Remix

Christine took us on a tour of the remix work in which she has been participating – lead by Randy Adams (runran).

 

The remix basically takes creative work produced by others within the group and remixes it in different ways.  This includes flash work, static pictures and sound.  The remix is based around a blog, which forms a creative conversation in both images and words, showcasing recent work.  Remixers have to reference the sources, so that the audience can trace the evolution of a piece through the history of the blog.

 

She showed us examples of her original work and her remix creations.  The source files are also posted on the blog so that other members of the group can download this material in order to create a remix.  The group ethic towards each others work seems really open and pieces get worked and reworked, producing pieces that include many layers of different people’s work.

 

One piece “Picasso’s Point” was constructed out of code, rather than existing as a picture file, so you can go behind and look at the source code to see how it works.  This harks back to one of the lectures last year in Lab, which lead to my post Code of Ideas.  Christine remixed this image by animating it, which was then in term remixed in several ways.  The whole project hinges on artistic responses to work, rather than critical responses – and this drives the work of the group forward and creates more.  This seems quite an organic process of creation – almost like minimalist music gradually changes with each repetition.  The piece “Machine_Language” actually works in this way as well, so this evolution is both internal to the pieces and external in terms of the structure in which they sit.

 

Chris did lead the discussion into whether this kind of idea might work using Comment Press to create a kind of Frankinstein story – remixing text work in the same way as remix works with artistic images.  Again, we ended up in the monetizing conversation, but that seems to be an important issue that we need to explore further, but that’s the same with artists of all shades… sigh!

 

There was (and is) an awful lot of awe for Christine in terms of her tremendous output and development of her technical skills over the last year – which has been phenomenon.  Her blog, including a showcase of her work, is well worth a look:  crissXcross

One door closes, another opens…

So, the final lecture of Campus Week opens the Creative Retreat for 2007.  Suddenly two distinct groups meet in one place: one group tired from the rigours of a week’s thought and the other raring to go after a year of absence. 

 

This final and first lecture is given by Mark Leahy, the external examiner for the MA.  This hinging point within this live week within the course being especially appropriate, given his topic…

 

Professor Leahy titled his talk Figures and Grounds, introducing several of his ideas and some of his work to us – including many of the questions he still grapples with.  These included: how do we recognise what we read? and how do we know how to read what we see?

 

One of the ways he considers these issues is with comparative terms, such as form/content, creative/critical, things/stuff… but in reality, these terms are constantly shifting in their relationships towards each other.  In particular, the relationship between things and stuff is important.  He asks: what is the point at which something becomes a thing, instead of just stuff.  Leahy argues that this point is different for each member of the audience – what one person views as a completed “thing” may be just a collection of stuff, or parts, to another viewer.

 

One element that determines this point in our judgement is our culture.  We hear or see what we are trained to hear or see.  At this point in Leahy’s talk I was reminded of my music training, where it was explained that we are trained to hear music in a western way – meaning that eastern music (which uses different degrees of tones such as quarter tones) sounds odd to our western ears.  The relationship between things and stuff will be different for different audiences with different conventions of reading/understanding.

 

Leahy then moved on to talk about how is it possible to analyse a piece in two directions – both outwardly and inwardly.  Inward analysis involves turning the microscope onto a piece and examining at ever closer range until you are examining the very atoms or phonemes of the piece.  In the case of more digital works, this might involve looking at the individual frames or pixels of a piece.  Conversely, outward analysis involves looking at a piece in context from an ever greater distance to see its overall place in culture.  Examining a piece to excess in either direction leads the piece to become blurred or distorted in the mind, but illustrates how the different points of view when looking at an object can affect our viewing of it.  Even when one examines the idea of listing as a way of analysing data, we find that as a creative process it can be found in renaissance work and Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 130 (amazingly remembered by Terry) involves the same process.

