Claudio's Thesis - QUICKNOTES
(idea: make my thesis as a website/blog? a pad document? with articles, notes, hyperlinks to references, working materials ...)
TO MAKE THESE PIECES I’VE BEEN LITERALLY PHYSICALLY LOOKING CLOSELY TO AT IN SCREENS LENSES AND CAMERAS
NOT JUST A TOPIC A REAL PRACTICE OF RNGAGING BODILY WITH THESE IMAGEMAKING DEVICES WITH THEIR MATERIALITY THEIR CAPABILITIES THEIR LIMITS
I’VE BEEN SHOOTING FLASHLIGHTS IN MY EYES
FILMES SCREENS AT FEW CENTIMETERS DISTANCE
LOOKED INTO CAMERA LENSES …0
Anatomical parts of the eye have been pieced together from polychrome materials: white bone for the white, a pink vitreous paste for the tear duct at the inner corner, a ring of black surrounding a thicker brown ring for the iris, and at the center a void where a pupil would once have been inlaid.1 Only the tear duct alters the symmetry of these concentric circles, decreasing in diameter to the pupil point – white, black, brown, black again – like a target. A sheet of bronze enfolds the back of the eye to hold its parts together; at the front, this bronze sheeting has been sliced into lashes that curl away from the eye and frame it.2 The eye does not move or contract as a beholder approaches; however, brilliance, hues, and variegation form and animate it.
Polychrome eyes that remain partially preserved or that have been fully reconstructed radically change a beholder’s encounter with a polychrome statue. The gaze of the inlaid eye amplifies the impact of the whole polychrome body. The inlaid eye also produces wonder (thauma) as it glints, reflects, absorbs, and shines forth from a figure designed to dazzle.3 A beholder processes such wonder through their entire body and especially through the eyes
Of the sculpted body’s complex material polychromy, the eye is the most complex, most colorful, and most intricately pieced together. The eye’s superlative materiality commands a beholder’s attention and foregrounds the eye as both a microcosm of the body’s fitted-together assemblage of material color-parts and as the most important part within the polychrome whole
. An inlaid eye would once have been fitted into that socket, but it now looks back with a blank gaze (Figure 105). Modern beholders have become accustomed to this blank-eyed appearance when looking at classical sculpture
e the differences between a sculptural body with inlaid eyes and one with the more familiar blank eye. The empty socket, which is void translated into opacity, acts differently from the inlaid eye. Where the right eye looked back with an assemblage of vibrant material color, the left eye stretches across the socket
The lack of differentiation and the monochrome produced by the empty socket denies a beholder the visual exchange that the polychrome body, enhanced and animated by the polychrome eye, performs.
These seem to produce monochrome wholes where ancient artists in fact fitted together assemblages
y fitted these inlays together from different polychrome materials as separate assemblages and then set these into sockets left
these into sockets left in the cast bronze form. Inlaid eyes in particular are often the most complex
s, the particularly complex example of assemblage that inlaid eyes offer, and the ways in which the production of these inlaid eyes intersected with and informed contemporary theories of material vision.
These ancient writers worked in environments populated by objects built up from material color-parts and polychrome statues looking back at them with fitted-together inlaid eyes. We cannot disentangle the artistic atomism that surrounded these writers from the theories of material vision, animism, and mixing that they produced.
To craft inlaid eyes for statues, artists pieced together eye-parts from an array of colorful, often high-value materials including copper, gold, silver, ivory, bone, alabaster, quartz, limestone, obsidian, rock crystal, lapis lazuli, resin, various pigments, and colored glass. While these materials varied – there seems to be no set formula for the materials used to craft eyes – each eye includes distinct colors and materials for its various anatomical parts. This juxtaposition and contrast of colored matter distinguishes different parts of the eye – cornea, iris, pupil, canthus, caruncle, lashes – and also emphasizes the functioning assemblage that these pieced-together parts produce. Highlighting the eye through these vibrant material colors shows it to be both a part of the whole figure and a synecdoche for the way in which the entire body has also been pieced together.15 Within a system of scalable material color, the eye is both a part (of the figural body) and a whole (organ of sight) that has itself been assembled from color-parts.
