Digital Resources in Arts and Humanities Conference, Cambridge, 2008
September 17, 2008
Tim has attended the DRHA08 conference and presented his interactive drawing machine, which has intrigued and alarmed some delegates.
A relay of joy - Synaesthesia and drawing: a performance of a physical computing assembly
Sydney Cooper Gallery Exhibition
July 29, 2008
Notations 2008
January 20, 2008
Tim set up the drawing machine at the Notations conference, a week long series of image/sound experiments and performances celebrating John Cage’s collaboration of the same title 50 years ago. This time the user could not see the paper, so audio feedback was the main sensory feedback for drawing. Touch also becomes important when sight is eliminated. The user could fel in front of the stylus, paint stick or graphite.
More images available on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artsmedianet/
Sound painting performance
November 28, 2007
I have presented the sound trigger relay machine to students, and in public performance. I have also filmed a painting test, where the work was set out on the floor. Integrating colour and viscous paint present a new challenge. I incude below the text that acompanies a submission for the Jerwood digital moving image award. Shortlist announced next year. See the Jerwood website.
Description of current work
My work combines Fine Art practice with digital media, with an emphasis on the physicality and engagement with material and autographic expression.
I have worked for some years with traditional print processes, combined with image origination and processing on computer. New insights into my practice have emerged from work that combines the digital and analogue realms.
I am studying for a PhD at the Slade School, on the subject of the grotesque image and imagination. Theoretical and practical research combines within my work, which intends to render visible concealed forms, which would otherwise remain liminal and disparate.
My short films, paintings and interactive drawings aim to identify grotesque and problematic forms and concerns. The abject, and the grotesque, present, in my view, a vital component of the subject’s composition, because being an integrated individual requires a sense of wholeness, in contrast to disintegration and becoming other, or different from a normative sense of the person.
The identification of a point of dissolution and breakdown is an important aspect of my work, and I am constantly experimenting with new ways of articulating and engendering this experience.
The computer comprises an aspect of breakdown of the subject – an anomalous prosthetic that is now accepted as a portion of the human subject.
I am interested in the construction of human and non-human assemblies for the purpose of locating an invisible thing, which may be the ‘decaying aura’, identified by Adorno as a remnant of a pre-industrialised past, when painting, and autographic expression were considered more significant that they are today.
Description of the digital moving image submission
A physical computing device for combining live painting with live audio production. I have presented the work recently (Open Ear, Broadstairs, November 20, 2007) at a public multimedia event, with the intention of inducting the assembled audience into the “machinic assembly’ of line, colour, sound, computer, data projector: an open network of live expression.
The graphic and chromatic notation of painting elides with the aural relay of sound, creating a new, combined assembly of subject, and visual and aural production.
I have intended to create a face, a monstrous face, that is the character, or identification of a human/computer interaction. The figure/face tends to break up and reform – it is informed by visual and aural feedback simultaneously, and this leads to an emergent, assembly combining psychological and sensory complexity, where surface, movement and the passage of time can induce a condition of daydream, or reverie. I am concerned with invoking the grotesque, and use sound samples derived from the human voice: the base, drone audio tracks, and the sounds triggered from making marks, generate a set of shifting motifs, which inform the spectator and artist at the same time.
I am developing different ways of controlling sounds generated from the paintings, and plan to use live vocals and instruments, which would respond to the sound/painting, and inversely, be modulated by the drawings and paintings, to crete graphic instructions determining a live score.
This work is still at an early stage of development, I am excited about the possible directions it might follow.
Relay of Joy film: proposal for Open Ear
October 31, 2007
Proposal for ‘A Relay of Joy” drawing. Tim Long, October 2007
Outline
A twenty minute live performance, creating a drawing of a figure on paper mounted onto a wall. The marks and motion of the stylus will generate sounds via midi triggers and a computer, played into a PA system.
The live action of the drawing is intended to be relayed via a video camera to a data projector.
Description of proposal
A relay of joy. Creating a drawing of a figure for the duration of the performance and a unique, graphically defined soundtrack determined by the position and intensity of the marks.
The live performance is intended to open a dialogue with the audience, through their engagement with the physical, aural, and graphic assembly of the work. The physical movement of the ‘artist’ will be aligned with the aural responses of the marks as they are made, eliding with the graphic properties of the marks themselves.
Further details
A new subject will be created within the performance, represented by the drawn figure, the duration of the work, and the shared experience of ‘artist’ and spectators. The network will be represented by the entire assembly: computer, drawing, sound, audience, duration.
