Midnight Special, Coding and Kanye

It’s a bit weird being back, some things have changed whilst other aspects of my life are exactly the same. It feels weird to reflect back on all that’s happened in the last two terms, the progression that’s occurred and everything that I’ve learned. It’s all very strange.

So I’m still doing 30/30 and have only 6 days to go, which is kind of great; the ‘home stretch’. It’s been a weird process, one that’s not been entirely pleasant. I’m sure if I hadn’t of been doing this then I’d have finished my essay by now among other things. Although that may be the case, I feel that I’ve learned a lot about my practice form this process, as well as a few more things to add to my cv, which is never a bad thing. I’ll quickly run through all the work I’ve made so I can get onto my week being back at uni.

Monday’s piece was created in response to the brief make something that has an expiry date. I began by thinking about the concept of time, and the things within my life/our society that we closely associate with that. I eventually came to the conclusion to use the Countdown clock to create a short video piece, as it’s incredibly synonymous with many generations of people from the U.K. This work was my second piece to get featured on the thirty website too, so that was exciting.

On the 19^th I decided to just use some footage from the previous day of working (where I’d created a very simple video game world). It was an incredibly barren landscape so I decided to set the video piece to Bobby Vinton’s Mr. Lonely. This also got featured. It was created in response to the brief make a diagram of your work, which the piece was slightly conforming to, as the world was made up of previous images of work that I had then pasted onto various structures within the landscape.

On Wednesday I chose to create a very basic thing after receiving the brief make a determined failure, give yourself the room to make the work badly and find interest in the mistakes. I took some simple gameplay footage of a woman being thrown out of the window of a building via a glitch. I then overlaid the classic sound of dying Mario. The video then rewinds incredibly slowly, coming to a head just before the woman is bounced out of the room. The sound is slowed so much that it sounds like the woman is screaming insistently.

Instead of conforming to day 21’s brief; try to make a work where you contradict your aesthetic taste, I decided to work with my aesthetic, only ‘amped up to the max’. I used the brief to make another small video game world, this time adding in swaying people and a robotic voice saying ‘aesthetic’ every time you took a step, alongside playing a song by Blank Banshee each time you jumped. It was fun to make.

For day 22’s brief read an old statement, one you’ve written about your work in the past, attempt to make a piece of work directly from that statement, is there any sense in it, or continuity? I delved into my work archive and re-made my summer project from the year before last, before I’d embarked on my foundation course. The piece was centralised around a day in my life, where a sculpture was made in response to each day, with the different tape attached to the sculpture representing different activities. I decided to go back and explore the mind-set that I was in during that time. To re-make it I took various images from Google depicting different aspects of my daily life, art for example. I then re-sized each of these pictures in Photoshop on a singular page to reflect how long I spent on each activity. I then took this image and put it into Google Sketchup, creating a short video piece set to the intro song from Mad Men. A few cannabis leafs are also involved. It was very weird to think back to this time, a mere year and a half-ish ago; how much has happened since that time, what’s changed. It’s all very worrying; this obvious idea of time. There always seems to be this longing inside of me to revert back to an earlier time, be it last week or last year, where things were ‘better’ than they are now. Things always seem to be better after reflecting upon them; all obvious thoughts but important nonetheless.

Yesterday’s work consisted of a still image of a billboard featuring pictures of Kanye West’s face exploding out of it. This was another video game based experiment; whilst attempting to create a fire in Unity I discovered that you could use any image you wanted. So instead of a fire, I used Kanye’s face. I then put this to one of my favourite songs of his, Good Morning. I feel that it was at least a vague success. It was made in response to the brief presentation is key, play with how you mount / display / install today.

I created todays work at around 2 o’clock this morning, with the very simple brief being learn a new skill. I began by googling ‘skills to learn in a day’ which brought up various ideas. One that caught my eye was ‘learn the gun rules’ or something along those lines. After discovering what the ‘gun rules’ were, I then recorded myself saying them into my phone, which later transformed into a computer generated voice saying them. To accompany this, I created a compilation of ‘gun fails’ on YouTube. I then overlaid the ‘gun rules’, named it The Ten Commandments of Gunny and was finished. You can’t not reference Peep Show when making a work centred around guns. I feel that the outcome is adequate enough for making it during the early hours of the morning.

Aside from 30/30 I’ve been back at uni this week, which has mostly been taken up by finalising what I’m going to show next week for the exhibition on Friday. Luckily I had kind of worked all that out last term, apart from a few odd things. I’ve been re-thinking my use of the tripod a lot and have bought three fake surveillance cameras to stick up around my space, forcing that idea of surveillance even more. I’m not sure if it’s needed or not, I just like the idea of creating my own space within the exhibition, a ‘controlled space’ if you will; thinking back to Neïl Beloufa’s work at the MOMA and how he made his own world within this huge institution.

