Sunday 26 December 2021

The personal & the external - Scale of Reach

The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard, where she writes about far reaching damage caused by human affectivity on the environment, encourages me to dwell on a need for clarity in my interconnectness, but I struggle with a sense of diminishment as I contemplate how much I am connected and how far my affectivity reaches. 

This shrinking occurs along a Scale of Reach rather than size. I don't shrink in stature like Alice in Wonderland, instead it is as if I am Plastic Woman; my body stays at a fixed point on an x axis of time and y axis of space but my uncountable multitude of arms reach out, forever lengthening, all around me in space, and to all positive points in time - and I cannot account for what they touch. 

The potion served up to me in ecological philosophy does not shrink me to a speck in the universe; it connects me to everything. I am a point on a mesh and as a result I fear to move for all the new connections I might make.

This knowledge has continued to develop throughout my life - I am nearly 50 - so I have experienced having my thinking thrown from once thinking I was one thing; an organism of me, to knowing that I am actually a multitude of other organisms which 'happen' without any consciousness on my part. What's more, this multitide that I nominally think of as 'I' affects a much larger world also made of almagamated parts. It's hard to think of oneself as being a multiple unit, of being affective and of being interconnected. That's a lot of connective states of beings.

The bit of my body called my mind was tumbling in this way when I spied a collision of objects on my bedside table: 

This is a screwed up discarded muscle strapping from my frozen shoulder somewhat flung on top of my copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Word for World is Forest. It helped me think about how I relate as an individual to large concerns; or rather how I struggle to relate, or normally evade thinking about relating altogether. 


So, on the scale of reach, the unit of amalgamated-one is dwarfed by an immense amount of entangled relations, relative influences and other unknowable connections. This is a problem because, when this scale of reach is multiplied, as it is in the even larger scale of the future, it really matters. It matters if we are cogs who feel like non-cogs in a vast world-tangle configured out of a combination of our discarded first bodies (our waste) and which we inhabit as enmeshed second bodies. We need to be able to take control of the waste we create. And that's just a start of our new mode of being.


So let's start with these two things and go from there. 


What things made the strap? What things made the book?


These are objects with complex births. They don't appear to have much in common to entangle them other than time, place and me, and that similar colour blue that caught my eye. True to say then that these things do have me in common. Let's start again there.


Though I cannot feel I exactly own the book - although I undoubtedly do own the object 'the book,' the words inside are authored by another and I do not own the copyright. But what else? They have been consumed by me and discarded by me. It occurs to me that it is hard to think of things as having connections to each other if not via the self. 


I read the book; ingested Le Guin’s words and ideas. I also wore the strapping on my body for a couple of days. I used them and then I discarded them - well, I put them down in this shabby fashion which alludes to the fact that my time with them is done. Did my association with them then end there? This leads me to ponder: was I associated with them before they even came into my possession?


Time exposes matters of affect. In the age of global warming and global supply chains what matters most is affect and the focus on the provenance of goods has increased massively over the last few decades. We care about not only what these objects are but how they came to be and how they got here? Was that any good, and how do we judge that 'goodness,' if we can manage to ascertain what happened in the first place? 


Before I start: what is judging itself but a way of ascribing certain ethical values to a scale within a dilemma, meant to provide a way forward from that dilemma - and I want a way forward from this scary place - so judging is going to have to happen. Of course, it's more straightforward to judge quantity over quality, so let's start there.


1. It could be claimed that the book is a more complex object than the strap. The book, once written - a process requiring fuel of probably protracted duration to the writer, then requires other processes and persons to bring it to fruition; for designing, printing, manufacturing; all kinds of publishing and marketing demands: meetings, cups of tea and conversations (another kind of energy,) minutely amended spreadsheets; and then there were the machines and materials; transportation to multi-destinations across land and sea, and my travel to go and buy it. Frenetic activity that brings just one iteration of Le Guinn's work to become laying here and others elsewhere - kept perhaps (as mine will be) but in becoming 'shelved' is this not just discarding delayed?


2. The strap is a part of an oilpaper-backed roll meant to be cut to size and corners rounded with scissors so it doesn’t catch on clothing. Besides the discarded corners, I can attest it is not a perfect design: mysteriously it can cause plainful blisters an inch or so away from where I put it, however it provides support and some relief from pain by forming to my body like an external muscle. Like the book it required designing and manufacturing, meetings, spreadsheets, etc. However, I have no use for it after a few days and must throw it away, adding it to the pile of things in landfill that I have put there. Therefore, waste is built in to this product - yet, I really appreciated it.