The subject-image assembly will be relayed through the technology, physical movement, a development of graphic marks delineating a human form, referencing haptic sensations, and related physiological and psychological responses:
Haptic of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception.
Haecceity the property of being a unique and individual thing. The sound track uses recorded loops and samples of the human voice and other textures.
Equipment I can provide
Mac laptop, midi interface, trigger box, triggers, paper, drawing board
Equipment I would like to borrow for the performance
Amp and PA for sound
Video camera for relay to data projector and for recording the performance.
Other requirements
Lighting
It would be helpful to have local lights shining on the board, preferable from two sources, to eliminate heavy shadows.
I would need to position the equipment to the side of the work space, so there are no tables or obstructions between myself and the audience.
The paper will be pre-hung on a board I will provide, which may be mounted to the wall, or may be stabilised somehow so it does not move around. The triggers will be taped beneath it, so the bottom height of the paper would be about four feet from the ground, so that my body or shadow does not significantly obscure the work.
If the performance is filmed, I would like the video to be relayed live to a data projector. The audience with then see a duplicate of the live action drawing on screen.
Tim’s new body uploads
October 21, 2007
I have uploaded a set of images titled ‘What can a body become?’, to Flikr, click the link to view them.
The figures started with images scanned from my collection of catalogues, and also some photos. The series examine transformation in two related forms – hybrid source material, autographic and reprographic, and secondly, the possibility of finding the subject, the figure, with a rapid assembly of marks and lines.
This latter sense intends to access pre-cognitive, or intuitive action of eye to hand coordination. The rapid pace of each drawing, the reiteration of legs, faces, arms, sprouting out of bodies that ought not to be bodies – this issue, of a body becoming something, anything that it is not, derives from the observation by Baruch Spinoza: ‘What can a body become?’ Some images site other narratives within them – people hanging from hooks, a female form inside a male form…
Can the body become the thought of the thing imagined? What relation is there between action and reaction, in the context of drawing in this rapid way?
The assembly of disparate material, using scanned images, printed onto A4 paper, pencil, brush and ink, pen and ink, are then added by hand.
The action involves selecting and scanning the images, then adding a physical, analogue reaction.
Although the scanned images have a predominantly historical, old fashioned look, the intervention of the computer, the digitisation of the material, renders it malleable, separating it from the printed page, where the image may be surrounded by other images, and text.
Principles of Landskip – Paintings by Bryan Hawkins at UKC Keynes College -October till December 7th 2007
The title of this exhibition Principles of Landskip is derived from the titles of two writings by the landscape painter Alexander Cozens (1717-1786). This hybrid title brings together the search for underlying systems and Landskip a term which evokes the past, the romantic and the antiquarian and perhaps more contemporary conditions.
In Principles of Beauty Relative to the Human Head Cozens attempted to define certain conventions and rules relating to beauty. In An Essay to Facilitate the Inventing of Landskips Cozens drew on Leonardo da Vinci’s writings to suggest a method by which blots and marks could provide a stimulus for landscape image making . This essay in particular has, since 1759, contributed to aesthetic debate and interest in abstraction, chance, visual language, dream, drawing, mark and gesture and representation of landscape.
In the series of paintings exhibited here my engagement has been with the landscapes of The Lake District and more recently Thanet and Margate. My involvement has also been with a mixed bag of artists and writers (artist/writers) who have employed, invented, charted and constructed their response to landscape through image making and through writing. Ruskin, Palmer, Turner, Cotman, and Constable – my taste has been mainly for the C19 Century – Sutherland and Piper and Craxton and others are there too – as influences and lenses. Words and images, artists and landskips.
If looking at landscape is conventionally understood as the starting point for painting landscapes – and the meanings to be found within the paintings produced the points of arrival – then I am interested in reversing this process. Looking at landscape, as though retrieving a lost sensibility or inner landscape or finding the possibility of a coherent sense of self in landscape becomes a point of arrival – the analysis of existing texts and images, as maps, or traces becomes a point of departure. The act of painting makes everything more complicated and moves, restlessly, between these points.
Bryan Hawkins
Hawkins, Bryan (bryan.hawkins@canterbury.ac.uk)
Thinking Through Art
June 15, 2007
I have only just started reading Thinking Through Art as a sort of introduction to some of the issues surrounding arts Phd’s which are largely or solely practice-based so this is not a review, far too early for that as I’m only 20 pages in.