artists sometimes inlaid the eyes and at other times painted them. Inlaid and painted eyes were once ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean. Many ancient statues have not retained their polychrome eyes, and this fitting together has been replaced by an empty hole or a solid surface from which the pigments have worn off. When such statues are reproduced, these polychrome eyes become a solid, monochrome expanse. Restoring polychrome eyes to statues or attending to those inlaid eyes still extant in the material record invites us to picture ancient Mediterranean beholders constantly confronting these eyes looking back at them. Visual exchanges between living beholders and polychrome objects depend on both the inlaid or painted eyes and the polychrome bodies into which they have been set and that they animate. These effects of assemblage and animation permit visual exchange at the level of particulate matter and these visual exchanges draw attention to each eye’s, each sculpture’s, and thus each beholder’s scaled assemblage, opening onto a range of discourses, materials, and geographies not generally associated with these works. Fittedtogether eyes allow us to see the scalable part-towhole relationships of material color. These relationships draw together a wide geographic range of materials, philosophical notions of vision and anatomy, a discourse around wonder, the relationship between vision and the wider sensorium (especially touch), and atomism. The eye thus becomes a material locus where ideas about color, vision, beholding, assemblage, animation, and mixing all come together.
the empty socket offers something closer to the ideal form of an eye than the inlaid one, or even the living beholder’s own eye. The void of the empty socket approximates an ideal form crafted in the mind, merely notional and devoid of material specificity. The substitution of an empty socket for a fitted-together assemblage offers a modern beholder the illusion of greater wholeness. The monochrome fragment has done away with the necessity of parts and no longer indexes the heterogeneity of fitted-together forms and of a beholder’s own physical body. The image is now abstracted into an idealized metaphysical form, or eidos.
both Parmenides and Empedocles engage with color as part of a shared interest in understanding the nature of the cosmos.25 Writing in environments saturated with the vibrant colors of the earth and landscape and many polychrome buildings, paintings, and sculptures, philosophers sought to understand the phenomenon of color as an index of the visible, knowable world. In the ancient Mediterranean, seeing was a matter of materials acting on each other. The centrality of vision and optics in the ancient Mediterranean has been and continues to be well analyzed, although this analysis has not always incorporated the centrality of color, despite the emphasis on the connection between vision and color by ancient authors. Ancient Mediterranean theories of vision and theories of color inform each other through their connection to the eyepart and also to materiality.
s. In her work on light and ancient lamps, Ruth Bielfeldt has argued that despite offering different ideas for how vision worked, ancient Mediterranean thinkers collectively emphasized the materiality of sight, what Bielfeldt names “vision’s visibility.” 28 (Ruth Bielfeldt, “Sight and Light: Reified Gazes and Looking at Artifacts in the Greek Cultural Imagination,” in Sight and the Ancient Senses, )
9 This is to say that the evidence of ancient Greek theories of visuality maps well to the fragmented and pieced-together evidence of ancient polychrome eyes. Both the perceptible, material world and the anatomical eye itself are understood as made up of material color-parts that can be synthesized into wholes. Perception of the polychrome world takes place in and through the polychrome eye
In working through this fragmentary evidence for ancient Greek ideas about seeing and being seen, three distinct but related theories of vision emerge: intromission, extromission, and a dual theory that combines elements of both (Figure 109).36 These three related theories emphasize the materiality of vision and argue for material effluences (apporrhoiai) emitted from the eye, the object, or both. Having established the materiality of color and the scalable part-to-whole relationship that this material color makes visible and knowable, we can recognize these effluences as chromatic particles of matter
Intromission, championed by Empedocles of Akragas (459–435 BCE), posits that colorful material effluences move from the object of sight to the eye, which takes these effluences in through its pores (poroi) in order to be processed.37 These effluences, or streams of particulate matter, are said to have color, which is perceived by the receiving eye.38 Empedocles argues that the effluences emanating from objects must match up with, touch, and pass through the appropriately sized pores in the beholder’s eyes in order to be seen.
The theory of extromissive vision posits that a beholding eye emits rays that traverse the space between a beholder and an object. These rays then “trace” the form of the object, apprehending its particulars through a kind of visual touch. Rays emitted by the eyes perceive both colors and contours.
The dual theory of vision captures the reciprocal material action and exchange of seeing and being seen. Particle exchange or mixing midstream takes place in the separate space (khōra) of visuality. Seeing and being seen demand mixing on the level of the particle. Materialist and atomist theories describe being in and seeing the world as the mixing and recombination of polychrome particles between bodies and across space.
d the inlaid and painted eyes that recorded artistic ideas about vision.47
Atomist theories contend that material colors have form at the level of the particle and that these colored particles join together to make up larger, infinitely scalable forms. These theories of vision develop over the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, produced by writers throughout the Mediterranean – Athens, Sicily, Ionia – in spaces populated by figural statues with inlaid and painted eyes. Since vision brings material color into beholding bodies, the specific materials of inlaid eyes take on particular significance. The materials used to craft inlaid eyes often contrasted with the materials used to sculpt the rest of the body into which they were fitted. Working these materials, which were frequently expensive, quarried with great bodily difficulty, and sometimes imported, required different skills
Rock crystal, for example, was among the most prized materials of the ancient Mediterranean.48 Obsidian, a volcanic glass,
Lapis lazuli
The whites of eyes could also be produced from materials ranging from bone to marble. Alabaster (calcite), which was also used for eyewhites,
Each of these materials brings a material valence to the bodily assemblage of which they are a part.
