The Practice Exchange: Imaging Experience

Date: Wednesday 6th June 2012, 14:00-17:00
Venue: The Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

We are delighted to announce the 9th session of the 2011-12 Practice Exchange. Please join us on Wednesday 6th June 2012 for presentations by Robert Luzar and Jim Threapleton.


Robert Luzar is in the 3rd year of a practice-based PhD at Central Saint Martins College of Art. Entitled Drawing Upon Multiplicity... his research combines live-art and conceptual forms of drawing, and attempts to assess the role of a philosophical mode of critical reflection inherent in drawing. Multiplicity is a condition of thought implicit in working, particularly with bodily gestures and marks. It is a term that Robert is articulating artistically to locate the role of (re)-evaluating conditional elements that inform how gesture invokes an act of thought.

Robert’s artworks have been presented through a series of live art events and exhibitions in the UK and Europe, includingThe Open West (2009), and The Creekside Open (2011). Robert has been commissioned to create a durational performance-drawing at the Making Sense conference supported by Jean Luc Nancy (2009), and has participated in group exhibitions such as Can You Here It, curated by Franko B, Nunnery Gallery (2010), and London International, 2011 curated by Edward Lucie Smith (2011).

Pratap Rughani is a documentary film director/producer whose work straddles artists' film practice and broadcast contexts, with commissions for the British Council,  Channel 4 and the BBC. His work is wide-ranging, from investigative to observational documentary film and photographic practices. He is interested in developing newer forms of inter-cultural documentary film and cultivating pluralized spaces through which deeper understandings of the relationship between 'self' and 'other' - of ethics and aesthetics - can evolve.  He is course director of MA Documentary Film at LCC. 


For the Practice Exchange, Pratap will present The Dance of Ethics in ‘Documentary-Art’, a paper exploring the unique power of actuality - what might be called the ‘lightning charge' of documentary and its indexical relationship to life, which raises practice-based ethical questions for the sometimes separate tribes of artists and documentarists. He will address a vexed question: how to create documentary work where subjects are not physically able to give consent in a form that’s usually understood in academic and documentary contexts? The paper includes clips from two documentary works, including Buñuel's Land Without Bread, before ending with practice-based questions that might give clues to the evolution of documentary film ethics.

Jim Threapleton is an internationally recognized filmmaker and artist working in London. He is in the 2nd year of his practice-based PhD at Camberwell College of Art. Born out of the experience of having his MA collection destroyed in a studio fire just weeks before exhibition, Jim’s fascination with erasure, negation, sensation and the image has seen his painting evolve as a subtractive, destructive process. His research explores a relationship between painting, corrosion and the sublime.

As a filmmaker his varied catalogue includes collaborations with notable producers, including Sarah Radclyffe (Ratcatcher, Caravaggio) and Paul Tribijts (This is England, Milk). In 2008 his improvised, BIFA nominated debut feature film, Extraordinary Rendition premiered in competition at the Edinburgh and Locarno International Film Festivals. The film was distributed internationally by the BBC.

Screening Memories

Deniz Akca: Practice Re-constructed
Dr. Mark Ingham: 120 Days and Nights of STAGGERING + STAMMERING
Date: Wednesday 2nd May 2012, 2-4pm
Venue: Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

Present: Deniz Acka, Lee Campbell, Lorrice Douglas, Mark Ingham, Maria Kheirkah,Ope Lori,  Elizabeth Manchester, Charlotte Webb

Deniz Acka, Night Map 2012

Deniz Akca is a full-time research student at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Her practice-led research uses cinematic and animated film to map representations of female identity. She draws on film and architectural space as representations for cultural and sexual identity. Her case study is Istiklal Avenue, one of Istanbul's most famous avenues, surrounded by majestic Ottoman buildings in a range of architectural styles. It is also the historic home to Istanbul's most important cinemas. For the case study she investigates and analyses the photographic and filmic representations of women in this place. Her practice involves transforming her case study into animated image. For this presentation she will talk about how this particular urban space shaped the beginnings of her research practice during her initial training as an architect in Istanbul.


For the Practice Exchange Deniz introduced her research project which entails the mapping of female identity through Turkish film and architecture. The practice of mapping has been influenced by Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, by Giuliana Bruno as well as the psycho-geographical mapping present in the work of Peter Greenaway.

The site for Deniz's research is Istiklal Avenue, a street in the historic Pera region of Istanbul. Deniz gave some historical background about the development of the regions of Pera & Gerata where Istiklal avenue resides, and which form the borders of her research. She described the development of Ottoman social relations to non-Muslim people living the area, and noted that different social and cultural conventions were played out amongst different social groups. 

The foundations of Turkish cinema were formed close to Istiklal Avenue, and cinema was culturally significant in this area, with the first cinema opening there in 1938. Although Turkish cinema became prominent during the 1950s, Deniz is focusing on films from 1990 to the present. She showed a key photograph from the 1970s, depicting a group of actresses, actors and directors who took to the streets to celebrate the birth of Turkish cinema. 

Deniz is particularly interested in the representation of Istiklal Avenue in the 1993 film Whistle If You Come Back by Orhan Oğuz, which she first saw when she was 9 years old. Whistle if you come back is about the painful lives and struggles of two nameless protagonists - a transvestite and a dwarf who are referred to as 'This and That'. Scenes of exchange between them are shot inside a flat on Istiklal Avenue, the landlady of which is 'Madame Lena', a rich Greek lady from a non-Muslim community. Madame Lena's character is important with regard to the representation of the female identity of Istiklal Avenue. She is isolated from society in the film, and in a real-life reflection of this, Deniz noted that the actresses name was never listed in the cast list of the film. The rights of film belong to ministry of culture of Turkey. 

Madame Lena's identity is unexplored in the film, which provided a space for Deniz to interpret her identity imaginatively in her first animation, a reconstruction of the interior of Madame Lena's flat. Deniz thought of Madame Lena's bedroom as a museum where memories are collected. The architectural space and her objects are used as a representation of her cultural identity.

