#in a world of digital there's something really different about holding a tangible physical object in your hands

[laurelwen]

The insanity continues. They kept releasing more photos from this editorial in Replica Man. I said to myself, "Self, you do not need a magazine just because Eddie Redmayne is in it. No matter HOW much gender he's serving."

And then they showed us the corset pics, and his slutty little waist was the final straw.

So yeah, I ordered this from the UK since they don't sell it in the US. It will go on the shelf next to "Denim People", a knitting pattern book by Rowan Knits, featuring Eddie modeling knitwear circa 2003.

[derbysilkmill]

HEGEL’S TROWEL: working on the thing

Making changes everything. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Soul is extra-scientific, outside of science, we will allow no scientific disproof of it. Maulana Karenga, Practice: Documents of Contemporary Art  

Locked down by government guidelines designed to increase social distancing, the  gap between oneself and the other, a space that can stop cross infection between us all, meant spending time watching the television. The daily BBC update reported how many more bodies have been, are still being, destroyed or attacked from the deadly Covid-19 virus.  It might not be surprising then with so much biological and existential demolition on the go that I found myself watching TV programming to do with restoration and making things: Salvage Hunters, Escape to the Chateau DIY, Secrets of the Museum, The Restoration of Notre- Dame Cathedral. Kirsty Alsop reckons these days we should Keep Crafting and Carry on; making things as a form of therapy. The Repair Shop is a phenomena with craft experts restoring material stuff to how it was. Grayson Perry promoted art, and artisan making – he is a potter - as a great healer: ‘we are all wounded’ he said on channel four. Before the outbreak of this new threat to life I was working up this small general piece about the transformational potential of creative activity, in the main, making.  

Lisa Tarbuck, was talking on radio 2. She’s a media celebrity and a fan of making things. Super mentioning  a piece of weaving or needlework she’d completed that day, she told her Saturday night audience: ‘I just couldn’t stop bloomin’ looking at it…know wot I mean…? An old friend told me recently that I just had to get hold of a copy of Mathew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands (2011). He, the old friend, was the studio furniture designer-maker when I worked with him at Detail London; a young furniture makers.  Together, we made bespoke furniture (for a beautiful stylish wealthy cool consuming clientele). Nowadays he works in academia, writing and lecturing to students about craft and making. His research has interrogated how human well-being is affected by undertaking craft activities, particular recreational making done by amateur practitioners. Crawford writes about well-being, too. The subtitle of his study is: or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good. In a recent email exchange the furniture designer turned academic communicated that he looked back with fondness to his making days. Perhaps with ‘rose-tinted glasses’ he qualified.

There is a growing group of western intellectuals who today theorise and promote the idea that there is a definite connection between the processes undertaken when crafting things from raw materials and human well-being. Often slow and protracted, acts of physical making are, they generally posit, a valid source and resource to increase self-esteem. Existential events such as technically planning how to make something from scratch, the selecting of appropriate materials, development and deployment of hand skills, constructing structures to a set standard, finishing worked-on material, just being in a practical workshop in extended time and space, are inter alia physically, intellectually, emotionally good for human life. Teaching craft skills in adult education and community workshop settings I have witnessed diverse learner makers achieve remarkable personal satisfaction, and that allied well-being a craft cognoscenti rightly identify, in going through the technical and material processes when constructing any crafted object. Contra this supra ideal of process, quotidian workshop life reveals that, in reality, it is not only the extended making of the final object that is beneficent to the maker of this newly-present thing – the temporal spatial physical crafting and grafting - but the now-made self-styled object- the present thing in itself the maker has made.

At the currently closed-for-restoration Silk Mill (soon to be transformed/remade as The Museum of Making) interested visitors come to Derby for a look around the modern workshop housed in the ‘world’s-first-factory’. Generally, but not always, these people are museum professionals, culture workers, creative artists or social activists. Nearly all are interested in delivering well-being because it matters. I like talking to these folks, often desk-bound and definitively (unavoidably?) over-digitalised in their daily office lives, they take a genuine interest in the practical making a workshop allows  – the working we do with our hands - activities they see as critical to human holistic well-being.  Sometime ago our executive director at Derby Museums was in the workshop standing by our CNC, talking with me. Next to Tony stood one of the inquisitive visitors; an interested (and interesting to me) culture-industry professional. Inevitably, the conversation made its way to mentions of well-being. I told them both how I see people who often do symbolically distinguished, but atomised or abstract, work -- practices with often unquantifiable or subjective outcomes (the negative work Crawford describes) -- come to a fresh and solider understanding of themselves after constructing a materially tangible piece of furniture out of plywood or turning out a curvy bowl from a rough brute blank of oak.  Stood next to the idled CNC I remember saying something like this:

“In my working life I come across a lot of people who do highly complex engineering, but in a rather abstract or theoretical way, or others who live in a digital bubble I call ‘computer world’, modelling AutoCAD perfection but never getting to actually see or touch any material outcomes or be involved in making something from start to finish by their own hands… But when people make something here in the workshop they objectify themselves…….as they say “no one has ever taken a picture of the unconscious…or seen a picture of the self ”.

There followed a sort of embarrassed silence. Then inscrutable nods and smiles from the Executive Director and his guest. Then a “well thanks for that Steve….” --  as they left the workshop.  

Specifically, a proud plagiarist, I had, of course, synthesized the ideas of  literary critic Terry Eagleton and Arts and Craft sculptor Eric Gill. Generally speaking, I had just paraphrased a few ideas of the well-known German philosopher GWF Hegel (1770-1831) --  ideas lifted from the undecipherable, but well known, Phenomenology of Mind (1807).                                     

 Well, to be more honest, I was paraphrasing Alexandre Kojève’s partially more decipherable Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Compiled from Kojève’s lecture notes, and first published in 1969, the cult text explains Hegel’s theory of the dialectical (constant changing) progress of human history, in particular his well-known concept of the ‘Master and Slave’ conflict – the transformative phylogenetic and ontogenetic dialectic. For me the key passage in Introduction is how the text unmakes and then reconstitutes Hegel’s brutal concept of The Thing – raw given objective nature as unshaped material object – and how non-human Things (slaves/workers/makers) become Human. i.e. transform their selfhood from a raw physiological primordial brute unthinking  thing by working on another thing (raw brute unshaped material reality – wood, stone, metal, wool, cotton, clay) and making it or, a key word,  transforming it (as of themselves) -  into something it wasn’t before, in its un-worked material given existence in the world,  for another: The Master.

This is the actual Hegelian (Kojèvian) paragraph that refers to the experience of the creating maker- slave who makes for, and in place of, the consumer master:

‘The slave can work for the Master – that is, for another other than himself…he does not destroy the thing as it is given. He postpones the destruction of the thing by first trans-forming it through work; he prepares it for consumption-that is to say, he “forms” it. In his work, he trans-forms things and trans-forms himself at the same time: he forms things and the World by transforming himself, by educating himself; and he educates himself, he forms himself, by transforming things and the World. Thus, the negative-or-negating relation to the object becomes a form of this object and gains permanence, precisely because, for the worker, the object has autonomy. At the same time, the negative-or-negating middle-term—i.e., the forming activity [of work] – is the isolated particularity or the pure Being-for-itself of the Consciousness. And this Being-for-itself, through work, now passes into what is outside of the Consciousness, into the element of permanence. The working Consciousness thereby attains a contemplation of autonomous given-being such that it contemplates itself in it. [The product of work is the worker’s production. It is the realisation of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realised in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it. Now, this artificial product is at the same time just as “autonomous,” just as objective, just as independent of man, as is the natural thing. Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realises himself objectively as man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. Therefore, it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is “incarnated” Spirit, he is historical “World”, he is “objectivised” History.’

Kojève concludes in the Intro that the dead German idealist philosopher (Hegel) ‘may well know much more than we do about things we need to know’.

Interestingly, a former US academic/intellectual, Crawford (he worked in a Washington ‘think tank’ before quitting to run a motorcycle repair shop) uses the same quote in his book The Case For Working With Your Hands – but misleadingly attributes the quote to the Kojève. Folksy Crawford expresses Hegel’s idea in a more homespun pragmatic manner, as is the way of practical American philosophy:  ‘The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy…he is proud of what has been made’

Crawford writes about a kind of ‘self-disclosing’ latent in creativity, work and making.Concurring with Crawford and Hegel the sociologist Richard Sennet in his study The Craftsman, rites about ‘the warm values of craft and creativity’ and a ‘zesty freedom crucial to well-being of society’.

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I worked for a time in a comprehensive school. The head of Design and Technology – a former skilled industrial toolmaker – had had the foresight not to sell off the capstan lathes, milling machines, welding kit, old-school woodwork benches and traditional hand tools bought and installed in the 1970s.                        

Painted out in dull lemon yellow, orthodox (vintage) wood-machinery apple green, the Design &Technology workshops  looked like the past and so still played their part in 21st century life. You could smell old machine oil in the cold metal machines, bashed-up blue vices fitted to weathered beech workstations exuded a residual making aura. When the lathes were set running, rasping files shaped steel, sharp planes flattened pine, the space sounded like a real live workshop in the (ontogenetic) now, yet echoing the making culture of a phylogenetic past. In America, Crawford tells us that technical making and design is simply called ‘shop class’, or more accurately was called shop class because he bleakly observes, akin to the collapse of technical skills education in Britain, since the early 90s educational institutions have instituted a ‘big push’ to close shop class to open up digital and computer literacy. Any revival of shop class today is hindered for Crawford by the lack of skilled people competent to revive technical crafts and making in general.

Frustrated by the British school drift to digital D&T practices, a virtual curriculum (there is now virtual welding), and driven on by a shared ‘it wasn’t all computers in our day’ narcissistic nostalgia (manifested in everyday miserableness), me and the old toolmaker got our heads together and came up with project which harked back to the days of secondary-modern craft lessons in wood and metalwork; the saved machines made the scene believable.

It was only a small pot-planting trowel. It was made out of aluminium and wood.  From tip to tip 200mm long. It had a curved blade and the cranked arm was cold-riveted to the blade in a traditional blacksmithing style; the students used ballpein hammers clanging metal on the workshop’s under-loved anvil. On the once-busy but no-longer-silent lathes we put a sharp point on the 6mm round bar that made the stem from handle to blade helping drive it into the softer wooden trowel handle. The serpentine bends were created on a small Groz metal folder designed for DIY artisan metalworkers. The hardwood handle was shaped with a selection of rough round and flat cutting rasps, before being sanded, with care, by glass-paper. The blade was formed with aero-industry tin snips before being worked into a symmetrical curve with metal files. To work the flat sheet aluminium into the required radius of the blade it was fed several passes through a small jewellery rolling machine – sort of a washing mangle meets pasta machine. The trowel looked impressive when made. Three hundred students made one. The test of success is always if young makers want to take what they make home to show to someone who they care cares; most did. They had worked on the thing, objectified themselves, could contemplate themselves in itself, the small trowel, a trowel designed to be used, a tool to work on the thing, transforming nature as soil to wit.

The now fired up ex-toolmaker pointed out to me that, before we could roll out the trowel project to the students, the NQTs (Newly Qualified Teachers) in the D&T department – the electronic, digital, laser engraving, 3D printing makers – and ESWs, (Educational Support Workers) who would assist students, had to be quickly trained up in the basic craft and hand skills required to create, then teach, the trowel. They would need teaching the basic historical making techniques for working on the thing.

We arranged an ‘after-school’ instruction session in the workshop classroom. Everyone arrived looking harassed with a mug of tea or coffee/mug of hot water; offered the usual banter; male teachers removed ties; everyone put on an apron.  Each participant got a set of stock blanks: a length of aluminium bar, 150mm x 6mm ø; a rectangle of sheet aluminium, 1mm x 75mm x 120mm; a section of hardwood (beech, oak, ash, reclaimed teak or mahogany), 100mm x 25mm▫. The first task was to make a two-dimensional template – using 5mm graph card folded in half along a continuous grid line – to mark out the tapering and curved profile of the trowel’s blade. Sketching freehand they used the graph-paper squares for visual guidance. The pencilled line was cut with scissors and the pattern unfolded to reveal a symmetrical, if rough, outline. The next step was to show the trowel-makers how to transfer the profile, geometrically square, onto the shiny cropped aluminium by using a scribed (accurately-marked) centre line to align the centrefold of the paper along, thus ensuring the blade sat true, i.e. at 90° to the square back edge.

A metal scriber was then used to carefully score a visible line around the flimsy paper template into the soft aluminium. The workshop was quiet except for the soft ringing sound of metal on wood benchtop as, in deep concentration, teaching-staff students guided the hardened and sharpened steel marking tool around the curved card onto the aluminium.

(Still you could hear some light jokey banter, but of a kind, collaborative, encouraging type of joshing – ‘phatic’ communication, some dead continental philosopher of language would say.)

Aluminium can be cut easily - as card with scissors - when using inexpensive aero-industry shearing snips. Commonly used in hand tin-smith work and light commercial bespoke production these tools are designed to cut straight or with a left or right hand bias. (They are colour coded red, green and yellow and a good workshop needs the full set – an additional long-nosed straight-cutting pair is a great help for occasional extended profile cutting or internal corners.) I demonstrated how to cut the aluminium in short snips, neatly following the scribed line, shearing the material slowly and deftly the snips making the waste (swarf) curl upwards, away from the desired external blade line.

It was pointed out to the teacher-students that - novice maker or proficient craftsman - it is generally best practice when cutting stock materials to work ‘outside the line’ leaving a small margin of material for cleaning up post-cutting. Dead flat with fine teeth, hard because made from steel, metal-working files were used to remove the extraneous rough cut metal to the scribed line, scored into the aluminium, demarking the required final recognisable trowel-blade profile. Filing produces sharp burrs on metal which, in this instance, were removed with industrial emery paper. The blade smooth and symmetrical was now ready for the students to roll.

Metal rolling is the same process for a fine silver ring as a thick-walled boiler rolled out from, as it happens, 25 mm boiler plate. Basically, thin or thick factory-milled metal plate is passed through two calibrated parallel rollers which are adjusted to the required gauge of the material to be rolled. Sprung under high tension the front bars force the metal sheet towards a single back roller which is set higher than the underside of the passing steel or, in our case, aluminium. The metal is malleable and -- forced to climb over the higher spinning back roller -- begins to take on the required radius of the part required. This might be a shallow curve as the trowel needs, or a full circle, as in a delicate silver ring or a high pressure vessel such as a boiler whereby the seam is soldered or welded together and ground back. We were using a small jewellery-maker’s bench roller - no more than 300 mm in width - but the radius-forming mechanical principal remains the same.

Operating a bench metal roller is, as I sort of said before, a bit like passing dough through a pasta machine. But instead of making the metal thinner per pass – which, as is well known, is how the metal plate was produced in the forging mill in the first phase of ‘thing working’ - the radius is increased; the careful gradual adjustment – the increased un-alignment of the roller - in small increments forms the aluminium into the practical, and aesthetically pleasant crescent wanted. Students checked the curvature against a small accurate plywood template. They had to make three to four adjustments.

                        Before forming the 6mm bar into the distinctive kinked component joining the wooden handle to the blade of the trowel, it was necessary at this stage to turn a sharp point on the aluminium that would allow the bar to be driven into the end grain of the timber. The stock piece of rod was placed in a three-jaw chuck screwed onto the turning stock of  one of the neglected Colchester lathes in the workshop, and the traverse tool slider bed set at 5°; a shallow machining angle, but correct for this operation. Each operative was informed of which was the correct tool to use for this operation – left hand cutting tool - and shown how to clamp and set the tool in the lathe tool holder to the dead-centre of the lathe and therefore the dead centre of the round stock material to achieve the optimum cutting angle and efficient waste removal.  As a matter of maker education, head-stock turning-speed settings – coded in colour on the foundry-cast body of the Colchester – were demonstrated to, but set by, the learner turners.

                         The trowel project was designed/contrived to include several processes and employ a variety of tools and typical metalworking kit to introduce youngsters to some fundamental craft techniques and experience bench fitting, sheet metal working, capstan turning. 

To secure the cranked arm to the blade two aluminium rivets were to be inserted through the stem and trowel blade and flattened into a pre-drilled countersunk hole so creating a secure fixing. But, the bar was round in section, so that only a small section of the stem would be in contact with the flattish blade. To achieve a better joint it was imperative, then, to flatten out the round bar by heating the end of the stem and bashing it while it was still plastic with heat, hammering it carefully into shape with a heavy ballpein hammer on the arm of a traditional forge anvil; a neat steer of the making process into the lost-world of blacksmithing.  

(Hegel liked to walk in his home town of Heidelberg, and perhaps it was the sight of the town blacksmith toiling over a hot forge, hammering and twisting hot raw iron into shape, making some decorative gates for the local lordship, that inspired his ideas about masters and servants and the transformative effects of working on the thing?  Today, most of us have seen similar images on TV: neo-blacksmiths heating metal in a forge until it glows orange-red with heat from the coals before working it to form, with that romantic ringing of hammer and anvil, before plunging the work into cold steaming water.)

The problem with aluminium is that, non-ferrous, it retains its silver-grey colour when heated, and, to boot, we didn’t have access to a traditional forge, but the old toolmaker had the answer. He produced a plumber’s Gaz blowtorch, “I nicked ‘im from construction cupboard”, and some Fairy Liquid. Go on then, he said, smirking, what’s the Washing-up liquid for? I put my bottom lip out, shrugged with a laugh, and said I had no idea. “Ally don’t glow”. “Oh…I see” I said. “Detergent turns black when metal’s ‘ot enuff…then you can work it on anvil…simple” he grabbed the collar of his white smock with both hands and gave them a tug, before firing up the blowtorch. I passed this tip on to the NQTs and ESWs before they flattened their trowel stems.  

