After
the crits earlier in the week I began to relax, as I was happy with the work
that I had created over the month or so since returning to London. I then
realised that I needed to consider what I wanted to create next, in what form
to work in and how to amalgamate my new ideas into something enticing and
interesting to look at.
Although
I intend to continue with my creation of a Zook slowly being enveloped by a
block, I feel that I’ve basically finished with this project (which I’m yet to
decide on a title for) and want to move away from these very basic ideas and
create something a lot more layered and a lot less obvious for the viewer, or
maybe even more obvious, but making that into a thing within itself. This is the link to the video surrounding 5 Eyes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ChDVN2rCE
and the link to the main video piece:
https://vimeo.com/155159307
I’m
considering a variety of ideas at the moment, and have decided that I want to
create something real, as opposed to something purely screen based and virtual.
Obviously the work will still be surrounding the idea of the digital and the
network, but through a medium other than film, or maybe a film immersed in an
installation, but with more emphasis on the installation than the film. I’ve
been looking at a lot of Timur Si-Qin’s work and his ‘Visit Mirrorscape’ pieces,
where he creates these utopian virtual spaces and displays them in front of
huge light boxes. I’ve also been continually returning and considering all the
work at the Whitechapel, with serious considerations of Jon Rafman’s sculptures
(I’m rarely not thinking about Rafman) and Evan Roth’s visualisation of the
internet.
At
the moment I’m thinking a lot about the parallels between how files are deleted
online and how they’re deleted in real life, and where these files go to.
Alongside this, an interesting point came up during one of my seminars on
Friday, how the internet, and more specifically search engines like Google and
Yahoo are similar to a ‘post-internet democracy’ where they show you that
people are more likely to search for Karl Pilkington than Karl Marx. Even
though this statement is kind of wrong, as search engines are usually personalised
to your own computer so are more likely to give you results that you would be
more interested in, I still found the point thought provoking. When you log out
of your account or enter ‘private’ browsing however, Google becomes
un-personalised to you, and manages to show how fucked our society is when you
type in the beginnings of a question, like ‘why does’ or ‘how can’. Everyone
has done this and has observed how weird and bored the majority of the first
world gets whilst navigating through the internet, aimlessly typing in shit
that you would have previously gone to a book or asked your parents/friends for
the answer. So if I were to make a work looking into this, it wold be easily
relatable, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
This
is a very obvious thought process, as the majority of young people consider
this type of thing at least once in their lives, but maybe that’s okay. For the
moment I’ve been considering very basic things for how to visualise this type
of thing/idea, whether to take simple screen grabs of these very obvious
sentences, or to make literally Google the piece of work, and the writing
surrounding it the important thing. Of course, ideas surrounding copyright
would come into play at that point, among other things.
(On
a side note I went to an interesting exhibition this week at the Jerwood Space
surrounding the idea of copyright, featuring work by Antonio Roberts, Owen G.
Parry and others. Those two in particular were showing some exciting work, melding
screens with digital prints.)
Another
ideas would be to bring the top search engines together and ‘look up’ the same
things (finding different results), this would be looking at how democracy
works on the larger scale (like voting for a prime minister/president relating
to Google) or on the smaller scale (putting ‘Gary’ in charge of the community
watch program with parallels to using ixQuick) and comparing the results. These
are only starting points however, and haven’t even considered how Google (and
other search engines) ‘tinker’ and distort the results that one gets for their
(Google’s) own agenda, whatever that may be.
I
started two ‘mini’ projects this week too, both very simple and able to run in conjunction
with my own bigger projects. The first is looking at small interactions with
people you may or may not know, a ‘small act of violence’ if you will. This
involves ‘jacking’ or ‘genie-ing’ a lighter that someone has left on a table or
on the floor, and then putting the lighter back and photographing it. I then
don’t see the inevitable moment that occurs when an individual ‘turns on’ the
lighter and a huge flame appears as opposed to s minute one. This small
disruption within someone’s life interests me and ties into the idea of ‘youth
culture’ and the jokes/pranks that have become so prevalent on video sharing
websites like YouTube.
The
second work is another on-going piece, which involves me noting down when an
individual in a film says the name of the film that they’re in in a Meta/fourth
wall breaking moment. I assume that this will turn into a compilation of sorts,
once I have enough to warrant a whole video. The idea of a compilation video is
always interesting to me, from Christian Marclay’s The Clock or Eva and
Franco Mattes’ My Generation to Omer
Fast’s CNN Concatenated. Through
research, the creation of the ‘compilation video’ seems to be a ‘rite of
passage’ for a lot of artists, so I thought it would be interesting to create
my own. I’m unsure whether the garnering of the movie clips is ‘my type’ of
work, or whether I should focus on a different type of compilation, in
relevance to video games or the internet, but for now I’ll continue to collect
these humorous moments in films. I distinctly remember Family Guy mocking this
in one of the episodes, and rightly so. The project, if I continue with it, would
focus on my own experiences with films and be personal to me in that way.