Films provide the main source material for her research, but Deniz also goes to Istanbul as much as possible to gather images from second-hand book shops and to take her own photographs. She noted that this is not archival research. 

Deniz showed her latest animation, 'Night Map', which she referred to as documentation of 'memory spaces' in Istiklal Avenue. Certain details of the architecture were reconstructed from Deniz's own materials and photographic collections. The animation depicts a fragmented architectural space in which the streets' inhabitants appear and disappear. There is an evocative sound track which comprises sounds of the comings and goings of people and traffic on Istiklal Avenue.

DISCUSSION

In relation to the Night Map work, Mark was reminded of Deleuze's concept of the crystal image because of how it deals with time and space. As in Deniz's animation, in the crystal image time, space and sound become something we don't expect…

Maria noted that, going back and forth from Iran, she is always struck by sounds and how different they are from sounds in the UK. She commented that the sound performs an important function in Deniz's work. 

Maria asked if there a sense in which Deniz's work represents her own feelings of isolation from Turkey. Deniz doesn't see herself as an outsider, having lived in Istanbul from 2001 - 2007. She described her presence there in the past as an almost disappeared architectural layer - now she is here in the UK, removed from the city, she can look at the city as a research object.

Maria also noted that there seemed to be an element of voyeurism or exoticisation present in the work, though it was noted that it might not be possible to avoid an element of voyeurism.

There was a discussion of the question of absence in Deniz's work - in her first animation she wanted to refer to the absence of the non-Muslim women in Istiklal Avenue, and the absence of Madame Lena's character in the film. In the later work, images of women are used. There was a discussion about how images of women might be utilised by Deniz and what the potential problems are with this - particularly ethical issues surrounding the use of found images of women whose relatives may still be alive. Charlotte noted that the floating ghostly quality of the figures in the Night Map work underlined this sense of disembodiment - of separation from the representation of women from the reality of their lives?

Dr. Mark Ingham, Marilyn Henry and Me 1956-2011

Dr. Mark Ingham is PhD Director of Studies/Supervisor at Wimbledon College of Art, and Principal Lecturer (Masters Programme Leader) in the Communication Media for Design Department at the School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich. For the Practice Exchange, Mark will begin by presenting a short film:

"The young man at the beginning of Andrei Tarkovsky's ‘The Mirror’ stammers and stutters, and then learns not to. My grandmother, Rose-Marie, staggers out of The China Hall Public House, The White Horse Tavern, The Crystal Tavern, The Eagle and never learns. In the icy wastes of the French Alps she dives into freezing lakes. Followed by my grandfather, without a St. Bernard dog for company. ‘Ice, No Brandy’. The very, very, late night Troy Bar in Soho always clings. However far I try and get away from ‘Grey Gardens’ it still tugs me back to 'Tea for Two'. ‘Just tea for two and two for tea Just me for you Just tea for two and two for tea Just me for you.’ Our lives are smeared throughout the world, recalled through disparate, dissolute, fragmentary images, sounds and memories. This becoming can be a start of a conversation."


For the Practice Exchange, Mark began by showing a slideshow of images in order to introduce himself to the audience. This comprised images of his own work in relation to fragments of text from A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Mark became enamoured with Deleuze & Guattari when doing his PhD at Goldsmiths. In his work, he is trying to unravel the idea of the rhizome. For TPE he wanted to unpick the first passage in A Thousand Plateaus where the rhizome is described. 

One of the things that appeals to Mark about Deleuze is that he tries to question what thinking is. (Deleuze's PhD included a chapter called 'The Image of Thought'). Deleuze and Guattari want to go against the idea that knowledge is rooted or fixed. They want everything to be connected - they don't want us to be separated - Mark is attempting to reflect on whether he can or has become rhizomatic in his work. It was noted that an attempt to engage an audience by way of metaphor (such as the rhizome) is problematic, because it's easy to start focusing on the images being which can, paradoxically, fix or obstruct the broader conceptual terrain…

Mark showed a series of early works from his BA and MA ranging from large scale wooden structures, to an installation of hanging chairs which he saw as ghosts, to a bin full of garlic, shown at Camberwell college, which made a gallery visitor vomit several times. He mentioned that at this time, he took up contemporary ballet.

He talked about a Henry Moore fellowship undertaken from 1985-1986, during which he was putting objects in trees, and described a desire to escape his own 'artschoolness'. He wanted to avoid making things that looked too conspicuously like 'art', and to resist art's imperative for signification.

In a later series of work, he started to trace his genealogy through his grandfather's slide collection, tracing over many overlayered slides to create densely layered drawings.

Mark's presentation can be seen in full here: http://markingham.org/stories/becoming-rhizomatic/

Mark then showed a more recent work: '120 days and nights of STAGGERING and STAMMERING', a video work which can be seen here: http://mark27ingham.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/120-days-and-nights-of-staggering-and-stammering-bam/ 

DISCUSSION

Mark said he feels trapped by making art - though this is not necessarily a bad thing, as making art can be truly liberating. There was a connection between Deleuze's desire to resist signification and Mark's desire to resist the conventions of art production.

Deniz was interested that Mark talked about education - she is from an architectural background, and expected that art would be a 'free space'! That it is seen as so bound by conventions and aesthetic boundaries was a surprise to her.

Charlotte felt that her life as an artist is also characterised by the feeling of being trapped - again, she does not feel this is necessarily completely negative, but rather provides something to push away from in developing her practice. 

There was significant discussion of the computer generated voiceover in the film, which is created using a read out loud text to speech tool in Adobe Acrobat. The voice had a quality of chanting or incantation, and it was sometimes difficult or impossible to understand what was being said. Mark said that he wanted to avoid having a conventional narrative, using his own voice. There was a simultaneous desire to articulate a practice and be voiceless…

Lorrice was struck by the performative nature of the work, and saw Mark's practice as trying to perform Deleuze, or embody a Deleuzian approach.

Charlotte enjoyed the fact that the temporal status of 120 days and nights of STAGGERING and STAMMERING was difficult to pin down - was it documentation of a show, was it a proposal for a show, did it look into the past or future? There were seen to be similarities between Mark and Deniz's work in this regard.