In old-school black and white ink,  a technical drawing indicated to the trowel-makers where on the straight length of aluminium bar marks needed to be made to indicate where the handle section should be placed in the trapping tongue - moved by a simple rack gear - of the Groz bender. The top of the tooling was also marked ‘clock –face’ style to show how far the tommy bar handle should be moved (from 12 to 4 say) and so work the soft rod into the flattened S shaped crank required of the finished component. The makers were having fun using the different kit, especially, the Groz, - they became absorbed in the basic but fundamental metal-forming processes and traditional manufacturing techniques introduced to them - but had to fully concentrate on ensuring that the two bends were executed in the same plane of orientation to avoid twisting the stalk of the cranked trowel stem or out of line with the flattened riveted section.  

[ The Groz metal bender is itself   a thing – converted and worked and cast from material nature (mined raw    iron ore -- made into steel and machine processed)  - made by things – humanised thing makers    (engineers) -  to make small springs,    fixing clips and rings - things for other things; tools, machine parts,    which in their bending, twisting and forming offer a thing maker chance to    transcend its objective thingness in working on this metal material stuff, and objectify its subjective self through the final thing made, which in    the case of machinery and tools may make other things and so on. Such as    clips on a motorcycle in for repair or customisation in Crawford’s American shop. ]       

  The cranked bar was then set in a machine vice on the pillar drill, and a  3mm hole was drilled to take the rivet stalk and slightly larger countersunk hole ( top side) into which the 3mm aluminium rivet stalk would, using a hammer and anvil, be flattened. The wider domed mushroom head of the round rivet traps the thin blade between the stem and blade. To avoid flattening the curvature of the rivet head a purpose-designed hollowed out steel tool -- an exact concaved inverse radius of the convex pip of the rivet fastening -- was used by the participants to protect it when hammering the soft aluminium into the bored out section on the reverse side. This was then also filed flat and finished smooth with emery paper. With this fine fettling the metal-working processes had been completed. Components had all been successfully marked out, cut, shaped, rolled and bent, riveted and finally filed into a recognisable small potting trowel. Everyone in the class (shop) looked dead pleased to have transformed the shapeless bits and pieces of metal into a tool that could be used; but they still had to make the handle out of wood. 

In a small box were a selection of pre-cut handle blanks ready to be matched to the still-shiny trowel parts. There were short 25mm square sections of beech, ash, mahogany, maple, oak and reclaimed pine – all unwanted found offcuts lying around waiting to be made into something useful but beautiful. I explained how that the first task was to set out the curvature required of a rounded handle on the end sections. For example,  a circle is created from a geometrically symmetrical combination of hexagonal flats filed at 45°, then refined further with 22.5° tangents which, if the section diameter was large enough, can be taken closer to a perfect mathematically round profile with 11.25° flats and so on, i.e. angles are halved until  a finite circle is produced. People smile when I say a circle is made of infinite flats, but, in a way, it is. 

The second operation was to drill a hole down the centre of the stock timber with a 6mm drill bit. The wood was set square in a vice on a pillar drill and a hole bored down its core to accommodate the aluminium.                                         

To be honest with you, most of the teachers and ESWs went their own way, freestyling, shaping the wooden parts, integrating underside curves with small finger-shaped hand grips. After the tight discipline of the metal techniques, finishing of the handles with spoke-shaves and rough-sharp rasps into vernacular crafted forms offered the makers a sort of soft therapeutic warm-down. The workshop took on a quieter woody – less hard metallic - aspect; a fresh atmospheric with the room infused by the aroma of the freshly worked old dead growing thing: the trees.

The organic-looking handles were finished with glass paper, students instructed in how to work from the roughing grades, 60 grit through to 100 grit, fining down to 240 flour paper. The job was finished by oiling the timber with Danish oil which brings out the light and shade and twisting lines of wood grain; sealing the material from moisture, and ultimate rotting. The final operation was to cement the riveted trowel section into the completed handle with a small dob of epoxy resin adhesive and stand back and admire; take in what had been achieved in a short after-school making session.

We stood around chatting. People said they’d loved making something. One said it had de-stressed him. Another couldn’t wait to take it home to show others. Some said nothing, but admired their handiwork. A few critiqued their own trowel, then complimented other’s workmanship. Phone cameras came into play. After we all packed away and tidied the workshop up ready for the next D&T school day – vacuum forming plastic bugs for students to stick googly eyes onto – everybody rushed out of the door to get home for tea. But one person hung back. She said to me ‘I’ve really enjoyed making this. Being in the workshop was just what I needed’. Good, I thought, and said ‘I’m glad’. She said ‘No more than that Steve…I needed this’. She paused. Looked a bit upset. She told me she’d had a horrible day. Awful and terrible because she was in personal conflict with a co-worker. The situation was unbearable. The emotional pain almost tortuous, nearly breaking her, she reckoned. So upset, she just wanted to go home; get out of the place. She’d forced herself to stay on. But holding up the trowel said ‘I’m so glad I stuck it out – I’m dead proud of making this’. She waved about the trowel as if digging the earth. It might only be a small thing, she admitted, but the trowel had proved something, her soul was restored, she had something to use and show for herself.        The Trowel project will feature in Museum of Making workshop programming 2021

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[vramcpu]

Invisible Impact

How perception is affected by the interconnectedness of aesthetics, mediums, and ideologies.

Written by Ramirez De Leon

“In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained — ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Note: This work is not a critique or analysis of politics. It is merely a look at different philosophical and artistic perspectives as they influence the perception of the self within culture. First, we take a look at the impact of mediums, next ideology and commodities, and finally habitus.

I.) MEDIUMS

“What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed word. The printed words sets up a paradigm, a structure of awareness which affects everybody in very, very drastic ways, and it doesn’t very much matter what you print as long as you go on in that form of activity.”

- MM

As an artist, as someone who walks in the unknown uncertainty of creativity, I understand that the work we do as artists has an impact beyond immediate description.

A work’s “non-descriptiveness” allows it to be felt intensely regardless of language, culture, or identification. It is an affect that is grossly underrated and under-discussed. This subject matter is rarely discussed or expressed because people are trained to think in a gross materialistic way at a very young age. Materialistic indoctrination forces one to see artwork (or creative projects) as merely products. (or as means to an end).

“Creativity is uncertain. To be creative you must get into the indeterminacy of your own structure, your own knowledge, your own future , one of the large control systems that you have in your head and in your body says… that for survival of the individual and survival of the race, these are the railroad tracks you have to travel. That may or may not be true. And we know that it’s true within certain limits, but these limits probably can be enlarged. We also know that in the software of your own brain, the province of your own mind, this is not really that necessary. We have sufficient computing capacity within our own structures, our own brains, so that we can turn over to a very small part of that computing capacity for the necessary programs for survival…you can have alternative futures, you can have alternative programming you don’t have to keep going round and round survival tape loop…”

- John C. Lilly

Oppression is not merely in the physical, economic, or material sense. Nor is it merely large entity versus the small entity. Oppression is often an ideologically materialistic , passive means of asserting dominance over the essence of creativity, true expression and new ideas. Oppression in its most basic form can be a concocted collection of institutionalized assumptions that repress possibilities of creative thinking.

Furthermore, we cannot underestimate the power of mediums themselves. To ignore the power of the medium or to maintain our ignorance to the medium is to refuse excellence in our art, thinking, and profession. This lack of awareness of the medium may be a direct hindrance to happiness and enjoyment in life.

For those not in a constant state of fight for survival, what must be obtained is the consciousness of the evolving medium that is the communication of our digital selves (avatars).

And so the title [The Medium is the Massage] is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral — it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were…

— MM

Mediums: the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses (or that force that acts on objects at a distance.) are indeed very powerful. Ultimately, our experience in the material sense is exactly that, a stimulating encounter with that information derived from the senses (engagement with the unseen and seen, where material objects have the leading role). This means that the objects we encounter in themselves are created works, and therefore can have just as much impact (or more) than those objects that we call and designate as “art”(those objects which we intend to be treated, viewed, and considered to be “works of art”).

We are not at odds with ideas solely, or primarily (as many might suggest). We are at odds with objects and their suggested implications. We are at odds with the roles that we have assumed and the mediums which carry the polarizing and sometimes offensive ideas.

The medium is allowed to carry a concept or an idea and present it to the eye or ear, and in many cases, when the viewer gives those ideas credence, the medium , as well as it’s objective is able to stealthy infiltrate the attitudes, moods and modes of the now subdued perceiver.

“It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”

— MM

II.) IDEOLOGY and COMMODITIES

“Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.”

- Slavoj Zizek , [Perverts Guide to Ideology, 2012]

If objects as mediums have a profound and sometimes subliminal impact on our perception, then we must also look at commodities of industry. Commodities help establish class and class systems.

Certain objects are often appreciated by those families of certain classes that train their young to appreciate those very objects as well as their cultural significance. These activities and objects, of course, are often guarded by characteristics of economic inaccessibility.

The nature of the fine arts, more specifically oil painting, collectively, helped reinforced a sense ownership, commodity fetishism, and high classism.

“From 1500 to 1900 the visual arts of Europe were dominated by the oil painting, the easel picture, this kind of painting had never been used anywhere else in the world before. The tradition of oil painting was made up of hundreds of thousands of unremarkable works hung all over the walls of galleries and private houses rather in the same way as the reserve collection is still hung in the National Gallery …European oil painting unlike the art of other civilizations and periods placed a unique emphasis on the tangibility. The texture, the weight. the graspability of what was depicted. What was real as what you could put your hands on…. the beginning of the tradition of oil painting, the emphasis on the real being solid was part of a scientific attitude but the emphasis on the real being solid became equally closely connected with a sense of ownership.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Imagine two individuals from very different classes. One is highly rich and the other very poor. It is easy to imagine that in some oil paintings of the 1600s, those wealthier individuals will likely have a different relationship and attitude towards those paintings (especially if they see themselves reflected in those very works).

Many argue for equal representation of minority groups in mass and popular media. If one sees themselves in the artwork around them, then their perception of the world will change.

It is my argument that not only “fine art” or oil paintings in todays era are a reflection and establishment of classes and class structures, but rather, almost any commodity, product, or medium can have a very similar affect. All of these subjects, and how we interact with them, are reflections of class structures and belief systems.

Objects, in a way, force individuals to consider their options and reality in a very specific and sometimes narrow way. It can greatly limit what one perceives to be possible for them within a society. These assumptions further perpetuated by objects and mediums can systematically eliminate the thought of new and positive possibilities that otherwise gain access to the mental faculties of the higher classes.

This can be simply understood as the impact of design on the psyche. Those who appreciate and know that design can affect our reality and our relationship with it know how important aesthetic and utility can be.

The late John Berger, art critic well known for his work entitled “Ways Of Seeing” explains that previously oil painting would show a class of individuals as they were, with their materials and land and lifestyle. These oil paintings reaffirmed their positions in their reality. And on the contrary, our modern era of publicity and advertisement displays a fantasy of who we are not, but wish to one day be. For the modern era, it is not simply about the product but the fantasy and attitude that the product will grant us.

“It was already Marx who long ago emphasized that a commodity is never just a simple object that we buy and consume. A commodity is an object full of theological, even metaphysical, niceties. Its presence always reflects an invisible transcendence. And the classical publicity for Coke quite openly refers to this absent, invisible, quality. Coke is the “real thing”.

— Zizek

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties….. as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.

— Karl Marx, Capital (1867)

III. HABITUS

In sociology, Habitus comprises socially ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is the way that individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar backgrounds (such as social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education and profession).

“Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing.

In one of his major works, Distinction, [Pierre] Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus.

Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.”

The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.

— Social Theory Re-Wired

“The meaning of a painting no longer resides on it’s unique painted surface, which it is only possible to see in one place at one time. It’s meaning ,or a large part of it has become transmittable. It comes to you, this meaning, like the news of an event. It has become information of a sort.” — Justin Berger

In conclusion, I believe that once we acknowledge the affect commodities have on the world beyond their implied and immediately described purpose, if we acknowledge their assumed magical qualities, we will understand that mediums and commodities create a very particular context by which we view ourselves within the world.

These objects quite literally create the structural boundaries in which our imaginations dance. These objects influence the distance in which our imagination travels as well as the means of such travel. It is only until we discuss and acknowledge these invisible qualities that we may consider our own rational alternatives to these prescribed perspectives.

If we are to acknowledge at all the boundaries and limitations that are put on artists and subjects of class, if we have any desire to have a say in how our work as artists is perceived and activated, if we want to change any of these conditions in which we live, if we desire to acquire a taste beyond the commonly associated, false identities; we must begin to learn about these materials, their invisible qualities, and the descriptions that are indeed the basis of our culture.

Twitter — @VRAMCPU

[prolapsarian]

Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers

The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019

There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching, holding. A movement in which the artifice strains between shuddering and juddering. Machinic GIFs seem to frame an event which may or may not have taken place. Their motions appear to combine an endless neurotic repetition and a totally adrenal pumped and pumping tension, anticipating confrontation. 

