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Archive / Album - Images of History / Images of the Future
Get PDFThis presentation critically reflects on the film Archive, Album and Other Images, (48’ 2022), an auto-ethnographic work that explores a ‘personal history as ‘implicated in larger social formations and historical processes.’ (Russell 1999) The film explores a hidden event in the life of filmmaker’s father, implicating it with his career in the space race of the 1960s. This expanded context in the film is made evident in visual material that can be framed as images of history, and at first can be contrasted with images from a family archive in the film. As the work unfolds however, the differences in the claims made by these artefacts to support the films narrative appear to dissolve
Cold Light
Get PDFThe inaugural exhibition in Matt's Gallery's new Nine Elms space will be Cold Light – a new video installation and virtual reality work by Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent.
Slippages and repetitions weave between real and virtual elements – sculptural and architectural elements recur, rendered and recombined physically and digitally, calling into question distinctions between materiality and representation.
The exhibition has been shaped by the artists' research into the life and work of Nikola Tesla, the title drawing on historic references to the first electric lights. No longer reliant on fire for illumination, the new electric light bulbs were referred to as 'Cold Light.'
Tesla was an inventor, engineer and futurist who performed scientific experiments theatrically, as a showman. He is best known for his contributions to the design of the Alternating Current electrical system. The work takes inspiration from Tesla’s visionary revelations in science, his extraordinary consciousness and his non-normative brain. He considered himself to be an automaton reacting to internal and external stimuli.
Cold Light takes a complex stand on how time exists in the brain and the significance of electromagnetism in all things. The works display a desire to edit in the way the brain functions as described in neuroscience. There is an intensity in the unfolding of the work that relates to a neurodivergent state of consciousness – in this case autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Research on these subjects has been sustained over many years and developed through dialogues with scientists including Chris Frith, FRS FBA, Professor Emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London; Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex; Paul Fletcher, Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience, University of Cambridge; and science writer Philip Ball.
Seers & Sargent began working together in 2012 when Sargent was commissioned to develop digital animations and publications for Seers. Over the intervening years this continued and developed into a collaborative practice. The artists have developed a language of blending objects, environments, light, sound, VR and CGI to contemplate quantum theory in a search for truths. Their work references human, animal and plant life with an ultimate desire for a new philosophy of metaphysical thought that can chime with the science it evokes.
Cold Light is developed in partnership with Turner Contemporary and E-WERK Luckenwalde.
With special thanks to the Seers/Sargent Exhibition Circle: Marwan T Assaf and Bianca Roden
Folk / modern: fitting the nation into the past
No full textIn 1936 Ankara’s brand new, radically constructivist Exhibition House (Sergi Evi by architect Şevki Balmumcu) housed an exhibition titled the Turkish Arts and Crafts. The exhibition presented various artefacts from lecterns, helmets, ceramics to textiles. Its state-sanctioned rhetoric was to infuse an indigenous essence of craft tradition into the modernity of new nation-state. The work of past craftsmanship was relegated to industrial precision waiting to be rediscovered by the industrialist endeavors of the young nation state and its new political community. The sheer modernist lines of the exhibition space and the avid historical tone of the exhibition presented thus no clash, they were suggestive of this new symbiosis.
Yet, a decade later in 1947, the Exhibition House saw a huge transformation, following the consolidated conservatism of the Second World War era. Through a project overseen by the German architect Paul Bonatz, its constructivist lines were dismantled, only to be replaced by a stripped-down classicist National Architecture style Opera House. This time, it was the new nation’s artistic genius, Bedri Rahmi Eyuboğlu who was invited to paint a mural, renown by his work on the amalgamation of the pre-modern folk elements with a style akin to modern primitivism.
