Edward Clive (UK)
Options for Objects.
My sisters recently re counted an anecdote from our childhood that I had no recollection of. We grew up in Somerset, England in a house that was annexed by an old cider press. Our parents had turned this into a museum, part of which contained a diorama of a man at work, shoveling coal into the furnace of a large copper distillery. I have no idea where this figure was purchased. He had hopelessly unrealistic features. Only his shoulder and hip joints could move, meaning he was forever trapped in an uncomfortable, unnatural looking pose, poorly simulating the act of shoveling. This figure was propped up against a cider barrel and apparently my sisters would sometimes make me hide behind him. When visitors walked past they would secretly cue me to jog the arms of the character, momentarily jolting him into a brief failing, performance of stunted animation.
A year or so later, at the age of seven I was taken to see The Tutankhamun Exhibition, on permanent display in a small county museum in Dorchester. One of the discovering archaeologists was [from Dorchester itself? jf], which led to the creation of the permanent exhibition, set up in 1986. I visited a couple of years after it’s opening and was [I remember? jf] absolutely terrified. Its a dingy claustrophobic museum, chronicling the discovery of the kings tomb and its remarkable contents. In places it is also set out as a life size diorama, recreating the moment the golden coffins were removed from the sarcophagus. The museums website claims "So accurate are the recreated tomb and treasures that… filmmakers and television companies worldwide have extensively used them for their documentary productions". In reality this recreation is laughably crude; misshapen figures hold awkward poses whilst looped 'dialogue' is emitted from poorly hidden speakers. I found this horrific as a child; lifeless, lumpen plastic models forever trapped gawping at a coffin whilst a disembodied voice overly dramatically dictates their excitement. [I think this is nice, maybe you can extend on why 'dialogue' is interesting/ridiculous? jf]
On recently revisiting I was reminded of another major detail - all the 'artefacts' in the museum are copies of originals. I had forgotten this, or maybe never knew, but on revisiting was surprised that this had escaped my attention. Obviously the treasures of Egypt’s ancient past weren't going to be displayed in a small museum in Dorchester, but I had unconsciously assumed the majority of the items in the museum would be pictorial, videos and dioramas. The exhibition itself is a recreation of a famous 1972 touring Tutankhamun exhibition that traveled to the USA, USSR, Japan, France, Canada and West Germany. During the global transportation of the exhibition some of the relics where damaged. As a result the Egyptian government decided the artifacts would never again leave Egypt, causing facsimiles exhibitions like the one in Dorchester. The exhibition is a recreation of an exhibition. Along with the unconvincing diorama there are many videos of 3D computer generated scans of the kings’ skull, evidencing how he died. Somehow there’s an accumulative effect that’s makes the existence of this ancient Egyptian king almost unbelievable. [is there a way you can talk about this a bit more? your personal experience of why it feels that way? jf]
A story’s story
Whilst recently working in a metal workshop fabricating some furniture I brokered a friendship with the technicians and caretakers who met daily for coffee before the workshop opened at nine o'clock. They kindly spoke English on my behalf and appeared to enjoy having a different face amongst them. At one point someone referred to someone else, jokingly, as "His Lairdship", seeing myself looking confused I was informed the caretaker was actually a Laird of Scotland. The story followed explaining how this character and his wife had discovered a dying sheep whilst walking in the countryside of Scotland. The caretaker then carried the sheep a few miles to a big house and was warmly welcomed by an eccentric aristocrat. Pleased by the company the aristocrat insisted they stay for dinner, which the caretaker and his wife politely accepted. The following day the aristocrat gave the caretaker a piece of land, a rocky outcrop one by three miles large, enabling the caretaker, lawfully, to be tiled a Laird.
