Perri MacKenzie

WHAT / HOW / WHY

assignment - 29 May 2013

What

A knitted garment based on Speedo “Endurance” female leisure swimsuit – knitted in 3 shades of green (mint green, swamp green, and green green). Although the swimsuit is based on a Speedo pattern, the knitting process warps the sporty cut, so the original design is less evident. The garment was displayed on a wooden coat hanger, on a clothes rail – so you could see the garment from all angles. The clothes rail rested upon an A2 digital print on off-white paper: a photograph of a watercolour painting of aubergines, lying on a floor.

How

The garment was created fully-fashioned on a knitting machine, with a mixture of green wool threads that striped randomly. Fully-fashioned means the design is unified: made of one piece of fabric sewn together. The clothes rail was found in a textiles workshop: cheap “chrome” effect and black plastic, with paint marks. The digital print was created for a previous exhibition, so it was already “made” - it was “found” by me, in my studio. These found moments highlight the work as an assemblage of objects, rather than a fully-worked construction.

Why

The garment was created out a desire to commit to a technology and a design choice: to completely “fashion” something. Machine-knitting is a bodily, symmetrical process, like swimming. In this way, the process of the making allows a motoric performance of the body, and then the final outcome allows for a (potential) further bodily performance. In creating this work I was also following a desire to visualise a “motile accessory” - a symbolic object that prevails in its own spontaneous slipping-away.*

• The display of this object, with the clothes rail and the aubergine print – did not reflect the exuberance of this “why”: when I decided to limit the description to 50 words, the “why” of the clothes rail and the aubergine print immediately fell away. Therefore these two items do not have the significance I first thought; or their potential as assemblage is not significant enough to read as “why”. So if it is only the swimsuit that is significant, how do I reflect the exuberance with which this object was created? In a practice of affect, exuberance is an important quality, endowing a work with a richness that needs to be made visible. How do I make this richness visible? Perhaps by thinking of the display as part of the idea of “motile accessory” or “fully-fashioned”. What kind of fully-fashioned display what make this object more motile, more accessorised?

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LIZ'S WRITING MACHINE

PLACE

Contemporary Amerika, where you can eat delicious french fries, withdraw $10, $20, $15 at a time from the ATM. In Contempoary Amerika, you play Life as a champion.

CHARACTERS

Woman in high heels, listening to Michael Jackson / Prince on her Walkman as she clicks along the pavement to work. She is glad to be escaping all the housework she has to do. She hums the words to “Sweet men”, or possibly “Speed men”, we don't know. She is young and stylish, looks like she came just out of the 20s.

Girl with bandage on her eye, revving a motorcycle, wearing blue nike trainers. She has a violin case on her back.

ACTION

Woman clicks along the street, quickly with her heels, her 80s synth pop, her stylish retro bobbed haircut. Sees girl with bandage on her eye, the one wearing blue nike trainers. The girl is revving her motorbike but it is not starting.

Woman: Alles goed?

Girl: Yeah, I'm fine, just having some trouble...

Woman: Can I help?

Girl: Thanks, but no, not really, actually...it has different kinds of speeds but none of them seem to be speeding. (She gives up) I feel like my own shadow is pushing me down the street.

Woman: The shadow is your bike?

Girl: No, the shadow is my violin case on my back...

Woman: Is it empty?

Girl: Yes, but that's not the point. You see, I'm against being overly sensitised, but the only way I can even think this thought is to be overly sensitised.

Woman: Oh, it's a trap. Your dead motorbike is pushing your empty violin case down the street, but it's not pushing it anywhere at all. It's a lifestyle of leisure, turned inside out. You, and when I say You I mean We, We are so wrapped up in our own knotted scarves, which carry empty violin cases, walkmen with indistinguishable music, and aubergines, that we cannot even perform basic biological functions. I don't know what it means to be an impotent woman, but we are one.

Girl: Yes, but is this an authentic experience? I can't get focus.

Woman: It's difficult to know what's authentic in a fictionalised life. But I know what you mean, I can't get focus either, the figure of your figure against the ground of the ground is shivering, I can't adjust the focus and I can't get an interior perspective.

Girl: The wolf's eye is the transgressor, it is dangerous and it is destroying my watercolour filter. If I just adjust my emotional palette...Ah, I can fix it through digitising. Digitising gives it a fixed freedom...

Woman: And the fixed freedom gives it location, and the digitising stops the pixels shivering, they are sharp and they create a detailed neural map of this moment of complete exactitude.

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WRITING MACHINES QUESTIONS

Please visit this link:

http://www.perrimackenzie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Machteld-by-Perri-and-Perri-by-Perri.pdf

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Synopsis assignment

In “the work of art in the age of digital recombination’, Jos de Mul presents a re-thinking of our experience with (artistic and new) media via the computer interface, as a construct of aesthetic experience, through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” De Mul briefly outlines the scope of Benjamin’s essay, in particular defining key terms such as cult value, exhibition value, and aura. Throughout the essay he re-defines these key terms in digital terms. Through this lens, de Mul develops a “database ontology”, which reflects on how the combinatorics of the database – the commands Add, Browse, Change, and Destroy, allows for surpluses of meaning in media to be created through multi-dimensional flexibility. In this sense, databases can function as material or conceptual metaphors – the former in the material databases of biotechnology or industrial robotics, the latter as a structure which extends and re-combines our experience of ourselves and the world. He then introduces his main thesis: for Benjamin: in the age of mechanical reproduction, everything becomes and object for mechanical reproduction. However in the age of digital databases, everything in the material and conceptual world becomes an object for recombination and manipulation. As he number of recombinations available via database ontology is near-infinite, the work of art in the digital age has a renewed presence of aura, in the sense that the work of media art becomes “an interface between the sensible and the supersensible” – a membrane not between the work and its history, but in between the work and its virtuality.

