User:Astrid van Nimwegen/textoutline

Text outline

I write descriptions about my work and my experiments and I also want to make an annotation of the whole proces and my thoughts about it during this trimester. I am still reading the essays by Allan Kaprow about 'the blurring of life and art'. Some essays which are most close to my thinking about my own work I will annotate and link them in this way to my work process.

So very roughly:

• My work - description
• How it links to Allan Kaprows essay's - annotation of few essays

The subject will be the shifting of perception and the interpretation and experience which is involved here.

Theory = Thinking = psychological

Practice = Body = physical

Interaction or synthese of those two = transparancy/soul

Sources:

-Allan Kaprow

(-Dewey)

-Stan Brackage

(-Bas Jan Ader)

I started my project by creating a camera obscura in my house. A beautiful view from my window was projected onto the opposite wall. The most interesting part to me was the movement in this projection. Because of the limited possibilities of video to register this movement and influenced by the book of Hockney, the work of several artists, life-art and the element of movement in a certain timesequence, as it appears always in all my other works, I decided to register the motion in a conceptual way, namely expose 16mm film in a pinholecamera and put it back on role later. By doing this I change the movement into another abstract movement. By the use of 16mm film I was forced to look different than I used to do. I did several experiments with the pinhole and also create contactprints in my dark room. It’s a time-consuming and very difficult medium, by that fact it took me very long to see any result at all. I took a couple of side roads and continuously tried to reflect on my experiments and keep the main road in thought. Much quicker to get an end-result would be to use digital images and print them onto my film, after discussing this and thinking about it, I composed a digital filmstrip in photoshop but I still ran into problems the whole time when I printed them onto 16mm film. I decide to stay with my original concept after a good talk with Simon because by the analog medium I’m forced to slow down my process and happy accidents can become deliberately choices. Reading and take notes of my thoughts helps me to clear my ideas and my concept further, it’s the same in the work process, I look at the experiments as it are notes and it improves my technical skills also. I’m now reading the book of Allan Kaprow ‘essays on the blurring of life and art’. So on the one hand I’ve the physical process and on the other the psychological, in fact, they are interwoven with each other and they are becoming more and more clear to me. Simon said a thing to me which is very true, I always start my work very complicated (and put in all herbs :-) and throughout the process I throw out all the things which add nothing to the essence. Mostly a very simple idea is left in the end and the essence exposes. By walking my path like this it seems that I’m able to make transparent layers visible as they also exist in our reality.

I work on an installation of different close-up viewings from a tree, exposed in a pinholecamera. Since 24 frames are one-second film the challenge is to make 24 one-second films of a now very abstract tree and bring them into an installation with multiple projectors. The next step I want to take, I already work on that, is to compose the single frames to a more fluent and conscious film. I think the work is too hectic now and at this point not yet very convincing to me. (Working on an edit-table will help a lot to make it easier on myself.)