Kari working draft

Essay on Method

In this text I will reflexively examine my practice over the past approximately six months that I have been studying here at The Piet Zwart Institute. I will do this through an examination of recent works in relation to broader ideas within my practice, setting concepts and aesthetic properties within a broader political/ art historical context. I began the Piet Zwart programme late due to taking part in a residency at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath (Scotland) and so had already started on some works by the time I arrived here. This was a research residency and I had spent my time there consuming and producing text. I was reading pretty didactic material around the themes of the debt economy, ‘immaterial’ labour and semiocapital, affect and the conditions of speech . I was also thinking a lot about the relationship between sound and image within film theory, defined by French theorist Michel Chion as the interplay between temporality and density . During the residency I was drawing connections between these different research areas, thinking about whether our current culture is one of sound or image, temporality or density and how these forms become cultures within themselves. I was working to a familiar methodology: that of taking an appropriated source and using it as a framework to produce my own material. In this case that was British Sounds by Jean Luc Godard . This is a film I had originally seen a few years ago. It is an experimental but still highly didactic study of labour relations in the U.K, made while Godard was still collaborating with the Dziga Vertov group. What attracted me to the film is both the fact that it was made in 1970; unbeknownst to the makers, a pivotal point in the shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist production in the U.K. Godard also made the work around a radical conjecture: images are too corrupted by capital to contain revolutionary potential, this is located is sound. Around this premise he structured British Sounds attempting to give the auditory priority over the visual within the context of film. I borrowed this framework from British Sounds giving myself the task of exploring contemporary labour relations and semiocapital through the medium of sound. I arrived on the masters programme with (a mess of) loose notes written around threads of interest I had identified. These I then began to take forward into works when I arrived here in Rotterdam. I will now focus on four recent works in some depth, which constituted a solo show in SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow in February 2015. The show was titled Ohmage a play on words both referring to ‘homage’ pronounced with a French accent and to ‘ohm’ the measurement of sound by the degree of resistance at reception. I will treat these as manifestations of thought processes and use them as points of access into the conceptual material I am grappling with. I will also try to deconstruct and analyze how working within the Piet Zwart has affected my thinking process and methodology.