JBR: How do the heavily stylised triptych of screens in ‘The Searchers’ relate to the GIF-like loops created out of conventionally-shot street footage? DP: I think of the three screens as something like the ‘unconscious’ of these nervous gestures. I’m interested in how video compositing can conjure up impossible or interior spaces, perhaps in a way similar to painting. Perhaps these semi-abstract images can somehow evoke how bodies are shot through with subterranean currents—the strange world of exchange and desire that lies under the surface of reality or physical experience. Of course abstractions don't really ‘inhabit’ bodies and you can’t depict metaphysics, but Paul Klee had this idea about an aesthetic ‘interworld’, that painting could somehow reveal invisible aspects of reality through poetic distortion. Digital video and especially 3D graphics tend to be the opposite of painting—highly regimented and sat within a very preset Euclidean space. I guess I’ve been trying to wrestle with how these programs can be misused to produce interesting images—how images of figures can be abstracted by them but retain some of their twitchy aliveness. JBR: This raises a question about the difference between the control of your media and the situation of total control in contemporary cinematic image making. DP: Under the new regimes of video making, the software often feels like it controls you. Early analogue video art was a sensuous space of flows and currents, and artists like the Vasulkas were able to build their own video cameras and mixers to allow them to create whole new images—in effect new ways of seeing. Today that kind of utopian or avant-garde idea that video can make surprising new orders of images is dead—it’s almost impossible for artists to open up a complex program like Cinema 4D and make it do something else. Those softwares were produced through huge capital investment funding hundreds of developers. But I’m still interested in engaging with digital and 3D video, trying to wrestle with it to try and get it to do something interesting—I guess because the way that it pictures the world says something about the world at the moment—and somehow it feels that one needs to work in relation to the heightened state of commodification and abstraction these programs represent. So I try and misuse the software or do things by hand as much as possible, and rather than programming and rendering I manipulate things in real time. JBR: So in some way the collective and divided labour that goes into producing the latest cinematic commodities also has a doubled effect: firstly technique is revealed as the opposite of some kind of freedom, and at the same time this has an effect both on how the cinematic object is treated and how it appears. To be represented objects have to be surrounded by the new 3D capture technology, and at the same time it laminates the images in a reflected glossiness that bespeaks both the technology and the disappearance of the labour that has gone into creating it. DP: I’m definitely interested in the images produced by the newest image technologies—especially as they go beyond lens-based capture. One of the screens in the triptych uses volumetric capturing— basically 3D scanning for moving image. The ‘camera’ perspective we experience as the viewer is non-existent, and as we travel into these virtual, impossible perspectives it creates the effect of these hollowed out, corroded bodies. This connects to a recurring motif of ‘hollowing out’ that appears in the video and sculpture I’ve been making recently. And I have a recurring obsession with the hollowing out of reality caused by the new regime of commodities whose production has become cut to the bone, so emptied of their material integrity that they’re almost just symbols of themselves. So in my show ‘The Dark Pool’ (Hollybush Gardens, 2014) I made sculptural assemblages with Ikea tables and shelves, which when you cut them open are hollow and papery. Or in ‘Time Crystals’ (Pumphouse Gallery, 2017) I worked with clothes made in the image of the past from Primark and H&M that are so low-grade that they can barely stand washing. We are increasingly surrounded by objects, all of which have—through contemporary processes of hyper-rationalisation and production—been slowly emptied of material quality. Yet they have the resemblance of luxury or historical goods. This is a real kind of spectral reality we inhabit.  I wonder to myself about how the unconscious might haunt us in these days when commodities have become hollow. Might it be like Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, in which through the photographic still the everyday is brought into a new focus, not in order to see what is behind the veil of semblance, but to see—and reclaim for art—the veiling in a newly-won clarity. DP: Yes, I see these new technologies as similar, but am interested in how they don't just change impact perception but also movement. The veiled moving figures in ‘The Searchers' are a strange byproduct of digital video compositing. I was looking to produce highly abstract linear depictions of bodies reduced to fleshy lines, similar to those in the show and I discovered that the best way to create these abstract images was to cover the face and hands of performers when you film them to hide the obvious silhouettes of hands and faces. But asking performers to do this inadvertently produced a very peculiar movement—the strange veiled choreography that you see in the show. I found this footage of the covered performers (which was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more digitally mediated image, and never actually seen) really suggestive— the dancers seem to be seeking out different temporary forms and they have a curious classical or religious quality or sometimes evoke a contemporary state of emergency. Or they just look like absurd ghosts. JBR: In the last hundred years, when people have talked about ghosts the one thing they don’t want to think about is how children consider ghosts, as figures covered in a white sheet, in a stupid tangible way. Ghosts—as traumatic memories—have become more serious and less playful. Ghosts mean dwelling on the unfinished business of the past, or apprehending some shard of history left unredeemed that now revisits us. Not only has no one been allowed to be a child with regard to ghosts, but also ghosts are not for materialists either. All the white sheets are banished. One of the things about Marx when he talks about phantoms—or at least phantasmagorias—is much closer to thinking about, well, pieces of linen and how you clothe someone, and what happens with a coat worked up out of once living, now dead labour that seems more animate than the human who wears it.  DP: Yes, I’ve been very interested in Marx’s phantasmagorias. I reprinted Keston Sutherland’s brilliant essay on how Marx uses the term ‘Gallerte’ or ‘gelatine’ to describe abstract labour for a recent show. Sutherland highlights a vitalism in Marx’s metaphysics that I’m very drawn to. For the last few years I’ve been working primarily with dancers and physical performers and trying to somehow make work about the weird fleshy world of objects and how they’re shot through with frozen labour. I love how he describes the ‘wooden brain’ of the table as commodity and how he describes it ‘dancing’—I always wanted to make an animatronic dancing table.  JBR: There is also a sort of joyfulness about that. The phantasmagoria isn’t just scary but childish. Of course you are haunted by commodities, of course they are terrifying, of course they are worked up out of the suffering and collective labour of a billion bodies working both in concert and yet alienated from each other. People’s worked up death is made into value, and they all have unfinished business. But commodities are also funny and they bumble around; you find them in your house and play with them.  DP: Well my last body of work was all about dancing and how fashion commodities are bound up with joy and memory, but this show has come out much bleaker. It’s about how bodies are searching out something else in a time of crisis. It’s ended up reflecting a sense of lack and longing and general feeling of anxiety in the air. That said I am always drawn to images that are quite bright, colourful and ‘pop’ and maybe a bit banal—everyday moments of dead time and secret gestures.  JBR: Yes, but they are not so banal. In dealing with tangible everyday things we are close to time and motion studies, but not just in terms of the stupid questions they ask of how people work efficiently. Rather this raises questions of what sort of material should be used so that something slips or doesn’t slip—or how things move with each other or against each other—what we end up doing with our bodies or what we end up putting on our bodies. Your view into this is very sympathetic: much art dealing in cut-up bodies appears more violent, whereas the ruins of your abstractions in the stylised triptych seem almost caring.  DP: Well I’m glad you say that. Although this show is quite dark I also have a bit of a problem with a strain of nihilist melancholy that pervades a lot of art at the moment. It gives off a sense of being subsumed by capitalism and modern technology and seeing no way out. I hope my work always has a certain tension or energy that points to another possible world. But I’m not interested in making academic statements with the work about theory or politics. I want it to gesture in a much more intuitive, rhythmic, formal way like music. I had always made music and a few years back started to realise that I needed to make video with the same sense of formal freedom. The big change in my practice was to move from making images using cinematic language to working with simultaneous registers of images on multiple screens that produce rhythmic or affective structures and can propose without text or language.  JBR: The presentation of these works relies on an intervention into the time of the video. If there is a haunting here its power appears in the doubled domain of repetition, which points both backwards towards a past that must be compulsively revisited, and forwards in convulsive anticipatory energy. The presentation of the show troubles cinematic time, in which not only is linear time replaced by cycles, but also new types of simultaneity within the cinematic reality can be established between loops of different velocities.  DP: Film theorists talk about the way ‘post-cinematic’ contemporary blockbusters are made from images knitted together out of a mixture of live action, green-screen work, and 3D animation. I’ve been thinking how my recent work tries to explode that—keep each element separate but simultaneous. So I use ‘live’ images, green-screened compositing and CGI across a show but never brought together into a naturalised image—sort of like a Brechtian approach to post-cinema. The show is somehow an exploded frame of a contemporary film with each layer somehow indicating different levels of lived abstractions, each abstraction peeling back the surface further.  JBR: This raises crucial questions of order, and the notion that abstraction is something that ‘comes after’ reality, or is applied to reality, rather than being primary to its production.  DP: Yes good point. I think that’s why I’m interested in multiple screens visible simultaneously. The linear time of conventional editing is always about unveiling whereas in the show everything is available at the same time on the same level to some extent. This kind of multi-screen, multi-layered approach to me is an attempt at contemporary ‘realism’ in our times of high abstraction. That said it’s strange to me that so many artworks and games using CGI these days end up echoing a kind of ‘naturalist’ realist pictorialism from the early 19th Century—because that’s what is given in the software engines and in the gaming-post-cinema complex they’re trying to reference. Everything is perfectly in perspective and figures and landscapes are designed to be at least pseudo ‘realistic’. I guess that’s why you hear people talking about the digital sublime or see art that explores the Romanticism of these ‘gaming’ images.  JBR: But the effort to make a naturalistic picture is—as it was in the 19th century—already not the same as realism. Realism should never just mean realistic representation, but instead the incursion of reality into the work. For the realists of the mid-19th century that meant a preoccupation with motivations and material forces. But today it is even more clear that any type of naturalism in the work can only serve to mask similar preoccupations, allowing work to screen itself off from reality.  DP: In terms of an anti-naturalism I’m also interested in the pictorial space of medieval painting that breaks the laws of perspective or post-war painting that hovered between figuration and abstraction. I recently returned to Francis Bacon who I was the first artist I was into when I was a teenage goth and who I’d written off as an adolescent obsession. But revisiting Bacon I realised that my work is highly influenced by him, and reflects the same desire to capture human energy in a concentrated, abstracted way. I want to use ‘cold’ digital abstraction to create a heightened sense of the physical but not in the same way as motion capture which always seems to smooth off and denature movement. So the graph-like image in the centre of the triptych (Les Fantômes) in this show twitches with the physicality of a human body in a very subtle but palpable way. It looks like CGI but isn’t and has this concentrated human life force rippling through it. 

If in this space and time of loops of the exploded unstill still, we find ourselves again stuck in this shuddering and juddering, I can’t help but ask what its gesture really is. How does the past it holds gesture towards the future? And what does this mean for our reality and interventions into it. JBR: The green-screen video is very cold. The ruined 3D version is very tender. DP: That's funny you say that. People always associate ‘dirty’ or ‘poor’ images with warmth and find my green-screen images very cold. But in the green-screened video these bodies are performing a very tender dance—searching out each other, trying to connect, but also trying to become objects, or having to constantly reconfigure themselves and never settling. JBR: And yet with this you have a certain conceit built into the drapes you use: one that is in a totally reflective drape, and one in a drape that is slightly too close to the colour of the greenscreen background. Even within these thin props there seems to be something like a psychological description or diagnosis. And as much as there is an attempt to conjoin two bodies in a mutual darkness, each seems thrown back by its own especially modern stigma. The two figures seem to portray the incompatibility of the two poles established by veiled forms of the world of commodities: one is hidden by a veil that only reflects back to the viewer, disappearing behind what can only be the viewer’s own narcissism and their gratification in themselves, which they have mistaken for interest in an object or a person, while the other clumsily shows itself at the very moment that it might want to seem camouflaged against a background that is already designed to disappear. It forces you to recognise the object or person that seems to want to become inconspicuous. And stashed in that incompatibility of how we find ourselves cloaked or clothed is a certain unhappiness. This is not a happy show. Or at least it is a gesturally unsettled and unsettling one. DP: I was consciously thinking of the theories of gesture that emerged during the crisis years of the early 20th century. The impact of the economic and political on bodies. And I wanted the work to reflect this sense of crisis. But a lot of the melancholy in the show is personal. It's been a hard year. But to be honest I’m not that aligned to those who feel that the current moment is the worst of all possible times. There’s a left/liberal hysteria about the current moment (perhaps the same hysteria that is fuelling the rise of right-wing populist ideas) that somehow nothing could be worse than now, that everything is simply terrible. But I feel that this moment is a moment of contestation, which is tough but at least means having arguments about the way the world should be, which seems better than the strange technocratic slumber of the past 25 years. Austerity has been horrifying and I realise that I’ve been relatively shielded from its effects, but the sight of the post-political elites being ejected from the stage of history is hopeful to me, and people seem to forget that the feeling of the rise of the right has been also met with a much broader audience for the left or more left-wing ideas than have been previously allowed to impact public discussion. That said, I do think we’re experiencing the dog-end of a long-term economic decline and this sense of emptying out is producing phantasms and horrors and creating a sense of palpable dread. I started to feel that the images I was making for ‘The Searchers’ engaged with this. David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. A selection of solo and group exhibitions include Pumphouse Gallery, Wandsworth, London, 2017 (solo); Sculpture on Screen. The Very Impress of the Object, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal [Kirschner & Panos], 2017; Nemocentric, Charim Galerie, Vienna, 2016; Atlas [De Las Ruinas] De Europa, Centro Centro, Madrid, 2016; The Dark Pool, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (solo), 2015; The Dark Pool, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, 2015; Whose Subject Am I?, Kunstverein Fur Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2015; The Dark Pool, Hollybush Gardens, London, (solo), 2014; A Machine Needs Instructions as a Garden Needs Discipline, MARCO Vigo, 2014; Ultimate Substance, B3 Biennale des bewegten Blides, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, CentrePasquArt, Biel, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, Extra City, Antwerp, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London, 2013; HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013.

[liamcreativetech]

Movement Statement

Over the last three weeks each of the lecturers have presented us a different definition of movement. This has been really helpful, as the broadness of ‘movement’ makes it easy to latch on to the first definition you come to. I spend the three weeks exploring the concept of movement and motion to find a direction that I thought was interesting and that had enough scope to be turned into a concept for studio.

To me, one of the core aspects and abilities of Creative Technologies is to translate a complex concept into something more accessible. The technology allows the project to exist and function, either in a physical or digital space where an audience can experience it.

The art side of Creative Tech informs the concept, and the conscious and subconscious effect the piece has. It develops the message, and can elicit emotion and thoughtfulness.

These two hemispheres do no work apart, but instead feed to and from each other In a constant feedback look. As a concept informs the specifics, so too do the technicalities affect the aesthetic. This dichotomy is at the heart of the creative technology discipline, and a practitioner must have ‘a foot in each’. Technology and art are hugely broad terms, and each project will enlist one or more previously discrete practices into each category. The outcome of this hybrid practice is greater than the sum of its parts, and not only the work but the workflow itself is unique and distinctive.

This is the aspect of creative Technologies that I am most passionate about – creating moving and thoughtful outcomes that have a valid message or question, and communicating that in a way enabled by technology. The thoughtful and critically creative application of technology can create incredible, impossible experiences for audiences. A conceptual and ideological synaesthesia, a potent translation between once disparate pillars of human experience.

One of my main influences from the lectures was “Meeting the Universe Halfway” [2], a book by Karen Bard. The book is about Agential realism, that existence is secondary to an intra-action, and those agents exist because of the action, not the other way around. This seems counterintuitive and farfetched, but if you take a second to ponder it you begin to look at the world differently.

I like to think there is a difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘believing’ – knowing being conscious thought and memory, and believing being the domain of the subconscious.

By focusing it seems like we can manually interface with our subconscious. You can convince yourself that no object exists without intra-action and that agential realism is the true mechanic of our universe, in a real and tangible sense. You can bridge the gap between knowing and believing, and for a moment your world changes because you’ve changed the way you perceive it. In that moment, things have deeply different instinctive (subconscious /believed) feeling, because you are able to believe a theory like agential realism, instead of just knowing and accepting it, and it becomes the truth that your brain runs on, the unconscious absolutes of your reality.

But the things experienced and intra-acted with exist differently now because they are being perceived and intra-acted with differently. The act of engaging with an agent creates and defines that agent; that is the core idea of agential realism, demonstrated by thinking about agential realism. I love the idea of being able to have influence over your own mind, to have the feeling of experiencing reality through another lens, one that you didn’t know could be changed. Because of this, I was drawn to research how humans experience movement.

First, how do humans perceive or detect movement? Movement can’t exist as an instant. It needs a frame of reference and context.  To identify a movement, we need to know something’s state in the past. With that we can tell how fast and in what direction something is moving. This isn’t just physical, mechanical movements. This could be a social movement, where ideas or opinions spread and move through people and communities, however what interests me most is the physical movement because of its effect on humans. An object moving towards you will trigger a subconscious reaction and sensation.

This has a lot to do with how humans experience time. Unlike computers, time as a human experience is not definite, as we have no internal clock running to second or millisecond accuracy.

As far as movement, an important part is what we experience as “now” – the present. According to many sources [1] our experience of now is not a linear “knife edge” but instead “has a complex texture”. This is known as the specious present – a short duration of time (less than a second) that we experience as ‘now’. One key point is that there is always a ‘center’ to the experience of the present [1], with the trailing events moving from ‘now’ to ‘now but not central now’ to ‘past’.

During my interrogation of what movement was, I had an idea for a project. The idea at first was from Physical computing as a test application for some stepper motors I had bought. I thought it would be interesting to enter a location on earth into a processing sketch and have a ‘pointer’ driver by two stepper motors point at that location. Because we live on a sphere, the location would generally be downwards. As I though more about this idea, I began to see the merits of its concept. We know that country like – for example - Germany exists, but in a somewhat abstract sense. Maybe you think of it on a map, or even as “up” -  as it would be in relation to us on a model globe. What we don’t think of is literally ‘where’ a country would be.

If someone asked you where the Sky Tower or Rangitoto was you would be able to point at them. They are of a scale that we can understand. This goes back to my ‘knowing’ vs ‘believing’ idea – we know we live on a sphere (oval), but we don’t believe it. It isn’t how we relate to the world, because it’s too large.

This little pointing gadget would be a perfect example of that core Creative Technology tenet of translation or transposition. Our ability to understand the gesture of a point, and apply that to the knowledge that this technology has calculated its point to show exactly where a given location is to us can give a momentary collapse of knowing into believing. Even when thinking through the experience of interacting with this piece, you are suddenly aware of the planet, the sphere hurtling through space that we live on. You feel yourself making the connection between the pointer aiming itself at a seemingly arbitrary point on the floor, the significance of that motion, and then the implications of where it is pointing. The planet is at a scale too large for us to believe, we can’t hold that in our subconscious. For a second the Earth shrinks to the size of a ball in front of you, and it feels tangible. This fades and as the instinctive and abstract reconcile, your experience of life and knowledge of where it takes place mesh.

This is where I found my starting point for the studio project, and what aspect of movement I wanted to focus on – the human sensation of movement and how that can be triggered to communicate an idea. Because these reactions are so deeply embedded in our subconscious, they have a large and lasting effect on us – more than a static piece of the same caliber could. Movement can tap into the most primal of human instincts.

The feeling of really ‘being on a planet’ that the pointer idea had made me feel stuck with me. I wanted to interrogate further down this path of inquiry, and see how that could link to movement. The obvious answer is our orbit around the sun. At 500 meters per second, we are all in motion, but the frame of reference and scale mean we don’t experience it. Our senses work on a smaller scale, and depend on the gravity of earth as a stationary constant.

Maybe a pointer that followed the Sun or other celestial bodies could give people the sensation of orbiting by providing an ‘artificial reference point’ for the movement.

 [1]          The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness from: Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science Edited by Jean, Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud abd Jean-Michel Roy Stanford University Press, Stanford Chapter 9, pp.266-329

 [2]          Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning  Author(s): Karen Barad, Published: 2007

[oppyyyy]

Write-Up

Work Statement

Splitting The Sky is a narrative VR experience based in a world in which the boundaries between the virtual and the actual have been dissolved. The experience was created using Unreal Engine, a video games engine capable of running VR in real time. The vulgar, warped views of extreme sexuality has seeped out of online pornography and coalesced with the surface internet. As the player wanders further and further this ‘digital’ world mirrors the way sexuality, power, dominion and abuse have become normalised through this spread. A desolate, ruined city stands alone in an uncanny valley-esque world amalgamated from the digital and the corporeal. As the player comes to, their only tangible company is a giantess who takes an almost sadistic glee in leaving chaos and destruction beneath her, and the cult-like followers that make no effort to proselytise the player, as the world operates through their fetishes. The player experiences manifestations of both trauma and healing; their means of guidance coming through refuge across the world, away from the female gaze of the giantess. This world exists as a postulation of how a digitally pervasive world will cope with therapy in a world where abnormal sexual desires and deviance are normalised; in a world where one brazenly champions another’s desire to be consumed, what measures will we take to seek help? When we live connected to a ubiquitous global system containing more damaging sexual material than any other media- one where its users are consciously using the computer as a means to detach from what they consume- where will the line be drawn before it is considered too far? In spite of this ominous future, Splitting the Sky is designed to encourage players to feel safe in themselves and their own capacity to heal. The concept of ‘healing’ itself is speculative and nebulous- it is something vague, undefined, but also something that one chooses knowingly to seek.  The VR headset is imperative as a subversion of the imprisonment caused by traumatic events; during flashbacks to significant, negative memories the brain feels like a cage one cannot escape from. Using VR, Splitting the Sky is designed to remind players they can heal in these same spaces, with the internal mantra being one of escape- leaving one’s prison and emancipating the mind.