Looking closer at the strap, I deduce it is probably made of plastic, or perhaps some kind of rubber. I doubt it will quickly biodegrade. I look it up on the Green Matters website, which says it is made of cotton with a plastic core. So, yes, not all good for sure. The book however, is made of paper in the main, but there is quite a bit of glue in there, so perhaps not as good as I hoped. *  The balance of my judgement in terms of waste matter falls positively towards the book because it is built to last in a way that the strapping isn't. But then I needed the strapping in a way that I didn't need the book. 


This is so difficult to judge.


With guilt, I notice now that in my photograph the casually dropped strap forms a frowning profile towards the book, and I feel an even greater sense of horror as I admit that I couldn't finish reading Le Guinn's novel. I'd read about the book in several essays and articles about revered artists and thinkers, and I knew the ending, and without optimistic hopes for a good ending her vision was just too grim for me to stay the course.


But let's face it, I'm not going to throw her book away; it's book after all, and a daughter of teachers does not do that, but one day surely it will go... so I can't claim wastage, even delayed, as a major difference between objects.


Perhaps this inability to stay to the end is configured in the same way as is my struggle with diminishment, an inability 'stay with the trouble,' as Donna Harraway names it.


More about the enmeshed second body in this book by Daisy Hildyard.

Link to Donna Harraway 'Staying with the trouble'

Ursula K Le Guin 'The Word for World is Forest'

So, leaving aside my unethical behaviour for a bit and to go back judging provenance - I realise my connectedness is never going to be 'good', but always 'not as bad as.' I think this is central to my unhappiness about Reach.

I realise I haven't come to a conclusion. I don't have an answer. I needed the strap - it helped me heal my body - but also the book - even though I didn't finish it, helped me learn something.

I haven't asked if I had an ethical right to healing or learning, nor have I tracked down what affects I created before or after my ownership of them - these are still vast, still unknown. 

When I think about making art, these same concerns definitely stymie my production as well as shape its outcome. I'm often thinking about what to do with the waste I produce when I plan to make a thing, and this often leads me to put off potentially matter-wasting experiments, or persaudes me not make anything - this can look like procrastination. Positively, it does lead me to often involve the wasted matter in the work. I put my brain to task in thinking up ways to use the waste productively to meet a personal and outer demand to make art. I think that is 'not as bad.'


This post was amended on 1 Nov 2022.


Artist on My Street Audio Guide in Coventry

One of my recent projects is programming the audio guide for Coventry ArtSpace's Artist on My Street. We are now midway through the project to spread the work of local artists and brighten up the windows of community projects and centres throughout Coventry's suburbs and Warwickshire. and there are Artists on Your Street as far afield as Stratford's Ken Kennett Centre and Bedworth Leisure Centre.

It was a joy to make my print sculpture for Crow Recycling in Hillfields and equally interesting to listen in to the voices of the other artists in the project talk about their work, their inspiration and their relationships to the communities where their work is shown.

This is the link to the audio guide in Echoes that can be listened to on-location on your phone while viewing the artworks - just select the relevant one from the list.

https://explore.echoes.xyz/collections/L3m0WzACqu0RdzSQ

You can read more about the works here and apply for the next round of commissions: Coventry Artspace Artist on My Street 3rd Round Open Call - Deadline Monday 31 Jan 2022.



Sunday 12 December 2021

Crow Papers

Listen on Soundcloud: SOUNDCLOUD
Crow Papers - hanging 


This is Crow Papers, which I installed last week at Crow Recycling Scapstore. It's part of a programme of commissions by visual artists based in Coventry designed to bring visual art out of Coventry City of Culture into the suburbs of Coventry and towns of Warwickshire. It's affliated with Coventry City of Culture and run by Coventry Artspace - who've been brilliant. I'm really grateful to have had the chance to make this work and to get to know Crow Recycling, who are lovely and are a great resource of artist materials.

So I have to deeply apologise for creating yet another artwork that is difficult (read - impossible) to photograph as one whole thing without getting all manner of things in the background of the shot, but nevermind, the sun was shining intermittantly on the day of install, so I managed to get some photos of detail.