 

Leahy showed us several pieces of his own work, including examples in which he was presenting physical printed text as an artefact within a gallery space.  He talked about his curetting and installation work.  Mags got a mention for her piece, which was included in one of the exhibitions Leahy was involved in producing – Public Pages.  This exhibition focused on the difference between public and private reading and how this difference affects the readers’ relationship with a text.  He also talked about other events involving the use of shirts, which seem to a physically reoccurring theme within his work – with specific shirts or elements from them being carried from one piece of creative work to the next.  He was questioned towards the end of his talk about the significance of shirts in his work and cited several reasons for his interest in working with these in a creative sense.  He has experience of making shirts himself, and a family association with the production of shirts – with his mother and grandmother making clothes.  He also explained how a shirt is a physical representation of the body, without the body being present.  He uses the fabric from shirts like a page so words – or elements of words in the case of one piece – are linked with the fabric in a physical sense, rather than the metaphysical sense of their meanings.

 

In other questions, Sue challenged him to answer: “who are you and what do you think you are doing?” (Leahy considers himself a writer, artist and curator) and Jo lead him into a discussion about domesticating fractals.  A bizarre conclusion, but a very interesting talk…

a grockle in new york

Well, I have to say, it finally got to me: the grockle tendency which inhabits all of us when we travel. I have the camera, the hat, the armful of leaflets, the suncream that smells of dulux… all one really needs to be a tourist. A grockle, as those in the West Country might say.

I should now really do the new-media-tourist thing and blog about the exciting things I have seen and done – including all recommendations and links etc. During the Women, Business & Blogging conference, Jess spoke about how blogs are often used as a kind of human filter for all the stuff that is out there. I did not really appreciate this use of blogs until moving to Word Press, which provides me with far more stats about my readers and how they get here. People are out there looking for things: blogs provide human summaries of those things through experience and opinion.

So, here are my brief experiences and opinions following my visit to New York over the last week – in true web 2.0 grockle style!

The Down Town Tour:

I am a bad person to review any tour, as I become a profession-snob as soon as someone else takes the microphone. Our open top tour of Down Town New York took far longer than planned due to UN week traffic and included two tour guides. The first really wanted everyone off the bus at the stop at which we boarded. He proceeded to sit behind us, rambling in quick-time-new-york tones about people and ball players we had never heard of, whilst pointing out random buildings which we had already passed. The second guide was better, but really only gave soundbites of information whilst repeatedly reminding us of his name, the driver’s name, safety and tips.

See? Profession-snob! No mention of the route of the tour, the sites we took in or anything! I will restrain myself.

The down town tour included Times Square, China Town (where we saw this great Macky D’s), Greenwich Village, Wall Street (where other grockles were taking pictures of each other at the bull’s behind :S), Diamond District, Garment District… basically, all the accessible areas of lower Manhatten. Diversion and traffic plagues the bus as UN diplomats moved around the city, but otherwise it was good to see so much from up high without the stress of people and cabs.

Ellis Island/Statue of Liberty/Harbour Cruise:

All of the above in one go. This trip was at the request of my youngest sister to help with her A Level courses. Unfortunately, she went round like death all morning having drugged up on travel-sickness medication. Sorry, I mean “meds” – must get with the lingo!

We decided not to get off at boat at the Statue of Liberty, as we got plenty of photos from the approach. Ellis Island was quite another matter. A free museum on the island chronicles immigration to the US through NY, particularly those experiences relating to the people who were checked into the country through the facilities at Ellis Island. I could certainly have spent a while day at the museum – it covers social history, immigration patterns across the world… all sorts! Not a place to go with any person who does not like museums though – speaketh bitter experience here

Wicked (@ The Gershwin Theatre, Broadway):

FANTASTIC show! Want to go again already! The soundtrack CD (currently playing) has been providing one of my main distractions from constructive thought ever since (as I don’t appear to be able to think and listen to lyrics at the same time). Some of the numbers were much more musically complex than one would expect in a musical, but the storyline was very clever and the light show extremely effective. I came away desparately wanting to write something with that much passion. Everyone should go see it!