Conceptual Overview

Themes

Initially, I wrote short poetry and notes inspired by the idiosyncrasy and personality of diary writing, and felt there were a lot of continuing themes that I felt worked really well to create visual metaphors and could build the concept of the work. These were elements such as the sword, divine beings, and warping the perception of space and time through traumatic experiences. To sufficiently explore these themes, I decided to combine my research: analysing the progenitive factor in my own interest on the subjects as well as academic studies done more broadly around them. My confessional words reused in a story transformed them (and their meanings) into motifs of my fictional world.

I created moodboards for the narrative (x), visual (x) and sound design (x), that helped me to identify the themes better.

VR

Viewing Jordan Wolfson’s 2017 work ‘Real Violence’ was the catalyst that pushed me to pursue working with VR. Beyond my interest in the concept of alternative perceptions of reality augmented by technology as shown by my previous work, studying VR theory brought those ideas to the surface to build my own method of storytelling, where the protagonist, the user’s perspective, can be a material to directly manipulate. VR holds an interesting dichotomy; although the screen engulfs the senses of the viewer so thoroughly as to make it almost seem real, there is always a disconnect between the body and the brain when using it that reminds us it cannot be real. This idea resonates strongly with the themes presented in Wolfson’s work because it is tense and unsettling while remaining comedic and ironic- a self-awareness that everything does ultimately take place in virtual reality.

I was drawn first to the unsettling, discomforting aspect of Wolfson’s ideas, and that was something I aimed to replicate in my own work early on in the design process. 

I had previously been interested in narrative theory and feminist storytelling, so these interests formed my intention to use VR very early on. The way a story is experienced in VR can be very different to other media, and the theory of VR backed up a lot of ideas I already had.

Giantess

Giantess pornography, and its audience, helped to create a visual language for the work, in order for me to approach trauma on the internet, and its effects on people in real life. To me, the giant sexy woman represented the dichotomy between exploitation and empowerment, seeing as the giantess is used for only sexual purposes in order to satisfy a male. The giantess appears God-like to me, in her power and her alienation, no one can relate to her. (x) I took this and created a Giantess character who was complex and wanted to express that in her words and actions within the story.

I also took words from Giantess porn videos (x) and the comments on those videos (x). I thought the language people used in the comments was very poetic, and felt the heaviness of the statements was diluted by that. This meant there were statements that were extremely derogatory towards women, but represented my point extremely well.

Sound Design

I performed quite a bit of research into the sound design, because in the beginning I was inspired by video game soundtracks (x)(x), and wanted to create a simple soundtrack of my own. I had collected sound effects I liked from synthesisers and FreeSound.org, and even planned what kind of music and sounds would be in each scene. However I felt I didn’t have enough music skills to really push it in the time that I had, and felt the work was still great without sound.

Video Games and Fantasy

Video games, such as Morrowind (x), experimental indie games (x), Metal Gear Solid (x), and more (x), were the basis for a lot of inspiration and research for this project. I felt that a fantasy narrative could be carried really well if I could understand elements of games and ludic game theory (x). As well as this, some lines from my script were lifted from games and recontextualised. This was intended to reference the type of language used in games and fantasy, and create a veil of irony that was both serious and comedic. While the concepts remained quite serious, in order to express this virtual-actual crossover world correctly, I felt it necessary to reference other media.

Healing

Nearing the works completion, I wanted to imagine an ending that could be satisfying and coherent with the rest of the ideas. I thought that in order for this work to be beneficial, rather than cynical and negative, I had to communicate a desire to heal from the personal and collective trauma the work was based on (x). To get to this point I wrote extensively about the theory and concepts of the work (x). The world in which the story takes place exists as a mental and physical space that the ‘user’ becomes involved with whenever they have flashbacks. Therefore the Giantess, the one who suffers and wishes to heal (and escape the world in which she is exploited), should talk directly to the player and pass on a message of healing. In the writing, this worked very well to conclude the work, and works in conjunction with the beginning.

Scenes

Each scene was designed to reflect the landscape of the psyche. The order of the scenes was integral to the story, as the visual and audio aspects needed to work in harmony to tell the story. The player is sent on a journey that is both inside their mind and outside in a fantasy world, meaning that time and place are non-linear. 

Technical Overview

I knew I wanted my work to be displayed in VR for my purpose. I had created a project in Unity for another module project, but I was more interested in using Unreal Engine based on the improved quality of the VR applications I’ve seen using it. I struggled with writing C# scripts in Unity, whereas Unreal Engine used C++. I also noticed that Unreal Engine is used a lot within the professional video games industry, and showing my ability to learn its usage would be a great skill for me to demonstrate. Learning about Unreal Engine was a steep learning curve, as well as learning about functions of Blender beyond what I previously knew.

Getting Started

My starting point with Unreal was learning how the use the interface and the workflow, because I hadn’t used it before. Once I had understood some basics, my next point was to start building the levels I would be using, and planning the storyboard around them. I had sourced models from Unreal Marketplace and elsewhere on the internet for me to create the world with. Before this point I had been working on my own models in Blender, some of which were used in the final product. These models were characters within the work, and some floating island models to place in a level to show more fantasy. I knew how to place assets within a world and transform them already, due to working with Unity before. A lot of models already had materials, but for some objects I created my own materials using Unreal Material Blueprints. Some of these materials were dynamic and complex. I used textures downloaded from [the internet] and imported into the engine.

World Building

When creating the levels, I had a lot to take into consideration. For most levels, terrain had to be built, sculpted, and textured using Unreal’s materials. For one of the levels, I had to create a custom skybox. I had researched into creating my own environment (in Blender or Unreal) that I would take a 360º render of to make a skybox texture with, but it would’ve taken a lot of time that I didn’t want to invest in something like that. Lighting was important to consider when building levels because I wanted the best performance while every level could still feel polished and complete. Early in the project, I was unsure what was necessary for the best VR performance, so I stripped a lot of things back in order to understand what was necessary and what wasn’t, and to understand what I could learn.

Lighting

Unreal allows for a lot of great visual effects through different types of volumes and lighting scenarios. I found that I mostly wanted very well-lit levels without too many harsh shadows, so a Sky Light and a Directional Light was necessary. A directional light acts as a kind of sun-light, that isn’t dependant on position, only the angle of the light source. There can be more than one directional light in a level to create more light, and it was necessary for some scenes such as the Giantess scene in the beginning. There can only be one sky light in a level, as this acts as an ambient light, that captures distant parts of the level and uses those colours as a light. It allows for softer, lighter shadows.

VR Pawn

Once the levels had been reached a state I was happy to move on with and I had planned where the player would stand and the path they would walk while editing, I wanted to create a VR camera class and pawn in C++, because I had noticed a lot in Unreal was created using Blueprints, and I wanted to show some programming in the work. I followed a tutorial I found online, and created a very simple VR Game Mode and VR Pawn (x). I only really wanted the HMD movement and to be able to move the Pawn around the scene, so I didn’t invest any time in interaction at this point. I had created all the levels in one project, and at this point, I migrated those levels into a new blank C++ project. This allowed me to get rid of any clutter of assets and write my own simple code.The VR Pawn had a camera component attached to its root component, so later on in the project, I used attached the pawn to an empty object that could be moved around in Sequencer, which I learned to do from a tutorial about using Sequencer with VR (x).

Reflection

I think the skills I learned helped me to fully realise the work. There were times that were extremely difficult, but I was able to continue and do my best to find out any method I could to complete a task.

Exhibition

Audience Engagement

I expected some people to engage much with a narrative VR experience in a group exhibition, so I was cautious about the kinds of visuals that people would see when first putting on the headset, and I was mindful of the length of the whole piece, as well as the lengths of each scene. I wanted to communicate an intended method of experience for the audience in my installation with comfortable beanbags and a relaxed VR setup, with no controllers or headset stand. I wanted this to invite people to put on the headset and sit down and just watch. With regards to the piece itself, I am satisfied with the overall experience. The installation itself was not excessively busy, allowing everyone who participated time to immerse themselves physically with the beanbags as well as through the headset. Each time I returned, I saw people exclaiming how much they were enjoying it, and I received numerous instances of very positive feedback.

Throughout the project I made sure I told people about my ideas and got feedback. This really helped me to make clear and effective choices with concepts. During and after the exhibition, I had many people approaching me to talk about my work. From these discussions I felt I learned more about my own intentions and how my work could be interpreted by others. These discussions also helped me to know where the work could go in the future, because I will definitely continue to work on this.

I was particularly proud to have been congratulated on my work by such a spectrum of artistic backgrounds. People with no knowledge of computing were extremely complimentary about the visuals and overall immersive quality of the experience; my fellow students praised me for the scale of it and I was approached by established artists offering me opportunities to work with them based on my aptitude with Unreal Engine and the unique concepts I used; some saw a connection within the themes of my work with work they have produced.

Contribution

Towards the exhibition itself, I was in a separate room with another student. I repainted the walls of the room and cleaned it out to ensure it was fit to hold two exhibits without clashing for space; I helped many other students with cleaning and repairing walls, as well as tidying the space to keep it as clean as possible visually. I helped run the bar for an hour during the middle of the night so that other people had a chance to speak to the audiences for their work, but I feel my most significant contribution was organising Curator’s Day for our exhibition. I arranged for a curator and two artists to come and visit the exhibition two days after it opened, when it was less busy, so that everyone involved would have an opportunity to have a professional appraisal and receive feedback that I felt would be beneficial for everybody. The evening was received well and saw another high attendance, so I felt thoroughly involved in what was a successful attempt to invite more people into the exhibition space and have the students want to talk, and want to feel more engaged with the whole exhibition.

Conclusion

Planning

I kept a sketchbook with me at almost all times that I made a lot of notes and sketches in. I kept my blog as up-to-date as possible most of the time, and I felt that really helped me during production and planning. I could look back at ideas I had or images I had reblogged to refresh my mind.

I feel I was quite successful with planning my time spent on the work, it seemed as though lots of things changed along the way which sometimes made planning very difficult. Some small issues took a long time to fix, and a lot of work was sometimes produced very quickly. The project presented a massive learning curve for me, but I felt I stayed on top of everything quite well. I also managed well with scaling back the project when I knew I couldn’t complete things before the deadline. I didn’t miss out on the quality of the work that way, and made sure it never felt incomplete.

How I Feel

Ultimately, I feel strong senses of pride and catharsis having completed my work. Everything I produce is innately tied to my own life and emotions; this more than any other was connected to me emotionally. On a purely personal level, it has filled me with incredible confidence and joy to see a major piece of work that is so intrinsically linked to me- not only on public display, but received so unanimously well. I am extremely proud with the techniques I have learned on Unreal Engine; having taught myself for the entire duration of the task, I am now a considerably more talented digital artist- but knowing I attained the ability through my own work ethic is something I am equally elated over.

If I had more time then I would have worked more on aspects of the sound design. I originally envisaged creating my own soundtrack, embellished with a host of ambient sounds across the world to truly foster a sense of immersion and characterising the world a little more. I would also liked to have added more major and unique voices across the cast; it proved too difficult to source people who were able to fit the voices I wanted within the timeframe. I am very pleased to be able to say that I do not feel the lack of these detracts from the overall experience whatsoever; it is more a sense of knowing what could have been that lingers. I would also like to explore more player interaction to allow for deeper storytelling. I wanted the work to be more like a video game, and I don’t think I’m far from achieving that in the future.

This leads into my plans for the future, however. Splitting the Sky has shown that it I am capable of producing the work that initially feels too daunting; I know now that I have the ability to visualise the projects I have thought of for years. Furthermore, displaying my own personal vulnerabilities in my work was necessary for me but not something I felt comfortable with; for the first time now I have a successful reference piece that I can use to remind myself that my work can be valid and powerful. I will feel more at ease conveying work that deals with trauma; to be offered opportunities in the immediate future because of it is something I am truly grateful for.

Being so personally involved with every level of running the event has given me a hunger to be engaged with more exhibitions. I was content previously to simply dream up work, whereas I feel a voracious desire to display what I do for people to see in a way I previously have never felt. Finally, in terms of my personal development as a consequence of the project, there were an absurd number of times where it felt Sisyphean and that I was simply making no progress. I have never showed more determination in my life than in completing this project; I feel that my perseverance alone has helped me grow significantly. The task has been a deeply poignant one for me; there were many times I believed it was insurmountable. Having completed it and had time to assess it, I feel it was a successful venture for both myself and my growth as an artist.

[calibanfilesystem-blog]

CALIBAN Design Inspirations

Here’s a meaty post on my thoughts on some inspirational game design mechanics and how they will relate to Caliban.

What am I suppos- oh I died...

My definition of a survival game is as follows: A sudden-death system which pits the user against an increasing set of challenges while slowly doling out the tools needed to survive and push further against them.

In a way, despite the savage “sudden death” nature of such games, the feeling of slowly pushing into what was initially an impenetrable system is an amazing motivator and I’ve found survival games to be the most rewarding. Same as learning to code, or learning piano, or slowly realizing the person you fancy isn’t out of your league after all. Or that the life you’ve always wanted but seemed impossible maybe isn’t so far fetched...

Another aspect I like about them is the desire to *see content*. You WANT to know what lies in the fog because I feel like, deep down, once you understand the basic rule-set, you want to *see which rules the game will break*. Personally, this has always been a huge motivator for me in games, and my favorite items you find usually have the most poetic usage descriptions and allow you to break an established rule you took for granted. I.e. (”Allows the user to fly.” “Can mind-swap with enemies.” “Allows user to eat coins.”)

The following are some games which I feel exemplify these qualities.

Forbidden Desert - A dead simple survival board game with such a tight rule-set, it lays bare the minimum you could need for an engrossing survival/exploration experience. I have ported the game to the computer in the past and I was very interested in the percentages and probabilities involved. I.e. a game on “Standard Mode” usually gives you a base ~45% success rate on any given action whereas “Hard Mode” puts you at ~25%.

7th Continent - This system has re-written the rules for what is possible in a board game. This game exemplifies the idea of introducing methods of interacting with the system you never considered before. I.e. using a magnifying glass to inspect a card’s artwork, solving visual puzzles with nothing but your brain and receiving cryptic clues that reward you with no special game mechanics, only the knowledge that they exist. I will certainly be taking a page from this book while thinking about Caliban.

Subnautica - Proves the efficacy of the powerful motivator behind simply wanting to see content. The entire purpose for your explorations deeper and deeper into the depth of an alien ocean is the drive to simply *see*. It is an almost objective fact that the deep sea is l33t, and the game scratches that itch so well. I want Caliban to have a similar drive to see what kinds of exotic and interesting species of softwares you’ll find out in the desert...

Seafall - This game exemplifies the idea of adding and changing the rules of the game at run-time. Playing through this board game with a group of committed friends was an absolutely exhilarating and unique experience. The game got major flak in mainstream reviews for not having rules that cover the edge cases you’d find yourself in (IRL undefined exceptions LOL) but if you look past that, this game was constantly re-inventing itself as you played. It shifted from competitive resource trading game, to war game, to exploration/puzzle game and towards the end it was a co-op survival game. Not to mention the reward mechanic of physically adding rules to the rule-book by way of stickers... also LOL the box said “batteries included” but you didn’t know what they would be used for until 66% through the game. Genius motivational mechanic.

What the fuck is this?

In my opinion, true puzzle games of quality are very hard to find. My definition of a “true” puzzle game is as follows: A cryptic system in which the tools to untangle it reside within the system itself and can be solved with no outside intervention. In other words, it’s what we lowkey wish the real world was. I do not consider games which rely on randomness, cultural trivia, or overly complex game mechanics to be true puzzle games. Those are excuses for poor game design. True puzzle games can and do exist with *one* game mechanic. True puzzle games are among the hardest in the gaming world. I admire that about them and have actively been seeking them out for years. These are some notable examples that I know of. I will be taking a lot of guidance for how they pace and implement real-world puzzles and look to them for structural guidance on how to implement the ideas that I have for the puzzles in Caliban.

You’ll probably see that certain games are missing that are supposed to be “good”. That’s for a reason and if you want to know why, then message me or just fuck off.

The Talos Principle - Yea, probably my all-time favorite video game. I could gush for pages. However I want to keep this focused on how this relates to Caliban. Specifically, how the puzzles and story relate to the digital nature of the game deeply inspires me. The story *is* the story of a digital consciousness, told through a pseudo-biblical filter. I am going to be taking some pointers from this when I am shaping the myth and story of Caliban.

Obduction - The latest game out of Cyan Studios (creator of you-know-what) truly couldn’t give any less of a shit about you or if you come anywhere close to beating it. Yes, to a fault. Its not as confrontational as Hackmud (below) but it certainly dangles a story-carrot in front of your face (which is as obtuse and unsolvable without a walkthrough as the notorious maze puzzle). Most unforgivably, the game is plagued by a fucking stupid walk speed and straight up tedious animations. If it takes more than 5 seconds to input a “code” into your “number lock” to test it, then fuck that and fuck you.

Hackmud - This game makes me LOL. I haven’t settled on how I feel about it and it is the last game I have been seriously into before starting this project. The gameplay here IS building a codebase. The game is a puzzle box you throw your code against and try to make progress. I am thinking about how I would like to integrate coding into Caliban, whether I will detect and forbid automation, hacking, coding etc.. or if I will embrace it. The downside to embracing it is that you alienate your non-coder audience and you start designing challenges under the assumption that your player base is code-savvy. What do you think about this? Sound off in the GIVE FEEDBACK section!

