Claudio's Thesis - CONCEPTS

GRS2023

a way to elaborate and articulate what I am making, and why - invited to do so during JAN assessment

. attempts at defining what I'm making - 1 sentence/short paragraph each day (?) - Here I try to write down, in simple sentences, what I am interested in, as an artist. I try to define the field in which i am moving. As I often struggle to clearly understand and therefore explain what I'm interested in, what and why I make, I will commit to an exercise of repeatedly writing short paragraphs trying to pinpoint the core concerns of what I make.

fragments, repeated attempts at partially defining what I make

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5/12/23

(WHAT) I'M INTERESTED IN (WHAT)

Through making BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES,

I’m interested in exploring the fundamental elements and conditions of vision, its limits and the notion of blindness in relation to images and image-making.

I’m interested in light and its double potential to make things visible and to make blind. Its absence and presence, its double effects on images and vision. To drown in light, or to emerge from it. To appear and conceal. To make the world exist, or vanish.

I'm interested in the fine line between visibility and invisibility, between transparency and opacity.

I'm interested in those liminal moments when nothing (or everything) is seen as something, or when something that can't be seen becomes nothing. Things becoming nothing, something, everything in and through light, in and trough images.

I'm interested in exploring the liminal states between seeing something, everything, nothing.

I'm interested in the paradoxical link between nihilism and the sublime.

I'm interested in explore the tension between pure abstraction and mere materiality of images, between representation of the world and presentation of the medium, between seeing everything and not seeing anything.

I’m interested in images and screens as supports for such paradoxical coexistence of showing and hiding.

I'm interested in the concept of blind spot. Ocular blind spots in retinal structures; blind(ing) elements in the "structure" of images (over/under exposures, out-of-focus, flickering ...); images and screens as blind objects; also, blind spots in perception of the world.

I'm interested in exploring light as a flash. The flash of light as a concept, an image, and a physical phenomenon. The flash as the basic unit of light; as a (im)pulse for/on vision. As a singular, sudden event of extreme light that paradoxically reveals and blinds. As a device for apparition and concealment, of existence and negation. As a metaphor and image for both nihilism and the sublime. Also, the flash as the fundament of every experience of moving images, and of digital screens too.

I'm interested in the failure of images. The paradox of making fail-ed/-ing images as part of my image-making practice as a visual artist. I'm interested in exploring and working on events of failure of images. Failed images as images that question and subvert their expected representative value. Images that represents nothing-ness, that show themselves as images, that are blind and that blind the viewer, both physically and conceptually.

I'm interested in the repetition and variation, in the redundancy, of images.

I'm interested in the durational experience/effect of watching.

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I suggest you describe a work related to your own and 
apply these questions: 

What are the implications of this work on my own? 

How can this work change my mind? 

How can this work sharpen my perspective on my own work. 

Tacita Dean - Disappearance at Sea (1996) + reading of Maria Walsh's Narrative Duration. TD's Disappearance at sea (parts in italics are quotes from that).

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8j8x5p

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VSjDwSaHtjtYYWnM_ae5VXCXkt1wzDXM/view?usp=sharing

I came across Disappearance at Sea researching about TD's work as a contemporary artist working with 16mm film, referring to a heritage of structural cinema tradition yet making work that is not only self-reflexive but also narrative and speculative. All elements that seem to resonate with my own practice and that were also remarked during the assessment as something whose place in my work I need to carefully reflect on. On top of this, this particular film seems a relevant example to reflect on in relation to the piece I want to make with the footage from the webcam scanning the beach at sunrise and at sunset that I presented in my proposal. (Part 2 W-O/A-NDERCAMS)

TD's film is 14 minutes long. It is a sequence of scenes shot in and from a lighthouse, on the British coast, at sunset. Abstract close-ups of the lighthouse revolving lamp, and four different views of the seascape/horizon (two of them partially framed by the lighthouse architecture, two only consisting of the landscape view). As the sun sets, the shots get darker, the light emitted by the lamp becomes more visible, and is seen projected on the landscape. The end is a pitch black screen. The seven shots are approximately 2 minutes long each. It is shown as a 16mm projected loop.

There seems to be some evident overlappings between TD's work and the way I want to make mine.

- a parallel between the disappearance of the world/landscape/horizon as the sun sets in the night and the disappearance of the image, as light - its raw material - is gradually replaced by darkness. What is shown is the gradient/threshold/transition between day and night, between seeing and not seeing.

- a contemplation of the cyclical nature of time, and a parallel with the rotational, circular, perfectly designed mechanical movements of the lighthouse's lamp.

- the horizon as a universal object of human gaze, as a catalyst for a tension, a quest for something that is expressed through its staring at.

- a reflection on human-made technologies to see and, through seeing, to grasp the world, to know it, to hold it.

