So,
this week’s been very busy, full of eBay payments and Amazon orders; new work
being hastily put together in time for the assessment on the 23rd. A
lot of this week has been centralised around compiling all the things that I’ve
done since Christmas, creating new diluted blogs of my blog here as well as
creating an incredibly long word document showing all of my 30/30 work. I kind
of like this busy feeling, the feeling of worry and anxiety; the trigger that
makes one create new things.
So
all in all I think I’ve ‘completed’ a few works this week, with the ultimate
culmination occurring in the next few days when everything I’ve ordered from
the internet arrives. A major piece is the game world that I’ve been working on,
which is basically finished now. After re-thinking it earlier in the week, I
started again by creating a mirage/desert like landscape, where pure blue water
is prevalent throughout the space. This utopian space is populated by
consumerist ‘relics’ from the 21st century; laptops, iPads, shoes,
slot machines, etc. In this scenario the participant is controlling a lone
figure that they embody and become, exploring the space whilst the sounds of
running water occur throughout the environment, occasionally glitching and
disrupting itself, unable to keep up the false visage of the space; similar to
the early parts of The Truman Show
where the elevator stops between floors and cars screech to a halt when Truman
cross’ the street, the fragmenting of this false reality or simulation; “We
live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less
meaning.” (Baudrillard). During an incredibly helpful tutorial earlier in the
week it was mentioned that this game space had some environmental concerns surrounding
it, the fact that the water seems to be flooding the space and the barren post-apocalyptic
landscape is dotted with these objects. I like this extra layer of meaning, but
may need to look into this matter more, or maybe the environmental aspect can
simply be insinuated by the fact that it is a ‘future utopian’ space, one that
will be no place in the future; only slightly confusing. Although I have moved
on from the idea of spinning totems to solitary stationary objects, I still
feel that the ideas surrounding the amassing of consumerist objects being a
futile thing are embedded within the work. It simply manifests itself in a
different way; with the game enabling you to get close to these objects, to
climb them if you will, but never to fully interact with them. This space
between interactivity and non-interactivity as a way in to considering the pointless
nature of collecting material things is interesting to me.
To
display the work, I moved on from the sofa installation/metaphor and decided to
purchase some blow up chairs instead, specifically ‘gaming’ blow up chairs,
with the meaning becoming obvious. One chair allows the viewer/player to sit
down and experience the world whilst the other chair is used to hold the portrait
television screen. This creates a dialogue with the player, making it seem like
you’re interacting with a friend rather than a simple television. This comes
back to the idea of games being a source of escapism, especially within young
people. These chairs are arriving tomorrow (Monday), so hopefully on Tuesday I’ll
be able to document the piece alongside the chairs, ready to be presented on
the 23rd as ‘new work’.
Another
piece that is basically finished was a work that I never really finished, one
that I started a little while ago. It uses footage from one of the more
prominent WikiLeaks leaks; Collateral Murder, a video of over a dozen people
being gunned down by an Apache helicopter in an Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. It’s
a highly distressing video. I inserted a part of this video within a screen
captcha from Call of Duty Modern Warfare, where the player is using an AC130
gunship to kill various unnamed ‘terrorists’. I’m using these two videos to
talk about the classified areas of our society, with this linking to WikiLeaks
and the fact that the Reuters were unable to obtain the video through the Freedom
of Information Act. I’m also looking at the relationship between real warfare
and video game combat, how realistic the video game experience is, as well as
looking to abolish the myth that video game violence desensitises you against
real life violence. This is of course not true. After creating the piece, I
thought a lot about how I wanted it to be installed, considering how to subtly
link to Snowden and his various exploits, making it into a work about
surveillance, video games and the leaking of information. In my head I was
reminded of an interview conducted with Laura Poitras, where she was talking
about how Snowden had identified himself as being Snowden when they first met
in Hong Kong. He did this by informing her that he would be playing with a Rubik’s
cube. This inspired me to use the cube within my piece, linking Julian Assange
to Snowden, as well as the idea of something looking simple when in fact it’s
extremely complicated; similar to the rules surrounding the Freedom of
Information Act and when to engage with a ‘target’ in warfare. I just need to
document the work with the cubes propping up the television and the piece will
be finished. I think, as a side project, it’s been incredibly successful. I titled
the piece Rules of Engagement and it
can be seen here: http://www.bobbicknell-knight.com/#/rules-of-engagement/
There’s
another micro project that I’ve been thinking about; translating classic ‘computer’
terms into realities, for example, taking the term ‘cookies’ and actually
creating a handful of cookies made from hard drives. Another piece would be
taking the term ‘to defrag’, which means to clean ones’ hard drive, and
actually washing a hard drive with soap among other things. In order to do this,
I’ve bought various hard drives to play around with. Although when reflecting on
the work now, it’s not as layered and as interesting as I had hoped. It may
turn into an obvious project that’s just a bit of fun however. For the moment I
have the hard drives, ready to be used whenever. I envisioned it to become a
series of works, all responding to these ‘tech terms’. I’ll see how it goes and
how I want to manifest these ideas, in video pieces or simply photographs.