Harry’s Puzzle - I love, love love this game. You can play it in its entirety right here. What I love about this game is how it is always there, always lurking. You can resume your progress just by going to the right URL. You can take your time, maybe years, chipping away at the puzzle, and communities have spring up around it. Maybe, maybe Caliban can aspire to such fame? Such renown? Such infamy? LOL, not my intention, but the ruthlessness and difficulty of Harry’s puzzle is something to keep in mind.

So what’s in it for me?

So, some people just don’t get games. They just don’t. I completely understand that. I mean, at the end of the day, what do you get out of them? What’s the point? “Seems like a waste of time if you ask me...” And beating a game almost always leaves you with a unique feeling of... loss. You shut the game down after the credits and... then what? Did you just waste 10 hours? 10 days? 10 months? I mean, I’m of the opinion that its *cool* to beat a game. Its *cool* to be good at video games, but I completely respect differing opinions.

For Caliban, I want your progress and eventual completion to be tangibly rewarded. I want you to leave the game with pieces of software you could not have gotten from anywhere else. Whether its a nice music box program that plays some chip-tune, or a unique little desktop physics widget, or a piece of interactive poetry, or a desktop sculpture or anything. I want this game to have tangible takeaways, and finally a piece of totally epic trophyware for those who reach the journey’s end.

Here are two games that I feel genuinely reward you in completely unique and satisfying ways and which I will be drawing heavy inspiration from.

Samorost 3 - The carrot on the stick in this game is music. As your progress through the game, you are simply rewarded with a new instrument track you can then trigger in the special music menu. That’s it. Those are your prizes. Each achievement you get adds new capabilities to your music-making arsenal and if that isn't the most beautiful and wholesome reward system, I really don’t know what is. Check out this link to see it in action. HIGHLY RECOMMEND

The Return of the Obra Dinn - This game is a utter masterpiece. The reason why I have it way down here in the “rewards” section is because i don’t know why, fuck off. But anyways, the eventual reward for completing this game is finding out what the fuck happened on the Obra Dinn. You are presented with disparate chapters of a story, told mostly in reverse, with a crucial chapter missing. If you don’t complete the game in its entirety, you never get to see this missing chapter and the story remains with a gaping plot hole. This is genius, I mean I’m kind of a nautica-phile so this was enough for me to keep progressing but I just love the idea of holding the story as the final reward. It may seem a given, like “yea you beat the game you get to see the end to the story”, but something about Obra Dinn was different. It wasn’t about seeing the ending, (the ending is actually where you begin) but seeing the exact pivotal moment the story rotates around was an amazing motivator. Thinking about this while I write Caliban.

What are you trying to tell me?

So, something I am not going to do is post my story. The story is something I will not be revealing until I am comfortable with the final release to keep it a surprise. But here are some influences I am taking into account:

Scheherazade

It’s Such a Beautiful Day

The Tempest (Caliban)  What, you thought the title was an accident? ;-)

Ok! So, here we are at the end. Woof. You still here? Wow. I love it. If you’re reading this, then welcome to The Inner Circle. Sound off in the GIVE FEEDBACK section and make yourself known. If you think I’m not going to reward “Day One fans” in-game then you’re CRAZY! You’ll be considered a VIP in the project and your constant feedback will help drive development forwards and who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself rewarded in more than one way :-)

Up next will be my roadmap on my first few steps on this journey and some milestones I will be trying to reach in the coming weeks.

Till next time  - M

[amypca]

Photobooks: In-depth by Matt Dunne.

With the explosion of photography books and photobook publishing it can seem, at times, that photobooks are ubiquitous, or maybe even a bit played out. Yet, as a form and as a process, the photobook still offers artists the ability to create something that’s a unique expression of a body of work or photographic approach. In a lot of ways, in the present moment it seems that photobooks are the dominant end point for photography.

With many people looking at photography on a screen, a book becomes an attractive next step as it is cheap enough to be accessible (especially compared to the astronomically expensive print) and tangible enough to justify its existence. Screens aren’t really something that engages physicality or touch, books do. Equally, from an artists’ point of view, books offer substantial creative expression: making a book is an artistic act. When the artistic interests of makers and the purchasing habits of fans align, there is a rich space for production and development: it’s actually a really good thing. I’d argue this confluence is underpinning the increase in photobook production and interest.

Importantly, for both artists and fans, photobooks offer fantastic access. While cultural commentators in London, New York or Paris are often quite grandiose and assured in sweeping dismissive statements (‘too many books’!), I feel that they forget there’s the rest of the world out there.

Vincent Delbrouck, Dzongchen

However, photobooks are often a misunderstood medium or, at least, often an over-simplified medium. I think the most frustrating overlooked truth about photography books is that the book is not the work. ‘The work’ encompasses all the material within a project: the photographs, the writing, the planning, the thinking, the ephemera. Many artists, when speaking about books, seem to gloss over this point. What a project is and what a book becomes can often be quite different.

“While COVID put a halt to many photography exhibitions last year, we saw a rise in photo book publications, as artists tried to engage with their audience through non-digital, socially-distanced means. It also gave artists space to consider other benefits of the book form in presenting a photographic series. A book run can cost significantly less than producing and framing exhibition prints, a book’s audience can be geographically broader, the viewer can have repeat encounters with it, and its lifespan is longer than any exhibition and even the life of its creator. The theory of haptics also implies that our emotional response to, and memory of, images in a book, will be much greater than viewing the same images on a wall.”– Libby Jeffery, Momento Pro

Jordan Madge, Banana Spider Bite

Another way to think about these books is that they seek to replicate the white cube gallery experience: typified by a lot of white space between photographs, minimal (or no) text and rarely any design. Does this approach suit the project and form? Does replicating the austerity and distance created in white cube galleries work well within a more intimate and personal experience of holding a book? For me it so rarely does, it feels like driving at two speeds. These books are almost exclusively concerned with photographs, but a book isn’t photographs: it’s a book.

My Thoughts on this article

As I come closer to my photobook whilst creating - i found that this article put some thing into perspective for me. Such as thinking of a photobook not as a readable object but as an experience - a concept that can be passed on through photographic visuals. To me, this concept is a construction of experiences to me had by finding the theme through their work and interacting with that subject matter for yourself.  

LINKS:

https://photocollective.com.au/in-depth/matt-dunne/photobooks/

[clarasjournal]

Gatherings from the literature

Hornecker & Buur (2006): “Getting a grip on Tangible Interaction: A framework on Physical Space and Social Interaction”.

I had a bit of a hard time with this paper. I found it a bit complicated and hard to grasp - even if their intention is to make tangible interaction more graspable than before this paper.... They wanted to inform readers about the importance of creating a new conceptual understanding of tangible interaction, specifically in relation so social interaction and user interaction experience. To do this they presented their framework of four themes: tangible manipulation, spatial interaction, embodied facilitation and expressive representation. They continuously highlighted the relation between material/physical artifacts and social aspects of interaction. I can agree that this is an important distinction because what we interact with on a screen is fairly hidden away from everyone else, but interacting with something physical in a physical space with other people is highly transparent and visible - so of course social aspects impact the way we interact with physical artifacts in contrast to digital artifacts set on a screen.

I found it interesting how they brought up how we point to something in physical spaces and adjacent people are able to follow the direction of the finger to know what we’re pointing at. We can’t do this in the digital world - a concrete example is when holding a presentation on zoom. Try to point at a picture on your screen and everyone who watches you on their screen will become confused.

An insight I will take with me and hopefully be able to think about during this project is that physical and digital objects should be of the same significance, otherwise the physical objects might seem redundant and out of place. The main insights from the case studies that I gathered:

(case 1) TEI allows for a shared understanding since we share the same space and work at the same thing simultaneously

(case 2) TEI can be both “lightweight” as they describe it, I would say easy to use, and allow for developing skill.

(case 3) TEI can be great to have in a museum or exhibition setting where the people can actively participate and explore the artifacts.

All in all, designers of TEI should consider different aspects and themes for different purposes.

Jansen et al. (2015): “Opportunities and Challenges for Data Physicalization”:

I had a better and easier time with this article, and I found it really interesting. It was more direct to the points and used a fairly simpler language for me to understand at least. They argued for using data physicalization in order to emphasize, share data, communicate efficiently and “realize” complex data. I thought it was very interesting to read about how data physicalization has the potential to explain complexities in a graspable way through using multiple senses instead of only vision that we’re used to. It’s an interesting notion that we as humans extract data through all of our senses, not just our eyes, and that we have a lot to gain as a designer to design with multiple senses in mind. An important insight I will take with me that I haven’t really paid much attention to before is to use multiple senses in combination with each other rather than separating them. This stuck with me: “... a smooth surface like glass or metal tends to be highly reflective, feels cold when touched, and silent when caressed. All these cues together participate in the perception of a single integrated physical property, ‘smoothness’” (Jansen et al., p. 5, 2015). Another sentence to further strengthen this insight is: “... touching a physical object can reveal a whole set of addition information such as texture, stiffness, temperature, and weight - it becomes a haptic display of information” (Jansen et al., p. 3, 2015). I think that using more senses than vision opens up for greater interactivity. The only thing that I’m skeptical of is whether this physicalization reduces the complexity of raw data that is not able to be felt or experienced. Such as hard numbers and such... 

I liked the idea of an active observer that needs to explore the physical artefact in order to extract the data encoded in its materiality. It engages the user and demands active perception of multiple senses. When we’re able to find out information ourselves I believe the data sticks with us more than if someone were to tell us the information using numbers and words. This reminded me of a field trip I was on when I was in pre- or middle school, where we were sent off to an explorative museum where we were demanded to touch, feel and explore everything in the building. Nothing was off limits, nothing was “fragile” or could break through interaction. The link to this place: http://www.navet.com. Might be in Swedish.

The challenges of data physicalization was interesting to know about too, and I believe there might be more challenges than the authors of this paper decided to bring up. One important challenge, especially in these corona-times, is that it’s difficult to share these data physicalizations over distance. We can share snapshots of them but they are of course best experienced when you’re physically present with them. 

References:

Hornecker, Eva & Buur, Jacob. (2006). Getting a grip on tangible interaction: A framework on physical space and social interaction. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 1. 437-446. 10.1145/1124772.1124838.

Jansen, Y., Dragicevic, P., Isenberg, P., Alexander, J., Karnik, A., Kildal, J., Subramanian, S., & Hornbaek, K. (2015). Opportunities and challenges for data physicalization. In CHI '15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3227-3236). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702180

[entergamingxp]

Outer Wilds and the Beauty of Emergent Gameplay Design

February 4, 2020 10:00 AM EST

Sometimes, discovering what your objective is can be your objective in and of itself, which makes the gameplay of Outer Wilds so compelling.

Editor’s Note: mild spoilers for Outer Wilds concepts are present in this editorial. Specific details and plot elements are kept as vague as possible, but but this is a game best experienced blind. Exercise caution before reading, but do play the game first and come back to this editorial after. It’s worth your time.

Had I played Outer Wilds in 2019, it would inevitably have been in my recent Top 10 list. A safe estimate would probably be that it would be #4, since it didn’t impact me quite as much as Disco Elysium, but I digress. What I’m saying is that Outer Wilds is an excellent video game, and I’m glad that I got the chance to tackle it recently.

Now, I would absolutely like to spend the rest of this article gushing about specific parts of Outer Wilds that I liked, including hugely interesting moments or revelations…but I won’t. Much of the charm and fascination that I had with Outer Wilds came from solving its mysteries entirely on my own. It might not be like that for others, but figuring things out entirely from a smattering of clues or acting on unspoken cues was a huge highlight for me.

You begin Outer Wilds by waking up on your home planet of Timber Hearth, staring up at the stars. You’re about to launch on your first space flight, and the opening section serves as a tutorial for many elements of the game you’ll come to experience. One big story beat happens, and then you will launch into space. At this point, freedom is yours! Anywhere you’d like to go in the solar system is completely open to you, once you’ve come to grips with the flight systems. You’ll never get any more tools or permanent upgrades beyond what you start with: the Scout Launcher, Signalscope, jetpack, and your spaceship.

The NPCs will offer a couple of basic suggestions: take a practice trip to the nearby moon? Or perhaps you’d like to meet up with the other explorers from Timber Hearth for tips and advice? The choice of actions you take is yours…up until the Sun promptly goes supernova after 22 minutes, ending all life in the solar system. Yes, that includes yours. After that, you begin once again on Timber Hearth, waking up and staring at the stars. Your ship computer carries over any points of interest or notes that you discovered, but that’s it. Time to do it again…and again…until you start figuring out what is happening and if this abrupt ending to the universe could possibly be prevented.

A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma

What follows for the duration of Outer Wilds is a rhythm of learning the workings of the solar system. Each planet offers a set of unique challenges, and solving them will reveal more parts of a bigger mystery. A precursor race left behind traces of many interlinked science projects, and their notes will frequently reference other places or experiments taking place on wholly different planets.

It struck me fairly early on that the only thing I was doing to progress was simply furthering my understanding of the game’s mechanics and setting. This is hardly a unique case, but Outer Wilds is extremely hands-off in letting the player solve this system-sized puzzle. You can’t make the puzzles easier by upgrading your jetpack or oxygen tanks. Ship upgrades to withstand hazards don’t exist. There’s no weapons, and any hazards you find just have to be navigated around.

From beginning to end, I was driving the entire experience forward. A mystery laid before me, expertly crafted and divided into several different information clusters that organically flowed between each other. It became a massive web of science fiction intrigue, and I just had to keep going and see it through to the end. There was always that timer in the back of my mind, yet death by supernova or other hazard was but an inconvenience…and other times, a hasty reset was exactly what I needed to catch a window of opportunity.

A single loop was rarely the same. Sometimes I’d try to act on a hint I’d picked up along the way, only to be missing something crucial to aid my understanding. I’d hurtle into the side of cliffs by accident, park my ship in a place that saw it ejected into space without me, or overestimated distances and run out of oxygen in a cave somewhere. Perhaps I’d uncover a clue about a timed event that would happen ten minutes earlier in a loop, so I’d close out the remaining time by attempting to jetpack to the next planet over. Sometimes, the music would start to signal the end of the loop, and I’d just wait it out by watching the end.

And in some loops…I’d just explore, or try different things without aim. How close could I skirt to the sun to gravity slingshot away? How far out of the system could I make it? Outer Wilds would sometimes possess the atmosphere of a horror game, leaving me tense as I raced against the clock to accomplish some objective I had set. But on other loops I was far more relaxed, just taking in the environment or experimenting with the mechanics further. Having the fear of death and significant consequences removed was relaxing; I could just enjoy and find the unspoken objectives at my own leisurely pace.

Closing the Loop

There is an ending to Outer Wilds, mind you. The mystery does eventually unfold, and a conclusion is reached. I overcame one final loop, fraught with danger and even the threat of permanent consequences this time around. But eventually, all the puzzle pieces were in place, I watched the ending, and I was able to roast a marshmallow one more time before the credits rolled. The sensation was…bittersweet. Finishing the game was an accomplishment, and I’m proud that I managed to reach it. But there’s a pervasive knowledge now that will forever color any attempts that I have to play Outer Wilds again. You can never go back to the first time…we can never experience those same sensations again.

The pervading knowledge is mechanical, also. All the tools and trinkets available from the start will carry you through to the end; what changes is simply the understanding of what you can accomplish with them. Some clues are less about the game’s core mystery, and more hints as to entire laws of physics. One simple sentence in the game — which I won’t spoil — absolutely blew my mind once I processed the practical implications. Subsequent “Ah-hah!” moments of the game felt like major triumphs the likes of which I so rarely experience in games nowadays.

This brings us neatly to the core element of what works so well in Outer Wilds: emergent gameplay design. At no point did the game do anything more than nudge me out into the solar system. I could go anywhere, do anything, and act purely on self-motivation and curiosity. Everything I needed was right in front of me from the outset, but my willingness to play with the systems and explore lead to massive revelations and ramifications. Even stumbling through the tutorial has a looseness to its structure. Hell, revisiting that opening section later in the game made me really just how many future clues had been hinted at there, hiding in plain sight.

I play a significant amount of RPGs; grinding experience, gathering stronger equipment, and attaining incremental upgrades to overall power is familiar territory to me. There’s objectives to complete, requests to answer, rewards to attain, achievements to grind…as much as I quite enjoy these gameplay loops, it can truly start to become a little too structured. Some games end up feeling too much like busywork and maintenance.

“You can never go back to the first time…we can never experience those same sensations again.”

But without that kind of gameplay hook, many players might feel lost or overwhelmed. What’s our next step? What must we do from here? If I can’t best this challenge, what can I do to ease future attempts? Abandoning these essential questions and leaving it up to the player to craft answers is a bold move. It’s to the absolute credit of Mobius Digital that Outer Wilds managed to pull this off with such aplomb. The preservation of the ship log, the marker within if there’s a remaining clue, and a handful of audio cues are all the guidance you’ll be receiving. There’s no mechanical benefit to completing anything; your reward is writing to read, and knowledge for future loops.

Even games of an exploratory, free-form nature tend to fall back on markers and progression systems. Minecraft has a progression system through various equipment tiers, assuming you don’t just take to Creative Mode and build things. Breath of the Wild is large and rewards exploration with unique vistas, but also tangible rewards of shrines or Korok seeds.