I’ve also decided to use my didactic video on Bitcoin, somehow situating it beside my screengrab work, or within it, displayed on a kindle or IPhone, not entirely sure yet; different formats have different connotations, although using the kindle will be a much more transparent way of displaying the piece. I think it definitely fits in with the main subject matter of the installation, this ‘new world’ that’s being created in today’s society.

I wrote a little bit about my work for the ‘press release’ that’s going to be handed out at the show, talking about the general ideas embedded within the installation alongside my artist statement, which is here:

Bob works predominantly in film, sculpture, installation and other digital mediums. Surveillance, the internet and the consumer capitalist culture within today’s society are the main issues surrounding his work, exploring these themes using a range of tools and technologies, which are relatable but not restricted to art.

The installation laments the death of a ‘pure internet’. An internet infected by large corporations feeding our consumer culture that’s enabled the multi-headed government to monitor our every move throughout the virtual and real world. You’re invited to charge you phone and connect your laptop to the ‘data towers’ embedded within the installation, investigating the variety of stolen data files within each USB drive.

I didn’t want it to be too long, just concise enough to get my point across. I also named my installation Vi(r)t(u)al Supervision, playing on the distinction that the different surveillance companies have between what’s ‘vital’ and what’s not. I like the playfulness of this title, referencing the internet in a vaguely subtle way.

Apart from that I had a meeting with John on Monday and then an extended ‘work session’ on Friday. It’s slowly dawning on me how much work it’s going to be to create the things he wants to make for his final show. For the moment the plan is to make various video games (eleven levels in total) in response to people’s dreams. He’s recorded these people talking about their different dreams, with some of them being incredibly difficult whilst others are just centred on a feeling, or of being in a normal room unable to move, for example. The idea is to have these games playable alongside pre-recorded footage from the video games set behind the films of the different people talking. It’s still kind of undecided, with the last week being centralised around learning how to use Unity more, figuring out how to trigger a sound occurring in an environment for example, or creating a water effect.

Because of the limited time I definitely foresee either a loss in quality or quantity. The lack of knowledge on my part is a shame; although I’m attempting to learn as fast as I can, I do have other things to worry about. It’s just balancing my time between all these activities which will become incredibly stressful as the weeks go by. Having someone else relying on you will also become stressful, but hopefully it will all work out. Saying all this though, I’m still very excited to be working on all of these things. It’ll be a definite skill that I’ll be using for a later piece of work too, I just need to think about what I want to make for myself.

In terms of new work, I think I’m just waiting until the offsite show is finished with, as well as 30/30, to actually think about anything ‘proper’. It’s just too much to think about. I’ve had some general ideas about creating a video game where everywhere you walk sets of a sound/note. If the game world were to be a simple cube, I could fill the cube with one song, where every step you took would activate a different part of said song. In effect the viewer could create their own version of pre-made songs. I think this would definitely be an interesting side project to embark upon; the hard part would be to choose a song which sounds ‘interesting’ whichever way you interact with it, or a song that has some kind of importance, whether in a cultural sense or a personal one. In relation to this I’ve been thinking about Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op. 11. A compilation video piece that features a number of cats playing the piano on YouTube, cut together to play Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 op. 11 Drei Klavierstücke. It’s very funny and clever.

I think that’s all the ‘work’ that I’ve done this week. I did hear back from one more thing that I applied to; txt.tv with their ‘boil’ text exhibition. I got in with a simple text piece which was written in binary code. I really like the uniqueness of the ‘text exhibition’, signing up to be texted artwork on a regular basis. It’s a really fun concept and I’m happy to be a part of it. After applying to a bunch of these things, specifically lots of online things, I’ve been thinking about making my own ‘open call’ online exhibition thing. Maybe after this week is over, who knows. I think it would definitely be a fun thing to do in terms of curating as well as just as an ‘experience’ thing, widening my circle of young people who create artwork.

Other than that, I did go to a few exhibitions this week. My favourite was by far the Zabludowicz Collection with the exhibition Emotional Supply Chains. I pretty much loved every piece, with a particular favourite being Simon Denny’s The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom. In this installation he displays various pieces of information relating to the arrest of Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload and Megavideo. Similar to his exhibition at the Serpentine, Denny continues to make work by presenting information with a very clean aesthetic that hints at a love for the capitalist society that we’re living in today. It’s an interesting way to create and display work. This installation, alongside Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion’s piece Nakamoto, (where they create a passport for the supposed creator of Bitcoin) has made me think a lot about the ‘key players’ within the internet surveillance leaks, someone I could look into and maybe make a specific work centred around. There are many to choose from, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, etc. Who knows what it will turn into, but I feel that this could be an interesting thing to pursue.

David Raymond Conroy had a simply brilliant video on display there called (You(People) Are All The Same) which satirised the structures used in podcasts such as Serial and This American Life. Being an avid listener of these very podcasts, I loved the attention to detail and how the different storytelling techniques had been transferred from the audio realm into the digital. His website is also pretty awesome too, coming under the banner of ‘I’m not conforming to this whole ‘having an internet presence’ thing’. Korakrit Arunanondchai also had his incredible video piece Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (I am a machine boosting energy into the universe). Although I had already seen this piece in a far better setting last year at the Palais de Tokyo, it was still nice to see again. Although it was far more basic this time around. Neïl Beloufa was showing his video piece People’s passion, lifestyle beautiful wine, gigantic glass towers, all surrounded by water installed in an installation. An installation no way as good as the one that was being shown at the MOMA in New York that I saw a few weeks ago.

