Not a huge amount of stuff happened
this week; assimilating back to being in London, thinking about art, the Leeds
show and issue 2 of the magazine… How exhilarating.
Let’s begin by going through all the
work I’ve made for 30/30 so far, a fair amount of digital collages alongside a
few videos, simple photographs and a gif or two.
Day 1, a gif of Mario jumping and being
unable to break a box:
Day 2, a wiki how video detailing how
to escape your life with found footage of ‘VR fails’:
Day 3, video game footage spliced with
an explosion, a lion yawning and a satellite dish?
Day 4, quite a fun video actually, sky
diving in GTA5 accompanied by an animated water wheel and a beating heart:
Day 5, utilising an image from Life is
Strange accompanied by found text:
Day 6, a self-portrait alongside free
wifi?
Day 7, text overlaid on various angry
young people fighting. I definitely need to utilise text overlays in a ‘proper’
video at some point, alongside a proper voice over, which I’ll come to later.
Day 8 was literally the soundtrack to
Journey:
Day 9, digital collage taking the map
from GTA5 and splicing in a few other cultural icons:
Day 10, a very basic one, taking an old
idea and sending it in as a work:
Day 11, a very slow day obviously:
Day 12 utilised episode 1 of a video I
made for the I.O.U.A.E residency I did last week:
Day 13 has been lost. I wonder what I
made…
Day 14, a queen bee crawling out of her
cocoon, with the aid of a human set to Demi Lovato’s ‘Gift Of A Friend’:
Day 15, a stock limbo image with the
person taken out of it:
Day 16, an uncompleted Snapchat that I
took at 2 in the morning:
Day 17, the ‘hang in there’ cat has
finally dropped, leaving scratch marks on the tree:
Day 18, lots of avatar faces turned
into a wallpaper:
Day 19, a webcam photograph of myself
in the studio:
Day 20, an edited, updated Google
Chrome icon:
Day 21, a duplicate drawing of a
clothes peg:
Day 22, Guernica taken apart, into a
sort of puzzle:
Day 23 (today), a video piece showing a
snowy 3D animation of a forest, with Van Gogh’s a starry night painted on a wooden cabin, with accompanying voice
over about relaxing from me and various overlays of cars and globes:
So that’s 30/30, it’s been okay, lots
of lazy submissions, but a few fun ideas to play with in the future. Overlays
of rain drops seems to be a fun feature alongside text overlays and speech recordings.
I want to stop using the robot voice and using my own in future videos, making
it more personal to me, maybe speaking about my own lived experiences, in a similar
vein to the recent online residency…
I’ve been wanting to make something
physical from all the digital work I did for the residency, something real and
tangible with the Facebook messages work that I unearthed. During the res I
dived back into the All My Messages project that I produced around this time
last year, publishing all my Facebook messages on the internet. I took out
various sentences, ones that contained words that would supposedly get you on
the NSA watch list, and highlighted those words after putting them back into
the context of the Facebook messenger app. Although this is a bit basic, it was
kind of nice, and developed into various works; vinyl prints, video pieces and
sculptures. These can be checked out on my website here: www.bobbicknell-knight.com/observe-monitor-survey
and a few ideas on the I.O.U.A.E Instagram here: www.instagram.com/i.o.u.a.e
I really want to get that ‘post 9/11’
piece printed and mounted, as I think it would look very clean in real life,
but that’s probably for the future. For the moment, utilising the blue acrylic
that I never used for the lights for the A217 show, I’ve been planning a new
sculpture that involves the 3D printed bitcoin and my Facebook messages made
into stickers. It’ll hopefully look a little like this:
The tripod would be holding this blue
rectangular cuboid, filled with Facebook messages crushed and screwed up,
whereas on the outside other Facebook messages turned into stickers would be arranged
every so often, subtlety blending into the deep blue of the acrylic. The
bitcoin would sit ontop like some sort of trophy, with the heaphones playing a
sound piece that I’m still unsure of, maybe the sound of someone
breathing/walking? Or maybe, with my new found enjoyment of speaking over
things, maybe my own voice reciting something? I could take the On Kawara
approach and record me saying all of my messages? For me this is the messages,
and the contemporary currency of bitcoin, undertaking surveillance on the participant,
silently judging them in this elevated position of the tripod. Both the
messages and the coin are fully intertwined with the capitalist undertones of
our society, trapped within the blue box. Maybe I don’t even need the broken