Elizabeth liked the fact that in the first part of the presentation, there were some linguistic slippages between the texts on the screen and the way Mark read them - this was pertinent to the idea of stammering...

The Practice Exchange: Feminine narratives – Pink and red

Gill Addison, Maria Kheirkhah and Alia Syed 

Date: Wednesday 25^th April 2012, 2-5pm

Venue: Centre Space, London College of Fashion, John Princes St.

Gill Addison is an artist-filmmaker and academic. Her research and practice negotiate memory, the archive and event in the context of the auto-ethnographic. Central to her video work has been a critical and formal examination of the filmic essay. The film she will present, Talked about Pink (2011 UK  35mins), examines ways in which the feminine is viewed and understood in the context of familial relations. ‘I was about 12 years old when Rimmel stopped production of the lipstick Talked about Pink. This was the lipstick my mother had worn all my life. It had a distinctive perfume, taste and vivid colour, it was more than just a lipstick, it was a key to becoming your own woman.’

Addison’s films and collaborations have been screened national and internationally at film festivals and screening centers. She was commissioning editor of Art in Sight/Filmwaves 2003-08, and is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Gill is a member of the Subjectivity and Feminisms Research group http://www.subjectivityandfeminisms.org.uk/.

Maria Kheirkhah is an artist and second year part-time PhD student at Chelsea College of Art and design. Her practice-led research looks into subjective feminine spaces specific to the Middle Eastern diasporic woman through the particularities of her characterization, image and voice in fiction, and the subsequent emergence of her representation within the context of contemporary popular culture.

Kheirkhah was born and raised in the North of Iran and first traveled to the UK in 1979 where she pursued her art education. She subsequently returned to Iran in 1988, teaching at two major universities in Tehran, Alzahra University and The Academy of Arts. Since her relocation to the UK in the early 1990s she has exhibited extensively both in the UK and internationally. She is currently Assistant Professor at Richmond The American International University in London and a board member of the 198 Gallery in London. In this presentation Kheirkhah will be looking at the different possibilities of an emerging voice.

Alia Syed is an experimental filmmaker exploring issues of identity and representation. Her work investigates the ways in which language and form both define cultural borders and extend beyond them. Interrogating story telling, time and memory, her practice incorporates ways in which various orthodoxies of experimental filmmaking expand the contemporary arena of the gallery; in particular she looks at the means by which narrative and notions of the edit translate through various viewing contexts.

Syed will present Wallpaper, a performative documentary spanning four generations of women. It explores the emergence of intergenerational relationships through the recreation of a wall painting that the artist’s grandmother made. The film was commissioned by Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, with financial assistance from Arts Council Wales.

Syed is currently an Associate Lecturer at Southampton Solent University. Her most recent film Priya was included in On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at MoMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010-11. She had a solo exhibition at the Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, entitled Imagine your own history in 2009.

Surface Matters, Professor Paul Coldwell & Jo Love

Date: Wednesday 7th March 2012, 14:00-16:00

Venue: The Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

Present: Deniz Acka, Kirsten Baskett, Sam Burford, Maria Christoforatou, Paul Coldwell, Patricia Diaz, Catherine Eland, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Jo Love, Elizabeth Manchester, Milena Michalski, Elliot Robinson, Charlotte Webb, Rob Wilon, Jian Zhou.

Professor Paul Coldwell is an artist and researcher, and currently Professor at the CCW graduate school. His studio work focuses on themes of journey, absence and loss explored through sculptures, prints, artist's books and installations. The role of the computer has been a key element in his practice-based research, in particular exploring the fluid relationship between drawing and photography that the digital makes possible and the changing relationship towards surface that he believes the computer engenders. The resulting work includes output that is purely digital as well as revisiting such older technologies as intaglio, lithography and collotype.

http://www.paulcoldwell.org

Jo Love is in the fourth year of a part-time practice-based PhD at Chelsea College of Art. Her practice emerges from a current body of research which explores surface, materiality and time through the drawing of dust over digital photographic printed surfaces. Jo is interested in the way in which a photographic image might sit on the verge of recognition and provide an almost blank field of vision within which she can attempt to re-engage or re-construct perceptions of space within the picture plane. The drawing of dust attempts to provide a key aesthetic reference to physical matter, to touch and to human presence within an era saturated by digital imaging technologies. Jo is interested in the way in which the presence of dust over the digital photographic surface generates dualities of presence and absence, of both something and nothing, and fullness and emptiness. http://www.johannalove.co.uk

Jo's Presentation:

Jo is interested in images which can generate perceptual ambiguity – how far may we see? Is what we can see ever clear?

She began by showing early works made prior to her PhD. Her background was in printmaking and drawing, and through a fellowship at the Royal College, Jo was plunged into the digital world, and needed to find a way that digital processes could work for her.

She became interested in perceptions of space and how the body could explore the idea of physical space. She made photo etches by drawing around her body, and was looking at how the digital scanning process could allow an image to emerge, and how the photographic image could create a space.

She then started to look more closely at what was happening when she physically printed on top of a digital image – there seemed to be a disjunction between the two types of surface. Zooming in, pulling things up and observing pixellation revealed a perceptual shift in the pictorial plane.

To investigate how marks could be drawn onto a surface, Jo wanted to photograph ambiguous spaces which would provide a starting point for working directly onto the image. She asked how the different media related to each other and created an illusion on the surface. She described her images as seeming to breathe according to light reflections on their surfaces.

She started to become involved with FADE, a research group which helped her to gather questions to start off a bigger body of research about hand made physical marks and digital illusionistic work.

She shifted away from looking at the body to looking at illusionistic space, taking figure out of the work, but still wanting something to draw from which could be inserted into a bigger space. Found images and slides were used to create large backgrounds for drawings, to question how photographic images and the drawn sit together. She often took out the colour info on the photographic image so that that when she drew on top she could have a closer dialogue between the different marks.