Still standing today, Ankara’s Opera House and Bedri Rahmi’s fresco within are witnesses to the fluctuating role assigned to folk motifs in the state rhetoric of defining the national in the early stages of official cultural politics in Turkey from 1930s to 1960s. The proposal thus investigates the prevalence of folk motifs in the official cultural politics of nation building in Turkey through the lens provided by Ankara’s Opera House in this period
The Big Short's incoherence, documentary aesthetics, and use of direct address
Get PDFThe Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015), based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis (2010), concentrates on the investment banking side of the years leading up to the 2007 burst of the housing bubble, and people that profited on it by forecasting the disaster. Understanding this event is complex largely due to the confounding terminology intentionally used by investment industries, and both the book and the film demand an understanding of these intrinsically complicated concepts in order for the viewer to attain narrative sense and meaning. However, instead of paring the screenplay down to the story’s narrative essentials and utilising an easy-to-follow style which is typically adhered to by Hollywood filmmakers, McKay opts to create a comedically frustrating and stylistically challenging film making these core concepts even more difficult to follow. This results in a film that is by turns highly relevant, darkly comic, and difficult to follow.
This article utilises theories of incoherence, opting for definitions established by Todd Berliner in distinction to Robin Wood’s traditional conception, as well as aesthetic theory as relevant to documentary in order to understand the style and structure of The Big Short. Furthermore, this article addresses theories of direct address in the analysis of sequences where characters talk to the camera both in-frame and in voice over to demonstrate how the film is precisely designed to create a cognitively challenging work of art which frustrates viewer familiarity and expectation. Ultimately, this leads to the way in which The Big Short utilises and plays upon concepts of, and the viewer’s sense of truth and untruth
Aeroscopics: media of the Bird’s-Eye View
Get PDFBook review of Aeroscopics: media of the Bird’s-Eye View
PotteryVR: virtual reality pottery
Get PDFHandcrafting ceramic pottery in the traditional method or virtual reality (VR) with intricate surface details is still challenging for the ceramic and graphic artist. Free-form pottery modeling can be efficiently geometrically modeled with the right tools with detailed 3D print outputs, yet challenging to be manufactured using traditional art. The new advanced pottery VR simulation is a promising method to recreate the traditional pottery simulation for a better experience with some barriers. The challenges that arise from surface detail in pottery are a tedious task accomplished by mesh blending and retopology. This paper focuses on refining the VP application’s performance by adding unique sound resonance as a more likely infinite geometric phenomenon textures, blending it into the basic shapes. This paper combines creativity and visual computing technologies such as VR, mesh blending, fixing errors, and 3D printing to bring the ceramic artist’s imagination to life. We have used sound resonance with virtual pottery (VP) systems refinements to demonstrate several standard pottery methods from free form deformed pottery, retopology, mesh blended for surface details, and 3D printed pottery with materials including polymer and ceramic resins
Drawing as an invisible present: a phenomenological study of a performative drawing practice
No full textThis text will aim to propose drawing is the meeting of thinking and performativity, akin to a phenomenology of the paradoxical. Paradoxical because when we make a drawing, i.e., make visible something or visualise something, we are at the same time in the process of hiding or concealing something else. That something else will here to be understood to denote the drawing-in-itself. Not the thing presented or its resulting appearance. As such, reveal that which was always present but not visible.
This will be to unpack a recent work entitled Clearing 2021. A performative drawing that contests the role and assertion that drawing is a means to cover, as such debating whether this simply intensifies the production of the virtual and appearance as opposed to the inner truth that drawing is an immersion through that duality of material and action. This means to expand upon key aspects of phenomenology and the role of materiality (Heidegger), embodiment (Levinas) and incorporation (Husserl & Merleau-Ponty)
Professionalisation and identification in UK higher arts education
Get PDFThis chapter frames the relationship between UK Higher Arts Education (HAE), government policy, and the emergence and maintenance of professional pedagogies in creative education. Its focus is on art schools and artists’ experiences and views of their fine art education and professional curricula. This has been developed from my 2021 study Artists and The Art School which investigated a 30-year period between 1986–2016 in London art schooling. In section one, I discuss the socio-political history of UK art schools, focussing on significant cultural and higher educational policy that shaped the adoption of professionalisation in creative pedagogical activity alongside the institutionalisation of art schooling. In section two, I define the parameters of the arts as professions and artists as professionals, situating the role of professionalisation in UK HAE today. Finally, section three details artists’ experiences and views of skilling and professional development, as well as considering how artists’ form professional identities through/against this
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