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.
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.
As part of our research both Bryan Hawkins (in collaboration with the Substation Gallery in Margate) and Tim Long are curating seperate exhibitions in the Carey Building at Broadstairs and the Powell Building in Canterbury.
The second of these, the Thinking on Paper exhibition curated by Tim Long at the Powell Building in Canterbury is exhibiting print based work by members of staff from the Departments of Media and Art.
