications of queerness as a dislocated front. Subtexts asks of the ambiguous term; Are we united by virtue of our difference, or rather the unique positions it presents us?

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Images from travel

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Alchemy, Medicine, Colour, Pharmacy

Art and Artisanship in Early Modern Alchemy, Bruce T. Moran

'"labored much in the preparation of various oils for varnishes and other things," including making different colors. The sixteenth-century physician, natural philosopher, and alchemist Paracelsus (1493/94-1541) noted that "nature brings nothing to light which is completed in itself; rather, human beings have to complete it. This completing is called alchemy... he who turns that which is found in nature into that which is useful to human beings … he is an alchemist."4 Changes brought to nature by means of well-known laboratory practices like calcination, sublimation, distillation and tincturing. By their means Paracelsian physician-alchemists became specialists in separating what was pure and helpful from what was impure and harmful to the body in a variety of substances, including metals and minerals. The result was the revival of an alchemical pharmacy that utilized minerals and metals as medicaments and offered new dimensions to traditional herbal-based pharmacopoeias. Art, craft, and medicine coalesced within this milieu as alchemy and artisanal culture combined to manipulate nature, fashioning products that diminished the suffering of the body and enhanced the pleasures of the senses.'

Moran, Bruce T. “Art and Artisanship in Early Modern Alchemy.” Getty Research Journal, no. 5 (2013): 1–14. (Excerpt 2-3) http://www.jstor.org/stable/41825343.

Alchemy and Alchemists, John Read, Gerber's diagram of Alchemical matter pg.258

Read, John. “Alchemy and Alchemists.” Folklore 44, no. 3 (1933): 251–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1256428.

Chinese alchemy 'phases'; time and eternal elixir:

Sivin, N. “Chinese Alchemy and the Manipulation of Time.” Isis 67, no. 4 (1976): 513–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/230559.

Notes: I have been considering chemistry, medicine, and alchemy as an area for research. This interest has partially formed from working in the clinical environment of the pharmacy dispensary, and observing the waves of shortages; Caverject, Tadalafil, Vyvanse, estradiol 50, PREP, Nizatidine, dutasteride tamsulosin hydrochloride, semaglutide (Ozempic) etc.

The aesthetics of the pharmacy and medicine sparked curiosity about the origins of chemistry, its early mysticism, and alchemy (Al-kīmiyā (Arabic)). Traces of alchemy begin in Ancient Rome, 35th Century BC, later Greco-Roman Egypt (4th BC), across the 'Islamic world', and in China between the 5th-3rd century BC.

In particular, colour is deeply embedded in alchemical practice; as in dyes, tinctures, elixirs, etc. For example, the colouring of base metal to result in a silver or gold effect- utilised for patinas, and to transmute baser metals into gold through and artificial facade; colours in dye (such as ios, or iosis, a violet colour suited for only royalty), the colour of the 'philosophers stone' (regarded as amber, red, or a colour containing all colours (all light?)), the yellow of elixirs, white tinctures of silver, and the black of base metals; regarded as colourless.

In particular I am interested in the connection of this experimental and deeply spiritual yet crude art to work that I can make now, drawing connections to alchemy in colour, light and falsehood -transmutation, images, and replication. I have not decided where this will lead but I am considering the form of a 'Show Globe' as an area of interest as a symbol of the pharmacy, of the apothecary, of alchemy and transmutation.

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https://arhsnsw.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Lewisham.pdf

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Snitt, HC Gilje, 2010, Galleri 21, Malmo

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Surface Tension, Screen Space