Despite the frequency with which artists produced inlaid eyes for bronze statues, descriptions often omit them.53
the glittering inlaid eyes of the bronze version have been rendered in blank marble
they now appear as a monochrome white surface, editing out the important polychrome variegation and brilliance of the glittering-eyed bronze sculpture. This material substitution alters the copy, which lacks both the scalable part-to-whole relationships internal to the bronze version and the animation that this polychrome variegation crafts. In contrast with the marble version, the Piraeus Athena looks out and down toward an approaching beholder with bright, pieced-together eyes, key parts in the assembled whole that animate the sculpture and catch a beholder’s eye.
. The copy tradition replaced the pieced-together polychromy of inlaid eyes with solid monochrome expanses of marble produced in the same material as the rest of the sculpture. Where those copied eyes were painted in antiquity, often only traces of pigment remain visible to the naked eye today.
ased the important piecing together of different polychrome materials present in the ancient iterations
t an ideal of monochrome formal unity drove the theorization of art, which in turn contributed to the (re)production of more art from the past that conformed to these ideals, i
Inlaid eyes necessitated ongoing care and maintenance without which they fell out and left a blank void and an empty socket
Empty sockets mark where the statue would once have had inlaid eyes
each of these bronze statues would once have looked out from inlaid eyes fitted together from vibrant material color-parts
While the inlaid eyes of many bronze statues are no longer in place, a number of statues do retain one, both, or parts of their eyes.
plaster copies solidify the empty sockets of the marble statue and render them as monochrome white surface
The empty sockets and the inlaid eyes that would have filled them in antiquity have been plastered over in the copy tradition
Reconstituting polychrome eyes, both painted and inlaid, also recovers processes of intersubjective exchange between the figure and the beholder by crafting animate, embodied polychromy. Polychrome eyes act. They see and are seen and they shape the period discourse on visuality. This reciprocal exchange takes place between the polychrome eye of a statue and the polychrome eye of a beholder, and the exchange animates the space between them
. Writing of Daidalos, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, active in the first century BCE, offers the following apocryphal insight: In the production of statues he so excelled all other men that later generations preserved a story to the effect that the statues which he created were exactly like living beings (empsukhos, lit. containing a soul); for they say that they could see and walk, and preserved so completely the disposition of the entire body (holon sōma) that the statue which was produced by art seemed to be a living being (empsukhon zōon) (4.76.2).79
In her work on Daidalos, Françoise FrontisiDucroux distinguishes between animation and mimesis.83 Daidalos’s sculptures live not because they mimetically imitate life, but because they are animated through their polychrome assemblages.
These different alloys, inlays, and overlays fit together material color-parts to craft whole bodies that each remain a “wonder to behold” (thauma idesthai).93
The webcam may display a vague image or no image at all after a storm or a longer period without rain.
If the image is blurred, there is something on the lens. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about this.
from PETTEN's website
Found images as found objects is recurring attitude. Found in places, found on screens
CURRENT STATE OF MY PLANS FOR JAN ASSESSMENT
4 sketches (or: scenes, episodes, parts), ideally shown as loops on 4 different screens.
1)
Closeup shots of empty/blank/lost eyes of greek sculptures. Filmed in the Louvre or at the Phidias (most iconic sculptor from Athens V BC) exhibition in Rome. Filmed in 16mm, slowed down, (or photographed in 35mm), high contrast black and white. The abstract(ed) shape of the statues' eyes gradually forms on the screen, is lost and found continuously. You see it and you don't, and when you see it you are seen too. Continuously looking for something, and then losing it, and what you see are eyes looking at you. The shots are repeatedly interrupted by black frames of various length.
Images are accompanied by a text (ideally, on screen - maybe as a voiceover - need to figure it out) about:
how eyes were made in ancient sculptures (inlays made of precious materials or painted on stone, very detailed, accurately, realistically) and how they decayed and they are now lost
facts about the current state of technologies of creating so-called bionic eyes - nano-sensors to be implanted inside the eye to (partially) recover vision of blind people ( these researches are still failing - the Nanoretina model - the most successful so far -only provides black and white pixelated impression of light and darkness - an abstracted experience of the world through light and darkness. )
In both cases, small technological objects, made of rare/advanced materials, that speak of an obsession for the eye/vision. Both are implants, both related to a loss and a failure of vision - both creating a sense of vision - of seeing, of being seen.
