Subject-Object Investigation, possibility as a method- text by Eothen Stearn: Difference between revisions

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My work performs subject-object investigations and looks to possibility as a method. I build up layers of varied material processes that communicate and connects people with textures present in the world. I have a mishmash approach to making, that seeks to blur an experience of how the work can be received. The people who surround my life perform in my artwork. Working with other participants is crucial to my practice and the performance of the work; it is only within this cross-pollination that the work can make any sense in the first place. Incorporating and mixing sections of the same ground.
[[File:10_5_16_Eo_Final Method Draft_Eo (1).pdf]]
• Sound
• Sculpture/Costume/Props
• The Body
• Chorography
• Language
I’d like you to walk through these sections now to give you a clearer idea of how my practice operates…
 
SOUND
I have been thinking about the varying direction in which sound can take you and how to achieve a live mixing of the senses. A synthestesis approach to performance. I direct participants to think about an expansive version of the work, its edges include music, dance, and radio, sound, sculpture, text, costume, improvisation, smell, and tastes, touch. I explore this emerging element of subject-object, channeling it through my own body. I look into how our bodies are conditioned. How through the voice things become more tangible and concrete.
 
I began the year with producing this listening device sculpture/prop (see photograph), which came out of a solo trip to a military museum in Den Haag, Museum Waalsdorp with an intention for finding out more about historical military listening apparatus. Thinking about how we receive information, and how particular material processes that I am working originate in the military, and the bankruptcy of Nation systems as a whole and how information gets filtered down but also travails so fast today. These WWII military objects are almost slapstick within their clunkyness and ability to perform. I was interested in this link between design, functionality and the obsolete. Moreover, through this process I was thinking about a reversal of such violent action and the objects connection to a construct of fear and a fighting of an enemy. And the construct of an enemy, fear and othering. It further develops my previous work surrounding pycho-authoustics, (Prior to Piet I made various “sound bath” performance based around the principle of overtones, new-age spirituality and freemason architecture). Also working with metal bespoke props I fabricated, utilizing my own skills of working as a fabricator after my graduation from my undergraduate program, working predominately male environment having to reveal or talk about my gender constantly. 
 
I have also been reading Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich A. Kitler looking at the military’s involvement with social technologies.  Along side of Anastasius Kircher’s devices for peasants to listen into Aristocracies quarters, thinking about class power and structure and Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts that delves into natural radio, and re-thinks energy at a global scale from brainwaves to outer space through musician’s artists and scientists, in ways that I relate to within my own methodologies. 
 
Anastasius Kircher (1602–1680).
 
 
My own listening apparatus at Piet Zwart
Museum Waalsdorp, Den Haag, Military listening apparatus.
SCULPTURE/COSTUME/PROPS
I make objects surrounding the body and tend to have more than one aspect or lifespan to them. For example, a banner/a garment, a meditational head piece that channels your left and right brain containing healing crystals, a military metal headpiece combined listening devise that has an archaic stereo two channel system, a ceramic talking head that contains soup to have dinner with Europe. Often, incorporating materials that cover the body with a soft psychedelic pallet that are both sculptural costume and performative. I have recently been making a quilt with Diptique technique with abstract DNA and penises on it, which will go onto feature in a time-based event. Each object is activated at different points within the duration of performances. I see them as a catalyst net, an ecosystem to contain the work. I never make anything particularly fixed it is always cosmic, open and welcomes improvisation. It is crucial to work with others, as so to have many voices output channeled from one transmitter.
Each costume is carefully considered for a potential language which can surround it. (They can act as the springboard for an argument or discussion, or serve as foils and/or nodes of various strands of thoughts.)
e.g. The recent work Being Liberal Is Not Enough, (see below) surrounded the topic of protest,
physical bodies standing shoulder to shoulder, occupying space along with what liberalism means or can look like. This work has multiple layers and functions, a textile that was both a garment and a banner, gives a clear example of how I work with in-between objects that embody a fluid state.
The materiality of the work spans through decades, philosophies, forms, feelings and texts. Particularly, in conversation with early feminist work of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party piece, looking into temporalities with a particular strand of art history and how I might look to meeting some works halfway, geographically or spatially speaking or a potential to insert myself into a particular space time dimension.
 