I've been involved in the Artist on My Street project from the beginning of all the commissions as producer of the audio guide that features each of the artist windows. So, for a change I'm not going to go into great detail here about the work as I have created both an onsite audio guide via Echoes LINK (It's a free app and you can be there or listen offline) and also a longer personal podcast on Soundcloud - which is my first podcast, so we will have to see how that goes.

However, here are some of my research photos from October this year, of inside Crow and around about Hillfields.

Hillfields is an area with a number of economic and social challenges to its fabric, but that in itself presents an interesting subject, especially since the places where other species interact are usually where humans are not, or where we have left untidy spaces, therefore I consider Hillfields to be quite rich in diversity because of its unkemptness, and I really enjoyed my hours spent exploring there. 

A few photos of the work in production. The silvery stuff is an insulation board left from my Silverhouses project. It's been really useful to use as a guide for layout and I really miss not using them in the actual installation. Sadly, it's about 2.5 inches thick and there is no room at the bottom of the stairs at Crow. 







Sunday 21 November 2021

Looking back to go forward

A few months ago I had the most interesting week with OutsideIn learning to create and deliver creative workshops online.

It required me to think incredibly hard about how other people understand me, how I can help them feel, how unknowingly I make them feel and think and how I can reach others and share space online with them. I’m excited to do more.

I was lucky enough to to share this experience with other artists in a giving and comfortable atmosphere. I felt their support revitalising my practice. And I don’t know where this will lead me but, unlike I have felt for a while, I feel confident that it will be somewhere interesting and worthwhile. In the short term a few other commitments will take up my time, but a direction for 2022 has formed.

I’m relieved about this, as, although time has been passing by quickly and there have been several projects that I’ve been glad to be involved in, which have been great to do, but they haven't stretched my visual art practice.

Within my wish to go onwards to create new work is a hankering to return to past ideas and re-examine them. I think this might be commonplace in coming out of a fine art degree where experimenting is everything - a sort of steaming ahead to the next new idea and not properly exploring each one carefully.  And, I confess, I've was expecting to keep going at degree pace and have became alarmed when it didn't pan out that way. Taking a pause and advantage of some professional development opportunities has given me a chance to take stock.

One of these things in stock has literally been sitting on my mantelpiece staring at me for the last twelve years. This:


It doesn't have a name other than blurbox. It's a sort of painting-sculpture/message in a bottle with a surface made of cracked theatrical wax which is nice to touch. I made it during the summer 2009 (?) before my final year which I ditched for various reasons and then ended up finishing eight years later.  I think I was putting to bed a state of mind or a memory - casting it into a holding state in cracked wax. I certainly couldn't see it clearly at the time.

That was when my practice was more inwardly focussed, but now I'm thinking of the blurring this technique produces to cast another metaphor, of a lack of understanding between species; that barrier that exists between earth beings who share existence but don't ever appear to be synchronised with each other. Cross-species understanding seems to hang on the brink, metabolised mainly by fear and rarely mutual understanding. How wonderful would it be to traverse that divide.

 Phenotype_Patterns_Gall_Insulation

I’m also looking back at the work I did about Knopper oak gall wasps and their crazy predatory gall shape and thinking of a sculpture that tracks that relationship - the oak tree, living wood, manipulated bark and the glossy wasp inside the no-longer-oak-baby-nut-shell. The wasp is parasitical yet entirely dependent on the oak which simply expands to accomodate its demands. Stories on how to adapt a species architype and become part plant bears thinking about in these climate-changing times.

And, due to having had a chance for an almost forgotten work to be shared - Seeds Grown in Stolen Ground - in Alix Villanueva & Tim Seeley's The Garden Zine - I find that I'd like to revisit this work too. Perhaps prompted by the loss of that project, but I think mostly I'm inspired by retelling its story, and that might count towards re-formalising the work.

I'm also being urged from a few directions to write more and explore different forms of communication. So I'm looking into that. But first, there is an entertaining commission to create and finalise and I will share more about that in another post.





Monday 13 September 2021

Recent work

I was filling in one of those proposals and thinking that I hadn't made any work recently, but then on listing what I'd actually done so far this year I realised I'd been so busy making work that I hadn't shared it so it had sort of disappeared. Which isn't great. So here's an attempt to catch up.

