Who is looking at you?

The second piece of writing I did about art – aged 17 – was a study of 4 portraits in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art by Alexie Jawlenski, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and the Scottish artist James Cowie. They were all painted around the same time – 1930s – and were portriats – one a self-portrait – and I was fascinated by the way they looked out of the image and the way that the viewer was asked to look back.

This interchange – between gaze and gazer has consistently fascinated me (and many other people) – but I new none of the theoretical ground work then about the pyscho-sexual power relationships played out in the act of looking and representing – replicating and repeating the gaze in art.

Golan Levin’s Eye Robot is fun …..

The first piece of writing was a confusing ramble on the problem of time in Constable’s Haywain ….. little did I know that this would also be another constant problem that I would return to in my thinking…. that’s for another day

 

 

 

AV Fest

The last few days have seen the launch and conference of AV Fest in Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesborough and Sunderland – and after having a quick coffee with Gaby Jenks and Kate Taylor to catch up on what they’d managed to get to I launched in too. . . . The first event I saw was the performance Radiophonia at the Sage. The Radiophonia Workshop is 50 years old this year  - and like many movements born in 1968, there is a very strong aesthetic – the Doctor Who theme tune being the most famous sound track they produced. I really enjoyed this event. The group playing, described (rather elusively) as the Sage Participation Group had apparently only 3 days to prepare and were not previously musicians. Using a range of tools that included a lamp shade, a plastic bag, a wooden pestle and mortar, a microphone and a tape player and several electric keyboards, the group built up a very well structured and layered composition of sounds. It was sophisticated and fun. As well as a captivating output, the group clearly enjoyed the performance – and it was great to see this kind of participation taking centre stage within a festival environment.  

 

Mika Taanila

Mika Taanila is another artist who operates with images as a composer does with sounds.  This is particularly evident in the stunning film he developed alongside The User, a Canadian artist duo made up of Thomas MacIntosh (architect) and Emmanuel Madan (composer) who developed the Automated Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers.http://www.asphodel.com/releases/view.php?Id=69He filmed a performance live – no mixing, no layering – and developed a film that references the physical materials generated by the printers. He quotes Buckminster Fuller – I seem to be a verb. . .  you need to look exactly back 25 years to think 25 years forward.  35mm, it was commissioned by film london, Lux and Spacex who invited 6 different visual artists to make 5 minute films that would be shown randomly across the UK in cinemas – in mainstream multiplex environment, without description or warning . . . the work was designed for the big screen.For Taanila, surrealism and automatic writing are key sources – he uses found materials, archival pieces that he then researches and uses. I love his films! 

 

Rose Lowder

Rose Lowder discusses her experience of working as both and artist and within the film industry . . . with no intention of working in film – but then in the 1960s she saw experimental films in London – then she started notice things, that for example in the film, The Famous Present,  a composed image of several frames are nevertheless seen by the eye as a composite – whole – simultaneous image.Frustrated at the technical set up of the film where a bad musician who can play lots of instruments is given the – over a great one who can only play one instrument (economic reasons) and the tension between the editor and the director –  film being a product of highly mechanised and hierachical process that had a lot of ‘norms’ – industry requirements and a regulated the structure.RL resisted making money through the commercial art market.Instead she worked on a series of graphic experimentations that related to the experimental film she’d seen. These became a set of perception base experiments. For example, making holes into 16mm films - if you draw a line and punch a hole in every frame you will see a line broken with a hole. . .if you draw the line and punch a hole every other frame – you see a steady line with a hole in front of it – if you punch the hole every 3 frames the line becomes much stronger and the whole doesn’t break the line – if you punch the hole every 4 frames . . .the line starts move flexibly in front of and behind the line – it is an illusion.Fascinated by the ideas that the physical of reality of the film in relation to what is seen on the screen – and the dis-juncture between the two – she decided to film ‘reality’. Her work plays on the tension between the subject – the media as an articulator – the figurative, illustrative and graphic elements of film.She shows us her note books – dense, ordered graphs representing time and space – a self-constructed notataion model for describing a method of making film where she literally carves up space with a camera held still and cutting between location and shot according to a predetermined score.     

 

Serious Games

Frank is a physicist who is working to develop technical interefaces for cars, cockpits and boats.

 

MAGNO – PARVO – two parts of the brain that govern perception. Peripheral vision – he talks about the signals that the primitive part of our brain understands. In understanding how these parts of our brain work – he can create  interfaces which have low attention requirements – like a log fire in your living room.

 

Serious Games are training tools and are about giving a heightened sense of self conscious awareness (and ability to respond) and evolution of the full use of senses that a fireman, soldier or dyke guard. For example – if there is a fire – then an experienced fireman will be able to read a whole set of sensory experiences – smell, air pressure (sound, relative heat – wind upon the arm, spatial awareness) – so, to be able to re-create situations which simulate an experience and train people to read and use their sensual awareness. And, through studying how the senses interact with each other generate powerful pieces of information – this knowledge can be used to interact with human experiences.

 

SLEEPY CAR DRIVERS – puffs of air that blow on the forehead when it is perceived that the driver os getting sleepy

COCKPIT PLANES – enabling heightened awareness of other senses if a pilot has to make a ‘blind’ emergency landing. 

Also – how can you  create a Full 3D set of head phones that use spatial awareness senses to express values in auditory inputs.

TACTILE VEST – if you have a hearing impairment and you like to dance – you can use the vest to enable the user to feel the rhythm that is in the room.

TELEPRESENCE BINOCULARS – 3D audio that gives directional awareness to enable the user a sense of prioritisation on what and where they should be looking at through cameras in another place.

 

 

Ulf Langheinrich

Ulf starts off by playing a very old audio piece made on tape – when he was a ‘useless’ painter and was making secret excursions into technologies. . . . he talks about the fundamental use-value of the tape being to capture the nearest possible copy of reality that is possible – but that in the attempt of mimesis – the fragments of the media interruption – the scratches, the glitches become obvious at a heightened level. This tension is a core problem that his work addresses…. he got hold of a syncing machine – and then used ‘live’ sounds and mixed repetitive sounds of his own voice. The process of making sound through technology without the intermediary of a musical instrument interface was for Ulf another key moment for him as an artist.

 

 

Day Two of Sonic Acts

Disorderly thoughts on synesthesia and other mysteries of the human sensorium ’ is the subtitle of the lecture of American radical and experimental filmmaker  Ken Jacobs ( USA ). Ken Jacobs began filmmaking in the mid-fifties with the seven-hour long  Star Spangled to Death ( 1957-59 /2003-4 ). During 1960s he was an important figure in Underground Film ; aspiring to a democratic rather than demagogic cinema he created The Millennium Film Workshop . He devised a unique system of live film-projection performances The Nervous System, in which he plays with the flickering effect of projecting the same film a few frames apart , deriving a 3D-effect from standard 2D-film , using most often archival or found footage . Since 2000  he has performed  The Nervous Magic Lantern, a single projection set-up , utilising neither film nor video .

 

Starting out

I have started this blog to help me keep in touch … the idea of talk and walk is that – apart from the fact I had a wok and walk noodle takeaway and that gave me the idea after 15 others were already taken – that I (like the rest of the world) seem to be in a constant state of movement and rarely have the chance to capture my ideas and thoughts – let alone communicate and share. . . . .Working in a new media environment – it also seemed appropriate to start practicing what I preach . . .  So – lets see how it goes 

 

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