It transpired the caretaker had told this story many times. So many times he almost seemed burdened by it, despite always being able to make people laugh. One of the technicians mentioned how many times he’d heard the story and it started to feel like this plot of land, indistinguishable form the land around it was more of a curse than a gift. Every time the caretaker repeated the story in which he endlessly retreads the same ground, with the same dying sheep, towards the same big house to be rewarded with the same piece of land, that plot of land becomes more and more abstract. On hearing his story I could only imagine a video image of this place, the sky bleak, black uneven rocks wet with permanent rain, wind whistling a weird high pitched monotone.
I asked him about that site. He said he visited it just the once, with the aristocrat, and had never been back.
The Electric House or Problems for Solutions.
Despite it breaking I don’t like or dislike my toaster, but I do feel a kind of affinity with it. It’s a digital toaster and with blue LEDs mounted into the control panel. Its chrome and the top surface is embossed with the words ‘hot surfaces’. This surface is tilted giving the whole machine an awkward sculptural quality. We brought it over from England, which means every time I want to use it the flat first has to be ransacked for a UK to EU adaptor, of which we only have one. This in itself is the beginning of a complex process of redundant efficiency.
As the toaster is digital the bread-lowering-lever has been replaced by an electric button. When touched the toaster emits a loud beeping sound, lasting approximately six seconds. Tonally this is exactly the same as the warning signal of a reversing truck. The toaster fused a while ago, meaning that it now only toasts on one side. Co-incidentally this is the same effect achieved if you select the 'bagel' setting on the control panel. Of course I haven't started eating more bagels to compensate for this unfortunate breakage, I continue to eat toast but now have to rotate the toast once its finished its first toasting in order for the un-toasted side to be exposed to the heating elements. This effectively doubles the time required to toast bread and the number of times I have to listen to the warning beeps indicating the different stages of ascension and descension of toasted and un-toasted toast. During the first round of single sided toasting I might pop to the toilet to wash my face and urinate. Here I am faced with a similar chrome plated problem.
The toilet flush has two buttons, set together in a metallic oval. One of the buttons is larger than the other, meaning it supplies more water when pushed. However the same volume of water is dispensed irrespective of which button I press meaning that the denomination implied through the differing of button sizes is meaningless. I know this, yet always press the button I should, despite their lack of difference. To some extent this is probably trained behaviourism derived from having pressed so many other buttons whose dimensions do correctly correspond to the appropriate variation in water volume. I sometimes stare at the buttons thinking about which I should press despite knowing the outcome is inconsequential of my choice. But then I start to think I’m thinking too much about it. But having spent this long thinking about it the choice I now make is consequential, but I’m not sure for what reason. This circular line of thought is then interrupted by the acknowledging beeps of the toaster ejecting the first side of toasted toast.
As I flip the toast around and again wait for the process to be repeated I will often stare out the kitchen window. This looks directly onto the offices of the fourth largest, global professional service and accountancy firm. It’s a uniform grid like building and I can see into many of the single occupancy offices. What is striking in these rooms is the similarities of their differences. Somewhere in the management there must have been a decision made that the workers should have one personal item hung on one wall. These vary from modern prints, a world map, an imitation Matisse, a horse calendar and so on. These are all dimensionally similar, not too large to be distracting but not blank, which would become noticeable. As I wait for my now massively dehydrated toast to be released I think about the corporations motto: 'Quality In Everything We Do."
Real pictures.
In 2006, whilst saving up to move abroad, I worked in London for a few months for a company specialising in property photography. My slightly dubious title was ‘Image Coordinator’ which basically meant using Adobe Photoshop to digitally manipulate photographs the company took of residential and commercial properties for sale, to then be passed onto the estate agents’ prospective clients. The digital manipulation of images had one main rule – it was illegal to digitally manipulate structural and architectural components of the image, however cosmetically it was pretty much open territory. Clone tooling out socks under beds, inserting blue skies above rain soaked exteriors, saturating colours, lighting dingy corridors and so on.
