paradoxofpraxis

[paradoxofpraxis]

5/5

Today has been very productive, as I made a lot of ground with my research work. Today has shown how re-doing your research as the project has grown can give you even greater insight! I started writing and reflecting on the photographs I took at Bell Labs for the secondary tier of the project - trying to explain where they emerged from ideologically and so on, and I realized that there was a much more important relevance of these images to the ideas of cyberspace and metropolis discussed in the film theory I had initially read before I got onto the phenomenology stuff. Basically, I have reevaluated the secondary tier of the project as not merely architectural in nature - I’ve realized it deals with the interplay of physical architecture and cyberspace - a really interesting interplay phenomenological speaking. I need to further refine the writing and make it more clear and concise, but it was a good start. I feel that it will make the goals of my project a lot clearer - especially given the very abstract nature of the tertiary tier at the moment in my mind. It’s also making me reconsider the primary tier - perhaps the primary tier should also have a comparative diptych aspect to it, in how it explores perspective? This could be explored by a technique I am going to experiment with which involves some ultra-black paint I have stumbled upon online, which is so black that it makes it hard to see depth and contour on objects, turning them into black voids of sorts. I could also parallel that with the tertiary tier visually in how I frame everything - a piece is coming to my mind of a deep frame with a flattened black 3D hand cast next to a photograph of a hand on a black background. I’m waiting on materials for physical work right now, but my alginate should come soon so I can make a better hand casting. Right now I need to keep focusing on writing up the ideas and research behind the work - I’ll write more on practical planning tomorrow, as well as finishing up the architecture/cyberspace writing.

[paradoxofpraxis]

hand casting first test

Although lifecasting is a process I am familiar with - I used it a while back when I was on foundation - I had bought new materials so I thought it’d be a good idea to give them a try and get my skills sharp again. I also would be needing a hand to experiment with for mounting the hand - and to get a clearer idea of how the product might end up being. As I have started considering the idea of sawing the hand to intersect with the plane of the image, a sacrificial test hand would be a good idea. I did my first test a few weeks ago but hadn’t had the time to write it up - so here that is before I move on to creating the finals.

I’d got hold of some standard alginate used for lifecasting as the project started, as well as a big 25kg tub of plaster, so I could get straight to this early testing of the process. Alginate is all pretty much the same - it mostly comes down to how much water you mix it with. I had to get hold of my old electric cake mixer and some big mixing bowls and measures - it’s a very messy process best done in a kitchen. I realised after doing my first test that I would need a lot more alginate than I had initially bought, so I made a bulk order off ebay today.

With regards to the plaster, I knew from past experience that you want to use really good casting plaster - in the past I had used relatively common Crystalcal-R plaster which worked great but I thought I would go one up this time especially as I was considering sawing and mounting the hand, so I bought basically the best plaster available, Crystalcal Alpha K, made by Saint Gobain. It was pretty expensive but it comes in a big plastic tub which is super handy, and it’s a hell of a lot stronger than anything else on the market - it’s closer to concrete than plaster, especially if composite glass fibers are used. I considered using other more advanced materials - I have used polyester resin in the past, and I also looked at using a specialist acrylic resin based material used in cinema called Jesmonite, but the plaster works best with the alginate and is the easiest to work with at home so I thought I would stick to that. Also, the white plaster would work well with the black and white print I was planning on working with, and plaster is very easy to glue, and won’t harm a print most likely. I know from past experience that resin can be a nightmare.

All in all the first test went well, but the very very thick Alpha K plaster brought out some problems I hadn’t experienced before - so it was a good idea to test early. More usually with alginate casting a hand you cover the hand in Vaseline so that the hairs and so on don’t stick with the water based alginate and make it very hard to remove the hand once the alginate sets. But this can leave some moisture beading inside the mold that is usually not a problem as it just becomes part of the plaster mix. But with Alpha K, the mix is so thick that seems to be a problem as the beads of moisture have left some voids on the inside of the casting. Next time I will skip the Vaseline and use a leaner algiante mix so that it is more elastic and easier to get the hand out, and make sure the plaster is ready to pour straight after the hand is removed from the alginate mold - this might require assistance but it should alleviate the problem.