This publication, pricey at £75, only with black and white illustrations and very difficult to find apart from on amazon, seems to be spot on. It asks all the right questions and rather than providing clear cut solutions provides detailed case studies of approaches to doing and completing a practice-based Phd. It starts very well and defines the what Christopher Frayling’s paper on Research in Art and Design identifies as the differences between research into art and design, research through art and design and research for art.
There are countless books on doing Phd’s out there but these are largely useless for understanding how art can function as research and whether research can or should function as art to be exhibited. This seems to address that issue.
Art and Interactivity
May 31, 2007
As part of the MA Fine Art master class on Saturday the 26/05/07 we discussed how networks change art whether this be through their use, such as the internet in net.art, or the idea that creating an art work as a open system is a network in itself between the artist, art work and user. This was discussed initially within the context of my work, what could be categorised as new media art, a selection of which was presented to the students who were then asked to map some of the same ideas and concerns without necessarily the use of technology to their own practice. The majority of students classed themselves as painters.
The above diagram, in another form, was used in the session to explain parallels between the Transmission Communication Model as discussed by Claude Elwood Shannon in A Mathematical Theory of Communication and later popularised in his co authored book with Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication and the model employed in the creation of traditional art (the top part of the diagram, a linear one way model) in comparison with the model employed in new media art (the bottom part of the diagram) which creates a feedback loop to the artist. The diagram below developed as a result of the session illustrated that students correctly identified that traditional art already creates a feedback loop (culture) but this loop is more complex, less controlable and often moves outside the framework of the intended concept of the art work.
References:
Shannon, C.E. (1948), A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal.
Ascott, R. Shanken E.A. (Ed) (2003), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press. (ISBN: 0520218035)
On the 26th of May I will be giving a master class for the Ma Fine Art programme in the Department of Art. This post is primarily for the students who will be attending to familiarise them in advance with the topics I hope to cover and by way of that introduce myself and what my practice as an artist consists of.
The main topic of the master class will be the use of new media (particularily networks) in contemporary artistic practice and how it continues a change in art, in its simplest definition the change from art as object to art as idea, occuring for almost a century. The origins of this lie in the work of Marcel Duchamp and are continually progressed and developed in Happenings, Fluxus, Conceptual Art, Video Art and most recently New Media Art and Net.art. I will show some of my work, talk about it, the themes and focus I repeatedly return to in a cross section of technology enabled online / installation / performance works. I will also talk about where my ideas come from, notably the ideas of Roy Ascott, Net.art and possibly touch on Conceptual Art. Below are a short selection of my works followed by links to the rest, my research and an interview I did a few months back.
Just to let you all know I am currently organising a performance piece for Snd:arc- (Sound and Architecture) taking place Friday 11/05/07 at Broadstairs Campus 8pm so please feel free to come along, its a free event. More details about the event here.
Above: Stills from the internet / installation piece Perpetual.Portrait.
Perpetual.portrait is a software based art work based on the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It attempts to simulate what a portrait can never really do, evolve, age with or independently of its subject or as in the novel accumulate visible signs of mis-deeds performed by its subject.
Above: A still (taken 05/05/07) from the internet piece “Quote me!”.
“Quote me!” is an online piece which uses live headlines from a selection of newpapers worldwide to generate short quotes and catchphrases so that I as an artist don’t have to and can focus on my work. In a sense it is my own personal automated spin doctor.
Above: 10 seconds of no video.
10 seconds of no video is a video piece created specifically for websites like Youtube, video on demand web sites, as a site specific work. The video is created through a webcam application with no connected webcam. It is a paradox, a video which states that there is no video, an error as video resulting from a video capturing application which has no input video signal.
Above: Extract from Open Ear performances 06/10/06 .
Open Ear is a loose collaborative group of like minded individuals creating audio-visual art and organising live events within club, gallery, open air or site specific venues. Our principal interests include collaboration, live performance, generative audio-visual work, hybridised art, DIY soundart, circuit-bending and networks.
Links to some of my work and research:
Work – http://www.asquare.org/
Research – http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch/
A recent interview about my work and practice (in Italian and English, scroll down for English version) – http://www.noemalab.org/sections/arte_focus.php?IDFocus=208
Some references / reading:
Sterling, B. (2005) Shaping Things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. (ISBN: 0262693267)
Baumgärtel, T. (2001) net.art 2.0: New Materials Towards Net Art . Nuremberg: Verlag Moderne Kunst Nurnberg. (ISBN: 3933096669)
Ascott, R. Shanken E.A. (Ed) (2003), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press. (ISBN: 0520218035)
Bleecker, J. (2005) Why Things Matter. Available at: http://research.techkwondo.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf (Accessed: 25th November 2006)