by Giuliana Bruno

"This larger theoretical premise about surface materiality leads me to consider the material condition of the film medium and to specifically address the surface of the screen. I propose making a material turn in visual studies in order to vitalize the surfaces that clothe the material of our objects and to show that, in our times, materiality manifests itself in projection, in the surface tension of media. In particular, I aim to theorize the screen as an environment of ‘projection’, understanding projection in the largest sense of the term—as an architecture of passage—while highlighting texture and materiality, surface, and light. Projection is indeed a space of relations, and it is becoming an actual environment. Architects are increasingly turning the façades of their buildings into screens, making them into translucent surfaces as permeable and layered as skins, and artists are reinventing the art of projection. We as visual theorists can contribute concrete reflections on these intersecting architectures if we think further of our own reflective surface: the projective mode and visual plasticity, the sartorial texture and opaque transparency—that is, the luminous material transference—that is our medium. It is time to design an alternative genealogy for the screen, not simply conceived as a window or a mirror. Departing from the metaphors of optical framing that have long circulated in film theory, I propose to think haptically of a luminous screen-membrane or screen-fabric. In fashioning the projective space in this way, I mean to emphasize the surface condition, the textural manifestation, and the support of a work as well as the way in which it is sited and mobilized in space. I am particularly interested in the play of materiality that is brought together in light on different ‘screens’, and in offering a theorization of the actual material fabric of the screen, outside of figuration. I am also interested in exploring the migratory patterns of such visual fabrications, and in tracing their material histories. This investigation of screen cultures thus concerns the archaeology of media as well as their shifting geographies. Such concern for a material geography runs deeply in my work. From an early call to exit the prison-cave of the movie house, I have worked to affirm the hapticity and mobility of film architectures through an expanded notion of cinema. The act of ‘streetwalking around Plato’s cave’ suggested a desire to explore film not as an isolated and enclosed domain but rather as a mobile, shifting terrain. 4 In further mapping the projective space, I have emphasized that the activity of projection includes a psychic interplay and modalities of affect as well as other relationships. Screens are a moving architecture in which spectators are engaged and participate in constructing environments of ‘public intimacy’. 5 In other words, screens are spatial formations that are relational. This geography of exhibition suggests that cinema is a variegated landscape, for there is a historical variety of moving-image exhibition in space. The function of the screen cannot be understood if we ignore that cinema is materially connected to other forms of display and if we overlook a consideration of these modes of exhibition. Screens are in fact a material architecture that emerges in dialogue with other arts and exhibition practices—including, historically, the birth of the museum. The public museum was in fact configured in its modern form in the same age of visual display that gave rise to the cinema, the defining art of modernity, and it shares with film that surface of communication that is the visual, theatrical architecture of spectatorship. The cultural function of the screen evolves in conjunction with the visual arts and in interaction with their surfaces and volumes.

... To recognize this relationship of art to film exhibition is particularly relevant in any attempt to address contemporary culture. When we approach the visual architecture of our times, we confront a hybrid, shifting landscape. Modes of reception in the visual arts and media are becoming more fluid and increasingly mobile. The exhibition of film images has exited the space of the movie house; screens have multiplied, and different forms of viewership and locales have emerged. As moving images have migrated, they have established a solid presence as light spaces in the art gallery and the museum. As a result, film itineraries have become increasingly linked to museum walks. This migration of screens has strengthened the relationship between art, architecture, and moving images. The architectural wall and the gallery wall are not only becoming more like light spaces, they are at times even turning into literal screens.

The history of the screen’s evolution teaches us that what we now call screen, and understand to be a projective surface, originated in the world of objects, material space, and interior design. The screen was a thing. It was an object of furniture, a domestic item that inhabited interiors. It specially acted to negotiate inside and outside, and it materially transformed space. When deployed to divide space in the home, a screen mediated between private and public zones of habitation and could create privacy and intimacy. The folding screen often presented itself as a framed surface that filtered and diffused light and was also richly illustrated with images. Its fabric quality emerged from its being also a form of window dressing. The screen was even more than a visual fabric, however. It was a piece of material culture, a matter of decoration and adornment. And this ornament could be ornate in many ways. There were portable versions of it in the form of hand-screens, which could even respond to a personal ornamental desire. In its many configurations, the screen had a real plastic visibility, and yet it was an imaginary structure. Its material substance could activate, animate, and mediate the dimension of the imagination. In other words, the screen was a veritable piece of ‘interior’ design. It was this particular object of décor that made possible a visual, imaginary passage, in such a way foreshadowing our current sense of what a screen is and what potential forms of ‘projection’ it may hold for the future. It is such a thing that we find both reflected and projected in our own screen world. When encountering the screen as an object, in fact, we can experience at a tangible level how the fabric of the screen—its projective potential—stems from a history of folding together architecture and interior design with moving images in luminous forms of imaginary projection. From the very beginning, the screen was constituted as a space of passage in which art forms could become connected.