A quest for seeing, of "making" eyes, while the viewers is drawn to look for and “make” the eyes on screen, actively engaging their own vision.
Other possible elements to speculate about:
threats to vision by screens and modern lifestyle - rise in myopia and vision loss - because of staring too close to things and screens, not being in nature ancient greeks theories of vision - very physical - images as objects colliding with eyes, or eyes shooting rays towards the world
...
actions/processes of wearing out of eyes/surfaces/materials
2)
A compilation of footage from 4 webcams on beaches in South Holland (from the strandweer.nu database). These webcams are set up on beaches for safety and weather reporting reasons. They perform automatic Pan-Tilt-Zoom movements, according to an internal algorithm, which makes them move unpredictably. They continuously scan the beach, the sea, the horizon, zooming in and out, and the feeling they provide is that of a constant quest for something, a quest that is always bound to fail. They seem to be seeing everything out there, yet what do they see? What are they looking for? Sidenote: these camera movements remind me vaguely of works by Michael snow (Wavelength, La Region Centrale), but in a lo-fi, internet-aesthetics way.
Footage fro these webcams will be taken on the 22nd of December 2023, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the day in which the amount of sunlight is lowest. The darkest day of the year. The footage will be taken in correspondance to the sunrise and sunset, capturing the transition from full darkness to full daylight, and back, and edited in a 2 hour loop - 1 hour at sunrise, 1 hour at sunset. . The edit jumps from one to another webcams along the 1 hour timeframe. From seeing almost nothing, to seeing everything in full sunlight. But what is this everything?
Long shots, slow movements, a contemplative mood, a quest for what? What are these cameras looking for? What are you - staring at these cameras - looking for? Also, the staging of a process of making - and unmaking - of an image, through natural sunlight, through a camera sensor, on a screen.
Extra element to explore, maybe in form of text on screen:
staring at the sea/horizon/sky as a primordially human act of seeing and of being in the world - the sea and the horizon as "screens" / to appear and disappear
to relieve eye strain they suggest to look out to open spaces/horizons
A parallel between the automatic Pan Tilt Zoom movements of these cameras and the 4 types of movements that human eyes can make (saccades, smooth pursuit movements, vergence movements, and vestibulo-ocular movements)
3)
A word - LOST, as found by chance and screenshot as part of a title of an article I was about to read on my computer - keep the same font, same typography - is blown up on a large LCD screen. The screen is filmed by a handheld 4K camera which moves in front of it, scanning the letters and the surface of the screen. The screen in filmed at various distances and angles. Letters are mixed, reversed, fragmented.
L O ST L S T O L T O S T O S L
The structure of the screen appears - as squared edges of the letters, as a grid of pixels, as flickering light interfering with the camera's own shutter speed.
A short (1/2 minute) video loop, with an equally short music loop/beat as a soundtrack . A sense of loss is evoked, literally and lyrically. The camera constantly loses its object, loses itself in the surface of the screen. A sense of loss that resonates with the other parts of the work. Loss of vision, lost eyes, lost at sea, lost in screens, pixels.
(2 and 3 could be merged into one single scene as there are some obvious links - scanning movements along a surface/screen, losing your eyes in the sea/in the pixels, looking out in the distance/looking very close up to a screen, the sea/horizon as a screen (devices of appearing/disappearing)
4)
(still figuring it out)
Abstract imagery - probably resulting from the various technical/structural experiment I made/will make in testing the possibilities of image making by staging extreme, absurd interaction/interference of cameras, screens, light - is run through some artificial intelligence application for visually impaired people that provide textual and audio description of images. Confronted with such imagery, they can't but fail in describing them. One of these apps often uses the formulas “I am not sure but this might be …” “I have doubts but…”.
Working on the failure of images as well as the failure of making meaning out of images.
Guessing what is seen is what our eyes constantly do.
Doubting about images, about their supposedly realistic content.
All 4 parts are at their core attempts at seeing. Quest for seeing, and to make sense of what is seen.