The images became increasingly ambiguous, and the work returned to a questioning, not just of a particular photographic image, but of a field that could be entered visually. Fog scenes were used to try to generate more ambiguity in the photographic image – she wanted to find scenes that would be something to look 'into' rather than containing something to look ‘at'.

Jo started using a scanner and observed that normally scanning was a closed process that objects/materials couldn’t enter; She began to open up the scanner – creating a space between scanner and lens. Unexpectedly, a major turning point was that as she was generating a distance between the image and scanner bed, dust was falling on scanner bed. She couldn’t control this – this has changed her whole project! There was a profound effect on the images the scanner captured, as the illusionistic space of the photograph and the dust were captured at the same time. This was a case of things both being at the surface and alluding to perceptual depth

Following this, Jo started to use the dust to draw with. The drawing became about making a physical mark on the surface of the photo – she was interested in what kind of detailed clash this would make, and in putting drawing under the microscope. Notions of Duchamp's dust breeding came into play, as she was literally trying to draw the dust back into a drawing that has no dust. Drawing dust reasserts the surface of the photo as something which is seen ‘through’ not ‘at’.

Theoretical reference points include Heidegger and Merleau Ponty, in terms of how the photographic image becomes revealed through the technology and how much Jo is involved in capturing this. Jo has also looked at Sujimoto’s seascapes, which there is not much visual information, but enough.

Paul's presentation:

Paul started by saying that all his work is driven from his practice, which is seen as including writing, curatorial work and a range of other creative activities. Drawing has always been central to Paul's practice; He works in sketchbooks and on paper all the time and sees this as a liberating way to get ideas down. Drawing is also taken into his print and sculptural works.

Paul talked about an early period in which he wanted to strip down his practice. He went to Madrid for 3 months with a drawing box and nothing else – a purifying experience! Paul showed a drawing from this time which precluded his interest in trying to depict a life through drawing.

The interconnectivity of everything is a common theme for Paul, the figure is absent in most work, but it is the figure as present that he is trying to describe.

In his early printed work Paul used a computer to make stencils which were turned into photo etches – he was interested in weaving these different material elements together.

He showed a project ‘With the melting of the snows’ which comprised a bookwork and a sculptural installation. Paul noted that as an artist you have to find a way of delineating the necessary time, space and energy to create your work – calling something a project helps him to do this! The project came out of listening to a radio programme narrated by Martin Bell. Paul wrote to the BBC for a transcript, as he wanted to work from it. He made an artists book for an Imperial War Museum show about war correspondence. He wanted to create a narrative through this, but was aware of ‘not having been there’ – he noted that we can only make statements where the imagination allows for empathy.

Ch 1: Images taken in Ljubljana were manipulated with a computer. A the opening of the biennale it was harrowing to realise he was so near a war zone.

Ch 2: Included reconstructions of what he imagined would be found in an abandoned landscape. Objects were made in wax that may have been included in such a landscape.

Chap 3: Images of suits were taken in Moss Bros; They seemed like the equivalent of mausoleums and the dead.

In the final installation, bronze objects were shown with the book in foreground, which created an object landscape in background. Objects were seen as 3d drawings.

Paul talked about a curatorial project, 'Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art'. Paul fell in love with Morandi at college; 30 years later he wanted to work out why this person’s work has had such an impact. The Estorick collection let him curate a show in which he set key works by Morandi against British artists who explored similar ideas. Morandi collected objects, then painted them. Michael Craig Martin had a virtual library of drawings which would be reconfigured – the juxtaposition of Morandi's and Craig Martin's works showed a technological distance but a methodological similarity. Paul wanted to see for one moment if he could hang on the same wall as Morandi and not fall off!

Another project was 'I called while you were out' at Kettle’s Yard. The house at Kettle's Yard contains objects which are placed with incredible care and are fixed to create new meanings – The house is an aesthetic experience – stripped of domestic workings, and is about merging art and life. On a residency there, Paul collected data by drawing, observing, talking to the owners etc. He made objects in response to the space, and wanted to respect the spirit of the house. He referred to this as an ethical question – he wanted to work with the established aesthetic.

Showing some recent images Paul talked about how our lives are made up of all the tiny bits – he is interested in the way it all fits together. His recent prints demand some effort from the observer to disregard the background to see the foreground and vice versa. You have to conceptually construct the image…

The group discussed Paul Jo's work, and several questions were posed:

Sam noted that Paul and Jo's practices both have a measure of erasure or absence. He asked whether Paul's work has autobiographical element, which was missing from his talk? Paul responded that his generation was brought up under the shadow of war, and that there was uncertainty in the 1950s about war events repeating themselves. Elizabeth noted there is a theory that we become obsessed with work made in the era when we were born. This is to do with a fascination of the time before we existed. Jo noted that all her titles are in German - her Grandma is German so she grew up with this language – one of the things Jo finds easily sways you is your history – it affects her work as a visual artist.

Sam noted that there is an emotional sub layer in us that perhaps shows up in our overall bodies of work…

There was discussion about the artists' 'right' to deal with certain subjects, one participant (name unknown) spoke about her own background, with German, Serbian & Bosnian heritage. She also questions whether she has a ‘right’ to deal with some subjects – how far can you abstract things without people feeling offended? She suggested that maybe it’s easier if you’re NOT personally involved…

Paul doesn’t see himself as a ‘witness’, but noted that the artist's imagination is one of the most valuable commodities we bring to communities – that you can think out of your personal position by trying to make equivalents to something.

It was suggested Jo look at the 1970s structuralist film – ‘Film with Dust Particles, Sprocket Holes etc’ (name uncertain)

Elizabeth referenced Helen Chadwick's viral landscapes as an important precedent, and asked whether Jo has ever tried working with negatives or moving images. She has, but the work is focused for now on the still image and how the still can evoke more – an absence of visual information sparks imagination.

Paul noted that he and Jo are both interested in messing up the digital bit. It’s not about the language of the digital – they are working from the photographic end, and are interested in looking back and getting some of the mess in – making it physical. Messing with it and therefore possessing it.