The Empire

I asked Ryan Hughes, Artistic Director of Coventry Biennial, if I could help with some of the renovations at their new space at the top of The Empire, a new music venue in Coventry, in return for being able to have poke through the detritus of the building work and see what I could find. I ended up being able to do a few half days and hours helping here and there, take some scans and a few photos before my shoulder gave way, which it has been threatening to do for a while, but it was enough to generate some written work.

Using a desktop scanner to capture the essence of a place is kind of wierd because it's almost pointless. The scanners, I used two onsite just to see how different they were, only collect data from objects pressed right against the glass, the rest of sort of disappears into a blurry gloom, but they do take on a sense of ambient light, and I'd noticed, from scanning next to a window at home over six months that this appears as cast light, and I've become rather obsessed with that. So I really wanted to scan there in those rooms at the top of The Empire (a name I could play with for ever), with their odd array of James Turrell-esque skylights. 

Those images turned out pretty enigmatic, which I liked.  I also took some regular images with my phone camera and its the long shadows in these that reminded me of the surface of Mars depicted in the NASA lander photos, and this idea of The Empire extending all the way to an inhabitable planet, now seemingly inhabited by an ever growing collection of dust-covered rambling machines representing the ambitions of obscenely rich human beings. They remind me of the cloistered pet toys in the nationhood appartment of the replicant designer in Blade Runner.

The Biennial were nice enough to agree to publish some of the resulting work in an appendix to their sixth communique, which I will share properly when it's out. 

...

More prosaically, but just as absorbing, I am designing and producing, in partnership with Helen Nelson, a game-based workshop about liabilities in artist practice for Coventry Artspace's artist development programme. The first part is called Navigating DisasterTM and the first workshops are about to be announced. 

I was also comissioned to draw all the illustrations for Coventry Artspace's development programme, the first part of which is Helen Nelson's Speedy CritsTM.


...

There has also been further illustration work.  I designed a screen print for Talking Birds new Nest Bonds which they launched a couple of weeks ago with their very lovely new studios in the Daimler Building in Coventry. Support them! They are briliantly supportive of art and theatre in Coventry and have been so for years and undoubtedly will continue. 

I am flattered that the other illustrators they comissioned were Frances Yeung and Micheal Snodgrass which puts me in great company.  I have never thought of myself as a drawing type of artist before, and I'm delighted that it's something that others like enough to want to commission me, so I'm looking at ways to do more of this. So it wasn't like I haven't been making any work after all.




Wednesday 8 September 2021

New work 'Longshore Drift' installed at St Mary's Allotments, Leamington Spa

I'm really pleased to have been invited by artist and curator Tammy Woodrow to include new work in this art & poetry trail at the Victorian St Mary's Allotments on the bank of the River Leam in Leamington Spa.


'Longshore Drift' and 'Onshore Drift' are about the movement of stone. 

I tend to think of stones as static things, but within a much larger scale of time they are not. The process of stone breaking down, wearing away and moving downwards is as old as the hills, older in fact. I've been litho-curious for as long as I can remember, and my current obsession with pebbles is fed whenever I go for a walk or visit a beach.  I particularly drawn to fossil hunting, I am staggered by the scale of timeframes involved wherein life becomes preserved in stone.

The larger images show a fossil in a flint pebble I picked up on Rye Harbour beach on the South coast. The smaller images are of another flint I found in a local field local. Flint presents its breakages well, preserving its moment of fragmentation in the difference between its weathered, chalky shell and shiny silica interior.

I thought taking a moment to think about the stones would be approporiate in an allotment. It's my experience of gardening that much of it involves bending to pick up and chuck out pebbles - helping the drift.

I was inspired to name my work by a book I read this summer called 'The Pebbles on the Beach - A Spotter's Guide' by Clarence Ellis, in which he traces the movement of stone around our shores, a process of shifting sediment called longshore drift.

St Mary's Allotments Art & Poetry Trail 2021


curated by Tammy Woodrow
11 - 19 September 2021
10am - 4pm during Heritage Open Days Visitor Information
12-4pm, free entry





'Onshore Drift' (detail) Digital print of scanned images on ripstop fabric, 2021.




Friday 3 September 2021

You don't have to but you can if you want

 

Resurecting an old post because I found it again and found that I still liked it. 

I can't remember what frame of mind I was in. I was probably on the train talking to myself.