Bodies:

I pretty much rail-roaded my sisters into accompanying me to this exhibition. I had to study photographs from it as prompts in a poetry class once, and despite the initial repulsion which affected me at that time (when it was still very controversial) I couldn’t help myself wanting to see it in the flash, so to speak.

The exhibition consists of models made from human bodies, using a technique involving polymers and acids. The idea was to de-construct the human body and show our inner workings – the way the public dissections did during the renaissance – making anatomy more real and tangible than mere textbook diagrams. The ones created by injecting a red polymer into the blood vessels of donated bodies, then removing the flesh to leave a cost of the circulatory system were actually extremely beautiful. I think I will blog about this separately on another occasion, as there is so much more I could say….

Night Tour:

Another open top tour, which took us around part of the down town loop and then across to Brooklyn to see the lights of the Manhatten skyline. The guide was much better and the views stunning – although I discovered that my night photography skills leave much to be desired. Coming across the Manhatten Bridge on an open top was much like riding a rollercoaster – the side of the bus was very close to the edge of the bridge, with the associated sheer drop on the other side. My hair was a little wind-frizzled by the end, but it was definitely worth it.

Uptown Tour:

As if I had not spent enough time on an open top by this stage (is it possible to spend too long on an open top?) I had to go one last tour, which took us Uptown through Harlaam, Columbia University and round Central park. This featured the best guide of the lot, who had quite a dry sense of humour and attitude towards politics (“we don’t go to war under false pretences anymore, of course”). He gave the most informative tour I have heard in a good while – including the background to Hell’s Kitchen, the details of the project to build the largest stone cathedral in the world (currently ongoing since the 1800’s) and how Ella Fitzgerald started out in the Apollo Theatre. My only criticism was that he was evidently a tape recorder: if he got distracted or interrupted, he had to go back to the beginning of his story and repeat it word-for-word, intonation and everything. You know what though? I actually didn’t mind!

Macy’s/Times Square:

Several trips were made to both Macy’s and Times Square during our stay. The highlight of Macy’s (for me) was the wooden escalators towards the top of the building. Apparently these are not permitted in the UK any more, following the Kings Cross fire in the London Underground. Using the ones in Macy’s felt like stepping into a Terry Pratchett novel – using something inherently modern, presented in a medieval way. Times Square was just a mass of lights and advertisements – fun, but crowded. As Forest Gump would say, “that’s all I have to say about that”… except that they did have a restaurant called Bubba Gump Shrimps!

So, there you have it: a potted account of our trip to the Big Apple, just in case you were interested!

a question of distance

I am no photographer.

I readily admit this. You can see my dabblings in my flickr feed to the right here, but these really are just dabblings. Most of the time, I just point and click. The pure serendipidy of the camera and the subject being conveniently syncronised in their progress through life makes the picture.

What I have found interesting, as a recent explorer into pictorial realms, is the way our attitudes towards taking pictures is changing with the development of sophisticated digital cameras. There is now a physical distance between ourselves and the camera as we take a picture using a digital camera – we are no longer right up close to the machine in the same intimate way as was previously required. We can also view each picture within seconds, judge it, and discard it instantly if it is not to our liking. We no longer have to finish the film, pay to process it and wait days for the finished, silky prints to arrive.

Being the owner and user of a nice new digital camera (my first ever camera in fact!), I am particularly interested to know what difference this physical distance makes, as we hold our cameras away from us to take a picture, instead of up to our eyes. For my own part, it means that my pictures are much less about what I am seeing from my position in the world, but more about what the world looks like at arms’ length away. It is almost like looking at the world through my finger tips – I see what they would see in my jpgs. On one occasion, I held my camera out over the edge of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol to get a shot of the bridge’s shadow on the cliff: something I did not see with my own eyes in full. Does this make the camera my aid to seeing things in the world that my eyes, due to their geography in my body, cannot see?

Maybe holding the machine close and committing a physical process in taking the photograph – involving chemical imprinting – causes us to have a more precious, personal relationship with the resulting picture? The results of this process are also physical, rather than simply light impulses on our computer screens. Does this deepen our involvement with the picture? Does it mean I am missing something intimate and pure about the art by going digital? Is it like the way taste and smell invoke memory? Or does it not really matter at all, as long as the image captures an essence in colours and shadows that can be manipulated and stored?