messages paper if I’m going to read them all out, with the MP3 player embedded
within the box. Anyway, that will be made in the next week or so, hopefully
getting the pieces sliced tomorrow and the box taking shape. It seems easy
enough, but needs to be developed further…
I’ve been thinking about getting back into
video game creating, or utilising the video game engine to create a video
piece. I was thinking about where I was this time last year, collaborating with
John on his degree show and thinking about all the skills I learned over that
time. Skills I only really used once or twice in my own artworks…
What else? Things with isthisit? are
going well, I recently looked at the monthly view count, and turns out the
website is averaging around 5,000 – 10,000 views per month, which is kind of
exciting. After looking at the Digital Artist Residency, an online residency
space, a recent collaboration they did with OVADA allowed them to fund a bunch
of different artists, commissioning work, etc. All because they get over 5,000
views on their website each month. So maybe I should begin looking for funding
for future projects, like the second issue of the magazine or simply being able
to pay curators/artists who contribute to the platform? Hmmm...
I opened the call for issue 2 of the magazine,
which will focus on memes and appropriation on the internet. I think having a
more precise open call will make for a tighter submission list. It also allows
me to include the recent essay that I wrote, which both allows for more people
to read my writing and one less essay to get from someone else. The open call
for the issue is here and ends on the 20th May - www.curatorspace.com/opportunities/detail/isthisit-magazine-issue---memes-and-internet-appropriation/1271
I’ve also begun emailing artists who
may be interested in making some 3D printed USB drives. I’m in a place where I
want to start contacting ‘bigger’ artists to be involved, but as I don’t have
any money to pay people with, I’ve had a few people turn me down. I’m offering
them a fair amount of the profits of the USB sticks (if they sell) but maybe I
should simply be offering them a sum up front, with all the profits going to me
once they sell? I need to think about this, and maybe talk to some people who
commission artists. If you know anyone who might be interested, let me know.
Everything is set for next week at
Serf, going up Wednesday to install in the eve, then opening on Thursday night
and coming back to London on the Friday during the day. I think it’ll be good,
lots of people have seen the event and are ‘going’/’interested’, so hopefully
money will be accumulated which will be used in future projects. I need to
start being acutely aware of how much money I spend, both on my art, on general
living and the money that I make from the magazine.
The online shows with isthisit? have been going well. Last
week Helena curated another show, featuring a bunch of her colleagues over at
School of the Damned, the alternative MA run by and for the students on the
course. Next week I’m curating a show on the site because the curator for this
week rescheduled, so that’ll give me a chance to have some fun, learning from
the previous curators and maybe making something bigger. I do love the learning
process, attempting to push the boundaries of Wix and its annoyingly frustrating
software. I wish I could code websites…
The next exhibition with uni that we’re
working towards now is in about 4 weeks time, with the plans having to be given
in in two weeks. What should I make, who knows?
David Blandy was the artist talk this
week. Finally, someone who actually makes good work. The first half was him
performing an artist talk, showing a bunch of different works in a performative
way, as well as singing and talking over a video making it seem like the video
was being created in real time. It was very good, although I would have liked
to see more of the work I haven’t seen, videos that are only available to see
in exhibitions, or work that I’m not aware of.
I think that’s all the work/isthisit?
stuff from this week… I want to curate another show this term, something new,
something in a ‘proper’ gallery space. Maybe I need to spend some money renting
a space…
I went to a few shows this week, the
first being the Zabludowicz invites show featuring Elliot Dodd, who makes these
amazing video works and drawings, the former being incredibly high quality
videos with ‘weird’ animations obscuring people’s faces and the latter drawings
of these slimy face drawings. The show featured a new video work, made to feel
like a music video showing two people, one connected to a VR device whilst
having a conversation inspired by Plato’s Timaeus.