Unspoken Player Guidance

Strangely, the game that I most liken to Outer Wilds is Super Metroid. Landing on planet Zebes in Super Metroid, Samus is isolated. The atmosphere is oppressive, despite your weapons and abilities. But the opening sections of the game are a masterclass of game design. Super Metroid subtly guides the player to their first handful of upgrades, encouraging them to figure out what they can do with subtle prompts, and then set the tone and stakes as its once dead world starts to come alive around you.

From landing on the planet to the first boss, the only instruction or line of text given is how to swap weapons to missiles. Everything else is inferred by the player as they descend and then return from that quick expedition. This trend holds throughout all of Super Metroid, keeping guidance and lessons vague as you navigate the planet. But always, there’s cues in how the levels are designed or laid out that encourage you onward. Even the most advanced concepts like wall jumps and Shinesparking is conferred not by text, but by seeing friendly creatures do something similar, and then mimicking their actions.

It’s this kind of non-vocal discovery and guidance that both Outer Wilds and Super Metroid excel at. Laying out a world and systems at the player’s feet, the onus is on you to explore it. Objectives must be uncovered first, and then achieved. Allowing the player to come to grips with gameplay systems, but not explicitly telling them? That creates massively impactful moments once they’re discovered. This subtle, unspoken game design is far more difficult to accomplish, but the fact that Outer Wilds managed it continues to impress.

“Subtle, unspoken game design is far more difficult to accomplish, but the fact that Outer Wilds managed it continues to impress.”

Now, I don’t intend to conclude this write-up by saying that all direction or explicit instruction in games is bad. I like RPGs too much to champion eschewing all progression systems. Nonetheless, Outer Wilds took a chance with its design: here’s a ship and basic tools, now go forth into this solar system! Live, die, repeat, over and over and over again…no progression systems, checklists, or clearly delineated objectives; just a solar system filled with curiosities and a mystery at the centre of it. Knowledge and understanding is all you’ll take with you on your next attempt, and it’s all you truly need to make it through.

Player-driven emergent design is a rare thing to behold in a game as well-curated and constructed as Outer Wilds. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did, yet I’ve only come to appreciate it more as I wrote this. Once I watched the recent Noclip documentary on the game’s development, I was even more impressed with the design principles that went into it. Games that demand your time and constant attention are increasingly prevalent, so something hands-off and indirect was a breath of fresh air that I didn’t know I’d need. Any confusion generated by Obsidian’s similarly-titled game are unfortunate, but Outer Wilds is surely worth your time for a player-driven experience. Also, you should go play Super Metroid. It’s real good.

February 4, 2020 10:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/outer-wilds-and-the-beauty-of-emergent-gameplay-design/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=outer-wilds-and-the-beauty-of-emergent-gameplay-design

[zoeeeeeeeeli]

Week 1

MoMA PS1

Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan

I think their works are extremely powerful.

The descriptions of works are comparably long and detailed. It might be because the context of the work has many cultural reference, or it might be because the artists want to be that way. Even though I think the artworks work powerfully without the text, but the artist might think it is necessary to make his intent and performance clear and understandable.

The first big screen is a performance in which the artist conducts a two-hour process of jumping into the air and falling back down into the muddy patch of soil until he was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. Li has explained the jump as departure and the fall as return. I interpret the exhaustion at the end is the person’s final death, just like his father’s passing (on the text). It strongly tells a story about the land-people relationship, the land raises him, he comes, he goes, and finally go back to the land – his body buried in the mud of the land. In this series of artworks, artists also show the relationship between human and nature, such as To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond. They all depict a picture of collectivism and the limits of human beings’ power over nature. In Drawing Board, Li pits his body against a powerful cascade of water that spills through an opening in a dilapidated roadside dam. He holds a wooden board against the surge of water. When my friend and I see this, we see his pose – he stood knee-deep in the water, holding the board against the strength of the water, we feel the balance between he and nature. Later his strength is running out, he falls down in the water and collapses. The balance is broken, all of a sudden we feel the fragility of the human body in front of the nature’s power.

The most powerful and impressive piece is Nine Holes. Zhang and his artist friends --- seven men and two women perform a kind of symbolic intercourse with the land. I normally don’t think the intercourse artwork is powerful, because there are too many. But the intercourse with the land is much more than the intercourse itself. The theme of human-nature relationship is always about balance and imbalance. But his performance describes human-nature relationship to a new level, I think rather than balance and imbalance, “exchange” is more accurate to describe the body and the land. Nine Holes is the exact continuity to the jump piece at the beginning.

 Fernando Palma Rodriquez: In Ixtli in Yollotl, We the People

One aspect I like about this show, is the sculptures appear to me as fragmentation and deconstruction. They certainly convey the themes that the artist was trying to state – violence, land, land-people relationship and indigenous culture. Robotic hands, house heads, butterflies, seeds, dead birds and stones. Those fragmented story reminds me of newspaper. The news on local newspaper are fragment and altogether form a story of history, stating the emotion of the land and the land-people relationship. However, one aspect I don’t like about these sculptures is that they all seem like interactive sculptures, but at the end I don’t know whether they are or not. The audience are all wandering around to see if they are interactive. I saw Arduino were installed, but it seems not that effective. The audience there were confused as well. I think that is indeed a downside of interactive pieces, they sometimes make people focus on the technology, instead of on the artwork itself. However, if the artworks seem like interactive pieces, but actually just moving instantly by themselves, then that is a very interesting presentation and there is some context hidden by this move, but I am not able to tell if the interactive part is deliberate.

 Seth Price: Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad

I think the most interesting point about Price’s work is the scale. There are a lot of works showing the scene of violence, the interaction, the movement and so on. But Price’s works choose to zoom in. He chooses to zoom extremely in, to the extreme that we might feel uncomfortable, to show the theme of violence. This zoom-in view isolate the identity of the models, which I read it as equality.

 DDA Faculty show

Carla’s work Pattern Recognition has a reference of another artist’s face, who I can’t recognize. It reminds me of the “reference pleasure” that one of my professor in my undergrads mentioned. The audience who recognize the reference in the artwork got much more pleasure than the audience who do not recognize it. Some artworks are designed to be appreciated by the one who can recognize the reference in the work. I would say maybe all arts are not designed to be seen by all people. Most of arts have reference, sometimes national social issues, philosophy problem, and sometimes more specific like persons, books, other artworks.

The work The Year We Make Contact I still not sure if it is interactive, but the tape and the shape of projection remind me of the shape of early computer screen. Maybe the artist is referring to the first computer screen? The show does not have long description like the one in MoMA PS1, the only clue we can fine is the text on the artist tag. It makes me wonder a question, for an artwork, sometimes what the audience receive and what the artist trying to say are different, but which one is more important?

 Readings: 

"Redefining Sculpture Digitally"

quote:

“At what point, as we add and refine perceptual cues, do we cease to think of the object as being “virtual” and just think of it as real? If we can see a single view of what appears to be a three dimensional object, is it a “real” object? No, we say, because we can't walk around it. If we can “walk around it” by using a joystick to control our point of view, is it then real? Suppose the image is displayed to us not on a stationary monitor set on a table, but in a tiny head-mounted monitor that reads our body movements and updates the image accordingly, so that we can physically walk around it. Is it then “real”? And if there are two images – a left eye view and a right eye view – so that we see the object in stereo, as our eyes normally do? Suppose we program into the object virtual tangibility, so that we can “feel” the object – perhaps with a set of electronic gloves that would be to our sense of tactility as CRT monitors now are to our sense of vision. And if we add sound? And scent?

How many, and which, characteristics must the object have before we consider it real? Or before we become incapable of distinguishing between what is real and what is not? Or before we cease to care about the distinction? (6)”

The reading makes me keep thinking the definition of virtual and reality, or even sculpture, which is defined in “introduction to Art Concepts, SAC, ART100″ (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sac-artappreciation/chapter/oer-1-25/) as “ any artwork made by the manipulation of materials resulting in a three-dimensional object”. By looking at this definition, I still cannot decide that whether my object in Maya can be called as sculpture. I always call the work in Maya as “virtual installations” even though it will finally be presented as two-dimensionally. Because I think I was making installation, to express an idea, but digitally instead of physically. For “the work in Maya”, I was manipulating data to make an artwork, and the object was three-dimensional. So if data can be defined as “materials”, then the thing in Maya can be sculpture. 

I believe Virtual Reality is a challenge to the definition of “virtual” as well as “really”. We can somehow “physically” walk around it. With the headset on, we basically cannot receive the sound from the physical world. When our sense immerse in the VR world, is this still “virtual”? When playing with VR, I feel terrifying. Because my sense is in an environment but my body is not. I still can feel my body in the physical world, without my sense, my body feel even more unprotected. It still challenges “virtuality” by taking away some senses. but it is awkward that it takes only some senses but not all of them.

"A Series of Digital Interactive Multimedia Murals" 

quote:

“This is also why abstract painting and sculpture can succeed. Willem de Kooning’s painting, A Tree in Naples, is powerful not because it represents a moving event of thing. In fact, we cannot say that it “represents” anything (in spite of the title). The painting is powerful because of the relationships between the forms and colors. These relationships are somehow analogous to experiences we have had, and that is why we respond viscerally to the painting.”

In addition to the “analogous” effects that art serve, I think powerful art also have the ability to make the audience strongly feel something. I strongly agree that good art have this analogous effects, and also I think that the same principle can be applied to more dimensional art such as sculptures and performances. In a discourse on the beautifulness of art, I commented that the beautifulness of art impresses the audience not because of how much pleasure it brings, but how much feeling that it can generate, which means, the power of art does not depend on how beautiful the art is, but how much feelings that it can generate. For instance, Chris Burden’s performance: Shoot (1971) and Through the Night Softly (1973). They are powerful not because the pleasure they bring --- they did not bring any pleasure, they are ugly, if I would say --- but because how much pain that they can let the audience feel, which is “analogues” effects described in the reading. In Through the Night Softly (1973) Burden was slithering across broke glass in his underwear with his hands bound behind his back and in Shoot (1971), Burden was shot in front of the audience. (I can not imagine how shocked the audience were when witnessing the artist being shot during this performance.)  

[thesilentsnapshotproject]

'Art In Boxes' Seminar (20 minute talk) - Marjolaine Ryley

('Art in Boxes' was a series of seminars for invited speakers and MA students held at PARC (Photography & the Archive Research Centre) at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London.)

As you know I am currently Research Fellow here at PARC. I began my application by writing the following:

"Is the way photographs are collected and stored changing forever as the digital age takes an ever-firmer grip on traditional snap-shot photography? The magic of discovering a box full of dusty, faded old photographs under a deceased relatives bed has a magic and poignancy to it that has changed little with the passage of time. But how will we examine a legacy left on-line a personal collection out there in the ether. Squabbles over who gets to keep the pictures could be a thing of the past however the tangible objects we so love to hold may soon disappear altogether. Is the family gathered around the slide projector in order to view an obsessive grandfather's travels through China a thing of the past? Is this indeed the last picture show?"

My research sets out to investigate this statement and perhaps answer some of these questions. For this short talk I will focus on the relationship between photographs and shoeboxes, the digital dimension will be touched upon within this.

At around the same time that I was submitting my application I was invited to take part in the 'shoebox show', the exhibition Between the Sole and the Heal.

Initially I struggled to come up with an idea. Because I felt that there was such an intrinsic link and binding association between the photograph and the shoe box I felt that any use of photography in relation to the shoebox would be to obvious, even clichéd.

However the more I considered this and the more I began to ask why this connection exists, the more interested I became in creating a piece that utilised and even exploited this marriage.

Before I show you the work I created I want to spend a little time considering the shoebox/photograph relationship further. So - why do people associate photographs and shoeboxes and why do they keep photographs in shoeboxes? I hope you will be able to help me answer this? Sometimes we need to begin by asking obvious questions.

•  Shoeboxes are just about the correct size to house peoples' family snaps, usually machine n-prints that are 5 x 7 or 6 x 4. They can hold lots of packets of photographs or loose photographs together.

•  They can act as a transitory storage place before they come to rest, edited, in a family album.

•  We all have them. Going barefoot is not an option and so we all end up with shoeboxes. Also, it's hard to throw things away, after all that box may come in handy.

•  Perhaps there is also a secret enjoyment in the disorder of a shoebox. Images mix together randomly avoiding the order and repetition of an album.

In the BBC book (following the series) Who Do You Think You Are?The author Dan Wadell even goes so far as to offer the following advice when discussing tracing your relatives:

"Family photographs are helpful too even though at first glance they may not seem to contain any useful information. Heirlooms include war medals and press cuttings: be wary, these artefacts, old family photographs for example may need careful looking after away from direct light, heat and damp. A good idea is to find an old shoebox to keep them in. If any heirlooms are damaged, or require restoration seek professional help rather than getting creative with glue and sticky tape."

So it is of course a good idea to care for our images, to store them somewhere safe. To treasure them in fact. To keep them safe because they are things of value.

According to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, the relationship between human beings and intimate domestic spaces such as chests, drawers, wardrobes, and cupboards is perhaps more complex than it seems. (I would add types of boxes including shoeboxes to his list). Bachelard writes:

"Wardrobe's with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed without these "objects" and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy."

"A wardrobe's inner space is also an intimate space , space that is not open to just anybody."

A box may also be a personal, intimate space.

Just as the squirrel buries his treasured nuts so also humans 'bury' things: jewellery, letters, photographs, secrets in boxes, drawers, under beds... So perhaps the family album that is offered for public display forms a different function. The shoe box my be a place of secrecy a place for a personal hidden collection.

If we think of the shoebox as being fundamentally a container perhaps we can delve a little deeper into what it really means to put images within it.

Intimate immensity and the imagination

In talking about memory and the way our minds house this, Bachelard quotes Henri Bergson when he writes:

"Here and there in the brain, keep-sake boxes that preserve fragments of the past."

The act of putting photographs away in boxes insures our memories are kept safe. So a box can be an intimate container and the box as an aid to memory surfaces often. In an article in the Guardian's 'Family' section recently on helping children who have experienced the loss of a parent or sibling, Joanna Moorhead talks about ways in which children can be helped:

"They need to express their grief through art and play: one exercise ... involves the child using different colours of sand to represent the character of the person who's gone, and then putting them into a glass jar as a keep-sake. Another idea is to help children create a memory box: small children especially, tend to like objects that retain the smell of their dead parent or sibling."

What an incredible but obvious thought - a memory box...and no doubt we all have them. The idea of aiding our memories is present in everyday life, on a day-to-day basis as well.

Bachelard goes on to discuss another writer Henri Bosco and to use the example of one of his characters - Monsieur Carre-Benoit. Benoit has a solid oak filing cabinet, which he was deeply attached too.

"And what a marvellous tool! It replaced everything, memory as well as intelligence. In this well-fitted cube there was not an iota of haziness or shiftiness. Once you had put something in it, even if you put it a hundred or ten thousand more times, you could find it again in the twinkling of an eye as it were. Fort-eight drawers! Enough to hold an entire well-classified world of knowledge. M.Carre-Beniot attributed a sort of magic power to these drawers concerning which he said they were the foundations of the human mind."

Bachelard goes on to praise Bosco's description "for with this filing cabinet he has succeeded in embodying the dull administrative spirit."

The fear of loosing things, our lack of trust that our memories will remain with us, our anxieties about the order of our mental faculty - all of these drive us to create a world of order around us with things contained, filed, boxed, box-filed and neat and tidy. Out of sight and out of mind but easily available at a moments need. The chaotic domestic arrangements of so many must surely contribute to their chaotic lives and inner states! But of course there is also creative chaos and 'dull administrators'.

Bachelard talks about an example of the box and secrecy. A novelist describes how a father tries to decide between giving his daughter a silk scarf or a Japanese box. He decides on the box, as it is more suited to her reserved nature. "This young girl receives implicit permission from her father to hide her secrets; that is to say conceal her mystery."

Shoe Box Memories - The On-Line Shoebox

The association is indeed deeply ingrained in our western consciousness. Type 'shoebox' into google and a proliferation of websites and webloggs abound. Shoe Box Memories, my personal favourite, offers to free your images allowing you to create slide shows, DVDs etc.

There are sites that allow you to show your work / 'portfolio' described as artists' shoeboxes. And sites where the shoebox found under the bed has now been liberated scanned in its entirety and put online for all to see. Shoebox 1.5 is a software programme designed to better iPhoto. It is the ultimate filing system for your on line images - ironic as a shoe box is hardly the height of organization?

Or is it? As we have seen, it seems the shoebox is natural home of the photograph not just because they physically contain the images but because they metaphorically contain the memories that are connected with the images.

The internet explodes the personal, self-contained private collection out onto centre stage for all to see. As our private lives become increasingly public, as reality TV encourages people to tell all and the sex inspectors are allowed into people's bedrooms should we be surprised that the internet abounds with personal, now very public, weblogs, websites and the millions of images within them. 'New' families on the net may well have replaced the break down of the nuclear family. Genealogy is a hugely popular pursuit.

In Who Do You Think You Are? we are told that genealogy is the third most popular pursuit on the internet (behind personal finance and, er, porn). My favourite is Dead Fred.

Websites abound - you are practically railroaded into feeling you must trace your long lost relatives or else. And the terminology of all these sites is still about memories and shoeboxes!

All you need is imagination and a bit of glue varnish...

So, for my shoe box I decided to embark upon something quite challenging. I had a few ideas initially - creating a miniature filing system or filling my box with images of my box - but I decided to return to the good old world of craft.