Another highlight was Ed Fornieles’ Dorm Daze. A work that consists of over 30 Facebook accounts all run by volunteers, creating fake characters and ‘OTT’ plotlines to their lives. The work manifests itself as a video piece where a narrator is exploring her news feeds as well as the different pages which you can explore for yourself. It was incredibly clever, something that everyone wants to make but never gets around to creating. His whole catalogue of works is both hilarious and incredibly impressive. I highly recommend watching the trailer for Dorm Daze, or just going to see the Zabludowicz show.

Moving on from the Zabludowicz, I also went to the Chelsea Space for a surprisingly good exhibition featuring a few noteworthy artists like Yuri Pattison and Seth Price. Pattison had a video piece which was looking at Pionen White Mountain; The worlds’ most esteemed data centre, partly for how it looks and partly because WikiLeaks used its services to store their servers for a time in 2010. Whilst Timo Arnall’s Internet machine and John Gerrard’s Farm simply documented various data farms Pattison’s piece actually expands on what’s being shown on the screen, not just documenting a space but commenting on it through a text based dialogue that’s occurring during the video piece.

I also went to a few less interesting exhibitions, one of which was the Lisson Gallery that was showing John Latham’s Spray Paintings and Spencer Finch’s various tedious colour palette paintings. When will people learn that we don’t want to see a flower from ‘the perspective of a bee’. That’s just fucking dull. Seriously, the Lisson is supposed to be a good space.

The ICA was good, showing work by Guan Xio (who was also at the Zabludowicz). The exhibition was mainly made up of various installations, featuring a number of ‘prop’ elements alongside screens with printed images and text. It was all very ‘exciting’.

Martine Syms’ had the upstairs, displaying a range of works that seem to be both personal and distinctly impersonal at the same time. Her use of laser cut plastic was interesting, turning it into a sculptural form as opposed to how it’s usually used.

Carroll Fletcher was next on the list, showing work from the artist duo Thomson & Craighead. I’m a big fan of their work, one of my favourites from the exhibition was Six Years of Mondays, a documentary artwork featuring footage taken form a Scottish man who loves the weather. Look it up and enjoy.

Bartha Contemporary let me down with some simple line drawings, which weren’t fun at all but the White Cube at Mason’s Yard was kind of interesting. It was like being transported back in time, to when artists displayed how much drugs they took on a regular basis and called it art. The work was largely made up of ‘spent’ joints, rolled up roach paper, assorted rizla packets and photographs of lovingly displayed rocks of cocaine. It was very weird to be transported back to the 60s. Maybe it’s coming back into fashion; or maybe it was five years ago; I don’t think anyone would characterise the White Cube as being ‘ahead of the curve’.

TJ Boulting was showing work by Helena Pritchard, various ‘nice’ looking assemblage works tied together with a number of coloured spotlights. Over the road the Josh Lilley gallery had various sculptural forms inspired by voyages at sea being shown. They were well crafted ‘things’ but not my personal ‘thing’.

The final exhibition that I went to see was at Chelsea’s Triangle Space. The highlight being a lovingly crafted potato powered Theremin connected to water by Rachael Nee. Interactivity was key. Faron Ray had a lovely little animation of the android logo lounging in a hammock. It was clever.

There was also the ever present Tuesday Talk, featuring Piers Secunda and his paint based practice. The talk was okay; I wasn’t really interested by the work. The real highlight was when it came to the questions, with the main question being ‘why don’t you think your work is political? When it so obviously is’, or something to that effect. This comment triggered a multitude of unsatisfactory answers from Secunda, ranging from ‘I’m just making a record of what’s happening’ to ‘there aren’t that many artists making political art these days’. It began to be quite laughable and I left quite unimpressed by Secunda and the way he had reacted to the questions from a student. Surely your work should hold up in front of a room of students on their BA?

Apart from that I’ve been watching a few films, the first being Midnight Special. A film in which nothing really happens, or nothing feels like it ever happens. It’s about a young boy who seems to have these special powers, one whose breadth is slowly revealed to you as the film continues. It made me go and watch another of Jeff Nichols’ (the director) films, Take Shelter. Not considered to be a sci-fi film, but on the verge of a sci-fi film, TS features Michael Shannon playing a man whose haunted by dreams of an apocalypse. Yet again, nothing and everything seemed to happen; this may be because of how well both films were shot, how crisp and perfect everything seemed to be. Or maybe it was some other, unknown aspect, that was making me feel this way. Both are worth seeing.