The other thing I gleaned from the first test is that my intended pose for the hand wasn’t working that well as there were prominent flats on the fingers - I had planned on touching the side of the mold container so that the hand was in the right position. I think using a guide sheet of plastic which is removed once the hand is in position, before the alginate sets, will work well. It’s hard to explain but basically it should give a hand where all the fingers are in line with a single plain - so that it matches the opposing photograph.

[paradoxofpraxis]

4/4

Regrettably, I haven’t achieved much for the project bar thinking about it and trying to plan executing my final ideas for pieces since my last writing, again. This is due to the work I have been doing with the sound art group I became a part of earlier in the year, The Noematic Collective. I ended up taking on a lot of the technical organisation, setting up a pretty complex 6 channel ambisonic sound system, and putting a lot of effort into my piece for the show which was last week. I wish there was some way I could incorporate the ideas I was exploring with this work into the CCP unit so the effort could be recognised – but the real value of the work I was doing for me as an artist was broadening my practice by focusing purely on sound and ignoring the visual component. It was really refreshing to do this and I learned a huge amount – it really was my first serious show of any kind so – perhaps the work I did in presenting the work could count towards the CCP learning objectives; I’ll talk to Simon about this if I can get hold of him, and consider how this sideline work could be evaluated as part of my effort for the CCP unit. After all, I think it could be very reasonable to consider sound a concept in contemporary photography - look at Wolfgang Tillman’s recent work for example.

In any case, it’s imperative that I plan the remaining time effectively and capture my working process, so again I’m going to persevere with the blog despite all the setbacks I have had with it. Firstly I need to work to materialize some pieces because framing and printing might end up being difficult logistically, because for whatever reason second years can’t use the studios over Easter break. This means I won’t be able to properly shoot my hand piece until they are open again. Because of this I made sure I have the first slot I can get on SISO booked out, so I can be ready to shoot straight away after the break by which time the plaster hand will be sorted. As I understand it I can start working on my frames as I am pretty sure we can still use the workshop and book out the tools from siso, so I’ve started focusing on what materials I will need for that - figuring out where I am going to get my moldings from and considering what specific framing style I will need to use etc. I also have considered how I will mount the plaster hand to a print and discussed it with Dave. If I have all the materials I need for framing, and have sorted my writing out, the week back after Easter should be relatively straightforward. The other thing I need to focus on is figuring out the specifics of the neo noir idea, and doing the final shoot of it. The major hurdle is the logistics of trying to find someone who will let me shoot their house, but this can be done over the holidays too. It’s a lot to do but it should be possible, especially seeing as my timetable is free for two weeks. Allow a day to plan and two days to shoot the final images for the neo noir idea, another day working with plaster for the final hand and another day for planning the studio shoot of the hand and doing test images - that’s 5 days. Allow two extra for miscellaneous stuff and a week’s worth of writing time, it should be fine. It’s a lot to do but I am motivated and care about the work a lot at the end of the day, that is where my energy comes from.

[paradoxofpraxis]

20/3 writing

So it might seem pointless to continue with a blog format, having not continuously written posts during the research and ideation phases of the project. But I’m not sure this is the case. The last time I worked on such a large project with this level of focus and blogged it I wasn’t researching as intensively, and so I found the problem of explaining ideas as I begin to understand them wasn’t so difficult. These days, dealing with heavy duty philosophy books and writing about it real time seems to be something of an impossibility for me – I need to mull the ideas over for a while. In this case I had the essay to deal with too which ended up being a bit of a nightmare for me, and also the New York trip – so I got to forming and planning my ideas out so that the project wouldn’t be left too late. But I think blogging’s strength is in the practice, which I have only just started on – it’s a great way of reflecting on how the work develops as it is made. As I am working very physically this time, I’m going to pick up blogging for the last ‘execution’ stint of the project, and write reflectively about the research up to this point, now the ideas are more fully formed in my mind.

