After
fully taking down the exhibition on Monday I spent the majority of this week
writing my essay. I once again find myself frustrated by the fact that I left
it so late to do, but that seems to be what everyone does anyway. Although it
feels as if I’ve just come back to London, the term is almost over already,
with assessments happening in a few weeks and the essay being handed in. I keep
coming back to this issue of time and wanting more of it, it’s difficult to
think about and comprehend. Soon it’ll be the summer holidays and the second
year will begin soon after that, it’s all going too quickly for me, with no
real time allotted to considering what’s occurring at the moment.
I’ve
been reading Eva Hoffman’s How to Be
Bored where she talks a lot about the importance of inactive time spent
doing nothing at all. How do I operate without doing anything? I’ve been thinking
a lot about when I last didn’t look at a screen for at least a day and was
having trouble remembering a time when I hadn’t. It’s probably been many years,
so many years. In response to this, during the holidays, I think I’m going to
not look at a screen for a certain amount of days, with the work being a
professional contract signed by me, saying that I won’t look at a screen for X
amount of time alongside other details.
Considering
time once again, I’ve decided that I want to make a book out of all of my blog
posts from this first year of uni; transporting the digital into the real
alongside considerations on time spent looking out of my window every Sunday
whilst watching the sun slowly fall. I want to make a professionally published
book however, rather than one that’s just been created by hand. This makes it
into more of a ‘thing’, similar to Evan Roth’s Since You Were Born and other self-published artist books.
These
are two mini projects that’ll happen over the holidays whilst I’m away from
London; something to keep me busy.
Coming
back to my essay, I feel that I should have been reading a little more during
the holidays as well as these past few weeks, but at least it’s done now and I
can get on with actual art making. This is the finalised draft:
Other
than writing I’ve been working more with John during the past week, continuing work
on the video game experience that we’re making together. For the moment two-ish
dreams have been created, one involving the San Francisco bridge collapsing and
another, much simpler one, where an elderly man transports boxes into a van.
Although it’s incredibly difficult and slightly stressful because of the time
concerns, it’s very exciting to be learning a new software. Here are a few
screengrabs from the project:
In
terms of my own work, I’m slowly finding time to think about concepts and
things. I thought I’d make my own video game of sorts as I’m learning so much
of the software anyway. With the creation of a video game as art you’re never
going to get away from the medium of the video game, so the works always going
to have all the things associated with the video game already embedded within.
To embrace this, I came back to the idea of the video game as an escapism from
our daily lives, ironically something one indulges in whilst sitting on their
couch, lying in bed or sitting at a desk, usually not moving from a particular
spot. Water, which is usually associated with feelings of escapism, is going to
be prominent within the game for the aforementioned reasons. Within this watery
landscape there’s going to be various items, spinning around in endless
animations reminiscent of various loading animations associated with the digital
realm like YouTube’s ‘loading circle’ and ‘powerups’ in popular video games.
These items will all be attached to consumer goods in some way, objects of
desire and wealth, and will be stacked up like rotating totem poles. Totem
poles usually relate to the experiences of various cultures, so in a way these
virtual sculptures will become a relic of this point in history. I’m currently
considering whether they should be climbable alongside if the objects should
break into smaller pieces when you interact with them. The climbing would
consider how one attempts to create a better life by amounting various goods,
but doesn’t actually get any satisfaction from it. This would be communicated
to the ‘player’ by their being nothing at the top of these momentous tombstones
but a long jump down. A small satisfaction for the amount of work involved. The
breaking apart would turn the passive explorer into the active participant in
the game. Enabling them to break these objects affiliated with consumerism may
be too much though, creating an agenda within the experience. It would also
increase the amount of effort involved.
I’ve
also been thinking about how to display the eventual finished piece; probably
having the television screen embedded within a sofa, referencing how one spends
most of their time whilst playing these things. The tv would also be turned to
the side, playing with how one experiences video games in day to day life, separating
the ‘art game’ from the ‘video game’. The sofa may also be partly
deconstructed, exposing its innards, evocative of how constructed these video
game worlds are.
It’s
so hard to not just make something that looks interesting without any substantial
concept or meaning. The fact that it’s interactive and there’s so much one can
do with it makes this a lot harder than creating a sculpture or a film. Or
maybe it’s because all these tools are new and exciting to me, so I get carried
away with the aesthetic.
I
also created a ‘range’ of t-shirts out of a previous project, ‘Internet Relations’.
The body of work was heavily influenced by the Vaporwave culture that I’m so obsessed
with and was created late last year. Within the works there’s a slight
obsession with consumer goods as well as social
and cultural icons of our time, so I thought that it would be ironic to create
a thing representing capitalism (a sellable item) with the embedded meaning of negativity
towards the consumer culture. I feel that creating a t-shirt perfectly
encapsulated what I was attempting to do. I also thought that it would be fun
to create a traditionally ‘sellable’ thing as I haven’t really made anything
like that for ages. Buy Buy Buy: http://www.bobbicknell-knight.com/#/internet-relations/
The
YouTube copyright piece is slowly becoming a thing. It’s more like a
compilation video now of the ten most watched videos on YouTube. Every time I
upload said video it gets immediately flagged for copyright reasons and is either
taken down worldwide or completely muted by multiple companies. I’m unsure
whether or not this is enough to translate what the actual work is about; fair
use on YouTube and how corporations can easily silence minorities. It may just
stop being a thing altogether, as I think at the moment it’s not ‘substantial’
enough to be an actual thing, I think my head may be still stuck on ‘30/30’ time.