Friday 27 August 2021

All falling things

It seemed to make sense to try and combine a couple of threads of work back into one and I had these printed scans lying around.

 

I’m not sure of the mirror on the foam, or the foam. 

 

Actually the foam does relate to silver houses.

 

Maybe try embedding them into the foam.

 

Maybe the objects too. There’s a cyclical relationship to the ground.



Friday 25 June 2021

Update: New work with scans and fossils

Here's a bit of work in progress. I've been busy on projects I can't share yet and non-art creative work, so it's nice to have some work to share.

Building on the many scans and all the stones that are cluttering up my space indoors, I'm trying out a new (to me) way of sharing these in public spaces, so I'm testing some outdoor-safe printing of some scans for installation for St Mary's Allotments Art Trail, Leamington Spa in September. The theme is loosely shelter, coverings, outside/inside so I thought of this one of flint fossil of a sponge I found at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve a few years ago. You can see the texture of the creature's jelly exterior but, unlike so many flints where the ancient skeleton has dissolved, this one has been perserved. I remember my surprise when I found it and that weird sense of lifetimes existing at such different times crashing together.

I've been fortunate that the printers gave me the first print that they messed up so I have a spare set to experiment with - thanks Contrado. They will have to be shown with dowels sewn in top and bottom, because they might be hung from trees or a fence, or even garden tools, but I like how they flutter in the wind. I need to work out if you can iron ripstop because getting it wet and crumpling it up really didn't work, however it is waterproof.






Friday 21 May 2021

Darts Trophies

Beneath a snap of dull brass angles and glassy green
Was an enquiry about darts trophies in the trees
Obviously stolen by the Beech
For the sisterhood of trees
For the sake of the Oak
Old as they are and too genial these days to care
For the thud of splitting cork
And the wreck of revenge.

A corps of Beech, creaking with anger
Strode down pavements
With long-rooted toes and leafy armour
Cast their arms on the doors
Of slack-jawed, portly men in pyjamas
Shrieking ‘How dare you hurt my friend’
Wrestled away the gilded bones from the mantel
And scarpered, rolling as they ran
Like great green battleships on land.

Journal notes: Weird Embodiment. [edited]

Today I finished a first reading of Timothy Morton’s Weird Embodiment. I am wondering how waste objects factor in to the vast array of partial things in nowness – the everlasting moment sliding between past and future - in appearance and essence, ambiguous objects in the Mobius strip of reality. It would seem that we are fooling ourselves that objects ever go out of connection with us. 

“…things do exist, yet they exist insofar as they are shot through with nothingness.”  Is this an agnostic turn?

 

“Since there are no top, bottom or middle things, there is no whole of which things are all components. Thus things are

necessarily partial.”
"And if you want to think of amalgamations made of partial parts, these form and reform, in a never ending, therefore never beginning, always turning, mobius strip of time."

 

He has things to say on beauty and Spinach art which make me remember an old crit where I struggled to express myself. There was a hierarchy of beauty that I struggled against too. “Art as disgust maintains a standard of taste, if only in the negative, which is why it is constantly struggling against beauty, against the seduction of the aura, against determinacy and the constraints of form.”

 

I begin to re-see why I am attracted to litter and waste and see in those abject objects some of the attributes of beauty. Because in waste objects disgust and beauty are joined and the difference between them becomes nullified in the struggle, which holds you in the moment of beauty, oggling at surfaces and lets you see past that to the object. Which becomes a moment in itself defined by its relations to others, both a product of processes and series of past relations, and a cypher of moments where this entity is called non-entity / nothing now and yet holds everything in its past association and lurks in the future as a frame of reference but at the edge of the frame.


Conversing with human litter is to be transported to the past via nothing more than an action of discarding,  a leap into a void; a gap when an object moves on from relation with humans as a component part into a new non-human amalgamation, (what we might lazily call nothing). Like old skin, it's there, we just don't want to recognise it as ours.


Which is why litter always strikes us as strange, weird and therefore disgusting – and we impulsively draw away from it. Litter drawn back up and examined, such as art made with found objects or an archaeological dig presents to us a chance to experience a new altercation with nothing, and with the non-human amalgamations that are out of our sphere of experience. It’s like meeting an alien who was once your next door neighbour.


This is a close up image of a scraper stone surface showing the scratches on the worn side. 