Losing/Failing vision and attempting to see. (expand)
challenges for assessment
presenting convincing visual and text material
write 2/3 loglines for the whole project / research questions
write down a list of every step i need to take for each of the 4 parts,
make a rough timetable for the weeks before assessments + for the upcoming months
28/11/2023
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tonight, i was trying to film the screen with a more advanced camera, that i rented at the rental station at wdka.
i was trying out different settings - shutter speed, focal length, focus - to get the best, most clear image of the screen's grid structure.
lights were on in the room, long led tubes, whiteblueish light.
i started filming the screen, once again. in the camera's electronic viewfinder I see something strange happening. apparently random flashes of reddish/orangeish light appear on the screen I was trying to film. the camera is still, the screen is still too, but i see this light moving, flashing, dancing
i keep filming. it must be some sort of weird interference between the screen's led structure, the room's lightning system, the camera's sensor.
I go back to my studio desk, willing to see the result. I open the file, no trace of that light, juts the plain, white, griddy surface of the screen. that lght i saw while filming was gone, didnt see it anymore. is this what I'm interested in?
(tbc...)
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am i losing myself in a rabbithole of self referential formalistic shit without any interest for others? am i just staying on the surface of things and not really trying to go beyond the formalistic refelection on images? this is what david is warning me about
should i try to get out? how can i do that?
he said that the more interesting parts are the blind spot and the idea of failure of images. work more on that? on what they actually mean?
24/11/2023
there s something with the surface+
its observation/exploration/scanning and its rupture/deformation/alteration/profanation
profanation of the dispositif (Agamben, always comes back)
interventions on the surface
ideas for final output?
a 16 mm film - screened as a analog projection loop - made as a compilation of short sketches - in between: short still fragmented texts that loosely relate to the images and partially elaborate on the topics involved
use 16mm print stock film - very high contrast, I feel it very much suits the premises of my project - and cheaper
[Steve suggests: in the piece described above, you are also making the viewer conscious of the experience of viewing the piece, which is encoded with 'burning eyes/eyes burning'. Please consider what this mirroring of words does, EYES WATCHING / WATCHING EYES seems redundant, but for me it suggests a shift from the inside of the film to the outside, between the object (the film) and the viewer, between the semiotics and the affect. the dash / is like a hinge that meaning swings on. By this logic FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING could be FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING/BURNINGWATCHINGFILMING. The material and the experience of the material feedback. This is consistent with your desire to work on the border between blindness and sight; visibility and invisibility.]
1 - THAT DASH SLASH / IS THE EDGE, THE TRESHOLD. ALL MY PROJECT IS MOVING ON THAT EDGE, ITS AN EXPLORATION OF THE EDGE BETWEEN
REFLECT ON MY USE OF IT, BRING IT OUT AS A METAPHOR/SYMBOL/IMAGE FOR THE SUBJECT OF MY WORK, TO TALK ABOUT MY WORK - ITS THEMES BUT ALSO ITS TOOLS
/ AS SEPARATION BUT ALSO RELATION, CONTRADICTORY/PARADOXICAL VALUE
/ IMPLIES A DOUBLE SIDE, THE POSSIBILITY OF A REVERSAL - I USE SIMILAR FORMAL DEVICES - THE INVERT EFFECT (FLIP IMAGES ON SCREEN AND POSITIVE/NEGATIVE REVERSAL OF AN IMAGE)
2 - Aitana also pointed out a certain redundancy in the stuff i showed in mentor group.
I feel it's actually a strategy that I am trying to develop. what does that mean? how can I use it effectively/intentionally?
is redundancy the right word? maybe repetition/layering?
(for part 3 / concepts)
other devices i use
slowing down almost to still frames / speeding up footage to a flickering flashing deconstructed perception of footage, altering the time images are given on screen
23/11/23
slowed down Louvre statues (excerpt) https://youtu.be/FfkTtrCsTFQ
make a 2 min piece of
shot:statue
countershot: balck dot on white background
shot: statue (opposite direction)
countershot: again black dot on white backgroud
loop
(an LCD screen filmed very very close)
(De Rotterdam's façade filmed form the Erasmus bridge)
sketch 1 https://youtu.be/ac1rEIsvwpA
sketch 2 https://youtu.be/IVagyN1DFVs
(Agnes Martin, Wood I, 1963 Watercolor and graphite on paper, 15 x 15 1/2 inches (38.1 x 39.4 cm))
(Agnes Martin, Aspiration, 1960 Ink on paper, 11 3/4 x 9 3/8 inches (29.8 x 23.8 cm) )
a refusal to make a fetish of the final “work” - to operate almost exclusively on the level of the sketch. - what is the value of this stance as an artist?
thinking about self imposed limitations to my practice
black and white only
16mm (limitations in shooting and editing)
when digital editing - keep it simple - 4 tracks + effects - aka not make things that would not be possible to make in analog editing
1 channel only? or can you make split screen in 16 mm?
sound? - no input mixer feedback loops