Maybe photographs would be a thing, I haven’t really ‘done’ photography for a
long time…
Yet
another work that is in the process of being made has been inspired by a book I
read last year called So You've Been
Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. Within the book he outlines various individuals
who have been shamed on the internet for doing stupid things which wouldn’t
have been noticed if it weren’t for the internet and it’s far reaching
properties. The incidents range from misjudged tweets to falsified experiences
in prestigious books. So, the work that I created was in response to a tweet by
a woman called Justine Sacco, who tweeted Going
to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white! Just before
boarding her flight. During the time it took to travel to Africa her tweet ‘blew
up’ on the internet, resulting in her being sacked from her job and basically
outcast for many years afterwards, with death rates and many other things occurring.
This quote already has all the ideas surrounding the PC (Politically Correct)
culture we’re living in embedded within it, alongside various issues of race
and the online world. I chose to take the tweet and print it on various office
equipment, from mouse pads to yearly calendars, the irony being that after this
tweet she was no longer hireable in any sort of situation. The various items
are currently on their way to me in the mail, arguably another layer of the
work, similar to Eva and Franco Mattes work Image
Search Result or Artie Vierkant’s exhibition Brand Innovations For Ubiquitous Authorship. I’m really looking
forward to seeing the finished products, which will be arriving sometime next
week, as well as thinking about how to display the various items. It would be
really awesome to go to an office to install them in, or to buy a classic
office cubicle, but that may be a simple pipe dream. I assume the works name
will reference Ronson’s book in some way. I hope the work doesn’t feel like I’m
reinforcing the hatred towards Sacco and that I’m simply presenting a simple
piece of text that has weight behind it to talk about the ‘keyboard warriors’
of our society and how the internet has turned from a beautiful utopian space
into this highly monitored machine.
The
collaborative project between John and I is going well, the video game levels
are slowly being made. I recently managed to create a level consisting of an
animated rollercoaster, with the player and a passenger enjoying the experience.
Alongside
this I also managed to create an elevator level, with the player moving up
through office floors racing a lift adjacent to their own. Unfortunately, your
lift is a lot slower as the other lift isn’t stopping at all the different
floors. These are fun to make and have been allowing me to continuously learn
new parts of the Unity program. I think we’re on track to finish everything by
the degree show. Also this week John built a lounge chair type thing to play
the game on and we decided on how the work would be shown, on a projector with
the video layered on top of the screen in a corner.
A
group of us from uni decided this week to put on another exhibition before the
term finishes. We booked Safehouse 1, maybe the most ‘studenty’ space ever, for
the 15th of June for a one-night exhibition. The theme is going to
be centred around work that’s been made in the month leading up to the exhibition,
created from scratch, so from today until then everyone involved (at the moment
there’s about 9 of us) has to make a completely new piece of work. I think it’s
going to be a really fun experience as long as everyone actually creates
something and we manage to transport everything to the space. I’m going to try
to display something that is small enough to carry around easily and doesn’t
involve the booking of any vans or Ubers.
My
online exhibition platform is slowly becoming a thing, I’ve signed it up as an
opportunity with CuratorSpace to legitimise it more, and will start to apply to
similar websites too. I think as the weeks go by and more work is added it’ll
(hopefully) turn into more of a thing. This is week #3 featuring work by Reuben
Martindale and Will Pardoe:
Other
than creating this work a few other things have occurred this week, one of
which was the weekly lecture that happened on Monday which focused on Guy
Debord’s seminal book The Society of the
Spectacle. Yet again, it’s a book I’m very familiar with, so I didn’t
really learn much from the experience of having Debord’s writing dissected in
front of me. It was good however for certain things to be refreshed in my mind
as it’s been a while since I read it during the first term of the year.
There
was also an artist talk being given by the artist Bobby Baker, which was pretty
positive. I enjoyed seeing a range of her humorous interactions and thoughts on
modern society. Although I wasn’t a fan of her Diary Drawings (a series of drawings, made once a week, over an 11-year
period) I respected how dedicated to the project she was. At this juncture
imagining how tiresome it would get to spend over 10 years on the same project
is distressing to say the least. I was a lot more interested in her series of
videos with the all-encompassing title Kitchen
Show, a set of films of herself, enacting mundane tasks in the kitchen. It’s
all very funny and I highly recommend that you watch at least one clip to give
you a taste.
I
also went to a few exhibitions, some of which were fairly good. As of yet this
term hasn’t been that successful in terms of gallery visits, which is a shame
to say the least. I’m finding myself too busy to either look into the various
galleries that have always interested me or to find some time to go out to these
galleries. It’s a shame, but I’m still slightly ‘stocked up’ with gallery
knowledge from New York, so it’s not too bad.
Sadie
Coles HQ was first up, with a terrible show by Richard Prince. The paintings
managed to be both dull and overcomplicated, but the real annoyance for me was
the transformation of the beautiful, concrete floored, open plan space to a
corridor with wooden flooring. For some fucked up reason, I’m assuming the
curator, decided to make the gallery space smaller, whilst leaving the outer
walls blank. On top of it being a waste of space, it just made the work look
incredibly ugly, uglier than it already was.