So the best start to the blogging would be for me to explain where I am up to now. Basically, the thinking about the project started off with me watching Blade Runner at Christmas and just generally being inspired by it – it gave me a number of concepts which I wanted to explore. From that – I really focussed on thinking about perspective, drawing from the narrative style and characters of neo-noir cinema in general, and especially the Esper machine scene in Blade Runner. I started doing some research into that and drew out another interest in the way neo-noir deals with architecture, which made me consider my ‘aesthetic relationship’ with modernist architecture. It also made me go back to some ideas I had touched on last year when I was reading about cybercultural theory, in which the concept of perspective is critical (especially in Neuromancer). Through looking at different cybercultural theorists I came across Don Ihde, who is noted as the writer of the first American philosophy of technology book (Technics and Praxis). The only book of his in the library was a book called Experimental Phenomenology, which ended up being crucial for my understanding of the ideas I was having. It is a basic primer on how to practice a phenomenology – how to see from a phenomenological view. In that I discovered a lot about how our perspective on the world is structured, and had the realisation that all the ideas I was having were dealing with that. This book ended up providing the major backing for my essay and it has taken me a hell of a long time to digest fully, during which time I had a lot of ideas for pieces I could make, and artists and films I could look at.

In digesting all this research, I ended up with three areas I wanted to explore with the project that are all interlinked, but distinct subject wise. They are three elaborations of the basic line of thought of the project at different tiers of extraction. To use more scientific terminology – primary, secondary and tertiary levels. The primary level of the project is philosophical – the phenomenological level. This has me thinking of the basic terms of phenomenology and how I can make a work that will tackle ideas like, say, the intention of perspective. More specifically, this has ended with me being inspired by the sculptural-photographic hybrid works of Darren Harvey-Regan, and conceptualising a photograph with a sculpture of the photographed object emerging from it. In this case the basic plan is to life-cast a hand, then photograph an opposing hand as if it were touching the cast hand, the actually attach the cast hand to the print. How specifically I end up doing this is going to grow as the project develops though.

The secondary level of the project is the architectural aspect. I am particularly interested aesthetically in modernist architecture because of how it is such a prominently intentioned form that seems to encapsulate the world view of the time it emerged from – and as that world view has kind of died out in a sense, this becomes a kind of surreal phenomenon. It gives these buildings a somewhat ghostly feeling, and I feel this comes back down to a lot of the phenomenological concepts about how visual thinking is so informed by individual perspectives and points of view in time. This aspect of the project I ended up hashing out quite quickly, because I had the idea to photograph a specific building I have been interested in for a long time which happened to be near New York, so I sorted the idea out in my head before we went on the trip there. The building is the Bell Labs building in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which is notable for being the birthplace of a huge amount of modern technology, especially the transistor. The building itself, in this way, is evocative of the world view that was that technological one that took place inside it – it’s always been a visually fascinating place to me. I ended up getting the shots I wanted, long story short, but I’ll write about that separately.

The tertiary level of the project is the filmic aspect – which combines the prior two but adds the way narrative and character operate thorough mechanisms mediated by perspective. This is a very big, broad, ‘felt’ idea in my mind that I feel will only really be explained by my work – it’s an understanding of a style of film through the philosophy of phenomenology basically. I feel that film noir characters are very multistable – they can equally be approached in different ways; key noir characters are the flawed protagonist and the femme fatale which in a way operate as ‘contradictions that make sense’. The visual illusions used to describe how phenomenology looks at the structure of experience that I saw in Don Ihde’s text are the exact same thing, and I figured, what a metastable Necker cube is to a basic experience of seeing lines on a page, a femme fatale is to a complex interpersonal narrative. It’s a very abstract connection – but that is the point, to illustrate a hierarchy of how experience of reality might be structured. The idea in mind for this project is the least developed, but I want in essence to stage a photograph with a narrative hidden in the details – one that you have to discover through zooming in, like how the narrative in Blade Runner unfolds with the Esper machine scene. Again though, I’m not specifically sure how I am going to play this idea out – right now I am focussing on just trying to experiment with images. I have a specific location in mind that incorporates the architectural ideas

I intend to draw these three ideas into framed pieces that I can compose into a salon type installation on a wall – a wall based composition based upon the links between the pieces in a similar way to Darren Harvey-Regan’s more recent work. Obviously a large amount of technical work will be required to do this and that will be captured on the blog. But I intend to keep reading and developing the ideas as I go along, and will retrospectively write about the major concepts and research behind the project.