Paul finds it hard to commit to digital images because there are so many of them; prints need to be committed to in a different way. They will not keep.

Sam asked where the digital leaves us as image makers? He’s afraid of his images being like a grain of sand in a desert, and notes that we may be at risk of forgetting how to look at things.

Angela asked about the idea of hovering with reference to Paul's sculpture of a hot water bottle in the Kettle's Yard project – Is it to do with the object standing for the self? Robert Vishna?

Paul is interested in making things about absence through a creative presence – he is interested in the spaces in between things. Morandi’s contribution was the metaphysical proposition that the space around something is as important as the thing itself. For Paul, nothingness is a place for enlightenment – the numinous… for him Jo's images meditate on what it is to be alive.

Elizabeth noted that in the later work, the portraits of people who aren’t there, there is a sense of depersonalisation – she asked how this works for Paul? Paul has become more interested in getting away from being expressionistic – he feels ludicrous if he tries to be Pollock, but rather wants to create objects so he can deign then, join them together. He’s interested in the kinds of things you share your life with – your razor, your comb, which accrue meaning because they help you through life.

Paul noted that as artists we propose a very different value system to the capitalist world – we ascribe value to things that function for us. We demonstrate a relationship with everyday things which we transform to create meaning. Objects are triggers to meaning for him.

Codes, Tactics and Tweets

Mike Ricketts with Professor Neil Cummings, and Charlotte Webb
Date: Wednesday 1^st February 2012, 2-4pm
Venue: Room A208, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

TPE5 – Wednesday 1st February 2012

Present: Deniz Akca, Marsha Bradfield, Sam Burford, Lee Campbell, Angus Carlyle, Andrew Chesher, Neil Cummings, Koichi Enomoto, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Vicki Kerr, Maria Kheirkhah, Ope Lori, Iris Luk, Elizabeth Manchester, Idit Nathan, Kathy O’Brien, Mike Ricketts, Scott Schwager, Charlotte Webb + 3 others (identities unknown).

Charlotte Webb introduced the stage she is at in her internet-based work as Pancake research after a term coined by the playwright Richard Foreman, who says that internet users read widely but without depth, resulting in pancake-thin knowledge. This is how she feels at this stage in her research, covering a lot of territory but not going in depth – it is making her feel thin. But this is a wider social issue – it is not just her.

Looking at her immediate context - other internet artists – she sees an emerging theoretical context. In a recent practice review, she found that her original research questions have collapsed, accounting for the shifts away from where she started her research. Her original terms/topics were generative art, micro-blogging, crowdsourced art and artistic collaboration. She is struggling with the phrase collaboration, and prefers ‘working with others’ especially as this implies others that are 'other' than humans, ie. computers and networks.

In the first year of her PhD she was looking at the field of generative art – an autonomous system of language, computer programmes, mathematical operations, etc. Her first work was the Topic Generator, a computer programme that generates PhD topics which became unexpectedly useful. She also made a programme based on William Blake’s poem Little Fly using a similar text-based process to experiment with different modes of sources. She was interested in the poetic nature of what is generated by chance combinations of words. She found another similar principle operating in blog posts on her tumbler account in variations on a quote from A Beautiful Mind.

Charlotte’s most recent piece of work is based on the song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, for which she made a karaoke version for people to sing along to. She found it much easier to work with text than image in this way. She wants to understand why she finds it difficult to work with images.

For the code she looks to Florian Cramer who speaks of imaginative computation and ‘words made flesh’ – the idea of meta-making, ie. making something that makes, a second order authorship. The main question is not who is the author. It is the slippages and tension between people and technology creating more than the sum of the parts. The materials of the code – symbols – have cultural connotations. There is a connection with Bourriaud’s notion of the artwork as generator of activity in work with the public or working collaboratively in some way.

Charlotte’s questions are: what codes are making her artwork? What code should write her PhD, that will in turn write her?

She is fascinated by the overwhelming multiplicity of images that are circulated, exchanged and commented on globally, by the many channels of circulation and the ways that people are ascribing value to images. She is making contact with people on tumbler, using the blog as a visual research aggregate, a place for people to publish art and/or research. She asks how does tumbler disrupt normal commercial channels of art?

The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006, combining 'crowd' and 'outsourcing' – the area is an ethical hot potato. Examples are Bicycle Built for 2,000 and Ten Thousand Cents by Aaron Koblin. Are their quasi-pedagogical approaches a displacement of the curatorial role? What are the ethical implications of crowd-sourcing? Can we call crowd-sourcing collaborative?

Elizabeth Manchester asked about the limitations of the parameters of the internet.

Angela Hodgson-Teall picked up on Charlotte’s use of the term ‘cheesy’ in relation to her Puff the Magic Dragon image, commenting that the lack of an existing human voice inhibited her from singing to the tune. By contrast Charlotte had called brain cells and viruses ‘cool’. This seems to raise questions about value-judgments, reflecting the complexity of the area that CW is working in. Charlotte replied that in tumbler the community decides what gets proliferated, as things get ‘liked’, which gives them value, and then they get appropriated.

Neil Cummings commented that the more popular something is, the more valuable it becomes. The values in a material world are not the same as in a world that has become code.

Mike Ricketts asked CW about her interest in the complex mechanisms behind things – is she interested in the processes that enable these enigmatic things that have a ‘wow’ factor? CW replied that there is a mechanism in tumbler describing how an image has circulated and what it is, a pragmatic description inscribed onto the project itself, which seems like a new way of accounting for art. This would normally be in an adjacent territory/place but here the explanation is part of the fascination, raising the questions: does this add to the work? Is it aesthetically important? Could it be a useful resource for others? Do the FAQs that reveal the code undermine the work by explaining it away?

Marsha Bradfield asked what is Charlotte giving back when she is taking all these resources? CW replied that generosity is important. There are many different ways of administering your generosity/constructing your references.

