Digital Resources in Arts and Humanities Conference, Cambridge, 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

Sound painting performance

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.

More images on Flickr.

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 sound drawing tests

Drawing as research into sound relay machine for a performance. The round triggers play a sound via computer once they are drawn over. The process of drawing is changed by the introduction of sound feedback from the touch sensitive area behind the paper.

I have tried making a drawing blindfolded (illustrated above), which brings far more random results in to play. The relay is also broken, or changed from the normal, sighted, hand-eye coordination. Instead, sound returns an element of sensory feedback, permitting another type of coordination to occur.

Open Ear

Open Ear: Audio-visual events and performances at the Department of Media’s Broadstairs Campus of Canterbury Christ Church University.

On October 16th at 8:00pm Open Ear hosted an event curated by Paul Adams entitled Interference which incorporated a number of performances and an installation based on this theme.

Videos from the first Open Ear event Interference are now online: http://openear.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/interference-videos/
with some photos:
http://openear.wordpress.com/2007/10/17/interference/

The call for contributors for the next event:
http://openear.wordpress.com/category/call/

Mick Grierson contribued to open Ear: http://www.mickgrierson.co.uk/

Tim’s new body uploads

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

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)

Sketchbook Snapshots

This post is my opportunity to share my thought and images as they are being developed in my sketchbook. I invite you to comment and respond particularly through images. I am also interested in exploring this strategy as a way of sharing ideas – would you be interested in contributing via flickr?
I am currently exploring the C18 story of Peter Schlemihl a story of a man who sold,regretted and reclaimed his shadow – as the basis for a series of paintings, prints and an animation. I include an example of an illustration for the book by the book’s first illustrator – Edward Cruikshank – a marvellous English artist who illustrated – amongst other books – the tragical Comedy of Mr Punch. This connection is beginning to influence the drawings !!

Dissolute Rapture

This text is a draft for a presentation on 3 May 2007 at the Slade School of Art, UCL, London, where I am registered for a PhD. Most of the images used to illustrate my presentation are available on arts-media.net on Flickr

Tim Long

Dissolute Rapture


This presentation explores the theoretical issues I am currently concerned with as part of my PhD research into the grotesque image and imagination.

I am used to form building with images, so I would like to make the same forms in writing – space, mood, texture, and narratives of the grotesque can be explored in text making and image making in similar ways, alongside formal written discourse centred on theoretical issues.

I have recently been concentrating research on anomaly and abnormality explored in Deleuze and Guattari’s book, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’.

‘abnormal refers to that which is outside the rules or goes against the rules, whereas anomalie, …, designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of deterritorialisation.’

I am still working with this text and the artists mentioned in it, including Antonin Artaud and Paul Klee. Other texts which have assisted me to mark out coordinates in the grotesque territory include:

Mary Douglas, who has written about the danger at the boundaries of territories, of the body, of the social body, of the border between the kinship units and the outside, for example.

Hal Foster has discussed ‘pulsatile desire’, in his book, ‘The Return of the Real’ defined as the oscillation of affect between desire and horror, seduction and repulsion present in contemporary artistic practice which, ‘… refuses this age-old mandate to pacify the gaze, to unite the imaginary and the symbolic against the real.’
Instead, Foster argues, the real penetrates through the gaze screen into an interior psychic core, exposing the other, through the use of violent, visceral and grotesque imagery. He argues Cindy Sherman portraits and Andy Warhol’s American Disaster screenprints achieve this fracturing of the screen/gaze.

In contrast, Philip K Dick’s work refers to a lingering atavistic sense that we are being watched, that something out there is going to get us, something is in the shadows, possibly a machine we have made to help us, lurking at the edges of the world or at the edges of what we think we know.

My research is concentrating on the sense in which there is a feral animality lingering in human nature, occasionally surfacing as being animal, or being anomalous, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology.

Julia Kristeva, in discussing fragmentation, disparity, abnormality and the ‘crisis of the person’ has commented:
‘What is interesting is that this crisis of the person, which I call abjection and which is a state of dissolution, can be experienced either as suffering or as rapture.’

Dissolute rapture could be described as a moment of penetrating disturbance, when we see into the unacceptable depths of our existence, which we project outwards into others, into the world, so that others are also forced to live out the chaos that we refuse to confront in ourselves.