[paradoxofpraxis]

26/1 reflection - research momentum

So over the last few days I have moved forward a lot with the project. I’ve been working in tandem with the RP1 unit and been mostly concerning myself with researching Blade Runner, something I need to write about properly at some point in more depth. I’ve really taken a lot from reading the BFI Film Classics text on it by Scott Bukatman. He discusses the film in many different terms – it’s confirmed my interests in the scene with the Esper machine; but I’ve realised that the significance of that concept in the film extends to the idea of ‘seeing’ in general, which I guess is the crux of the film. This is inline with what I have picked up in my recent reading of How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hailes, another key text, particularly for RP1 but also for CCP. This idea of looking as it is formulated within the concept of cyberspace is particularly fascinating so I got to looking to see if, beyond it’s use in sci-fi like Blade Runner and Neuromancer, if there was much critical/philosophical writing about it. That is how I came across Don Ihde’s work – a phenomenologist who deals a lot with this kind of stuff.

I looked briefly over his book Experimental Phenomenology and it is perfect for what I am trying to achieve with my work as a whole at the moment – a visually explained introduction to phenomenology which has already enlightened my perspective on how we see and experience perspective, remarkably through pretty simple visual thought experiments. It’s a great text with some great concepts – I’ve found its discussion of metastable objects, a basic, well known type of visual illusion, are really connecting to what interested me in the Blade Runner Esper machine scene at the start of my thinking about the project. The past few days have been spend contending with this text and considering how I can move forwards with it in the realm of praxis as opposed to theory – as I feel like this phenomenology is so rigorous and useful that it can be my entire theoretical base for the project. Below is perhaps the most common metastable object, a Necker cube, which switches perspectives spontaneously:

My first thought was how much I have encountered Necker cube like (metastable) situations in my 3D software of choice Blender, especially with my more recent geometric work. When my mouse slips, I can get completely disoriented with some of the Lorenz attractors I was using the the last project. So I was thinking, despite my interest in exploring film aesthetics like film noir and architectural history and portrait and so on, it could be really useful to turn this theory work into some simple praxis in Blender say, so I have an artistic base to move forward from beyond just writing about pretty heavy duty philosophy.

Then I got to thinking – it could be particularly effective to make work that follows my progression mentally from the primary phenomenological concepts I have been thinking about, to the tertiary ideas I have (the film noir architecture portrait stuff) for work that comes back to this idea of ‘how we see’ that is the base. This could take the form of some kind of abstract metastable shape rendered in Blender, so I’m going to work on exploring that idea while I research further. Thinking with final outcomes in mind – it could potentially make a really effective installed exhibit to have these strongly contrasting kinds of images arranged on a wall. I was particularly interested by how Darren Harvey-Regan’s work in this style (see below) – it certainly works beautifully visually and is a good way of going beyond the singular image to make a philosophical concept more lucid in the work. This is something I need to consider more – but already it’s a good direction for exploring the ‘exhibition ready’ learning outcome, something I was not sure how I might address.

Getting back to Blade Runner, I’ve started to realise through reading and thinking about the film, and the cyberpunk/posthuman genre in general, why I have also been thinking a lot about architecture and the film noir trope of the femme fatale. Cyberpunk has often harkened back to film noir for various reasons – this is something I have been interested in for a long time.

I’ve always felt there was an inherently feminist angle under the surface of this – a positive, but simultaneously critical revival of the femme fatale is something seen in a lot a sci-fi. This is just a feeling I have in general, and one that is less present in Blade Runner than other similar films like Gattaca, it’s definitely something I am going to look at and research more. But it is tied together with the ideas about architecture I have been having recently, almost instinctively, partially inspired by a specific bunch of houses in Jumper’s Common near Christchurch where I frequently go walking, partially by Gattaca too.

I’ve long been interested in modernist architecture and how much it represents ideas of a utopian society, how starkly the ideals of the buildings of that era for the future contrast with how society actually ended up evolving into the postmodern era. I feel there is something very profound in the presence of the buildings of that era that remain standing today – they have a hugely narrative presence, as does architecture in general. It turns out through my reading that the cyberpunk genre, especially Blade Runner, is very heavily concerned with similar ideas, perhaps in different ways because of the fiction aspect to sci-fi, but still, I am going to study this cyberpunk discussion of architecture a lot more because the linkages to my interest in technological development, and also societal structure, feminism and so on, are huge. I have always loved the work of Lebbeus Woods, an experimental architect who draws almost sci-fi like buildings – a kind of cyberpunk architect if you will, so I’m definitely going to revisit his work in my research.