The
other piece that I’m working on, the interactive music experience, hasn’t
really progressed since last week. It’s something that I know I could make in a
week or so, I just need to find a song to work with. I need to talk to my
parents about childhood songs or something, linking it to video games as well
as the beautiful ignorance of childhood. I do really want to actually make
this, as the interactive nature of the video game would work so well.
I
did however get around to creating an online exhibition thing, where each week
I curate a few pieces of work to showcase on the site. It’s a fun micro thing
that I’ve wanted to do for a little while now which I’m happy about and will
keep me busy during the coming months. You can follow the link to get to it
here: http://isthis.wix.com/isthisit Every
Saturday/Sunday there will be new work up and if you’re an artist and want to
be featured email isthisit96@gmail.com with a piece of work.
I
think that’s everything I’ve done this week in terms of work; as I say it was
mostly centred around the essay, as well as getting over 30/30, which is still
fresh in my mind and fucking up my ability to fully flesh out ideas. As so many
of the participating artists managed to do the whole 30 days (around 90 were
successful) I assume that the exhibition will be a lot more cramped than
originally intended. However, it’ll still be one more thing to add to my CV. I
continue to apply for various things, which hopefully I’ll keep hearing back
from, be it good or bad news.
Other
than work I’ve been to two exhibitions this week, only student ones, as I ‘ve
been slightly too busy to go to ‘real’ ones. The first student one was
underneath a coffee shop in Camberwell, with a few interesting pieces, my
favourite being a ten-minute video work featuring a toaster which, every ten
minutes or so, pops up with the aforementioned toast. I enjoy these types of
films, ones that you can immediately ‘get’ after watching for 30 seconds or so
because of how succinct and clever they are as an original idea. Another exhibition
was at the Safehouse spaces again; the only interesting piece being a
continually refreshing Instagram feed being shown as a projection over the
artists bed. This I enjoyed, whilst the other work being shown was kind of dull,
not really utilising the space at all with terrible watercolour paintings and
A4 sheets of paper.
On
the subject of student exhibitions, a few of my fellow students and I are planning to
put on an exhibition before this term is over; to ‘mark’ the end of this year,
as it doesn’t seem like we’re given another opportunity to showcase our work.
Unfortunately,
there was no weekly lecture this week because of the bank holiday, but there
was an artist talk being given by Rehana Zaman. She talked a lot about her film
based practice which is focused on a lot of research and the various workshops
that she’s a part of. Lots of her installation based video works were really
interesting. I don’t think I’ve been to an artist talk at Chelsea where the
artist has actually thought about how their video work was going to be shown,
talking about it in such length. A particularly humorous piece featured an
entire cast of actors to be a part of this mock tv show soap that she directed.
I was impressed and proceeded to watch the whole 50-minute experience when the
talk had finished.
Alongside
this I went to a lecture later on in the week being given by Daniel Cardoso
Llach on ‘software and the imagination of design’. He was talking about his new
book, which was basically a history of the CAD model accompanied by the idea of
autonomous machines being slaves to humans. Although it was an incredibly
informative talk, I felt slightly overwhelmed by the amount of ‘tech talk’ as
well as the fact that it was incredibly design orientated. Definitely worth
going though.
I’ve
also been really bad with my film-watching habits this week, only watching a
grand total of two films; 10 Cloverfield
Lane and High Rise. I enjoyed
both films, although the plot of the latter was a little too choppy for me.
There was no real explanation as to why everyone didn’t just leave the apartments.
The set building and acting was superb though. Cloverfield Lane was really good, creating a real mystery of what
had actually happened. Even though having ‘Cloverfield’ in the title is a
spoiler within itself, you didn’t really ‘know know’ what had happened in the
world until it was revealed. Definitely worth watching for the amount of
tension that’s built up in the scenes underground.
I’ve
started watching another tv show called The
Americans, which looks at a married couple who are Russian spies living in
America in the 1980s. It’s actually very good, with solid acting and actual
gritty moments occurring. As a side-line to that I’ve also been watching season
2 of Grace and Frankie, which is surprisingly
depressing. Either it got a lot sadder in season 2, which Netflix shows always
seem to do, or I just don’t remember season 1 as well as I thought.
Oh
and I forget to mention another project that I want to start, which will
probably begin over the summer holiday period; creating a Vaporwave album or
ep. I think it would be a really interesting side project, playing around with
the medium of sound whilst putting together a genre of music that I love. I
look forward to coming back to this idea in a month or so; when my uni work is
finished and I have a lot less pressure.
With
the week ahead I think the majority of my time will be spent working on the
video game with John, with my own water video game project slowly happening in
the background. I want to have made at least one of my ideas into a reality
before the assessment occurs. Now all I need to do is find somewhere to live
next year and everything will be sorted out.
Enjoi.
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