Another film I finally got to see was Zootopia, which was simply amazing. The world that was created within the film was incredible, the attention to detail was simply awesome and the plot actually had some vague twists and turns. The writing was clever and to the point, which I highly enjoyed. I finished watching it feeling happy, which was a lovely feeling.

I also watched Home, which, compared to Zootopia, or any good film, was kind of dull. It was fun, but not fun enough to properly entice me into what was going on onscreen.

United 93, although distressing and worrying, was very well done. After watching the new trailer for the new Jason Bourne film I just had to watch a Paul Greengrass film to suppress myself. I’m a big fan of the Bourne series.

The final film was Road House, which was hilarious. It did surprise me a little when it turned really dark towards the end, but it did just add to my enjoyment of the experience. I now understand the Family Guy reference.

So, the week ahead looks to be quite busy, setting up for the offsite show alongside 30/30, essay writing and game building. This last term is going to be a fun but exhausting one. I look forward to coming home, lying on the grass outside my house and drinking a cold beer. The middle class life…

Enjoi.

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Margaret, I Origins and Ghost in the Shell

I’m finally back in London after being away for nearly a month; the experience has been a mixture of excitedly exploring New York contrasted with lying around my house in Suffolk watching film after film, making work after work. I feel a little like an employee in the ‘art factory’ in The Holy Mountain... It’s interesting to think about how this ‘holiday’ has been, compared to the Christmas ‘holiday’ that occurred a few months ago; how much things have progressed since then as well how I’ve used my time differently. It’s a very weird thing to reflect upon, or a very obvious thing to reflect upon. Something to consider anyway; time.

I’m still creating things every day for 30/30, which is going fairly well, a certain pattern has emerged within the majority of the video pieces; cutting multiple videos together to create a work containing lots of windows. This is definitely something that I’ve been being slowly drawn to, be it simply because of the aesthetic style or because of the windows representing the screen and the idea of the voyeur alongside other things. Who knows?

The weeks been a little similar to last week, with aesthetics taking over some days more than it should; but as I’ve continuously said, tomorrow is another day. Mondays piece was vaguely basic; I took a previous video piece from 30/30 and viewed it as a text document on my computer, transforming the video work into a text piece. Something to note is that when you view a video as a document it doesn’t allow you to view the document as a video, it’s an irreversible process that destroys the original product forever. The brief was dismantle an old work, to make a new one. I titled it 1010100 1001001 1010010 1000101 1000100 which is binary code for tired, I think.

On the 12^th the brief was do you make work the work you think you should make? Only slightly confusing. At the time I was experimenting with a 3D sculpting software, and just submitted something, an ‘aesthetic’ image made into a gif from that; not really responding to the brief unfortunately; but I think I had a lot going on on that particular day. I called it Ambiguous Totalitarianism and was done with it.

Wednesdays was allow yourself the time to write a list of things that you can remember wanting to make but never got round to making. can you make any today? or start? This was a fun brief which allowed me to dive into my ‘art’ note folder on my phone. I took the opportunity to create a video piece coming back to my fascination with the consumer culture that’s alive within us all. It turned into an amalgamation of appropriated imagery from YouTube, a screen recording of a monologue from the film Network occurring over Facebook as well as another screen recording of the creation of a 3D sculpture using the software that I mentioned earlier. This was all tied together with the song リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー by Macintosh Plus, a classic Vaporwave track which has all the corporate conations embedded within. I played with it a little, reversing several parts to make it my own among other things. I really like the finished piece, it definitely seems to me that it’s lamenting something, whatever that might be. Both the beginning and the ending start with a skeleton dancing meekly, with the intention that the video loops forever, or until the dystopian futures portrayed in any number of classic sci-fi films becomes the inevitable reality. Titled r3p3At afT3r m3.

On the 14^th the brief was leave a work unfinished, something that I obviously wasn’t going to do in a literal way as the majority of my work always ends up in a ‘finished’ state. I decided to return to the avatars of people that you program to say ‘welcome to my site’ or ‘buy this thing’, something that I abandoned using during the end of the first term in favour of a different thing at the time. I programmed the avatar of an old women to say ‘fuck you’, editing the short video clip so that it cut off during the ‘you’ part of the short sentence. The video then cuts to the ‘classic’ no signal television screen with the even more memorable ‘beeeeeeeeeeep’ sound, with a text overlay saying ‘insert art here’. Although it was a very simple conceit, I enjoy how quick and easy it is to ‘get’, how simple the idea is, how obvious it is to have an old, white women saying this profanity. It was a fun idea that I’m kind of proud of. Suppressed Profanity seemed like a fair title.

On Friday I created another short video piece in response to the brief make a site specific work. This was going to be my last full day in Suffolk so I decided to make the piece centralised around the activities that I participate in when I’m back at home; primarily sitting around, watching films/tv shows whilst eating various foods that I rarely eat when I’m in London. It also transpired that during the previous evening me and a friend had left my webcam on my computer recording for nearly two hours, so that also went into the video, another layer of activity. I spliced all of these videos together, coming back to the fascination with the windows that I was talking about earlier in terms of the layout of the work. This was mildly enjoyable, not my best piece of the week, but not the worst by far. So I was slightly surprised when this was the piece of mine that got featured on the ‘thirty’ website as part of their daily online exhibition schedule. It’s still good to have been finally featured though. Pest Control.