Mike Ricketts presented ‘The Vessel’, the story of his attempts to access and photograph Britain’s only prison ship, The Weare, that opened in 1997 and closed in 2005, and is now somewhere in Nigeria’s troubled oil delta. When he first encountered it, it was moored in a private port near Portland off the Dorset coast. He saw it from the back windows of his brother’s house in Weymouth, looking out over the Portland Harbour. At this time it had 450 prisoners on board. He was immediately fascinated by the boat – its notoriety and incongruity – and wanted to photograph it. But it was very hard to get to see it as it was moored at the foot of a cliff. He requested permission from the Portland Port authorities, but Portland Harbour had been chosen as a site for sailing events during the 2012 Olympics and the boat had been sold to an African company who were refitting it as living quarters for oil workers, so he was not given permission. But he tried in any case. It was moored just outside a land-based prison. He rang Barclays Bank free helpline for legal advice, who advised him that it was technically not illegal for him to photograph the ship but that he should contact the prison authorities in any case. Then he discovered that the ship had already left and was on its way to Nigeria. He found a photograph of it on the website of Sea Trucks Group who had bought it, renamed it Jascon 27, and refitted it to house 500 oil workers. As a prison ship it had been controversial in the news. Google Earth was still showing it as HMP Weare, moored in Portland Harbour.

Mike’s search for the ship’s origins took him to the blog of an Argentine group of Falklands War veterans and a Facebook group ‘Falklands 1983’. Here he found photographs of the ship moored in the Falklands where it had housed British troops. According to stories from the veterans it had a covered and heated pool on board where Falklands children had learned to swim. In fact the editor of the islands’ only paper, Penguin News, had learned to swim on it. It had also been commemorated on a stamp.

At Lloyds Shipping Register in London, Mike learned of the vessel’s early life. It was built in Stockholm in 1979 at a time of global recession. By 1982 it had had three different owners and three different names. It is a flotel – basically welded together containers that can only move by piggy-backing on another boat. It has no bow and no engine, but once it is moored it is totally self-sufficient with electricity, plumbing, etc.

After the Falklands War, the ship was chartered by the department of crime in New York where it had its first job as a prison ship, triggering a controversy amongst Lower East Side residents. It was used as a rehabilitation centre for prisoners (up to 85% of inmates were HIV positive). After three years as a prison ship here, the Hudson River authorities forced it to be moved.

One of the ship’s long-term inhabitants, a Barge Master, Mr Connell, had an obsession with the musical The Phantom of the Opera.

Mike showed images of the ship that suddenly appeared online after it had left Portland for Nigeria. He was puzzled by this until he discovered that the boat had hit bad weather in the Atlantic and had been forced to dock at La Coruña, where many Spanish people took photographs and commented online.

Mike concluded his presentation with reference to The Man without a Country – a short story of a man sentenced to spend his life on large naval ships traveling the world. Without contact with his home country, he becomes increasingly reclusive and desperate for news.

Elizabeth Manchester asked about Mike’s poetic nostalgia – how is he personally invested in the story of the Weare, in relation to works by Tacita Dean which always have some kind of personal history connection with the artist? Mike responded that although it might seem ironic to think of nostalgia in relation to such a vessel and such recent history, the way the story begins with visits to his brother’s house and concludes with an historical tale of longing, separation and loss probably allows for this. Mike was interested in this suggested connection – especially to Dean’s works ‘Disappearance at Sea’ and ‘Teignmouth Electron’.

Deniz Akca asked what the ship looks like inside. Mike responded that he didn’t want to show pictures of the inside. The company who now own it had sent him all sorts of images of the interior but they were too generic. Others taken by Royal Engineers seemed too personal.

Sam Burford commented on the distance that the boat was always at from MR and that in the end he had had to let it go – travelling to Nigeria it was going too far away for MR to follow. He suggested a comparison might be made with narrative performances by Tris Vonna Mitchell whose narratives emerge and then peter out leaving the audience in a confused state.

Charlotte Webb said that for her it was not distanced – she admires the fact that MR followed it through in such a committed way, comparing it to Tim O’Reilly’s moon project in which he embraced serendipity. Mike said that maybe the form of the work came from trying to overcome problems or barriers as he came across them.

Marsha Bradfield identified a punctum moment in the relationship between the images and the narrative when the Phantom of the Opera image was shown, pointing out that the actors in the projected image were the first people to be shown. She asked how that works in relation to the poetic method. Mike responded that although he had selected the images with care, he hadn’t consciously omitted images of people. He was interested that this seemed such a key moment.

Maria Kheirkhah commented on the relationship between the outer shell, the journey, being distanced and the life within the vessel. Is MR building desire through distance? Mike replied that for him the ship gradually comes alive through people’s stories of their experiences.

Scott Schwager commented that there are several parallel stories: the story of the vessel, the global story in different locations, the story of Mike chasing the ship all the way to Nigeria. The ship has become an imaginary object that has carried Mike – it is his voyage over a period of time (his research). Mike replied that he is very interested in this - he has recently read ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, an essay by Igor Kopytoff which explores how tracing an object means intersecting with multiple divergent stories (contexts, value systems etc). Mike also mentioned the work of Simon Starling.

Lee Campbell asked if Mike could have done the presentation without images, commenting on the visual role of the audience and the performative nature of the presentation; a discussion about the role of the images and the relation of different types of image to narrative ensued. The writing of W.G. Sebald was one key reference point for Mike.

Lee commented that the politics of surprise are relevant to both presentations – blips, chance, incongruity are all part of the work.

Mike Ricketts is in his 5^th year of a part-time PhD based at Chelsea College of Art & Design.His practice involves engaging with rules and codes that are intended to determine access to particular spaces. His method involves an exploration of certain spaces, and his attempts to access them or work in them in particular ways. Encounters with specific regulatory structures have stimulated various projects.

Mike has wrangled with the regulations of governmentorganisations, companies, public-private partnerships and community groups, but also codes that are more individually defined and enforced. Most of these rules have been somewhat inaccessible, subject to mutation and/or reinterpretation.

His methods involve noting, challenging, and getting embroiled in the enforcement, contestation or appropriation of certain rules, participating in and tracking social dynamics, and presenting (re-framing) the results of this research in the form of art works and projects.