After considerable research I purchased a bottle of UHU creativ'. I had decided to attempt the Victorian craft of decoupage.   Decoupage comes from the French word meaning to cut. Is also known by other terms - in Italy known as Arte Povero "poor man's art". I was relieved to read the blurb, as it was with some trepidation that I regarded the event. "Welcome to the wonderful world of creative handicrafts. With imagination and skill you will be able to make all kinds of decorative items. UHU creativ' would like to help you - with a range of great ideas and adhesives. You don't need to be a gifted artist to be able to decorate all kinds of objects in a creative way. Even printed serviettes or tissue paper can take the place of paint and brush. All you need is imagination and a bit of glue varnish..."

Villa Mona In Miniature

So I used the link between box and image and created a physical object, a shoebox that would have images physically rendered to the surface. Bound irreversibly together.

The images that are glued / varnished onto my shoebox are from the series Villa Mona, a body of work which is very much about exploring domestic space, the world of the interior and the gendered roles of the house's inhabitants in relation to the space they occupy. Villa Mona is a family holiday home on the Belgian coast, a place that myself, my mother and my grandmother have all spent parts of our childhood in.

I liked the link between the gendered roles of men and women in the Villa Mona and the female hobbies like decoupage undertaken by Victorian Women. In her essay 'The Pattern of Work', Judith Flanders writes:

"With more and more servants available to the newly prosperous middle classes, many Victorian Women retreated from the drudgery of housework. Industries grew up to provide these newly unoccupied, newly bored women with ways of killing time. Hobbies - or, as women rather sadly referred to them, their 'work' - were mostly craft-based, and entirely focused on the home."

Women were also charged with keeping family albums and they also kept extensive scrap-books - decoupage bridges / combines these activities.

I loved the idea of the box becoming a kind of miniature house and the reference to the dolls house. I liked the feeling of the interior particularly being wallpapered with images. The wallpaper often featured in the Villa Mona images. I like the idea of a house of secrets, buried treasure, memories, which is how I experience the Villa Mona. These are now embedded on the box and in the box but could also be put inside the box.

You can also discuss the box and house in relation to the dialectics of inside and outside, miniature and the imagination, and the house and the universe, areas Bachelard has also explored in 'The Poetics of Space'

I talked earlier in my RDF statement about the serendipity of the shoebox discovery. I think you still get this as you turn the box, open it, look inside. I included the quote for those who went as far as looking underneath the box as and finally underneath. A quote by Walter Benjamin reads:

"For the private man, the phantasmagoria of the interior represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago? The arcades and the interieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas: they are the residues of a dream world."

I would like to conclude with a quote by Bachelard talking about the casket / container (box) and the imagination.

"Sometimes a lovingly fashioned casket has interior perspectives that change constantly as a result of daydream. We open it and discover that it is a dwelling place, that a house is hidden in it!"

[asuoneemmajarvis]

Museum, Objects and Collection

A Cultural Study by Susan M Pearce

Museums, Objects and Collections

when looking at an artefact you are looking at ones thoughts

Europe has at least 13,500 museums, 5000 of which are in Britain

Museums

institutions which hold the material evidence, onjects and specimens of the human and natural history of our planet, in which case if this is the “definition”  of museums, surely if they were to embrace digitisation and virtuality then they would no longer be holding ‘material evidence’ and would be redefining their institution, literally the definition would need altering

think about the origins of collection, museum holdings assembled with some degree of conscious intention by collectors, immoral intentions of original collectors?

in a broad sense the museum of today / the modern institution as we know it came to birth in 15th century, Renaissance cities

15th to 17th century = early stages of modernity

up to 1950 = classic modernity

1950 onwards = late / post modernity

modernity concerned with the development of meta - narratives, overarching discourses through which objective realities and external truths could be defined and expressed

human history material and the belief in the essential individual

pg.3

“Museums held the tangible relics”

“The modern world came to define itself, both communally and individually, largely in terms of ownership of goods, which correspondantly came to be it’s most characteristic expression”

“The modern world has also been a world of things, of objects and material goods”

a commentary on how even contemporary texts discuss the museum in terms of tangible things

the world is now transitioning, we are no longer just a world of objects and material things, perhaps we are no longer in the era of post modernism but now with the digital age have reached the era of transition, seeping into early futurism, where we live through data, tweets, statistics, posts, likes, reblogs/retweets, instant messaging etc

both the way we define ourselves has changed and so has the way we give each other value one another, our cultural value is based on whom has the most followers rather than the most, or best, or priciest things

ideas of progress, the progress of history

shift in the Victorian role of the museum has shifted - Henry Coles 1884 definition of the purpose of the V & A, the museum and its social implications

three elements constituting this book - curatorial care, study and interpretation

Objects

Key words relating to describing an individual piece or number of pieces

- object

- thing

- specimen

- artefact

- goods

selective lumps of the physical world upon which cultural value has been ascribed

pg.5

“Material culture is that segment of man’s physical environment which is purposefully shaped by him according to a culturally dictated plan” (Deetz 1997:7

the whole of cultural expression falls into material culture

material culture held by museums today falls within broader frame

those discrete lumps of material culture “which have always formed, and still form, the bulk of museum holdings and which museums were and still are, intended to hold”? - is this still the case? if so should it be? should their intentions be more accommodating to the digital world we live in now?

cultural significance? what defines objects that end up in museums as distinguishably higher value? cultural value? value of creation? money value? sentimental value?

pg.5

“The crucial idea is that of selection, and it is the act of selection which turns a part of the natural wold into and object and a museum piece”

through selection and display things become part of the world of human values, a part which every visitor or viewer of the museum, gallery or exhibition brings their own personal value system - include this in my questionnaire? which objects are most culturally valuable to you?

specimen = natural history

the process of selection and organisation of one particular object into some kind of relationship with another, other or different material alters its interpretation/type and value, and also begins to build narratives, this is certainly how I work with collections, objects and stories to narrate history

thing = ordinary, yet elusive word for all these pieces, usually refers to objects that have bearing on our everyday lives - hence - ASU - Things Remembered exhibition title

artefacts - made by art or skill

goods = economics/production, market value

Collections

All collections have three things:

1. They are made up of some/all/or one of the types discussed - artefact, object, thing etc

Only a small proportion of the available material ever finds its way into a collection

Some collections by almost no means at all end up in an established museum

pg.7

“The process of selection lies at the heart of collecting”

“the act of collecting is not simple; it involves both a view of inherited social ideas of the value which should (or should not) be attached to a particular object and which derive from the modern narratives we have been considering and impulses that lie at the deepest level of individual personality”

- surely that individual personality is influenced by social/cultural norms, so can never be totally individual, a collective identity? Why do we all in a Western society personally collect similar items stored in a similar way? - ASU

Objects Inside and Outside Museums

pg.15

“even the humblest material artefact which is the product and symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes” (Eliot 1948:46)

“consider the solid silver cigarette cases of forty to fifty years ago, which no longer carried, have not yet joined the display of georgian snuff boxes in the curiosity cabinet, but lie instead stacked in attics, awaiting a decision as to their value - antiques or just weight in silver” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:99)

“objects are lumps of the material world. They share the nature with all living things, including ourselves and this materiality distinguishes all that share it from insubstantial creation”

discussion on terms ‘material things’ and ‘matter’ - our ambiguous relationship to material, the physical means of living

objects and humans have a mutual capacity to be in only one given place at any given time - is this also now changing with digital media? Humans using messenger or skype can be physically in one place but communicating in another, people speak/require engagement verbally/physically etc where as objects can be a digital ‘thing’ - it transforms from object/material/real but it can be a thing digitally, we cannot

“as it moves through time, it acquires a history of its own, passing from one professor to another, perhaps from one kind of use to another, and from one place to another”

“this materiality of objects and the physicality of their anchorage, in time and space give them some special characteristics which I wish to single out for discussion as their social life; their power of physical survival that gives them a unique relationship to past events that moves curators and others to call them ‘the real thing’ “

when we digitise these ‘real things’ are they real at all - do they go into the ‘cloud’ of data, altered experience, its no longer a fluid relationship between people and things but a complex consumption of digital abundance

pg.21

“objects are all pervasive in human social life, and society as we understand it could not exist without them”

“they are intentional inscriptions on the physical world which embody social meaning”

“social ideas cannot exist without physical content”

“idea and expression are not two separable parts, but the dame social construct”

if you think about museums of the future online etc even if they use digitisation techniques, there has to be a physicality to begin with, other than in terms of imagery in order to have digitally documented that object into a virtual thing

in other words you can never really have just digital collections, unless everything collected in it was new media art or digital imagery (which is likely to be on a physical, still readable for now, SD card somewhere)

think/thing

beauty must have something to be beautiful

perhaps the research is less about identifying why museums are no longer relevant but defining exactly why they are?

thinking back to the museum definition, it shouldn’t be changed but expanded to be more accommodating and inclusive of the digital age  

museums as they are now will always exist but will they remain relevant?

‘if we can access them online and all objects can be seen virtually, how will the museum in the coming future keep visitors coming, especially if the museum of the now does not / will not exist as it did in abundance in the past’

the physical key to the cabinet - whilst digital is the norm, traditional analogue and materiality still prevails - humans are tactile beings?

pg.24

“we must therefore try to understand how it is that objects can operate in both the past and the present, how they work to create the present, what the nature of that relationship is and why it has such profound significance for us”

the end of history?

are we at a stale mate with the world of material and immaterial? is there no future, no futuristic all digital?

will it be the end of history but not the erasure of it?

how do we document today’s history - is it the role of museums to do this to start collecting information from twitter, photos from Instagram and messages from Facebook?

Physical objects that have been replaced by digital ones?

Whilst better physical things have made previous physical versions redundant, they are never totally obsolete and there are always a percentage of people that still use those versions - no physical thing has been made obsolete by its digital version

pg.32

“the physical character of objects means that they are capable of being owned, stored, and handed from one person to another, but the reasons why those things happen to them, that is either desirability, rests in the value that is ascribed to them by the community concerned”

we are always perceiving the given value of any object, but we are always also, modifying this value in the light of taste and circumstance

is the individual altering the value of the object or the object making the individual change their idea of value

pg.256

“within this material object and specimens have emerged with two crucial characteristics…constitute the metaphorical making of meaning, through behavioural interaction between material and person, but their materiality means they always retain a concrete and intrinsic relationship to the original context from which they came and to all subsequent contexts in which they have been placed. It is this capacity for reality which gives them, and so the museums which hold them, their ability to testify to the nature of past events, with all the weight which this has implied in a modern society which has needed material proofs of its knowledge and values, and in the capitalist system, which has needed ‘real’ yardsticks’ against which to measure its world of goods”

[awardspecificunitoneemmajarvis]

Research: Museum, Objects and Collection

A Cultural Study by Susan M Pearce

Museums, Objects and Collections

when looking at an artefact you are looking at ones thoughts

Europe has at least 13,500 museums, 5000 of which are in Britain

Museums

institutions which hold the material evidence, onjects and specimens of the human and natural history of our planet, in which case if this is the “definition”  of museums, surely if they were to embrace digitisation and virtuality then they would no longer be holding ‘material evidence’ and would be redefining their institution, literally the definition would need altering

think about the origins of collection, museum holdings assembled with some degree of conscious intention by collectors, immoral intentions of original collectors?

in a broad sense the museum of today / the modern institution as we know it came to birth in 15th century, Renaissance cities

15th to 17th century = early stages of modernity

up to 1950 = classic modernity

1950 onwards = late / post modernity

modernity concerned with the development of meta - narratives, overarching discourses through which objective realities and external truths could be defined and expressed

human history material and the belief in the essential individual

pg.3

“Museums held the tangible relics”

“The modern world came to define itself, both communally and individually, largely in terms of ownership of goods, which correspondantly came to be it’s most characteristic expression”

“The modern world has also been a world of things, of objects and material goods”

a commentary on how even contemporary texts discuss the museum in terms of tangible things

the world is now transitioning, we are no longer just a world of objects and material things, perhaps we are no longer in the era of post modernism but now with the digital age have reached the era of transition, seeping into early futurism, where we live through data, tweets, statistics, posts, likes, reblogs/retweets, instant messaging etc

both the way we define ourselves has changed and so has the way we give each other value one another, our cultural value is based on whom has the most followers rather than the most, or best, or priciest things

ideas of progress, the progress of history

shift in the Victorian role of the museum has shifted - Henry Coles 1884 definition of the purpose of the V & A, the museum and its social implications

three elements constituting this book - curatorial care, study and interpretation

Objects

Key words relating to describing an individual piece or number of pieces

- object

- thing

- specimen

- artefact

- goods

selective lumps of the physical world upon which cultural value has been ascribed

pg.5

“Material culture is that segment of man’s physical environment which is purposefully shaped by him according to a culturally dictated plan” (Deetz 1997:7

the whole of cultural expression falls into material culture

material culture held by museums today falls within broader frame

those discrete lumps of material culture “which have always formed, and still form, the bulk of museum holdings and which museums were and still are, intended to hold”? - is this still the case? if so should it be? should their intentions be more accommodating to the digital world we live in now?

cultural significance? what defines objects that end up in museums as distinguishably higher value? cultural value? value of creation? money value? sentimental value?

pg.5

“The crucial idea is that of selection, and it is the act of selection which turns a part of the natural wold into and object and a museum piece”

through selection and display things become part of the world of human values, a part which every visitor or viewer of the museum, gallery or exhibition brings their own personal value system - include this in my questionnaire? which objects are most culturally valuable to you?

specimen = natural history

the process of selection and organisation of one particular object into some kind of relationship with another, other or different material alters its interpretation/type and value, and also begins to build narratives, this is certainly how I work with collections, objects and stories to narrate history

thing = ordinary, yet elusive word for all these pieces, usually refers to objects that have bearing on our everyday lives - hence - ASU - Things Remembered exhibition title

artefacts - made by art or skill

goods = economics/production, market value

Collections

All collections have three things:

1. They are made up of some/all/or one of the types discussed - artefact, object, thing etc

Only a small proportion of the available material ever finds its way into a collection

Some collections by almost no means at all end up in an established museum

pg.7

“The process of selection lies at the heart of collecting”

“the act of collecting is not simple; it involves both a view of inherited social ideas of the value which should (or should not) be attached to a particular object and which derive from the modern narratives we have been considering and impulses that lie at the deepest level of individual personality”

- surely that individual personality is influenced by social/cultural norms, so can never be totally individual, a collective identity? Why do we all in a Western society personally collect similar items stored in a similar way? - ASU

Objects Inside and Outside Museums

pg.15

“even the humblest material artefact which is the product and symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes” (Eliot 1948:46)

“consider the solid silver cigarette cases of forty to fifty years ago, which no longer carried, have not yet joined the display of georgian snuff boxes in the curiosity cabinet, but lie instead stacked in attics, awaiting a decision as to their value - antiques or just weight in silver” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:99)

“objects are lumps of the material world. They share the nature with all living things, including ourselves and this materiality distinguishes all that share it from insubstantial creation”

discussion on terms ‘material things’ and ‘matter’ - our ambiguous relationship to material, the physical means of living

objects and humans have a mutual capacity to be in only one given place at any given time - is this also now changing with digital media? Humans using messenger or skype can be physically in one place but communicating in another, people speak/require engagement verbally/physically etc where as objects can be a digital ‘thing’ - it transforms from object/material/real but it can be a thing digitally, we cannot

“as it moves through time, it acquires a history of its own, passing from one professor to another, perhaps from one kind of use to another, and from one place to another”

“this materiality of objects and the physicality of their anchorage, in time and space give them some special characteristics which I wish to single out for discussion as their social life; their power of physical survival that gives them a unique relationship to past events that moves curators and others to call them ‘the real thing’ “

when we digitise these ‘real things’ are they real at all - do they go into the ‘cloud’ of data, altered experience, its no longer a fluid relationship between people and things but a complex consumption of digital abundance

pg.21

“objects are all pervasive in human social life, and society as we understand it could not exist without them”

“they are intentional inscriptions on the physical world which embody social meaning”

“social ideas cannot exist without physical content”

“idea and expression are not two separable parts, but the dame social construct”

if you think about museums of the future online etc even if they use digitisation techniques, there has to be a physicality to begin with, other than in terms of imagery in order to have digitally documented that object into a virtual thing

in other words you can never really have just digital collections, unless everything collected in it was new media art or digital imagery (which is likely to be on a physical, still readable for now, SD card somewhere)

think/thing

beauty must have something to be beautiful

perhaps the research is less about identifying why museums are no longer relevant but defining exactly why they are?

thinking back to the museum definition, it shouldn’t be changed but expanded to be more accommodating and inclusive of the digital age  

museums as they are now will always exist but will they remain relevant?

‘if we can access them online and all objects can be seen virtually, how will the museum in the coming future keep visitors coming, especially if the museum of the now does not / will not exist as it did in abundance in the past’ 

the physical key to the cabinet - whilst digital is the norm, traditional analogue and materiality still prevails - humans are tactile beings?

pg.24

“we must therefore try to understand how it is that objects can operate in both the past and the present, how they work to create the present, what the nature of that relationship is and why it has such profound significance for us”

the end of history?

are we at a stale mate with the world of material and immaterial? is there no future, no futuristic all digital?

will it be the end of history but not the erasure of it?

how do we document today’s history - is it the role of museums to do this to start collecting information from twitter, photos from Instagram and messages from Facebook?

Physical objects that have been replaced by digital ones?