Yesterday’s piece that I created was lightly mocking the 12ø collective, with the brief being choose a piece of work that you like and make it better – be it yours or someone else’s I decided to attempt to re-make their websites front page, screen recording the entire process. As their website has a very ‘a e s t h e t i c’ look to it I decided to make it even more so, putting the majority of the text through an ‘aesthetic text generator’ as well as making a new icon for the site. I then sped the whole thing up and set it to My Girl by The Temptations, a classic love song, considering my love-hate relationship with the Vaporwave aspects of their website. I enjoyed doing this and think the outcome is generally humorous, if a little segregated to the people who are already aware of the website. is that better?

With today’s work I took a multitude of screen recordings from different films and tv shows, only taking a very small snippet from each one, be it a small cube out of the top right hand corner of the screen or a thick slice from the middle. I then took a sound recording from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a renowned cyberpunk film that considers what it means to be human, from a cyborgs perspective. I obviously love this conceit for the film, but I chose to use it within my work as it ties in with the aforementioned windows from your computer screen, and the idea that the screen is becoming a part of you as we as human beings value the screen and spend more time interacting with these things every day. The different video pieces appear on the screen whenever a tinge of music occurs within the video clip, or when a particular robot is exclaiming ‘help me’. I’m happy with the work. Acknowledging The Understated as the title fit quite well, as the piece draw your attention to the details of these different shows, as well as the background soundscape to the film.

Although I am enjoying this process, I do feel like it could become wearing over time, and I definitely couldn’t do it for another month. I do worry that it’ll conflict with my ‘proper’ uni work though. 13 more days to go.

Oh and I finally got around to cutting all of my Snapchats together to 'complete' the piece of work which finished a little while ago. You can see the updated version on my main website here:  http://www.bobbicknell-knight.com/#/retrospective-obsolescence/

Other things that I’ve done this week include beginning my essay, with a new and improved title, one that actually focuses in on something that I have looked into deeply and am interested by; as opposed to the earlier title which was a little too broad. The new title is How have the Edward Snowden revelations influenced artists and the artwork that they create? I feel that after watching so many documentaries about this topic, as well as going to the Laura Poitras show over the holidays, I’m in a good position to write a well-researched and well thought out essay.

I also heard back from a group exhibition that I applied to called The Listening Booth and have gotten in. I submitted the soundscape that I created for Utopian Realism as it was a purely audio based exhibition only. Hopefully I’ll be hearing back from a couple of others soon too.

I’m not sure if I’ve done anything else this week apart from watching a variety of films. One of the most distressing movies of the week was Margaret, a film focusing on a 17-year-old teenager living in New York who witness’ a terrible bus accident. The film then proceeds to document the repercussions of the crash. It’s all incredibly depressing and over three hours long with some beautiful extended shots of the city, managing to capture the majesty of the place. I would definitely recommend, although the main character did thoroughly annoy me; but I’m sure that was intended.

I’ve been catching up on a couple of sci-fi greats as well, including Soylent Green and Rollerball, both classic films focused on corporate greed and the idea of a dystopian world ruled by fear. I also watched Fahrenheit 451 for the second time. It’s definitely up there with some of the better book adaptations. Dark City was kind of weird, a little bit too much like fantasy with an overly produced Terry Gilliam-esque plotline. The Quiet Earth was a weird one, weird in a good way, I think mostly because of its New Zealand origins. It’s the classic ‘man wakes up all alone in the world and has to figure out what happened’ plotline that we all know and love. I’m a particular fan of when it’s used in the first ever episode of The Twilight Zone; with a beautiful revelatory moment. It also made me think about the parallels between ‘modern day’ considerations, for example The Last Man On Earth. I feel like the majority are carbon copies, with a distinct difference being that there’s rarely any twist, all of these new films/tv shows are solely focusing on the character development, rather than any big mystery that has to be solved. I also watched The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was actually surprisingly good but overly long. We all love Bowie.

I watched I Origins too which was a lovingly crafted film by the director behind Another Earth. I feel like these films have some big similarities between the two movies that I was discussing last week; Primer and Upstream Color. Both focusing on the human problems of a sci-fi esque situation. I thoroughly look forward to the next films created by the directors.

Another film that I’ve always wanted to watch but never got around to seeing; Requiem for a Dream. It was a very well-crafted observation of the dangers of drug abuse; I still favour Trainspotting for ‘best film to put you off drugs’ though and Midnight Express for ‘best film to put you off buying/transporting drugs in a foreign country’. Also in this category of ‘I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before’; Donnie Darko. A great film with a very painful ending that’s a little too close to the ‘it was all a dream’ scenario that we all kind of hate.