In
other news, Laila and I continue to think about our collaboration, considering
how ‘the internet’ could be seen as an office, where each cubicle or screen
within that office is where one’s own personal internet history exists. This
ties into the endless-nuss of these work spaces, and how similar spaces are
duplicated throughout the world. Samsara and The Crowd came up during our discussions,
those ideas of repetition and the impersonal. The video would consists of going
into these individual screens and attempting to visualise different peoples
viewing habits, etc, moving from the normal into the abnormal. The videos shown
below are very simple experiments and I continue to be excited by the
discussion and the work that we are yet to create.
On
Monday I had my second seminar on Utopia, which looked at a variety of philosophers,
from Bloch to Adorno and considered how capitalist societies are a utopia space
for some people within this world. The discussion surrounding these ideas was
really interesting and really related to the work that I’ve been making.
The
lecture in the afternoon was focused on Baudrillard and the copy, which was
also really interesting and made me want to read Simulacra and Simulation… So many books so little time… The work by
Allan McCollum was mentioned, which is very cool, his Perpetual Photos being a favourite. It was a really enjoyable
lecture.
On
the Tuesday, crits were happening all day, which went well. I gained some good
feedback and felt a weight lift from my shoulders, which is always a positive. This is my work that I displayed:
The
artist talk was also good, featuring an artist (Lana Locke) who hates craft
shows (who doesn’t) and mocks the establishment. All good things to think
about.
Friday’s
seminar was enjoyable too. In advance we were told to attempt to read a few
pages of the society section in Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory. After the first three pages my mind was already ‘fried’ and I
couldn’t take anymore. There was so much talked about that I can’t really
relate without literally copy and pasting the entirety of my notes, which I’m
not going to do.
I’m
learning a lot from these seminars and am really excited about the coming weeks,
and the knowledge that will gradually build up over the years.
In
terms of galleries, I only went to the Jerwood Space and the White Cube in
Bermondsey. The White Cube had a really exciting show called History of Nothing which was highly
influenced by Eduardo Paolozzi and JG Ballard, which fully relates to the ideas
within my work surrounding mass media and the uncanny. Josephine Meckseper’s installation
Sabotage On An Auto Assembly Line was
a particular favourite, deconstructing the mechanisms of capitalism through
appropriation. I was a big fan.
I
intend to go to a lot more exhibitions during the coming week and I’m really
excited for the new Carroll/Fletcher show which features Constant Dullart with
the title Neoliberal Lulz.
As
usual I’ve watched a variety of films, Citizenfour (really interesting), Blue
Jasmine (okay-ish), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (quite awesome), Children
of Men (including some really great filmic moments), People Places Things
(always lovely to see Jermaine in something), The Revenant (in the cinema this
time, which was quite amazing), Bicentennial Man (weird and predictable with a
lovely message), The Fly (freaky and weirdly great), Gattaca (a scary concept),
Forbidden Planet (really enticing sci-fi), The Thing (simply amazing), Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (an impressive ending), Nemesis (terribly clichéd cyberpunk),
Porco Rosso and finally Kiki’s Delivery Service (both incredibly beautiful and well-crafted
stories).
I
also played a few games, the first being Middle-earth:
Shadow of Mordor. It was mostly played for pure enjoyment, but some of the
systems within the game were really interesting to consider, the relationships
that you curate with the different captains was a definite high point. A
completely different sort of game worth mentioning was Freedom Bridge where you play as a cube, attempting to cross to the
other side of a river. It takes around 2 minutes to play and was deeply
distressing, I recommend that you go and play it. The final game was called
Sunset, where one steps into the role of an individual cleaning someone’s
apartment. Obviously there are many intricacies within the game, but what I
found really interesting was how you get to know this person, who you never
encounter, by simply interacting with his possessions and exploring his home.
By doing this you also learn about the character that you’re controlling, via
her reactions to certain objects around the house or snippets from her diary.
It was a thought provoking piece of work.
This
coming week is officially ‘Practice Workshop’ week, where there’s going to be a
number of different workshops and activities being put on by and for the first
year students at Chelsea. Last week I chose to attend two of the workshops, one
called Error Correction being run by
Dan Ward and another titled Lucid
Techniques for Making Art by Francis Brady. Both sound exciting. On top of
this I’ve organised (along with some other people) a few ‘film nights’ where
people can get together and discuss the medium and the different video works
that influence them, etc. I’m really looking forward to the week of workshops
and continuing to consider my ideas.
Oh
and in unrelated news, I think my Snapchat project is slowly coming to an end,
as I find myself taking videos within the app less and less nowadays… I still
continue to do so, but it’s more like once every few days, as opposed to
upwards of 7/8 times a day. Over the next few weeks I’m going to examine what’s
going on and make a decision about where I want it to go.
Snapchat:
bob.bk
Instagram:
bob.bk1
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