It also takes footage from Accounting,
a VR video game created by Crows Crows Crows and designed with Squanchtendo
(the guys who make Rick and Morty).
Yeah, it was a good piece, although I was sad to not have seen some of his
drawings, which I enjoy, or maybe something with more stuff in it… A thing I like
about the zab invites shows, they always do an interview with the artist, which
serves as their press release. They’re always great, and whilst I was there I
saw that they’ve compiled them into a book. Definitely worth buying. Also, book
shops, lots of galleries have them, are they for sustaining the space?
The other, bigger show at the zab right
now is You Are Looking at Something That
Never Occurred. An exhibition of photography, with one or two videos. It’s good,
with some amazing prints that I’ve only seen in books, an example of this being
Andreas Gursky’s Chicago Board Of Trade.
An incredible piece, but still a photograph. The most interesting work that I
wasn’t aware of had to be Sara Cwynar’s Soft
Film, an esoteric experience that explores how objects circulate via the
internet, examining her personal collection of objects purchased from eBay.
Both exhibitions are definitely worth seeing and making the trip up to Chalk Farm
for.
In between the ‘actual’ shows I went to
two student shows being put on by Chelsea first year students. It was nice to reminisce,
see how far I feel I’ve come and to see some potentially interesting work. One
was at Safehouse 1 & 2 in Peckham and was fairly dull, the other was in
Camberwell at 47 gallery. The students had created a pop up shop within the
white cube environment, exhibiting the work on clothes racks and various other
retail equipment. For first years, the concise theme, with the idea of the
replica (or in reality the simulation) was really impressive, with a lot of the
work feeling custom made for this show. Yeah, I’m excited to see what the people
do next, as I do love to see good work being made, which always seems fairly
rare at Chelsea…
Tenderpixel was next, seeing David Ferrando Giraut’s
solo show The Accursed Stare on the
last day. A few prints, a few sculptural wall works with embedded lights, but
the two main events were video works, one considering the relationship between
an iPhone 4 and an Egyptian hand mirror, and the other an incredibly dense 35
minute experience composed of a number of chapters, beginning at the birth of
the image and ending with the consumerism of today. The videos were all 3D
animations, basically essays that had then been transformed into films. Very
intense.
After that there was Marian Goodman with a
not-very-interesting solo exhibition from Annette Messager. Lots of sowing,
lots of big scissors made from fabric, lots of watercolours of vaginas, a whole
room in fact. That was fairly amusing and overpowering, but everything else was
a bit ‘I’ve seen this before’…
Mat Collishaw at Blain Southern was actually quite
enticing. You walk in and see this huge projection of an animated wire frame
tree, slowly swaying in the wind. The installation is a little over the top,
but still kind of impressive in its enormity. On the walls of the space were
these small, very detailed and delicate paintings of British garden birds
tethered to perches connected to graffitied cement walls. In the other room,
the ‘main event’ of the show was a ‘zoetrope’, a pre-film animation device that
produces the illusion of motion through rapid rotation and stroboscopic light.
This gives the illusion that these garden variety birds were moving. Quite
impressive and beautiful. I liked it because of its technical achievement rather
than the ingenious concept.
Carl Kostyál had a solo show by Yu Honglei made up
these huge sculptures that look like they’re made of painted polystyrene. Huge
and garish at times, these were accompanied by a video piece that I wanted to
watch, but at this point I was limited for time. It did look good though, with
the snippet I watched featuring a group of people sky diving above Palm Jumeirah
in Dubai…
The highlight of the week was seeing Ryoji Ikeda at
(surprisingly) Almine Rech, who knew they put on exciting exhibitions? The
highlight of the works were, as always, the videos that go through various
iterations of analysing massive amounts of data in different aesthetic forms.