On top of this I had the pleasure of watching both Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. They were really good, full of ideas centralised around the post human condition with an incredible art style. Definitely up there with other animations like Akira and Spirited Away.

I finally managed to watch all of David Fincher’s films, topping off the list with Zodiac and Panic Room. Both great films, although I still feel that Fight Club is the obvious best.

For the final film of the week I watched American Graffiti, a definite ‘feel good’ film capturing that segment of time in the world perfectly. It really reminded me of Dazed and Confused, although the latter film is a lot better for obvious reasons. Although there is a severe lack of cruising around in Dazed.

Oh and I watched the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It was okay, if a little too much, compared to the first season. A clever comedy masquerading as a dumb one is always tricky I feel. Alongside this I watched all of Silicon Valley, which was actually consistently fairly (ish).

So, the week ahead looks to be interesting; offsite show planning, a meeting with John, more one day projects and the rest of an essay to write. Oh and obviously many of the new exhibitions that I haven’t been to yet. I am very excited to be back as well as to experience the final term of my first year at uni.

Enjoi.

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Pony Island, Oxenfree and Blue Velvet

This week has been fairly productive, creating daily work for 30/30 alongside watching a bunch of films and playing various video games. Unfortunately, I still haven’t got around to even starting my essay, but I’m hoping that in the next week I’ll actually get it done so that when the new term starts on the 18^th I’ll be able to solely concentrate on work and the offsite shows, rather than having many things to juggle around.

Most of the work that I’ve created this week for 30/30 has been, in my opinion, fairly good. There have been days where I’ve simply had an idea, or remembered something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, and just done it, without actually thinking about what the various connotations were, or even if the meaning was fully fleshed out; I’ve not been entirely happy with these particular works, ‘style over substance’ would be the best way to describe them. Whenever this occurs though, I just remember that tomorrow is a new day, another chance to make a new piece of work. Other than that they’ve mostly been good.

So, on Monday the brief was experiment with documenting your work through another medium. This was one of my more ‘aesthetically orientated’ days, where I simply threw a bunch of video clips together from previous works overlaid with various text. It was kind of dull and I was slightly disappointed in myself at the end of the day.

Tuesdays brief, translate your work into another medium, was a good one, inspiring me to create a new piece of work using one of my old sculptures from my foundation course. I decided to film the burning of a particular sculpture, using three different IPhones to document the process which enabled me to create a – sort of – three channel video work. The different videos are all moving at different speeds, you see the same journey occurring from different angles and different clips, progressing as one separated into three. It definitely encapsulates the feelings that I have for my foundation work, which I’m happy about. It’s interesting, as the work that I destroyed was centred on capturing emotions, so in creating this new work I have, in a way, made a work about my emotions towards my past emotions. This is being highlighted by the aforementioned differentiated clip speeds. I enjoy this very small meta idea.

Wednesday was another bad one; use wiki how to learn something new and make a work with it. After creating and submitting the work I realised that I could have made something a lot more interesting if I had simply thought about what it was that I wanted to do for at least ten minutes, rather than simply jumping into a thing that sounded like it would be good. I ended up creating a gif that featured a bunch of internet memes that I had created, slowly filling the television screen within a family home. It was a shame, but as I say, another day, another new piece.

Day 7’s brief was make a fake, of your own work. On this day I happened to be crawling through my old files as I had to reset my computer to its factory settings, and discovered a video piece that I’d created a few months ago to go alongside my film Utopian Realism. At the time I’d spent a day or so working on it but had decided against using it for one reason or another. This time I chose to use it, tweaking it slightly, ‘bob-ifying’ it, over-utilising certain video effects. This worked out well, but it did feel a bit dull still. Less like fun and more like work, albeit not a lot of work.

On Friday, make a work in five minutes, I decided to re-appropriate an idea that I’ve seen duplicated many times, the speeding up of a film; allowing the viewer to watch a whole film in a mere ten minutes or so. This is reminiscent of many pieces, in particular Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho where he slowed down Hitchcock’s Psycho to two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. For my piece I chose to speed up Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Many hated the film at the time of its release, mainly because it didn’t actually answer any of the questions posed by the TV show. I feel that many people at the time probably wanted to see it, without actually ‘seeing it’, so I felt that it was the perfect film to re-appropriate for my original simple idea. I enjoy the idea of speeding up a film, and hope to use it for a more suitable piece in the future, thinking the connotations through a lot more as well as making it into a bigger thing, maybe cutting together multiple films by the same director? Turning someone’s prized collection into bitesize chunks of data to only be enjoyed on a visual level, with the plot not being cared about. This would work for films like Avatar or the majority of Michael Bay’s ‘cinematic escapades’, style over substance, aesthetic over concept. Diluting Bay’s entire film library into a five-minute visual orgy would be interesting. An idea for a later date.