I am sure the issue will continue to puzzle me as I wander through scenes, hopefully clicking/ticking away, but many things puzzle me about images and views, so what’s new?!

The Code of Ideas

I am not even sure I know how to get ideas out of my head anymore.

Which is why I have decided to blog my thoughts and responses to the various issues appearing throughout my studies on the DMU MA in Creative Writing and New Media program that I am currently studying in an ever more dedicated way (does that sound positive or what?!)

One of the points of discussion was the idea of opening up the code behind digital artwork (of whatever form) in an artistic way, thus showing the viewer how the piece works… almost like opening up a Swiss watch and showing the innards. I am not sure whether I am entirely comfortable with this idea of showing the guts of a piece, possibly because I was brought up around my grandmother’s tapestries where the flip side, although scrupulously neat, was always carefully hidden by a frame and a wall.

I understand that there are people in the world who like viewing the method, logic and workings of a piece, at least as much or more than the “surface”. In business, I am one of these people – I like to know how things work. I cannot really access art (in the painted sense) in terms of layers due to my eyesight, but in both English and Music, I am equally happy just letting a piece work as I am understanding the hows and whys etc, or viewing the score microscopically. This possibly just means that I am now able to turn off my inner analyser in a slightly healthier way!

It stands to reason that there would be more absorbers of art online who are interested in the layers and seeing how things work. These are tnot just he coders, the computer builders… but also the people who are in the porcess of learning how EVERYTHING works and have not yet learnt to distinguish what does not need to be discerned in this way. Everyone is looking deeper. There are areas of escapist pop culture emerging on the web, but in a world where anyone can do, everyone still wants to know how.

Understanding the layers and code of art then becomes interesting, not just to those of an academic bent. Turning pieces over or inside out is not a new way of looking at art – it is just a way of making digital art more tactile. It is looking at the brushstrokes, rather than the pristine surface.

I picture art gallery pieces online with a roll-over to show the underside/code. People would analyse this critically in the same way as agitated brushstrokes are psychologically purused by experts now. Code can, no doubt, be beautiful to the right type of mind. It can also be sloppy, it can be crisp, it can be elegant… it can tell us almost as much as ordinary language about the coder. Are they a scavenger? Are they obsessive? Are they lazy? Are they unskilled or using a pre-existing programme to generate the art?

I can see the opening up of code as an analytical mining exercise for high brow thinkers. I can see the physical strings of code as beautiful objects in their own right, when placed within a piece of art or poem or whatever. I can see code as a language of communication between certain groups of people, not like a natural language, but rather a designed language like the language of a subculture, with all that entails psychologically. One day, maybe code will be as free form and artless as the natural world I am watching streak by as I travel at high speed through the country side along the Great Western Railway – a working reminder of the dawn of the industrial age. At the moment, it still seems contrived and self-conscious. This current thinking may be starting this process of natural code-based expression, or it may be focussing too much on the code, rather than let it creep quietly into our consciousness artistically, as it has done so far.

There is also the issue of how it almost ceases to be when not in active use. A painting continues even when noone is looking at it. When code is dormant, it is not performing as designed. Is it then more like the ballarina’s costume or the musical instrument? Only art when it is functioning/performing in the presence of a person?

Code is just a collection of letters and symbols like a painting is a collection of pigments and chemicals. Really, these things only become art when they pass through our minds. Something in us makes them art when we interpret them. Maybe it is our reaction to things that makes them art – code being by function interactive and dependent on our interpretation, makes itself art.

Maybe art is simply a puzzle we can’t solve – something we constantly fund more in to grasp and more questions in to ask. Code does this as well. Not just computer codes, but DNA and other complexities in life that we are constantly trying to render in symbolic form. Some sculpture, some paint, some write, some code… we are all trying to render the same things in symbollic form…