It’s beautiful to watch, spread over multiple screens. I remember seeing a more
all-encompassing rendition of this work at Brewer Street Car Park in 2015, and
it was beautiful. Weirdly, I wrote about it in my blog back in May of 2015 – ‘From there I went on to the Brewer Street
Car Park, that was showing work by Ryoji Ikeda, who is an electronic composer
and visual artist. The exhibition involved a lot of sound and flashing lights,
and is quite hard to explain. It was an amazing experience.’ I haven’t changed
haha… Alongside the videos, there were a bunch of more commercial works, impressive
prints that encourage you to stick your face incredibly close to the piece to
see the numbers, or incredibly clean lines. How big must those PNG files be?
Then there was Timothy Taylor with a terrible
exhibition of paintings by Eddie Martinez. So boring…
Sadly, the last exhibition I went to was at Massimo
De Carlo with a very weird show by Paola Pivi. Weird because their practice was
so varied, ranging from feathers attached to bike wheels spinning (totally
weird), to a cube room which was made up of 52 huge tv screens, covering the
walls and turning the room into a sauna, with obvious lies blurting out over
the speaker system and various images continually changing on the screens. The show
ends with huge, life size sculptures of polar bears made from white feathers
and a bunch of large not-very-good cartoon drawings. Like, what is going on
with this artist’s practice?
That was everything, an interesting variety of
stuff, but still have a load to see that’s opened recently…
Did I watch any films this week? Or was it only
concentrated on tv? Ah yes, the one film I watched (which was great) was Get Out. A horror film about, and I
quote, ‘a young African-American man who visits his Caucasian girlfriend’s
family estate.’ What unravels is quite enthralling to watch, from the
incredibly tight critique of white western society alongside an impressive
acting experience by the whole cast. For me in horror films, I do much prefer
the lead up to the reveal, rather than the reveal itself, which is usually a
lot less interesting than what you might think it is. It is very rare for the
lead up to ‘live up to the hype’. Either way, amazing film and well worth your
money/time.
I forgot to mention last week my obsession with Samurai Jack, a beautifully animated tv
show that I managed to watch in the space of a week. The very basic plot line
consists of a samurai fighting a demon like creature, who transports him into
the past. The samurai then must find his way back to the past, to stop the
demon from enslaving the world, like he’s done in the future reality that the
samurai now resides in. The first few seasons are incredible in terms of
animation style, with the plot being good, but not that serious, more comedy
than drama. They recently began airing a new season, after a ten-year hiatus.
The new season is amazing, building from the foundations of the early seasons
and creating this character who’s dark and brooding, who’s still fighting the
demon after being in this new world for 60 years or so in an un-aging state.
Yeah, it’s incredible and I would highly recommend watching. It is a shame, as
the early seasons are still very good, just not up there with the Rick and
Morty’s and the Bojack Horseman’s of this ‘new age’ of animation, where things actually
matter in the plot line and developments in the characters aren’t simply
scrubbed clean at the end of every episode. To watch this new season it’s not
fully required, but to actually ‘know’ the character of Jack I would highly recommend
watching all the episodes… Fucking good stuff.
I also started to watch 13 Reasons Why, a Netflix original based on a book focusing on a
young girl’s suicide and a series of tapes she leaves behind, tapes specially
made for all the different people who pushed her to commit suicide. It’s okay,
but not great, and there’s a lot of blame and glorifying suicide going on. I
don’t know, I’ll update this next week when I’ve finished it and have come to a
real conclusion…
I think that’s it, maybe? The first half of the
week is going to be business as usual, making work and curating the online show
for Friday. On Wednesday I go to Leeds for a few days, hopefully having some
time to go to a show or two whilst installing a (hopefully) successful show at
Serf. If you’re in Leeds, come by Serf on Thursday, drink some beer and buy a
print or two... Still slightly concerned about the lack of content in the show,
but hopefully it’ll be okay, people like prints…
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