In examining structures through practice (rather than through a detached ‘analysis’, for example), Mike contacts people, makes applications, follows trails and responds to opportunities - discovering certain regulations by coming up against them.

The form of his work has ranged from narrative performance to strategic distributions of sculptural objects in social contexts such as planning consultation meetings and a farmer’s market.

For TPE 5 Mike will deliver a short illustrated lecture: a first outing for a new project. The subject will be his attempts to access and photograph the UK’s only prison ship of modern times, Her Majesty’s Prison ‘The Weare'.

Decommissioned in 2005, and until recently located in Portland Harbour in Dorset, this vessel is now somewhere in Nigeria’s troubled oil fields. The story of this barge is often quite extraordinary: it takes us from Sweden to the Falkland Islands, the Netherlands to Manhattan, and involves engineers, ship spotters, soldiers, and his Chris…

The presentation will combine a first person narrative with still and moving images gleaned from a very wide variety of sources. Mike is also working on a film version of this project, so will be filming this lecture for possible footage, and as documentation.

For the second part of the session, Professor Neil Cummings, an artist whose projects also involve extensive tactical research of various kinds (most recently in the commission, ‘Self-Portrait: Arnolfini’, Bristol ) will enable a discussion. Mike will talk briefly about how this new work fits into his wider practice, and there will be discussion about some of the implications of the art/research methods he is using.

Likely topics include what sociologist Bruno Latour has called ‘feeding off controversies’; ‘space’ and how it can be understood, constituted and re-presented; tracking and tracing elusive and encoded kinds of evidence; and uses of narration in art and research.

Charlotte Webb is in the second year of a part-time PhD at Chelsea College of Art. Her research is a practice-led investigation into artistic collaboration and human agency.

One of her key creative strategies has been to use computer programmes to generate artworks. The early stages of the research has included a series of experiments set up to investigate how different kinds of agency can be accounted for in computer generated artworks. Entering into a relationships of interaction with a programme (an alternative ‘other’ to collaborate with) has prompted questions about where the creative agency in such an interaction resides, and to question how digital technologies are re-conceptualising current understandings of ‘collaboration’.

She is increasingly interested in the ways that web technologies and social media nuance artistic practice and create new possibilities for collaboration, and uses web based strategies of appropriation and distribution. She is currently designing a Karaoke website through which the public will be able to upload versions of the classic 1963 song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’.

http://otheragents.net

www.otheragents.tumblr.com

Narrating Practice

Date: Wednesday 11th January 2012, 2-5pm

Venue: Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

Present: Deniz Akca, Elena Artigas, Dalia Baassiri, SE Barnet, Helen Couchman, Maria Christoforatou, Karl Cresser, Nerma Cridge, Cristina Figueroapalau, Rebecca Hackemann, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Maria Kheirkhah, Catherine Long, Ope Lori, Elizabeth Manchester, Aaron McPeake, Elle Reynolds, Robert, Scott Schwager, Su, Joel Yuen.

Susan Edith Barnet is in the final year of a practice based PhD at Kingston University, and is an Associate Lecturer on the Fine Art Foundation course at Central St. Martin’s. Her research looks at the experience of disorientation. In it she attempts to go somewhere else as a way of accessing the unfamiliar. She turns to the experiences of others as they are relayed to her through storytelling. As these are not her own experiences they maintain a degree of strangeness, otherness.

Recounting an experience lies in a convergence of the unconscious with memory. Telling one’s story relies on remembered experience, whether of that which has been lived and is in the moment being remembered, or which is being remembered from moments of previous telling, or of a combination of these things and others as well. There are influences that range from childhood recollections to cultural histories to the particulars of the physical body. The connection to another’s experience traverses a wide gap of both conscious and unconscious activity.

SE Barnet presented a talk given on her work at the Royal College of Art’s Edge of Our Thinking conference by the artist Anne-Marie Creamer, referring to herself in the third person. She showed transcriptions of mobile phone messages that she had exchanged with Anne-Marie Creamer before the talk, a form of narration of the various arrangements that had to be negotiated. She presented photographs taken from aeroplanes showing the landscape below, over which she had drawn in green snaking lines – a series entitled You can’t walk on water you can’t sleep on clouds. In making these and other works she was thinking about what it is to make the familiar unfamiliar.

SE Barnet always presents herself in the third person – the emails she displays are presented as part of an exchange.

In the Landmark videos, she presents open-ended scenarios around collaboration with members of the public – a form of documentation of dislocation and displacement, a movement between what is same and familiar, and what is strange.

Story of Elsewhere, which she created for her thesis exhibition, is set in public spaces. We see individuals speaking in a multi-screen video projection, in which it is not possible to see all the screens at the same time. The viewing experience is one of constant disruption as the speakers talk over one another. It is a performative act of remembering and relaying as the people describe their impressions of public monuments in another place. At the same time she presented a video showing the Eiffel tower being photographed, alongside two artist’s books.

In Story of Elsewhere there is a constant negotiation between first and third person narratives, as the subtitles translate the words of the speakers in the third person, although the words were originally spoken in the first.

Elizabeth Manchester asked about SE Barnet’s different selves – the split between SE Barnet as first and third person. How conscious, and how explicit does she feel it to be? How much is in the written part of her thesis? SE replied that the abstract of her thesis suggests a navigational approach to reading through the three written and two visual parts of her thesis, in which she uses substitute/interchangeable identities. One part is fictional – it narrates the journey of a traveler.

Scott Schwager asked about the dialogic aspects of SE’s practice. She responded that the narrative/story-telling comes from her training in film-making. Unfolding a dialogue or narrating a story come naturally to her – everything goes back to story-telling – and expresses the pleasure of engaging with narrative.

Maria Kheirkhah asked whether anything is fixed in SE’s work. SE responded that that question had been asked in her viva – her work represents a definite challenge to fixity…

Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about the notion of having a fixed artist’s identity and SE responded that in her case it comes from having had two different identities all her life – she has two birth certificates and two different names – a double identity.