In ‘Remixing and Remixability’, Lev Manovich reflects on flexibility and modularity as a marker of an media object’s worth, in a description of what he calls “remixability” – the potential of any kind of information to be copied, pasted, sampled, and “remixed” into any other kind of information, endlessly. He uses examples from electronic music, video editing (“mash-up”) and the world of fashion to illustrate this idea. In particular, he makes a distinction between collections of information where remixing is practiced “publicly” (such as computer programming) and those collections where remixing is practiced “privately” (such as the stock image library of a graphic design studio.) This distinction begs the question: will cultural works be blurred into this remixability milieu in the future? Will they be designed to be modular, to be broken into blocks which “know how to couple with other blocks.” ? Contemporary modularity, for Manovich, goes beyond the design restrictions of twentieth century design – in a contemporary modular system, every time the blocks are used again they can modify themselves automatically to produce “unlimited diversity”. This points towards a possible future of “complete remixability” or “universal modularity”. He describes a tendancy for information to actually want to be infinitely remixable – “in the era of Web 2.0 – ‘information wants to be ASCII’.” This tendancy means that the distinction between professional and amateur has blurred, as their media pools mix. It is at this point that his thesis becomes an exploration of the difference between modularity in contemporary culture versus industrial modularity, which is governed by a different logic. In this way we have been modular for a long time – but at the same time “we have never been modular.”

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Synopsis Assignment

I have looked diligently at my own mind is an essay by Heraclitus of Epheses, (Greece , c. 500 BC). It is one of the many ancient thought-fragments anthologized in The Lost Origins of the Essay, (ed. John D’Agata, Graywolf Press 2009).

I have looked diligently… is a series of 38 short statements. Each statement is visually separated from the next with a graphic. This gives each thought space to be itself - a discrete statement; yet with the flow of the repeated graphics this discretion is given visual continuity.

This discrete continuity is subtle: each thought at first seems aphoristic, Zen-like, unified in itself. Yet, as you read the essay, the thought-fragments begin to correspond with each other. Thus the writer moves from

We share a world when we are awake

to

Awake, a dying world.

The essay begins with a reflection on knowing and intelligence:

Those who wish to know more about the world must learn about it in details

This then moves on to an extended meditation on the movements of the elements (fire, water, lightening) throughout the world, eventually returning to its details - the world’s debris of dirt and dust:

There are gods here, too.

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Describe what you do assignment

What follows is a 150 word description of three projects.

Popsong

There are three elements to Popsong: two screen prints, a performance, and a PDF. The screen prints: two, A2 in size, two colours - dark royal blue and dark ochre. The prints were graphic, containing hand-written text (blue) and a drawing (ochre). The first text read “popsong”, the second “ritournelle”. Each drawing appeared to be scrawly renderings of a single foot. The performance was of me, talking and singing, descending a stair case - lasting approximately 15 minutes. I read from a script, which had painted elements on the backs of the pages, and deposited each page as I descended the stairs. I sang in French and spoke in English. I sang La Javanaise by Serge Gainsbourg, and spoke about zig zags, translation, hexagonal chessboards, and the letters A, V, and Z. The script from the performance was scanned in double-sided as a PDF, and it exists on my website.

(150 words)

Ivan: A meditation on three objects

I was asked by MAP magazine to convert research I had accumulated on a residency at the Centre of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, into an online publication. It is soon to be published. The online publication is called Ivan: A meditation on three objects. Each section contemplates a “cultural object”, in order: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Mappa embroideries by Alighiero Boetti, and The Lecture on Ethics by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The text is set in Times New Roman, with occasional blue italics, and is accompanied by 13 watercolour illustrations in process-blue, process-pink, and process-orange. The illustrations range in style and content, from tonal washes to graphic fills. The publication is laid out in a series of landscape spreads, and is designed by me. The text is approx. 6,000 words long, split into three sections with a very short introduction and no conclusion.

(144 words)

The air was full of scent, imbued with life and with contradictions

This is a performance by me to take place on Saturday 13th October at Sunday Artfair. It is presented by Victor and Hester with Aye-Aye Books in the publication section of the art fair. The performance is part of a broader project with Victor & Hester and Allison Gibbs exploring the potentiality of archives. The performance will be approximately 20 minutes long, and will include the following: one A3 watercolour painting by me, pinned to wall (the painting is of hands holding a colourful rectangular object with a green leafy background), and myself reading aloud an abstract essay referring to my relationship with my particular copy of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. The essay also refers to the phenomenon of “structural colour” in objects such as opals, fish scales, and the blue sky. The essay centres around the arbitrary question: “what is this books relationship to its cover?”

(149 words)