Yesterday was a good day; with the brief being get someone else to make you work. I chose to take this brief on a journey through many layers of thinking. I began by having the simple idea of purchasing a piece of ‘art’ from eBay and the order details being the work. I slowly expanded on that by using a piece of work by Hito Steyerl Is the Internet úäCì@?ù.1HcpiÙîfê¿Dead, a digital piece where Steyerl intentionally corrupted a found image of a woodcut print by Utamaro, embedding one of her written texts into the image’s source code. This glitches and degrades the original image. In the video piece that I created, I have positioned Steyerl’s piece next to the screengrab of the order details from a painting of an elephant that I purchased via eBay. During the video piece, using the online app ‘Image Glitch Tool’, I attempt to recreate the general aesthetic of Steyerl’s piece, taking away the meaning of the work and simply focusing on how it looks, playing on how ‘glitch art’ is primarily centred on the first layer of a given work; the aesthetics. Whilst I was attempting to recreate Steyerl’s image, I utilised my webcam to film myself, which I then blurred out, giving myself a segment of anonymity whilst being embedded within the work. I’m still trying to work out why I put myself in the piece, maybe to make the process more evident, maybe to create a classic ‘rule of thirds’ composition or maybe to make it less evident that it’s me creating the thing, and that it could be anyone. I think I like this third option the most, as it furthers the point that anyone could be doing this, that there’s no real skill in what I’m doing. The slowed down keyboard tapping accompanies the manipulation, serving as a soundscape at times, perfectly fitting with the continuous distortion of the screengrab. I like how it turned out and feel that it fitted into the brief quite well, using someone else’s work, an online application that does your work for you and an image of someone else’s painting, all coming under the banner of get someone else to make your work.

Today’s brief was use a readymade/existing object as todays work, put your own concept on it, does it still work? In response to this I decided to create an assemblage of sorts, taking quick screengrabs of the various windows that are constantly open on my computer whilst I’m working. The central clip consisted of all the Google Image results that come up when you type in ‘readymade art’, accompanied by the Google Search bar, a segment of the final episode of House of Cards from season 4, a slice of scrolling through my own Facebook feed and a square from writing this blog post. Looking at myself as the readymade, or the screen/applications/media that I interact with every day. It also takes ideas from earlier projects of mine, surveillance and the overconsumption of various screen-based forms. The sound experience that goes along with it is a mixture of different House of Cards recordings, the typing on a keyboard and Blank Banshee’s Teen Pregnancy. All part of my daily routine with various connotations embedded within each of them.

The rest of my time this week has been taken up by consuming the screen, using my ‘free’ time to indulge in incredibly rich video games and certain films that I haven’t got around to watching until now.

Playing Oxenfree was definitely an intriguing experience, a supernatural 2.5D adventure game that follows a group of teenagers who open a rift to an alternate dimension whilst exploring a deserted island. Throughout the game you play as Alex, attempting to discover what’s going on whilst interacting with the different members of your group to form unique bonds that impact the games narrative. In Oxenfree I began to feel connected to these characters, due in part to the well-written dialogue that actually felt like you were having a conversation with a teenager, rather than in Life Is Strange, for example, where all your interactions with fellow students felt like a 45-year-old man’s perspective on how young people speak in today’s society. This connectivity made the ‘choice and consequence’ mechanic all the more pertinent, getting you to choose between saving Clarissa or Ren, for example, becomes a lot harder when you’re actually invested in them as individuals. Although this mechanic is used a lot in video games, in any of Telltale’s games or throughout the Fallout series for example, I feel like it actually worked well here and to the games advantage, rather than simply embedding it for replay value alone. The art style is also quite beautiful and unique, especially when the screen glitches when time is being manipulated and distorted within the narrative.

Pony Island was another video game that I consumed this week, coming under the ever-growing banner of ‘games about games’ it describes itself as ‘a metafictional game that has the player interact with what appears to be an old arcade cabinet game called “Pony Island”’. As you progress through the game you are tasked with deleting the very game that you’re playing, as it’s apparently the manifestation of the devil itself. Like The Stanley Parable the game seems to be having a dialogue with the participant, in a literal way in terms of the message boxes that pop up throughout the two-hour experience as well as in a not-so-literal sense when it’s teaching you how to play the game within the game. To give you a sense of how the game attempts to fuck with you, as I was playing the video game on my laptop, messages kept popping up from Steam, enquiring whether or not my game had been ’hacked’. This turned out to be an incredibly inventive tactic used to make me look away from the screen, stopping me from concentrating on a certain puzzle and failing that part of the video game. This was genius. There was another point where the game was briefly minimised because a virus on my computer had opened a pop up ad. There was a brief, five second or so period, where I wondered whether or not the game was simulating this virus, or if it was just my computer having a normal virus. Even if that’s not even possible to do, making me think that it’s possible is an incredible feat to have accomplished. I would definitely recommend investing two hours of your time having your mind fucked with for a mere £3.99.