Aaron McPeake brought up the issue of gender – femininity has come to be associated with multiple identities. This stimulated a general discussion around multiple identities and the notion of fluidity. SE had used Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a way to access this slipperiness in her early research – it had been an early starting point for approaching the notion of destabilization. She likes the idea of the disembodied voice of the psychoanalyst. She would like to be speaking from a hole in the ground.

http://www.sebarnet.net

http://sebarnet.wordpress.com/

Rebecca Hackemann is a second year part time PhD candidate at CCW. She received her MFA in 1996 from Stanford University, California. Her practice spans a variety of media and is inspired by theoretical concerns surrounding the position of the spectator and the structure of vision and language, both written and photographic. It consists of photo-based image text work, anamorphic drawings and most recently optical devices on pavements in neighborhoods of New York. Her recent research studies engagements with a viewing device on two pavements in New York, where they are presently anchored for the next year. Thus the work is not finished when it is installed, it consists of a process, despite having a physical form. The Urban Field Glass Project both analyses the surrounding physical location using historical photographs, and tests itself as an art/research object – it collects its own feedback.

Rebecca’s theoretical aim is to use psychoanalysis as a methodology in her thesis and furthermore bring the complicated nexus of disciplines that converge in the public and the contested definitions concerning place/space/site in the public realm into a new focus through psychoanalytic theory. Rebecca would also like to discuss the relationship between practice and research for her upcoming presentation at CAA in Los Angeles in February www.rebeccahackemann.com http://tinyurl.com/7fn2hae

Rebecca Hackemann presented very briefly her trajectory from her early training as a photographer, to what she is doing now in her practice-led research. She presented stereoscopic viewing boxes in which she controlled the viewer, forcing him or her to look through two peep-holes to see close-up photographs of parts of the body. This work was influenced by theoretical concerns, texts such as Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin that she had encountered on her BA at. In 2007/8 she showed anamorphic drawings on the walls of Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta and Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York. To see these the viewer had to stand on an ‘x’. The Looking Glass House shows an anamorphic house with Alice coming out.

Rebecca’s PhD is concerned with new role public art might play– focusing on permanent public art in places where you don’t normally expect to see it. She unexpectedly got a grant and had to act quickly – there was a deadline by which she had to spend the money and execute her project. Her starting point was to challenge the public art cliché – enlarged studio art, extended, made more durable and then put outside without consideration of place or any attempt to engage with the community around it. A theorist Miwon Kwon, analyses projects that claim to be engaging with the community. Rebecca wanted to put up work that is not finished, which attracts respondents after it is installed. She spent a few months working with people, asking them what they would like to see in the two spots that she had selected. She chose two spots in areas that were not visited by tourists, dead spaces, places where there is not much to see. For example a street next to a fly-over, with a long stretch of metal fence, behind which is a triangle shaped left over urban space. On these pavements she installed metal viewing boxes on poles that invited the viewer to look inside through peepholes like the ones on her stereoscopic boxes from previously. The viewer sees a rotation of images selected by the public – as well as two historical images of the sites that appear in 3-d. At the same time as rotating images, the boxes solicit data from the viewers who can respond/give feedback through an app accessible using a ] QR code on the back of the box and a weblink. She also sent out a questionnaire online. The questionnaire asks them how they have found the experience of seeing something in a non-tourist area, and then whether they have ever visited a piece of public art – for example the Anish Kapoor piece at the Rockefeller Centre a tourist spot. Everyone answers no to this – they are all non art-world people.

This is art that creates data – an alternative to grafitti. It has a fluidity – through Rebecca’s taking herself out as an image-maker and decision-maker. Rebecca did not create any of the images that play in the slide-show; she described the process of soliciting images from the public, before asking a panel of people to make a selection. She transferred these to slide by photographing them in order to create the final work.

Maria Kheirkhah asked about the physical object – the viewing mechanism – what is the place of the documentation of the process of making it in Rebecca’s thesis. Rebecca answered that the process is irrelevant. For her, the piece takes the place of an analyst - it is the one who asks questions. It reveals the context that it sits within. The data will be original research in her thesis. This installation in New York is the pilot work for a bigger piece of work, as yet undetermined. With this project she has been investigating how people really react to public art – it is a model for engaging afterwards – to use the information in future work. She wants to ask: what new roles can public art play in the public realm? How do people react to it? Can the methodology of psychoanalysis open the whole picture?

Scott Schwager asked a technical question about using the QR code app – only younger people have this generally, so would this not be problematic in terms of data? Perhaps there is a need for multiple ways to gather data – through surveys in documents/questionnaires?

What about the sculptural aspects of the piece? What about the work as a piece of sculpture?

Rebecca answered that the questionnaire was also asked as an e-mail and using SurveyMonkey. She is going to conduct interviews as well. Scott asked if this was not too much data, or data from too many sources to manage, to which Rebecca asked – is this not what we are supposed to be able to do well in a PhD – synthesise data. To her the object is not designed to read as an aesthetic object.

As Rebecca’s psychoanalytical methodology is Lacanian, Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about Lacan’s notions of power and the worker in relation to Rebecca’s project. Rebecca says that she is thinking about architecture as subject – the real, the imaginary, the symbolic are all intertwined in it – also many disciplines are involved, such as sociology, urban planning and social geography. She is working as a sounding board, reactivating existing work – public sculptures that people walk past without noticing at the same time as finding out what part public works can play in people’s lives.

Maria mentioned that the topic of (permanent) public art and audience seems very broad and so did Scott. Rebecca agreed, but feels she is narrowing down particular areas of concern (gaps!) and that psychoanalysis is not a seperate discipline to bring into the research (making it bigger), but is rather a method and research position that can bring all these disciplines that impinge on public art together to unlock new paradigms for public art theory and practice.

Rebecca passed out a questionnaire to everyone. It asks us about our own practice and what role it plays within our research. It is for her talk at the impending College Art Association Conference. The questionnaire is available here www.rebeccahackemann.com/Research/CAATalkHackemann.pdf