I made a watercolour and pencil sketch of a piece of litter from the collection; a crumpled gold foil chocolate wrapper, the gold exterior flattened around the white paper interior that buds from the centre, unfolding like a pair of twisted grey lips; the lips of the chocolate eater split and ready to eat. The foil shimmers in the close bright light I set to cast a deep constant shadow from which to draw. If I move my view will move, and the foil will shoot off light from its many angles and my subject will not be still and my drawing will be more difficult to achieve. I must be still to control the shimmering. Hold myself constant in relation to the chocolate wrapper. 


I started to think of the foil folds as stone surface.



21 February 2021

embodiment is not a case of being situated constantly and presently, but rather of shimmering or flickering.” T Morton ‘Weird Embodiment’



Sunday 28 March 2021

Cracks in the moon and aliens in the sand

This is my COVID era blog post. Bit after the fact I know, but it still means a lot to me.

I'm helping clear out some space above a huge retail unit in Coventry that will eventually become a gallery space and studios. It has no windows, only an array of four large skylights fringed with flaking paint. I took some scans of the paint flecks that had fallen. I will do a few more before the project is done. When I'm allowed, once the gallery is opened and the first show launched I will share some photos.

Thinking about Cracks in the moon and aliens in the sand / eyelashes & fluff as a title. I wrote notes before I made the scan:

Peeling and falling, letting go, leaving. Becoming leaves and falling. Hard material, chemical composition, covering; peeling away like bark on a living organism of a building. Fluttering down to be among the misplaced pigeon dung fertilising a painted concrete floor.

 

“A pigeon got in. You know what a mess they make.” Little fluffy white down feathers are amongst the small lumps of concrete and granules of sand that litter the floor in the room we walk through to get to the stairs. It is lit by a single ground-level flood light that sheds long pin-width shadows reminding me of the many, many images of Mars I categorised, on Zooniverse, the citizen science website, during the first spinning-out-of-control weeks of the first lockdown. Doing something useful - putting my brain to work so it didn’t make me sick. Planet Four was a citizen science project to help identify and measure features on the surface of mars – a caramel field dotted with blobs of soot (click if seen) that, sometimes extended out in ‘fans’ or ‘blotches’ (draw carefully on these to indicate direction) that scientists thought could indicate wind direction. These formed seasonally, possibly due to bursts from geysers of carbon dioxide gas through a layer of carbon dioxide ice. Clues to life the red planet. My tired mind just wanted to play join the dots, and I liked the idea that it helped someone else, somehow, to find out stuff, new knowledge, even if that was on another planet and couldn’t really help here. 

It brought Mars closer. Onto the screen on my lap. I was touching it. Deciding what it told me. Drawing on it.

Every image I saw was taken from the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter and each blob was somewhere between the size of my laptop and the sofa. https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mschwamb/planet-four/about/research

 

I wear a mask, a hat, old jeans – they have holes in – old clothes to protect me from the dust. They are comfortable enough but not nice to wear, simply protecting so my skin so it is not damaged by this alien building. 

 

Becoming leaves. Falling. No longer a fluttered eyelash window shadow or a margin of spinning salsa dancer fringe on the eyes of the peering, unconcerned sky, counted four times, two times two. An array of two.

 

These are skylights made of thick, discoloured plastic, flat, slightly domed. I was offered but No, I’m not going up on the roof to see them from the other side. I can see them well enough from down here. Four unnaturally square moons.

 

Becoming data. A moment of pixel-determined length.

 

I took the scanner in, and next day took five scans. Upped the dpi each time and the higher the dpi the bigger the size of the image and the size of the file, but there is so little detail there to capture - it's just a field of air and a few flecks of paint - so the files ended up being a reasonable size. 


The field is the same colour as Mars: brownish caramel and terracotta. The cracked leaves of fallen paint appear as instances of pockmarked surface with edges faded into the striped pattern of a digital imaginating of ambient light.  The feather I find and drop on the glass for the last two scans appears as an abundance of skeleton. It discloses its pigeon dna as complex structure that, next to the boring lines of digitally drawn air and the fallen paint, is unmistakably organically other; chaotic, rooted in algorithmic dna, flexible enough to bend to survive the rigours of our environment. 


The scanner is not flexible. I cover it and the laptop carefully with a sheet of plastic to protect them from the dust to which feather’s complex structure of delicate criss-crossed filaments gives no access.