I am experimenting with the possibility of collapsing and contrasting these themes in my pictures. I often take collage elements from disparate sources in order to discover, or glean meaning from them. Various forms get mixed up in these pictorial machines, like alchemical processes that are equivalent to the process of changing chaos into order. Or perhaps the inverse, what order there is becomes chaos.

Marina Warner, in her book ‘Phantasmagoria’, discusses the notion of soul in contemporary practice, where artists ‘project themselves into animal changes of shape, or imagine sci-fi alien mutations, or even dramatise new visions of monsters, and thereby transvalue hitherto abhorrent and abominable phenonema.’ She discusses the mutability of consciousness, prone to splitting, offering ‘multiple potential’, and ways of understanding and exploiting the virtual universe contemporary media offer.

Antonin Artaud worked most of his life at articulating a disturbing, disarticulated turmoil. He believed that society cannot accept its ultimate centre as chaos and unreason, governed by lies and delusion. Society must suicide madness and chaos by subsuming unreason into its pathetically limited social code. Artaud denounced America and the body of war and money, he also cursed the figure of the modern priest, the psychoanalyst, ruling over the trinity of Pleasure, Death and Reality.

Disparity, contradiction, metamorphosis – the grotesque presents, and paradoxically assists, an understanding of existential terror founded on the fear there are no constants across all possible worlds, no immutable forms, except those we choose to define as such by the construction of language, institutions and social bodies. These rigid bodies are the ‘strata’ discussed by Delueze and Guattari, which regulate and control, in contrast to the ‘plane of consistency’, a condition that floats and permits movement across and between types of bodies and types of being.

At the centre stands the elemental and unruly self, given form in the grotesque, at once seductive and repulsive, external and internal. By externalising the repulsion, into others, into the world, we elect temporarily to defer realising the chaos and mute incomprehension that must constantly be guarded against, although it is always too late.

The structure of my PhD should reflect these contradictions. The limiting, arborescent model discussed by Delueze and Guattari may not be so helpful. The rhizomatic model seems equally problematic, although continuous horizontal growth with occasional shoots sideways may be a better way of setting out a range of ideas. Other forms present themselves as equally valid (chapters and an index would be a good start!)

Artaud did not distinguish between writing and making images. His dessins ecrits, drawn words, explore anomalous, disparate and contradictory forms. He wrote of his images, ‘These are gestures, a verb, a grammar, an arithmetic, an entire cabal which shits on the other, which shits at the other.’

Paul Klee also investigated relationships between the word and image, ‘the word and the picture, that is, word building and form building, are one and the same’ Paul Klee, Notebooks.

I have begun to experiment with the potential writing offers for creating a range of grotesque spaces, figures and themes using speculative, fictional forms, derived partly from themes explored in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’,
For example, discussing Paul Klee’s “gray point” Deleuze and Guattari state ’starts out as a nonlocalizable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled bundle of aberrant lines.’
This statement could be a starting point for writing or painting: equivalent structures of this type often bridge a gap between forms.

Deleuze and Guattari’s themes exploring becoming animal (ferality), becoming intense, becoming molecular, the refrain and the chapter on Faciality (I have displayed a number of portraits today on the screen exploring this idea) seem to me to have two useful functions. Firstly the ideas work across and between fixed, stratified, epistemic models, and secondly, offer the visual artist a rich array of starting points, for image making with words and pictures.

I have recorded some of my fictional writing, speculating on the possibility of conjuring grotesque themes and forms with the spoken voice. Making form with sounds, with words, with images – I am experimenting with giving form to ideas in a shifting and growing set of speculative explorations.

Picturing research

I presented work to a group of Tutors and students at the Slade School of Art last week as part of my PhD work. The presentation (see text below called ‘Dissolute Rapture’) seemed to be well recieved. I spoke to a couple of students who attended who enjoyed the talk. They commented on the relationship between the images and the ideas presented assisting thier understanding of the underlying ideas.

I discussed the various models and methods for structuring text on the theme of the grotesque; the form and content in should possibly compliment each other. The arborescent model discussed by Deleuxe and Gauttari in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ might be too rigid. The rhyzomatic model is now a bit overused and difficult as a result. See the online rhizome. The digram of the growth of Tantric forces could assist the constrution of a body of text with associated components, like sattelites, independent, but circling the key themes and spaces; this may be the most attractive option at the moment.

Images are a vital asset when discussing theory and structure because they can bring to life the ways ideas can be set out and explored.