I also played a little game called Unravel where you step into the shoes of ‘Yarny’, a small, wine glass sized anthropomorphic creature made of yarn. The central mechanic that sees you navigating through various environments involves the unravelling of your own body. This incredibly dark aspect of the game, having to loose parts of yourself to continue your journey, is never really commented on. Similar to the character of Kirby and how he ‘sucks up’ creatures in order to gain their different abilities. This happens a lot in video games, particularly ones designed for children, where a key gameplay mechanic is actually devil-esque in its nature, I feel that there are definite parallels between this and old kids tv shows where the majority of what’s being said is centralised around sexual innuendos. It was a lovely game; but nothing more than that, with the main mechanic becoming quite dull a little too quickly.

Beyond: Two Souls was another piece of interactive fiction that I dipped into this week. I’ve enjoyed the majority of Quantic Dream’s video games, Fahrenheit being a particular favourite alongside Heavy Rain. I am still yet to fully experience the whole story, but compared to other games in the genre of ‘interactive drama’ I feel that, at this point, it doesn’t really stand up to some of my favourites that I mentioned in last week’s post. The breaking of a spell that was over my past self for a while.

The final game that I experienced this week was a beautiful game called Rayman Legends. A game I used to play a few years ago, one that brings up various memories of how my life used to be. It’s interesting to consider how, due to the interactive nature of a video game, the emotions that can be conjured up are far superior to that of a film. I feel that muscle/procedural memory is one of the factors that contribute to this; learning to interact with the medium allows you to be more invested in what’s occurring as you’ve given more of yourself to this active experience, rather than a passive medium like film or television. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people manage to do with video games in the future, the rise in VR and AR technology being a key factor in this.

Saying that, I did watch a few films and finished House of Cards, which was quite incredible. I’m really enjoying how dark it’s getting, how the layers of Frank and Claire’s marriage are slowly peeling away to show their true selves. The last shot of season 4 eloquently sums this up for me. I really enjoyed it and can’t wait for season 5, whenever that’s going to come out.

I finally got around to watching Blue Velvet, a definite gap in my ‘film bank’ that I’m happy to have filled. It was a beautifully dark tale, which needs no real introduction. I also watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me which was quite great. Giving no answers to the unanswered questions of the tv show, but that’s obviously demonstrated within the first ten seconds, where we see a television being smashed into pieces with an axe. I found ‘the scene that everyone knows’ to be incredibly disturbing and worked so very well due to the simply awesome acting by Sheryl Lee.

I also watched Victoria which was breath-taking. The ‘one shot’ aspect was awesome and is definitely the thing that draws you in most but you do find yourself slowly becoming enthralled by the cast of characters as you slowly learn more about them through extended ‘dialogue heavy’ scenes filled with well-acted discussion. Another simply astonishing film was Upstream Color, directed by the same person who created Primer; the undeniably amazing sci-fi indie film of 2004. I would highly recommend everyone to see UC, for the majority of the film I felt incredibly uncomfortable and generally perturbed and astounded as to what was going on in front of my eyes. I don’t want to spoil it by actively describing what occurs during its 1 hour and 36-minute running time. I would just go and watch it.

Alongside this I saw Hail Caesar! Which I found to be quite exuberant and visually appetising. Unfortunately for me it didn’t quite have enough substance to back up what was occurring on screen and there was no real moment where the whole thing was turned on its head, in the classic Coen brothers style, which was a shame. Whilst I’m saying this though, I’m very aware that I thoroughly enjoyed it. To go along with this, I watched Beneath the Planet of the Apes, whose ending was just laughable. The whole thing was a complete downgrade of the original, which was quite saddening.

One of the highlights of the week was Mr. Nobody. A film where an elderly man reflects on his life, and all the different paths that he could have taken. With heavy Cloud Atlas vibes, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Quite a heart-warming tale centralised around the loss of memory and what it means to be old. Really interesting. Another sci-fi film was The Man from Earth, a very well researched film that involves a man admitting to his colleagues that he is in fact 14,000 years old. The bulk of the film is made up of the man being questioned by various professionals about where he’s come from and who he’s ‘been’ in history. It offered a really interesting, fresh look at what a 14,000-year-old man would be like in today’s society; just a ‘normal’ person.

I know that I watched many more, but unfortunately I’ve completely forgotten and lost the majority of my browser history (due to having to reset my computer earlier in the week) which is a shame. When these things happen I always feel like I’ve lost a slice of my life, a segment of time that will only be remembered when someone says ‘have you seen …’ and I immediately remember an incredibly important film that I’ve missed off this list. This reliance on other people is never pleasant, alongside the serious overreliance on my browser history. It’s something interesting to think about in terms of artwork, something that has come up a lot within my work and will probably continue to in the future.

During the week coming up I want to finally start on my essay and use up this last week at home to its full extent, experiencing a range of films and video games before ‘serious’ work begins again. Although I’m enjoying 30/30, I feel like it’s slowly ruining my ability to actually create work with any substance, which is kind of distressing. I hope that in a week or so when I embark on a new project I’ll be able to readjust back into my ‘normal routine’, whatever that means. Anyway, that’s my week.

Enjoi.

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