It’s a surplus scanner. I wanted a printer but it was cheaper to buy a unit with a scanner. I’ve used the scanner loads and I don't like to use the printer if I can avoid it.

 

#remotesensing   Mapping climate change requires entwining of monitoring of ground level activity by satellites. Whether you like the idea of surveillance or not, they are helpful.


How can an empty room with a pile of sand and a lamp become Mars?

 

There is an immense distance between us and I can see land but I can’t touch it. I can touch the method of seeing.

 

As soon as I think of the thin shadows being similar to those sooty marks on Mars, the floor stretches out beyond the walls and the city and I am standing in my boots feeling the pull of shoelaces keeping me on Earth.

 

Up there is a metal, plastic and glass eye, mapping, looking, following commands.

 

There is something in the distance between us, circling eye, which tells me where I am and gives me an idea of what will happen. There is regularity in our patterns and the small ways in which they change. 

 

The way I see you changes what I can see. The scan can be imagined as a slow blink or an image in dots per inch. dpi - depths per instance, dpi - distance per image. Slow digital machine blink, by command in a room being changed. Space elevated by concrete, brick, paint, stairs, doors, elevators, breeze blocks, wood, plastic lamps, and configured by light from an array of windows.

 

I take great delight in the fall off of clarity in the detail of capture between the object of paint that is skin-skin with the scanner bed but which curls away and escapes it, fading into a blur of background space, unknowable by the scanner. This manifests as mist and represents missed data unknowable to this scanner’s capacity as a scanner. It represents failure. This is where the software starts to be imaginative, substituting an algorithm for data for what it cannot be sure about because it has to fill it with something. There can’t be nothing - there is no space between 1 and 0 - that distance where the paint curls out of reach, until the difference between paint and not-paint and light and not-light can no longer be defined and we reach a point of pure algorithmic conjecture. A machine anxiety which produces the pattern of stripes that is the scanner’s best bet on fulfilling the directive to show what is there.

 

Sensors shooting out beams of light speaking in 1s and Os. Hit something now. Become 1 now.

 

As I command an increase in the number of dpi the size of the image produced gets bigger. Sometimes, conversely and unexpectedly, the file size becomes smaller.


Making a Drawing of an Object

 

If I make a drawing of an object it’s not because I want to have a drawing, or make research in order to make another piece of art, it’s because I want to think about this object and get to know it’s surfaces and relation to others and me. Rather than trying to capture an essence of a thing, what I tend to end up doing is to find patterns in its surface that remind me of other patterns. So a crumpled sweet wrapper (the image below) may manifest its surface as crumpled rock strata. Both of these are things that are found at ground level. It’s always - this thing is alike in some ways to another thing I have seen. I experience everything I see through everything I have already seen, and I find the longer I look and think the more the other things I’ve seen come to mind and the less I see the object in front of me. 


I
’ve given up trying to be authentic to the object in front of me. I’ve given up trying to see it for what it is. It plainly doesn’t care what I am, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t return the favour. Maybe it would see me as just another object like all the other objects that passed before it. Instead, I’ve become more interested in picturing how my brain thinks.



Thursday 18 February 2021

New / old directions

Now a chapter is spent with the completion of my Coventry ArtSpace graduate residency is complete - bar a last blog - I am looking at where I taking research to next and luxuriating in being able to peruse the internet for all the interesting things that I glimpsed as I flew over in pursuit of past work obsessions, deadlines and humdrum marketing responsibilities.

One of these treats is Tai Shani video interview about her meditations on ergot, wheat, ancient farming practices, feminism, witches and psychodelic intoxication at Serpentine Galleries: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/in-conversation-tai-shani-untitled-hieroglyphs/ The alternating visions of google earth, maps, ergot infected heads of wheat, but not the arhythmic red, red waves lapping at the shore of affected consciousness, reminded me that I wanted to reapproach the work I neglected to finish on the boundaries formed where digital mapping photogrammetry joins images of the ground resulting in an imposition of virtual borders on land because it reminded me of the heady, again arhythmic, but this time because of the wind and not the sea - invisible wind can be seen in the play of crops - , bobbing heads of chrome yellow oil seed rape of that day we filmed with the aid of a bright pink rope where the false line fell on the land. Perhaps I feel something of the same alteration of consciousness. Perhaps I don't, nevertheless, I want to look at that again.