Notations 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/

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.

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.

face landscape

I visited the National Gallery in London this week and tried to apply the face landscape model to viewing the paintings. On a literal level, a very high proportion of paintings which are not portraits have face and lanscapes in them. The Early Netherlandish paintings commonly combine a tiny landscape at the edges of the image, as if it was not good to exclude one, or the church patrons expected to get one..

Music occupies an ethereal place that is free from physical substance, whereas painting is corporealised, face landscapes are always becoming possible with the viscosity and physicality of material, but music is constantly ‘inventing lines of deterritorialisation for the refrain, implies procedures and constructions that have nothing to do with those of painting…’ The distinctions Deleuze and Guattari define between music and painting invite alternative discussion. Does the written word not become something else when spoken? Can sound and image together transform both, when presented together? Can Deleuze of Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicities and becomings present an argument against the determination that music has its own index, that properties and assemblies can pertain equally to science, art and music? It may be tempting to pose a broad synthesis linking types of expression by defining core, shared properties. Although expression and content differs, certain abstract properties, and ‘assemblies’ can be borrowed and relayed. The issue of disjunction, rupture and anomaly, for example can be called upon to question the territorial borders between forms, including music and painting.

Hello world!

This blog is about Research Informed Teaching at Canterbury Christ Church University. It is currently run by Bryan hawkins and Tim Long

Thinking Through Art

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

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)

MA Fine Art Master Class 26/05/07 – Garrett Lynch

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)