Yet, TD's work is one-way - as it only stages the "disappearance" part, at sunset - the form I have in mind for mine is double: as I intend to include also the opposite process of the landscape appearing at sunrise, coming to light/sight from darkness. I want to have a full circle - or a wave-like figure, continuously fluctuating between light and darkness, between vision and blindness.

The fact that i am appropriating fotage from a 24/7 live-stream online webcam calls into question the ubiquitous presence of visibility devices - cameras and screens - a "regime" of visibility, of mass production - and consumption - of images, to which we are constantly subject to, and object of. I feel this comes across through the inherent, material qualities of the footage I am using - the camera movements, the lo-fi digital texture of the image.

I believe that my interest in blindness - or the failure of the act of seeing and making images - has to do with this, as an interest towards a possible way out, an escape from such a state of hyper-visibility and hyper-exposure to images.

TD's work speaks too of such a human strive to see everything and, through seeing, to grasp the world, to control it, yet I feel the lighthouse places her reflection in a more poetic, literary realm, rather than the sociopolitical one that appropriating a webcam's footage can imply. Also in TD's work, the material features of the 16mm film apparatus - light shining through film - are more directly referring and mirroring with the natural sunlight that is present in the film.

On a more "formal" level, in my footage, the point of view is that of the webcam; the viewer coincides with the camera, their gazes coincide.

In TD's film the point of view of the camera is external, a third party. This creates a triangle play between the landscape, the lighthouse, the camera/spectator, a triangle that is staged through a shot-countershot structure.

I don't have that. What does that add? Can I try to do a countershot of that particular webcam I am using? (is this what I am trying to do wanting to go and find the webcam? maybe yes).

I also feel that in the footage that I am using, there is something more at stake in relation to the "surface" of the image, which I don't see in TD's work. The depth of the seascape seems to be flattened on a vertical plane by the digital texture/grain that is constantly perceived in the webcam's footage, with varying degrees - at night, but also at times when raindrops or salt from the sea breeze get stuck on the lens glass; as well as by the prevalent panning/scanning movements performed by the webcam which seem to happen on a vertical, flat plane, which resonate with the vertical, flat interface of the screen that these images take form on.

TD's footage seem to hold much more depth. Not only when it comes to the landscape shots - which are often composed of different layers - the structure of the lighthouse, the rocks, the sea, the sky - but also for the way the lighthouse lamp is framed and shot - the complex light and shadow plays, the rotational, circular movemetns, which seem to ecoke a three-dimensional space. This is possibly due to the different types of camera - a webcam has for sure less DOP than the more sophisticated cinematic camera that TD has allegedly used for her film. Yet, I feel that this flatness of the footage has much to say in terms of mediation of the world through barely visible interfaces.

I think that the act of going there to see the webcam - and film this journey - could be a way to break into this flatness, to

cutouts from DRAFT

I also feel that in the footage that I am using there is something more at stake in relation to the "surface" of the image, which I don't see in TD's work. The depth of the seascape seems to be flattened on a vertical plane by the digital texture/grain that is constantly perceived in the webcam's footage, with varying degrees - at night, but also at times when raindrops or salt from the sea breeze get stuck on the lens glass; as well as by the prevalent panning/scanning movements performed by the webcam which seem to happen on a vertical, flat plane, which resonate with the vertical, flat interface of the screen that these images take form on. TD's footage seem to hold much more depth. Not only when it comes to the landscape shots - which are often composed of different layers - the structure of the lighthouse, the rocks, the sea, the sky - but also for the way the lighthouse lamp is framed and shot - the complex light and shadow plays, the rotational, circular movements, which seem to evoke a three-dimensional space. This is certainly due to the different types of camera - a webcam has for sure less DOF than the more sophisticated cinematic camera that TD has allegedly used for her film. Yet, I feel that this flatness of the footage has much to say in terms of mediation of the world through such barely visible interfaces. I think that the act of going there to see the webcam - and film this journey - could be motivated as the attempt to break into/through this flatness.

- a parallel between the disappearance of the landscape as the sun sets in the night and the disappearance of the image, as light - its raw material - is gradually replaced by darkness. What is shown is the gradient/threshold/transition between day and night, between seeing and not seeing.

reflexive references to light and movement from structuralist film, appearing to have another agenda here

but also disappearance, loss, both on the level of the image and on a more "existential" level poetic

WHAT ABOUT TIME

In both pieces, nothing really happens, and no one is in sight. Emphasis is put on passing time

Shots are kept long, cuts are not

The only body that is at stake is the one of the viewer, whose experience seems to be perceived, called into question, included as an inherent element in the piece through the durational, prolonged engagement with watching the work.

durational excess, a sense of time felt through the body

also, the continuity in time of the production of thies imagery, of this digital gazze who is always on, whose vision is only blinded by the coming of the night - the digital gaze is always ON, the day/night is a cycle

sound?