From
there I went to the Marion Goodman Gallery, which was showing some beautifully
minimal work by Ettore Spalletti. I distinctly remember him from a booth last
year at Frieze, where coloured blocks were being subtly pushed out from the
wall by a mere pencil. You have to see these works in real life to actually
understand the simplicity of the wall sculptures. Some really great work.
After that I went to the Pace gallery, which had a range of works by Keith
Coventry being shown, the only impressive one being a huge bronze of the front
of a blown up shop window. It was very ‘wow’ but as I reflect upon it now, it
didn’t really do anything more for me…
I
also went to the Tate Modern to see the Mona Hatoum show, which was a terrible
mistake. After seeing the same retrospective at the Pompidou Centre last year,
I wasn’t really expecting there to be any difference, but I was unfortunately
wrong. The wooden floors of the Tate just destroyed a lot of the sculptural
work for me, as well as the tiny rooms making the work feel constrained and
unable to breath. The first piece you encounter is the Socle du Monde, a huge cube of steel that’s dominating and
affecting. Unfortunately, it’s shoved into a corner, with ugly grey tape on the
floor disallowing you from observing the entire thing. Another awesome work, Light Sentence, has been roped off, stopping
you from actually entering the cage like structure. Another one of my favourites
from Hatoum, + and – was yet again
pushed into a corner, with her Twelve
Windows also being roped off and becoming an un-interactive set piece. They
even had less work within the exhibit, leaving out Map and a number of her seminal hair pieces. As a friend said, “they’ve
Tate-ed it up”, summing up the whole experience for me, making the work child
friendly and badly curated. Fuck you Tate, fuck you.
In
other news I started reading a collection of essays this week on Jason Rohrer
and his video games. The book holding all of these writings is called, you guessed
it, The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer.
I’m a big fan of his, especially as he’s the first video game designer to have
a solo art show featuring his work, a step forwards in legitimising video games
as art. His games vary from having an inventive mechanic that makes you think
to simply having an emotional, subtle story embedded within a five-minute experience.
I thoroughly recommend going and downloading Passage, a free game that’s definitely worth five minutes of your
life.
I
think that may be everything that I’ve done this week in terms of ‘art related’
things. I have been continuing to apply for things, an aspect of my life I’m slowly
becoming used to, which is definitely a positive thing. If you aren’t getting
your work out there, how are people going to know you exist? Plus, I need to
get used to the rejection that will happen a lot more once I’ve left uni.
I’m
very unhappy to say that I’ve only watched two films this week. For some reason
I’ve gotten into watching series after series again, rather than film after
film. I must rectify this. Happily, the two films I did see were incredible.
The first was called Locke and was
entirely contained within one man’s car. It’s always impressive if an actor can
keep you on the edge of your seat whilst simply talking, primarily on a phone, for
an entire 90 minutes. Without spoiling anything, it’s a must watch, which I’m surprised
to have not seen until this point.
The
other film was called It Follows. A
thriller with one brilliant idea that doesn’t get overused. The idea being that
‘death’ is constantly following the protagonist, slowly walking towards them,
waiting until their back is turned to slowly walk up behind them and kill them.
This conceit makes for a thrilling film, one that puts you in the same position
as the main character, constantly looking behind them to make sure that there’s
nobody coming towards them in the background. I would, once again, thoroughly recommend.
In
terms of tv, I managed to watch the entire series of Transparent, which was a really interesting show where an elderly
man comes out as being transgender to his family, having hidden it for many years.
This unique plot point makes the more obvious ones, a dysfunctional family for
one, seem more exciting and relevant. I look forward to season 3.
I
also watched Catastrophe, a surprisingly
funny comedy about a man getting a woman pregnant, not the most innovative
conceit. It made me laugh, which was, once again, surprising.
On
top of this I’ve come back to The Good
Wife to watch its final season. This season is better than the last, coming
away from politics and focusing back on the actual lawyering, the stuff that
people are actually interested in.
I
think that sums up my week. For the next seven days, I hope to document the
finalised pieces of work so that they can go into my assessment as well as
printing everything off so that I’m fully prepared for Monday the 23rd.
More levels for the video game will have to be made, as well as hopefully a few
more exhibitions being visited. I also want to get around to starting the
creation of the sounds based game, but I’m slowly re-thinking that as a thing, or
maybe not. I don’t know. It’s going to be a vaguely hectic week, running around
to get everything done, with hopefully some time to talk about the upcoming exhibition
with the group of artists that have been chosen to exhibit with as well as some
time to just be in London and experience the sun and enjoy relaxing slightly,
but I guess I can do that when I’m back in the countryside.
Oh
and the t-shirt that I ordered last week with my work on it arrived, I’m
incredibly happy with how it came out, but unhappy that it’s slightly too
expensive for me to have another one made.
Enjoi.
Instagram:
bob.bk1
No comments:
Post a Comment