CHOROEGRAPHY/MOVEMENT/DANCE
My approach to movement is inspired by everyday white noise surrounding my body. Mapping is the initial process I undertake, by drawing out the architecture of the space with multiple bodies, transcribing choreography together. In general I work with women, when collaborating we look into a collective consciousness of a situation that we want to traverse. (For example, I previously worked with eviction (including movements of monotonous poses that came out of a Post-Fordist theory discussion, insect’s ecosystems (I worked with a USB microscope and my body became the stage), pirate radio (dancers transcribed my radio broadcast over the aftermath of the Olympic invasion in London)) and my girlfriends hand performing a choreography to camera of religious sex symbolism signage). Choreography develops through foundations of phrases I have compiled, e.g. “collective concertina or accordion movements”. Everyday people bring reflections about what they feel to the work. Thinking collectively about primal movement, synchronicity, the relationship between the amateur and professional and a potential to locate what we consider to be art. Or what there is less of in and needs to be more of. The work Being Liberal…. worked with how protest operates and looked to make barricades of movement of bodies standing next to one another. There were moments when performers held out their hands as an offering, which steadily progressed into aggressive movements with glimpse of near strangulation simulations, borrowing aesthetics of utopian cults.  The use of chirography further permitted subject matter to be incorporated, allowing moments of metamorphosis to take place and a flow of semiotics out of the body.
THE BODY I work with the body to flesh out politics, and corruption. Looking at bodily transit and movement as signifiers of power through history, and how we have all become entangled together. Looking to public and private spaces, daily rituals, matter that enters the body and shields a naked body. I engage with how sci-fi looks to the everyday to analyze social systems. To the notion of community, and individualism and how we work to evolve to form future ecosystems co-habiting this earth with other beings and animal life.
Historically my work places an attention on a female experience, through the use of female protagonists. I sway to working with groups of women or gender queer people.
Most recently, through our Spinoza seminar, I have been looking to Post-Humanism and Neomateralist thought. Many aspects of this writing seems to correlate and osculate with my work’s Feminist position.
Moreover looking at Spinoza’s idea of assemblages, I have been developing the Diptique Quilt whereby many fabrics can be present in a multitude. With a back grounding of Paul.B Preciado’s Testo Junkie in my thoughts making this sexually charged object with DNA and abstract penis on them, could they be dildos? What gender you are born with. How you are told you can and can not do things from your birth depended on your sex. There are also vaginal sections within the quilt, with sex bodily stains on it. Taking the form taking a traditional “Wedding Band structure.” I am interested in the quilts ability to depict histories. Emboydaried on the top is an experiment called “Bouba and Kiki” (see below), The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. With I am using mixed in with other sex symbolism signage to comment on our reading of the world through constructed norms.
 
 
“KIKI” “BOUBA”
 
I am also interested in non-human agency. Taking influence from servomechanisms, automated systems, algorithms, cyborgs, the natural and artificial fragments of nature and society. And have performed in the past to achieve a gender neutral voice.
 
LANGUAGE My work deals with texts surrounding the body or embodiment. I have previously written socio-feminist fictions even collaborative scripts. Tonality and rhythm are crucial to all elements of my practice. In that past I have written scripts/poems that were playful, poetic and non-sensical about my everyday perception of the world. I extract algorithms and build up a thesaurus of everything over time. I would then allocate these prose to works and build them up from there observing where patterns were formed. I look at associations to the female through language and feminist incentives to change grammar biased words. Thinking about the fact that the moon is feminine (la lune) has an impact on how we think of the moon, or images that have been associated with the moon across history. Looking to steer an audience towards the mechanics of grammatical gender and make violent parallels present within a physical world.
Below is a sketch for a screen print for a T-shirt series involving abrasive French grammar that has a masculine grammatical root, although it is located on a female body or a female bodily act. There has been feminist initiative to change such language. And I am interested in this act of protesting for language. For example, le vagin, (a vagina), Le sein, (brests), L’attlaitment, (breast feed), L’accouchement (child birth).
 
This train of thought originated in my experience of learning French and the gravitational pull of French feminist thought and thinking about grammar and how language shapes society. Thinking about mistakes within language, auto-correct what is deemed as good grammar. My own experience growing up with dyslexia and being weighed down by words. Writing poems with misspelt words, or leaving the naturally occurring ones in, before they are swiped out for an auto-correct or right click trade. Re-visiting the alphabet, “correctness” and the way words sit on the page. Moreover, moving to Holland and not understanding the sea of sentences floating around my body, this defiantly influenced my producing of the Military metal listening device.
At the moment I am forming my own alphabet, of objects, thoughts, texts that I can go on to compose a new code with. I am accumulating things, ideas and am interested in how linguistics can perform within these physical objects and conceptual framework I am carving out for myself. Working to create a body of work where possibility is a method that can de-code the many systems we are in the swamp with.

Latest revision as of 15:57, 10 May 2016