Moreover, it’s clear how concerned the cyberpunk genre and especially Blade Runner is with looking as a concept – which I am developing with the phenomenology perspective – so it’s directly dealing with the ideas of the course and photographic concepts I am discussing in response to the unit of perspective and so forth. Honestly, I feel great about all of this moving forward. I’ve not had such a harmonious project form since my FMP on foundation, which I feel was my most effective work yet. I’m confident I can get through this seemingly gigantic mountain of theory because of how clear it is in my mind, also because in general I’m in a good state of mind and am working well. So on reflection, it’s been a good couple of days. The project is really getting in it’s swing despite a pretty slow start, so the blog and so on should pick up pace now and make up for the lost ground. Planning and reflecting are going to become more important now I have a strong direction with the project – so I guess that is my goal over the next week or so coming up; to keep organised with my writing and ideas as they grow over this period by writing like this as I go along.

[paradoxofpraxis]

the story so far

So while this might be my first writing for the project, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, playing around with different ideas in my head with CCP in mind, and so I need to basically catch up with this. Right now, I don’t really know what my project proposal is going to be. I’ve got a few different ideas – and a general area of interest that I have identified over the last few months while working on realism and image and the page, so this is the perfect starting point for this blog which I hope to use to document the journey of the project properly. I’ve fell behind with this in every unit I have done so far at uni – and I think that’s been a big hindrance in my academic performance so far compared to how well I did on foundation. I feel like the end pieces have not been that well justified by my written work because so many parts of the decision making process get left behind somewhere and become natural parts of my thinking that usually aren’t that obvious to other people (which is especially bad given I tend to have quite disparate research sources and contextual influences). So that is my first and overriding goal with this unit – to fully focus on the blog as the ‘medium’ of the project – I really feel it’s the only way to get to grips fully with my practice which is highly centered around multi media experimentation and research.

The major thing going on in my mind coming into this project – thinking about the concept I am to tackle with the project – is one I extracted discussing my work on realism with Lee. While my immediate focus on that project was the subject matter of love, I feel that is something which was really only available to me in the work. Looking from an outside perspective, and looking back at the work myself, the really interesting thing about it is how it broke apart the ideas of photographic representation in a technical sense. As Lee said to me; “All of your work is concerned with revealing the structures behind things”. In my mind I was focused on the structures behind love and relationships in society – but that way very abstract in the final pieces. I haven’t got the grades back but I think that may be reflected negatively in the marking of the work – because the overriding thing that was deconstructed by the work I did was the way we perceive and experience photographs and images. I don’t want to talk too much about that project though because truthfully it was a nightmarish semester for me and I want to move forwards from it – but this is the genesis of the area I think I want to explore somehow.

Looking back further, this is indeed the best descriptor of my ‘artistic direction’ – I’m always concerned with the structures behind how images come into being. I think my work on photograph as object was effective (and also marked well) because that was so concrete in the final piece – it was essentially photographs turned into glass lenses digitally looking at other photographs. It was a really pure expression of my understanding of photographs at the time, and I think is some of my best work yet – and is actually going to be my first exhibited work (a refined version of it is being shown as part of a screening toured by the art critic duo The White Pube; it could potentially be shown at the ICA). My understanding of the work really came as I started to critically consider that work, and consider how that understanding of computer generated imagery and digital artworks could manifest in my practice going forward, which influenced a large amount of my technical choices for the realism unit (albeit a lot of this was subconscious and probably not written about – it was a hectic time). But that talk with Lee really kicked me into thinking about this stuff, and over recent weeks I’ve really started to think this has to be something I discuss with CCP.

