today is the day we presented our current work to the fine art XD pathway yr 1's (5 mins + 5 mins qna each). it was quite tricky planning what to say that would be helpful to them - and I wasn't entirely sure of what I've been doing in the past few months. in the end, I gave a sort of chronological overview of my process from getting the casio qv-10a to the digital drawings/collages now. I got good feedback and great questions from them - e.g. hauntology. also, Anne gave me a few references too. It was good to have this practice of talking about my work to an online audience, even for just a few minutes. just after next week, it'll be their turn to present their work, and i'll be facilitating the crit with others.
I'm quite worried about my crit coming up in a few days as I did not want to present the same thing though I think I'll need to go through some of it as it is still basically my whole process... I think I'm going to need to scramble up something new this week - hopefully the scanner works with the stuff I collected/bought + personal doc. + writing/reading references + maybe something with low quality photos I took.
My _exploration right now comes from my personal obsession with documentation, as in, feeling the desperate need to capture as much as possible in day to day life, no matter how mundane. And I’m kind of investigating why that is, I guess, and if this is sort of a common phenomenon in our times.
So I found this camera from a car boot sale one day, Casio QV-10A which was produced in 1995, it is apparently the first consumer LCD digital camera. This was a breakthrough at the time, having a screen to view the scene through in real time. I realised that I am super interested in this old-new technology thats not too old but not too new either. Perhaps I was thinking of the outmoded, which you can find in surrealism, or things that have lost its function. So I bought it half hoping that I could still use it today especially in capturing the low res/poor image, which im also very interested in, but after going to camera shop and asking them I saw that it might not be possible.
So, I began to operate this obsessive capturing on the camera itself, with my -also old but not really - 2000s small digital camera. I felt that flash images of an object held this almost fetishised energy as I looked at my photos as a whole archive. I thought it was sort of ironic to document something that could not document anymore. That is sort of sad.
the big challenge for me at this point was confronting this very different mode of a starting point, and a way or methodology to go about these ideas. I’ve never worked solely from a single object before. I’ve always painted from dreams in my head that I later collaged from found and personal images. >>(*just for reference these are some paintings from film stills / dreams I had)
>> so at first, inspired by this vintage packaging, I played with my own version. However I was frustrated being stuck in the collage to painting cycle. This simple process which worked before did not seem to resolve what I am exploring. So I began a fluid series of experimentations across these past few months.
>> if couldn’t record WITH the object, I was going to try my hardest to extract as much information as possible from it. I tried simply physically drawing from it, digitally drawing from it, copied down the words from the instruction manual, I wrote down my experience of getting the camera, my interaction with the woman who said it was a present for her ex husband who did not want it. There is this unknown history to this object And I was thinking about the significance of this. Does it matter? Could I look at this object as it is, right now? The same way I could look at myself as I am, right now, without my memories? Is this camera subconsciously a symbol, carrier, representation, suggestion, even replacement of myself?
>> I tried scanning it and dragging it across, felt like a live collage . I loved the ambiguous space it seemed to occupy. There’s something ghostly which reflected the nature of the empty shell of an object. Thinking about this I then went to the workshop and vacuum formed it, which required me to trace around it. It made me think of its outlines.
>> thinking about outlines and representation, at this time I was also very interested in diagrams. I was taking a museum conservation course from the Hastings museum, and I discovered the spectrum system of documentation, I found flowcharts to determine the fate of an object.
>> and then, when I flew back home, I started seeing diagrammatic and documentation inspiration everywhere, in my mum’s jewellery books, in her hand written notes, in my sister’s choir payment slip, plastic toys, Japanese text books. I thought a lot about the Venn diagram. I thought about how I could place the diagram, what I would put in it. How the audience could experience it. And I’m still thinking.
>> these past few weeks, I’ve been using digital means to collage and distort scans nd other images I collected together, creating these digital drawings. I still don’t know where these are going, but I feel I am in an exciting place of playing with the materials I have.
>> perhaps I do, ironically, feel a bit distanced from the original object, the camera itself now, the obsession with it wore off, and that makes me sad for the object . But without it, this whole train of thought never would have started. It was part of the documentation process. And maybe not everyone feels this but I think sometimes we get really caught up with feeling like there has to be an output to every single thing we do. But, I realise now that all these little experimentations you do along the way will somehow come together in a way you can’t fathom at this point and the most important thing is to keep thinking, and definitely MAKING through it.
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anne:
-technology both in terms of software and hardware becomes obsolete (no longer produced/used, out of date)
-huge project going on in places like the national archive where they are trying to get young people to train to become curators of digital archives. we know the digital is incredibly unstable. if you save something as jpeg, it rejustifies itself everytime you open and close it, you should save all your documentation as tiffs, otherwise over time jpegs degenerate. so there are these kind of things that we are just not aware of in the same way.
-exhibition called the electronic superhighway (whitechapel) few years ago, catalogue of a wide range of practices that engage with the digital including the formal qualities of the apparatus.
-hito steyerl in defense of the poor image
-when you were lookibg at the material/three-dimensional output, you might be interested in elizabeth wright's work. so she teaches the 3D pathway in BA. she's made things we're familiar with but to the wrong scale.
other comments/questions (chat):
poppy: I think the digital drawings are really pretty - do you think you'll continue with digital techniques or move back to painting etc?
geeta: do you feel you're wanting to capture/document moments has altered since working with the camera? as you weren't able to in the conventional way.
aislynn: are you into hauntology? I feel like there's a lot of stuff in that realm about outmoded technology and formats, and also ideas about why we're nostalgic about old digital forms.
india: these pieces are so beautiful and I love the idea of documentation and I've often felt the same about technology - do you think you'll take any of these experiments to sculpture that you could then translate into painting?
