Readingandwriting

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text on practice

TEXT ON PRACTICE NOTES by arabella

text on practice :

He is okay.

What have you been making?

I've been busy with the eye film project. Which has taken me quite a lot of effort to reach the present stage and form. This project is the first step, and first experiment, in making something from the long term research that I've been doing since i've been here. The starting point is North Sentinel Island. This is basically the first step and also, it was important for me to step away from the island itself and realize that the island is not the core of the research. It is just the starting point. The island is a pretext for me to reflect on other topics which are mainly related to image making, image making technology and the implications of these things on our contemporary world. I am gradually shifting to different images, it started just with the island but now i'm trying to wok in a more associative way. It is related to the starting point, but now i'm bringing in stuff that isn't immediately related to the island - maybe it's to do with shapes or something else. This EYE film project is split into three stages, the first idea was not the way I wanted to make things as an artist. I then tried to deconstruct this because it had a really rigid structure.

What do you mean by deconstructing it?

It had a really rigid structure, with introduction and conclusion. I didn't want it to be so didactic and straightforward. It was relying too much on thoughts and subjects. I am not fully satisfied with the final project. But I will work further on this.

The whole idea of the piece was to compare, and bring together two apparently very different images. This was a scan of the Rothko painting from a book, and the images I took from Google Maps. I then staged these images, and built a set with them. I put them in relation, not just as a pure images. I wanted to show their medium and show how they circulate. This is actually the main subject of this research. I reflected on the implications of the mediums. I wanted to somehow bounce between the images themselves, and their mediated image.

What do you want to make next?

I want to make a lot of stuff. I want to continue with the island stuff. I want to create a sort of archive, my images are messy at the moment, not organized. So I want to find a way to catalogue. There is a lot of material and there are connections, but these connections are not obvious at the moment. I want to make these connections stable and clear, I know why the images are together and collected. But I want to make this more specific.

I will start writing then, about these connections.

And, on the side I want to shift a bit from this island subject. I want to develop some strategies (missed?). My old practice has quite a conceptual side, I want to merge this conceptual side with a more free form approach to images and sound. I want to work on thus relation between images, and sound.

What are the subject of these projects? Names?

Loss loss loss loss - is the name of one. This is a film of Jannes Makes called Loss Loss Loss. I downloaded I pirated the film. It took ages. And I thought as it was downloading imagining what would happen if the film was lost somewhere on the internet. This film was a diary of the artist's exile in New York. This resonated with me on a lot of levels. I wanted to connect this lost between (sorry someone was speaking couldn't hear).

The camera gets lost in the original film, and I wanted to make an edit with imagery from the digital internet. Cables. Hard drives.

Do you have another project?

Yes its called Pure Theory. It's a fragment of a video I made, it was a video of a performance I made. I was in Venice, there was a big political event that was happening. There was a helicopter in the sky, I zoomed in on the helicopter. A seagull then cuts across the frame. They are both flying objects. But the helicopter's way of flying is pure theory, a seagull (from nature) cannot fly this way. I don't know how to develop this, but one part of this could be referring to Leonardo Da Vinci's diary. He studied how bird flies, but then stopped around 1500 and then started thinking about making flying machines - which were pure theoretical.