A big way this thinking grew was watching the film Bladerunner. Films were perhaps my main influence growing up and were the backgrounds for my most effective work on foundation – but for practical reasons I’ve found myself majorly missing out on watching new, challenging films since being at uni. So my new year’s resolution is to watch more films, but I guess it is a goal for this project, and Bladerunner was first up on the list. There is a whole huge discussion I want to have about the film – I definitely need to re watch it and research it properly for the project, but the particular scene where he is looking at the photograph on the special magnifying machine to me is fascinating and entirely evocative of the way I am growing to understand photography as it is moving into the future. I really feel it has a lot to do with the sublime – a digital, technological sublime – and also the photographic perspective (and likely it’s connection to the ‘optical unconscious’ idea). It is also heavily centered around my understanding of fledgling photographic techniques that are going to become important very soon, especially computational photography and plenoptics and VR.

The lecture we had yesterday with Lucy Soutter – especially the second half – was the final nail in the coffin for this. She spoke about about how she has seen photography moving forwards over the last few years and straight away I was hooked when she mentioned Laurence Lek, an artist who I saw doing a live visual performance in 2014 in Liverpool who pretty much kick started my interest in 3D graphics as an artistic pursuit along with the glitch artist Mark Klink. She discussed how these kind of artists are pushing photography into a new area of ambiguity between real and artificial; with their very conservative visual nature despite their ‘artificial’ subject matter. Obviously this is hugely related to the hyperreal and the conceptuality of the lens as a tool, perspective and a whole bunch of things. She gave us some great texts to look at and I ended up having a great discussion with her afterwards, and I’m hoping to get an email from her at some point to discuss some ideas because a lot of this is truly evolving on the internet in closed groups and so on that I have somehow become pretty heavily involved with. Again though, I’m only at the beginnings of being able to articulate this stuff – but I think that is great as I will be able to show how I form a more specific brief from this area of thinking on photography.

Moving on, I want to research Bladerunner in more depth, and revisit my reading on posthumanism and cyberculture that tie into this, mostly to see where it takes me. I have been meaning to read Neuromancer by William Gibson for a long time too as it discusses many of these concepts. Also, I’m going to do some reading moving on from the texts that Lucy Soutter put me onto, again making sure I keep up with writing during this research.

I’ve also been playing around with a lot of new techniques and software recently; I’ve been playing around with Blender a lot more and trying to learn some more advanced techniques, as well as exploring some software I bumped into by way of it’s crazy online advertising, Daz 3D, which is centered around user friendly photorealistic animation of human characters. I’ve started playing around with it last night and it’s really neat but also really strange and problematic from a critical perspective, it’s definitely something I want to discuss with some experiments as I move forwards. I’m also, as an aside, working on sound a lot at the moment as I’m working on a project proposal for the fine art department’s sound group as we are working on a really neat touring exhibition at the moment. My practice tends to be pretty holistic in nature so this will no doubt have some influence on my direction with CCP, but this is something I need to develop going forwards.

[paradoxofpraxis]

dawn

what is it about dawn? i guess it is because I only ever see it in extraordinary circumstances. either through travel, a very late night? or perhaps the fact that things are very out of the ordinary then, the only people out warrant questioning, the predominant motion is inanimate. I see discarded effects of man more than before, lost without the species that created them. It reveals the truly absurd nature of your path, it induces the refractory moment. dasein confrontation. no fallenness. dawn is when I am brand new; what if life were like this? walking up the hill in bournemouth, about to head home after a long term, and a night of loud sounds and isolation. walking through melbourne to flinders street station from fitzroy for the first train after a night speaking to the least ordinary person I have ever met, confronting my future head on. countless unidentifiable transfers through dubai; a place that seems a permanent dawn in my mind. watching the light come up chasing the stars to conclude a year of discovery. the birds and cold air outside burgman saying goodbye to those that changed everything. the sublime remoteness waking up and looking out over little long point. every time confronting your life like a ship through the dark waters, all because of the time of day. overcast mornings warrant capturing.

[paradoxofpraxis]

symphonic

is this the word I am looking for? what is this musical sentiment? the sound of the advancement of civilization manifesting in the passions of individual lives, repeated and duplicated billions of times over? So much time on the other side of the harbor? What is it about this sound that makes me feel the emotion of that time? One day I must photograph the other side, realistically speaking, not metaphysically. Next time I am there.