There were many discussions with the ‘Senior Image Coordinator’ who would have final say on what could and could not be altered. We used the perspective tool a lot, to correct the fish eye distortion of the camera lens, but often had to be careful not to exaggerate this, as it is quite easy to amplify the volume of a space visually beyond the laws of psychics, reality and perspective. I recall a fairly long debate with my supervisor about a client I had worked with a few times and was friendly with, who had requested I ‘photoshop-in’ a missing kitchen cupboard door. The intention of this was presumably to hide the unsightly paraphernalia of cornflakes, breakfast teas and jams, that in a sales picture may [spelling change my to may . du] dissuade a potential buyer away from the grinding reality of a forty year mortgage [hmmmm, quite cynical and assuming though? jf] and the potential for only mild variations in breakfasts.
I took great relish in these manipulations and would often try to persuade my seniors (which they’d sometimes bend to) to allow me to make greater and greater alterations, purely because I found the prospect of entering a manipulated image into commercial circulation rather exciting. The greater the warping of spatial reality the better – it was purile and utterly inconsequential but I found my microcosmic contribution to the construction of a more and more virtually designed world exciting, rather than depressing.
When I left I asked the director for a collection of some of the images that get deleted everyday because the quality of the originals were too poor to bother manipulating. He complied, although he thought it peculiar. I’ve never known what to do with the images, but I’ve kept the digital copies for almost six years now. I occasionally find them after accidentally meandering into the wrong image folder. I look at a couple of them for a few seconds, giving them a short, flickering existence. [This fleeting affinity you have with objects and stories seems to add up here in a more clear way]
[Think its really nice, wonder what you will do next with it. I like the short texts, seems like intros to something else, I enjoy them as fictions/stories though as they are...jf]
.......
On the basis of the feed back 2 specific options were made apparent (with a third option speculated upon) for the continuation of the first chapter. These were:
1. The thesis to be a continuation of these anecdotes. In doing this the theoretical interests would emerge through insinuation and context of the stories. This would require the themes/interests of Nudge, media theory, behaviourism, image making/object mediation to be more disceranble as interests and references than they currently are. The example of this was the point Steve made about the (N. Katherine Hayles) term flickering signifier which was used in one of the texts - how would or could this be elaborated on within the framework of these anecdotes?
2. The 2nd option was that the next chapter would NOT be in the format of these anecdotes, instead the anecdotes would act as a starting point (or a reference block) to then flesh out the theoretical elements mentioned above.
Originally I intended to proceed with option 2. I was going to do this through lens of The Unbuilt. The Hand. The Prop. terms I introduced in the proposal seminar as means and modes through which I make work. I had roughly sketched out the below as away of contextualisng the anecdotes of the first chapter through these terms:
The Unbuilt:
The films by Frank Zwartjes
Ghosts by Cesar Aira (his notion of the Unbuilt)
Skeumorphic - N. Katherine Hayles
The black box
On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking - Heinrich von Kleist
The Hand:
Choice architecture
Interface by Matthew Fuller
Nudge theory
Behavioural Insights Team/MINDSCAPE
libertarian paternalism
Behaviourism
Evidence by Mandel and Sultan
Memex machine designed by Vanavar Bush
The Prop:
Harun Farocki investigations into the mediation of the image (Still Life, 1997) and the designed world (The Creators of Shopping Worlds 2001)
Feedback/cybernectics, the origins of simulation
Virtual reality and the 'flickering signifier' - N. Katherine Hayles
Objectivity by Galison & Daston
Mclhuansim - the medium is the Message
Collecting Visible Evidence - by Gaines and Renov
The use of the '3d image' in Blade Runner (with reference to Mark Leceky)
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but after seeing and hearing people engage with the anecdotes the option of continuing them is now quite appealing and something I really hadn't considered previously. Im interested in possibly now writing some fictional anecdotes as the second part as a way of being able to articulate more directly the theoretical interests, without having to specifically introduce them in an academic contextualising manner. Then a starting point (as a means to combine 1. and 2 perhaps) could be to tell stories of The Unbuilt, Hand and Prop. Im thinking now, alternatively The Unbuilt, Hand and Prop could be 3 semi-fictional/semi-factual stories that are themselves the start of a chapter, under which these anecdotes could fit