This material history shows us that the screen is a space of crossovers in which the visual and the spatial arts come into dialogue. The screen is a vessel: it is the material support onto which proliferations of images can come into being and, in luminous passage, also flow in time across media conditions. As such a material medium connecting art, architecture, and film, the screen is a stretchy fabric: it is the site of intermedial projections. On this pliant, reflective surface, mediatic shifts can take place materially, becoming palpable to our senses in surface tension. In probing the ‘surface of design’, we can sense the variety of intermedial transits that are written on screen surface. When we trace the history of its design form, we can expose the rich potential of screen space, including how it functions as a passage, a transitional site, and even a relational space. If I keep pursuing ‘the surface of design’, it is because, as Rancière notes, ‘by distributing surfaces, one also designs partitions that enable one to partake in communal space, […] configurations of what can be seen and what can be thought, forms of inhabiting the material world’.9 Forms of ‘superficial’ envelopment in the visible world involve the sensible realms of texture and inhabitation. Theorizing the screen in this way, I want to emphasize that the surface comes into play here as a partition in which one can partake. It ‘mediates’ by acting as a material configuration of how the visible meets the thinkable and as a form of sensible dwelling in the material world."

-Bruno, Giuliana. “Surface Tension, Screen Space.” In Screen Space Reconfigured, edited by Susanne Ø. Sæther and Synne T. Bull, 35–54. Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

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Idol, Sarah R. Serfati, 2024. video loop (colour), repurposed perspex, steel, 77 x 48 cm. Install at QHY Space, Join The Dots.

Idol encases a selection of 2nd generation Kpop and Jpop girl group music videos, obscuring their content into an elementary state. Stripped from colour, sound, and image, idols shift across a vertical screen, spilling light into the street from the gallery window.

A signal with no message - a relic to the fancam, Idol is the vacuum between the parasocial devotee and the spectacle, both possessed by a viral algorithmic stream. Intercepted by the virtual at all points, the star and the devotee are consumed in the delusion of transmission.

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Blue Diamond installed at NAS Drawing Gallery Building 25 for Mechanism Unseen

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Install test for Hoax, 2024, video loop (sound, colour), stainless steel. 16th September

Install plan of Hoax, 2024, video loops (sound, colour), stainless steel. 14th October

After the crit session a few weeks ago and discussing with lecturers, I adjusted the colour mixing of videos and cut out 2 minutes of footage. I also have edited the sound tracks and mixed them into L/R channels, levelling the gain and cutting out any extraneous noise that compromise the atmosphere of the installation.

I am considering adding another element of some small glazed ceramic tiles scattered along the ground of the gallery space that may catch some light from the projections and draw connections from the video.

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Polar Inertia

"Thus , alongside the well-known effects of 'telescopy ' and 'microscopy' , which have revolutionized our perception of the world since the seventeenth century , it will not be long before the repercussions of 'videoscopy ' make themselves felt through the constitution of an instantaneous , interactive 'space-time ' that has nothing in common with the topographical space o f geographical or even simply geometrical distance.

In fact , where the real time o f live television broadcasting prevails over the real space of a land actually crossed , the mere distinction between natura l and artificial light is no longer enough ; one has to add the difference in kind between direct light, natural or artificial , and indirect light, for electro-optical lighting now replaces electrical lighting as the latter once did the rising of the day . And this is while we wait for the active optics of computer graphics to achieve its next feat : that is , the coupling of the passive optics of cameras with a computer capable of rectifying the transmitted image as only glass lenses used to do . Digital optics will then succeed analogue optics , as the latter once cleverly complemented the ocular optics of the human gaze .

But let us return to the city , the 'light-city ' that has been home to all historical illuminations from the Fire of Rome through the pyrotechnics of the Age of Enlightenment to the laser displays of recent times. Since illumination is synonymous with the unveiling of a 'scene' , with revelation of a transparency without which appearances would be nothing , only a narrow conception could still talk of light simply in terms of the lighting of places . For how can one fail to see , behind those dazzling electro-optical displays , that the public image is on the way to replacing public space , and that the political stage will not be able to do without indirect lighting , any more than it has been able to do without direct artificial lighting ? With its origins in the city-theatre organized around the public spectacle of agora , forum or parvis, then in the cinecittà of Western modernity , the contemporary 'telecittà* today establishes the commutation of perceptible appearances through the feats of satellites , Hertzian networks and optical fibre cables . In its respective time , each of these 'urban representations ' has known how to use the spectacle of transparency , of public illumination , to develop its culture and collective imagination .

-Polar Inertia, Paul Virilio