Whilst better physical things have made previous physical versions redundant, they are never totally obsolete and there are always a percentage of people that still use those versions - no physical thing has been made obsolete by its digital version

pg.32

“the physical character of objects means that they are capable of being owned, stored, and handed from one person to another, but the reasons why those things happen to them, that is either desirability, rests in the value that is ascribed to them by the community concerned”

we are always perceiving the given value of any object, but we are always also, modifying this value in the light of taste and circumstance

is the individual altering the value of the object or the object making the individual change their idea of value

pg.256

“within this material object and specimens have emerged with two crucial characteristics…constitute the metaphorical making of meaning, through behavioural interaction between material and person, but their materiality means they always retain a concrete and intrinsic relationship to the original context from which they came and to all subsequent contexts in which they have been placed. It is this capacity for reality which gives them, and so the museums which hold them, their ability to testify to the nature of past events, with all the weight which this has implied in a modern society which has needed material proofs of its knowledge and values, and in the capitalist system, which has needed ‘real’ yardsticks’ against which to measure its world of goods”

[awardspecificunitemmajarvis]

Musuem, Objects and Collection

A Cultural Study by Susan M Pearce 

Museums, Objects and Collections

when looking at an artefact you are looking at ones thoughts

Europe has at least 13,500 museums, 5000 of which are in Britain

Museums

institutions which hold the material evidence, onjects and specimens of the human and natural history of our planet, in which case if this is the “definition”  of museums, surely if they were to embrace digitisation and virtuality then they would no longer be holding ‘material evidence’ and would be redefining their institution, literally the definition would need altering 

think about the origins of collection, museum holdings assembled with some degree of conscious intention by collectors, immoral intentions of original collectors?

in a broad sense the museum of today / the modern institution as we know it came to birth in 15th century, Renaissance cities

15th to 17th century = early stages of modernity

up to 1950 = classic modernity

1950 onwards = late / post modernity

modernity concerned with the development of meta - narratives, overarching discourses through which objective realities and external truths could be defined and expressed

human history material and the belief in the essential individual

pg.3

“Museums held the tangible relics”

“The modern world came to define itself, both communally and individually, largely in terms of ownership of goods, which correspondantly came to be it’s most characteristic expression”

“The modern world has also been a world of things, of objects and material goods”

a commentary on how even contemporary texts discuss the museum in terms of tangible things

the world is now transitioning, we are no longer just a world of objects and material things, perhaps we are no longer in the era of post modernism but now with the digital age have reached the era of transition, seeping into early futurism, where we live through data, tweets, statistics, posts, likes, reblogs/retweets, instant messaging etc

both the way we define ourselves has changed and so has the way we give each other value one another, our cultural value is based on whom has the most followers rather than the most, or best, or priciest things

ideas of progress, the progress of history

shift in the Victorian role of the museum has shifted - Henry Coles 1884 definition of the purpose of the V & A, the museum and its social implications

three elements constituting this book - curatorial care, study and interpretation

Objects

Key words relating to describing an individual piece or number of pieces

- object

- thing

- specimen

- artefact

- goods

selective lumps of the physical world upon which cultural value has been ascribed

pg.5

“Material culture is that segment of man’s physical environment which is purposefully shaped by him according to a culturally dictated plan” (Deetz 1997:7

the whole of cultural expression falls into material culture

material culture held by museums today falls within broader frame

those discrete lumps of material culture “which have always formed, and still form, the bulk of museum holdings and which museums were and still are, intended to hold”? - is this still the case? if so should it be? should their intentions be more accommodating to the digital world we live in now?

cultural significance? what defines objects that end up in museums as distinguishably higher value? cultural value? value of creation? money value? sentimental value?

pg.5

“The crucial idea is that of selection, and it is the act of selection which turns a part of the natural wold into and object and a museum piece”

through selection and display things become part of the world of human values, a part which every visitor or viewer of the museum, gallery or exhibition brings their own personal value system - include this in my questionnaire? which objects are most culturally valuable to you?

specimen = natural history

the process of selection and organisation of one particular object into some kind of relationship with another, other or different material alters its interpretation/type and value, and also begins to build narratives, this is certainly how I work with collections, objects and stories to narrate history

thing = ordinary, yet elusive word for all these pieces, usually refers to objects that have bearing on our everyday lives - hence - ASU - Things Remembered exhibition title

artefacts - made by art or skill

goods = economics/production, market value

Collections

All collections have three things:

1. They are made up of some/all/or one of the types discussed - artefact, object, thing etc

Only a small proportion of the available material ever finds its way into a collection

Some collections by almost no means at all end up in an established museum

pg.7

“The process of selection lies at the heart of collecting”

“the act of collecting is not simple; it involves both a view of inherited social ideas of the value which should (or should not) be attached to a particular object and which derive from the modern narratives we have been considering and impulses that lie at the deepest level of individual personality”

- surely that individual personality is influenced by social/cultural norms, so can never be totally individual, a collective identity? Why do we all in a Western society personally collect similar items stored in a similar way? - ASU

Objects Inside and Outside Museums

pg.15

“even the humblest material artefact which is the product and symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes” (Eliot 1948:46)

“consider the solid silver cigarette cases of forty to fifty years ago, which no longer carried, have not yet joined the display of georgian snuff boxes in the curiosity cabinet, but lie instead stacked in attics, awaiting a decision as to their value - antiques or just weight in silver” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:99)

“objects are lumps of the material world. They share the nature with all living things, including ourselves and this materiality distinguishes all that share it from insubstantial creation”

discussion on terms ‘material things’ and ‘matter’ - our ambiguous relationship to material, the physical means of living

objects and humans have a mutual capacity to be in only one given place at any given time - is this also now changing with digital media? Humans using messenger or skype can be physically in one place but communicating in another, people speak/require engagement verbally/physically etc where as objects can be a digital ‘thing’ - it transforms from object/material/real but it can be a thing digitally, we cannot

“as it moves through time, it acquires a history of its own, passing from one professor to another, perhaps from one kind of use to another, and from one place to another”

“this materiality of objects and the physicality of their anchorage, in time and space give them some special characteristics which I wish to single out for discussion as their social life; their power of physical survival that gives them a unique relationship to past events that moves curators and others to call them ‘the real thing’ “

when we digitise these ‘real things’ are they real at all - do they go into the ‘cloud’ of data, altered experience, its no longer a fluid relationship between people and things but a complex consumption of digital abundance

pg.21

“objects are all pervasive in human social life, and society as we understand it could not exist without them”

“they are intentional inscriptions on the physical world which embody social meaning”

“social ideas cannot exist without physical content”

“idea and expression are not two separable parts, but the dame social construct”

if you think about museums of the future online etc even if they use digitisation techniques, there has to be a physicality to begin with, other than in terms of imagery in order to have digitally documented that object into a virtual thing

in other words you can never really have just digital collections, unless everything collected in it was new media art or digital imagery (which is likely to be on a physical, still readable for now, SD card somewhere)

think/thing

beauty must have something to be beautiful

perhaps the research is less about identifying why museums are no longer relevant but defining exactly why they are?

thinking back to the museum definition, it shouldn’t be changed but expanded to be more accommodating and inclusive of the digital age  

museums as they are now will always exist but will they remain relevant?

‘if we can access them online and all objects can be seen virtually, how will the museum in the coming future keep visitors coming, especially if the museum of the now does not / will not exist as it did in abundance in the past’ - potential research paper focus/title?

the physical key to the cabinet - whilst digital is the norm, traditional analogue and materiality still prevails - humans are tactile beings?

pg.24

“we must therefore try to understand how it is that objects can operate in both the past and the present, how they work to create the present, what the nature of that relationship is and why it has such profound significance for us”

the end of history?

are we at a stale mate with the world of material and immaterial? is there no future, no futuristic all digital?

will it be the end of history but not the erasure of it?

how do we document today’s history - is it the role of museums to do this to start collecting information from twitter, photos from Instagram and messages from Facebook?

Physical objects that have been replaced by digital ones?

Whilst better physical things have made previous physical versions redundant, they are never totally obsolete and there are always a percentage of people that still use those versions - no physical thing has been made obsolete by its digital version

pg.32

“the physical character of objects means that they are capable of being owned, stored, and handed from one person to another, but the reasons why those things happen to them, that is either desirability, rests in the value that is ascribed to them by the community concerned”

we are always perceiving the given value of any object, but we are always also, modifying this value in the light of taste and circumstance

is the individual altering the value of the object or the object making the individual change their idea of value

pg.256

“within this material object and specimens have emerged with two crucial characteristics...constitute the metaphorical making of meaning, through behavioural interaction between material and person, but their materiality means they always retain a concrete and intrinsic relationship to the original context from which they came and to all subsequent contexts in which they have been placed. It is this capacity for reality which gives them, and so the museums which hold them, their ability to testify to the nature of past events, with all the weight which this has implied in a modern society which has needed material proofs of its knowledge and values, and in the capitalist system, which has needed ‘real’ yardsticks’ against which to measure its world of goods”

[researchintopracticeemmajarvis]

Museums Objects and Collections, A Cultural Study By Susan M Pearce

Museums, Objects and Collections 

when looking at an artefact you are looking at ones thoughts 

Europe has at least 13,500 museums, 5000 of which are in Britain 

Museums 

institutions which hold the material evidence, onjects and specimens of the human and natural history of our planet, in which case if this is the “definition”  of museums, surely if they were to embrace digitisation and virtuality then they would no longer be holding ‘material evidence’ and would be redefining their institution, literally the definition would need altering 

natural history museums holds 67 million specimens 

think about the origins of collection, museum holdings assembled with some degree of conscious intention by collectors, immoral intentions of original collectors? 

in a broad sense the museum of today / the modern institution as we know it came to birth in 15th century, Renaissance cities

Questions to consider for research :

 - question the definition of the museum in todays society and culture? 

- perhaps we need to challenge these definitions? 

- the role of the museum in the digital age? 

- are museums still relevant? or are they now a thing of the past, much like the material they house? 

- how can we revitalise them? 

- how in a time of transition for information can we ensure these material objects are transitioned into the digital age but are simultaneously still engaged with, still experienced and appreciated for their material, historical and cultural value? 

15th to 17th century = early stages of modernity

up to 1950 = classic modernity

1950 onwards = late / post modernity 

modernity concerned with the development of meta - narratives, overarching discourses through which objective realities and external truths could be defined and expressed 

human history material and the belief in the essential individual

pg.3

“Museums held the tangible relics”

“The modern world came to define itself, both communally and individually, largely in terms of ownership of goods, which correspondantly came to be it’s most characteristic expression” 

“The modern world has also been a world of things, of objects and material goods”

a commentary on how even contemporary texts discuss the museum in terms of tangible things 

the world is now transitioning, we are no longer just a world of objects and material things, perhaps we are no longer in the era of post modernism but now with the digital age have reached the era of transition, seeping into early futurism, where we live through data, tweets, statistics, posts, likes, reblogs/retweets, instant messaging etc 

both the way we define ourselves has changed and so has the way we give each other value one another, our cultural value is based on whom has the most followers rather than the most, or best, or priciest things 

ideas of progress, the progress of history 

shift in the Victorian role of the museum has shifted - Henry Coles 1884 definition of the purpose of the V & A, the museum and its social implications 

three elements constituting this book - curatorial care, study and interpretation

Objects 

Key words relating to describing an individual piece or number of pieces 

- object

- thing

- specimen 

- artefact

- goods

selective lumps of the physical world upon which cultural value has been ascribed 

pg.5

“Material culture is that segment of man’s physical environment which is purposefully shaped by him according to a culturally dictated plan” (Deetz 1997:7

the whole of cultural expression falls into material culture 

material culture held by museums today falls within broader frame 

those discrete lumps of material culture “which have always formed, and still form, the bulk of museum holdings and which museums were and still are, intended to hold”? - is this still the case? if so should it be? should their intentions be more accommodating to the digital world we live in now?

cultural significance? what defines objects that end up in museums as distinguishably higher value? cultural value? value of creation? money value? sentimental value? 

pg.5

“The crucial idea is that of selection, and it is the act of selection which turns a part of the natural wold into and object and a museum piece”

through selection and display things become part of the world of human values, a part which every visitor or viewer of the museum, gallery or exhibition brings their own personal value system - include this in my questionnaire? which objects are most culturally valuable to you? 

specimen = natural history

the process of selection and organisation of one particular object into some kind of relationship with another, other or different material alters its interpretation/type and value, and also begins to build narratives, this is certainly how I work with collections, objects and stories to narrate history 

thing = ordinary, yet elusive word for all these pieces, usually refers to objects that have bearing on our everyday lives - hence - ASU - Things Remembered exhibition title 

artefacts - made by art or skill

goods = economics/production, market value 

Collections 

All collections have three things: 

1. They are made up of some/all/or one of the types discussed - artefact, object, thing etc 

Only a small proportion of the available material ever finds its way into a collection 

Some collections by almost no means at all end up in an established museum 

pg.7 

“The process of selection lies at the heart of collecting”

“the act of collecting is not simple; it involves both a view of inherited social ideas of the value which should (or should not) be attached to a particular object and which derive from the modern narratives we have been considering and impulses that lie at the deepest level of individual personality” 

- surely that individual personality is influenced by social/cultural norms, so can never be totally individual, a collective identity? Why do we all in a Western society personally collect similar items stored in a similar way? - ASU 

Objects Inside and Outside Museums 

pg.15

“even the humblest material artefact which is the product and symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes” (Eliot 1948:46) 

“consider the solid silver cigarette cases of forty to fifty years ago, which no longer carried, have not yet joined the display of georgian snuff boxes in the curiosity cabinet, but lie instead stacked in attics, awaiting a decision as to their value - antiques or just weight in silver” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:99)

“objects are lumps of the material world. They share the nature with all living things, including ourselves and this materiality distinguishes all that share it from insubstantial creation” 

discussion on terms ‘material things’ and ‘matter’ - our ambiguous relationship to material, the physical means of living 

objects and humans have a mutual capacity to be in only one given place at any given time - is this also now changing with digital media? Humans using messenger or skype can be physically in one place but communicating in another, people speak/require engagement verbally/physically etc where as objects can be a digital ‘thing’ - it transforms from object/material/real but it can be a thing digitally, we cannot

“as it moves through time, it acquires a history of its own, passing from one professor to another, perhaps from one kind of use to another, and from one place to another” 

“this materiality of objects and the physicality of their anchorage, in time and space give them some special characteristics which I wish to single out for discussion as their social life; their power of physical survival that gives them a unique relationship to past events that moves curators and others to call them ‘the real thing’ “

when we digitise these ‘real things’ are they real at all - do they go into the ‘cloud’ of data, altered experience, its no longer a fluid relationship between people and things but a complex consumption of digital abundance 

pg.21

“objects are all pervasive in human social life, and society as we understand it could not exist without them”

“they are intentional inscriptions on the physical world which embody social meaning” 

“social ideas cannot exist without physical content”

“idea and expression are not two separable parts, but the dame social construct”

if you think about museums of the future online etc even if they use digitisation techniques, there has to be a physicality to begin with, other than in terms of imagery in order to have digitally documented that object into a virtual thing 

in other words you can never really have just digital collections, unless everything collected in it was new media art or digital imagery (which is likely to be on a physical, still readable for now, SD card somewhere) 

think/thing

beauty must have something to be beautiful 

perhaps the research is less about identifying why museums are no longer relevant but defining exactly why they are?

thinking back to the museum definition, it shouldn’t be changed but expanded to be more accommodating and inclusive of the digital age  

museums as they are now will always exist but will they remain relevant? 

‘if we can access them online and all objects can be seen virtually, how will the museum in the coming future keep visitors coming, especially if the museum of the now does not / will not exist as it did in abundance in the past’ - potential research paper focus/title? 

the physical key to the cabinet - whilst digital is the norm, traditional analogue and materiality still prevails - humans are tactile beings? 

pg.24

“we must therefore try to understand how it is that objects can operate in both the past and the present, how they work to create the present, what the nature of that relationship is and why it has such profound significance for us”

the end of history? 

are we at a stale mate with the world of material and immaterial? is there no future, no futuristic all digital? 

will it be the end of history but not the erasure of it? 

how do we document today’s history - is it the role of museums to do this to start collecting information from twitter, photos from Instagram and messages from Facebook?

 Potential practical outcome for RIPU ; 

proposal for a ‘new’ museum, that serves not to collect objects and artefacts but digital ‘things’ - traces, remainders and reminders of today, the history of now for the future

Research Task? : 

Name one object that does not have a digital version you can choose to use/view but has been entirely replaced, making the physical/old analogue version obsolete - is there anything? 

Physical objects that have been replaced by digital ones? 

Whilst better physical things have made previous physical versions redundant, they are never totally obsolete and there are always a percentage of people that still use those versions - no physical thing has been made obsolete by its digital version 

pg.32 

“the physical character of objects means that they are capable of being owned, stored, and handed from one person to another, but the reasons why those things happen to them, that is either desirability, rests in the value that is ascribed to them by the community concerned”

we are always perceiving the given value of any object, but we are always also, modifying this value in the light of taste and circumstance 

is the individual altering the value of the object or the object making the individual change their idea of value 

pg.256 

“within this material object and specimens have emerged with two crucial characteristics...constitute the metaphorical making of meaning, through behavioural interaction between material and person, but their materiality means they always retain a concrete and intrinsic relationship to the original context from which they came and to all subsequent contexts in which they have been placed. It is this capacity for reality which gives them, and so the museums which hold them, their ability to testify to the nature of past events, with all the weight which this has implied in a modern society which has needed material proofs of its knowledge and values, and in the capitalist system, which has needed ‘real’ yardsticks’ against which to measure its world of goods”