Claudio's Thesis - INTRO/OUTRO

Claudio's Thesis - INTRO/OUTRO SteveSuggests

First draft of INTRO (first chapter of the thesis)

things to reconsider in the structure of my thesis

(title)

remove flashes (?)

BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRACES, FLICKERS AND FAILURES

make it less dependant on the actual project

working process/progress

final form

tools/techniques

structure of the thesis

INTRO OUTRO ok

description of materials i'm working with - things I make (make a list NOW) - what, why, how

before: (do I need this)?

now:

greek statues

webcams of beaches in the netherlands

lost loop

a catalog of concepts / map (?)

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First draft of INTRO (first chapter of the thesis)

This text is called INTRO.

INTRO is a general outline of the starting point of my graduation research project, BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES. It will present its premises, its pinciples, the tools I plan to use, the attitudes I will rely on, the thematic fields that the project will cross and address, the questions driving it.

INTRO is a self-analyisis of where I am at right now. Now that I have written my Project Proposal and I am starting to grasp what I am making yet I feel much will change and evolve and I still have many doubts to figure out. Also, it will serve me as an exercise to reach a temporary state of clarity over the next month and devise an effective and convincing way to present and frame my intentions at the assessment in January.

I will write another text - OUTRO - just before the final due date for thesis. It will be a complementary, mirror text to INTRO, an attempt at recapping the work made and reflecting on its achievements and failures, its discoveries and future trajectories. Also, a more detailed description of the form that this project will take in the graduation show.

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BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES  is a visual research project that I will carry on over the coming months, towards the graduation. During the first year I focused on a rather broad yet quite specific field of research, which I would frame as the theory and practice of image-making, and, conversely, of the experience of images, considered in their complex implications - technological/technical, material, semiotic, affective/existential - between their digital and analog nature. In other words, I have been concerned with the conditions of possibility of images by constantly lingering on their limits. This project belongs to the same research path. It's an attempt at reaching its core and making it more radical both in content and form.

BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES  will be an elemental exploration of fundamental questions about seeing and being: the way we see, what we see, why we see, and where we stand. It will give form to a critical discourse and practice that weaves together and questions the experience of the world by seeing it, through light, on images and screens, the materiality of these - as physical/analog and virtual/digital objects, and the related quest to find meaning and stand in between these, living the tension between nihilism and the sublime. A personal reflection on the experience of seeing as well as a (self)reflection on the possibilities of the medium of (moving) images.

BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES will take the form of a cumulative, open-ended, expansive work on visual material from different sources and with different qualities. Its subjects will be piercing light leaks and dark black holes, over- and under- exposed shots, blinding flashes and fast flickers, windows, curtains, screens, eyes, pixels, digital noise, black and white blank frames [tbc...], collected and choreographed together in short, stand-alone sketches/fragments.

An annotation process will run parallel, unfolding meaning in written form, producing text material that will end up in this thesis work and in the final piece for the graduation show.

BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES will find its outcome at the graduation show as an experimental moving image work, in an installation form. It will probably have a fragmented, open form as a result of the non-linear process of its making.

I envision it either as a single-screen compilation or a multi-channel installation comprising of (4?) speculative episodes/parts

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(IS THIS STILL RELEVANT?) (if so, what is the right place for this?)

I can pinpoint a specific moment in my practice last year that I now recognize as an early, intuitive yet strikingly clear turning point. A turning point that brought up and matched, suddenly, unexpectedly, images and ideas, topics and tools, theory an praxis. An epiphanic encounter that caught my attention, marked my practice and whose resonance I can find in the project I am about to engage with.

For the "Writing through editing" workshop - in the second semester of the first year of the course, we were asked to make a short 5 minute video using footage from the Open Beelden online archive. The piece I made was titled A cameraman filming aka FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING ( https://youtu.be/l_7_ol6iXIo) and was built around a rather intriguing clip I accidentally found in the archive showing two cameramen filming each other on top of a skyscraper being built in New York in the 1920s. That short clip held a unique self-reflexive nature which immediately attracted me: its subject was not New York's fast vertical growth - which remained, literally - in the background, yet the very act of filmmaking, of making images of the world, by means of cameras and film. The subjects were the two filmmakers, filming each other while filming the world in front of them. I built my piece around that clip, editing it together with other footage - this time intentionally looked for, not found - that could bring out and develop that self-reflective nature even further. A film projector, a film strip burning, as well as various images of eyes. I wanted to weave together the act of seeing/watching, the act of making images through film, and a more intuitive notion of burning - light burns the chemicals to impress the celluloid, eyes burn when they stay open for too long or, a burning desire and need to see things. Along the whole piece, with varying intensity, I used a flickering effect, as a device to make the moving image apparatus visible and sensible the viewer; as a metaphor to recall the blinking of the eye, as well as the projector's presence; also, to trigger the physical perception of moving images and further play with the provoking idea of burning eyes.

In the first half of the piece, I crafted a quite intense sequence featuring a fast edit of footage of the two cameramen, images of eyes and text-on-screen playing with variations of the phrases EYES WATCHING / WATCHING EYES, all layered with a flickering effect. All of a sudden, the screens goes black, abruptly. After a few seconds, a new text-on-screen appears, white letters on black: EYES BURNING.

A hard flickering sequence - white and black frames only - follows, emphasizing even more the sensation of burning eyes. The same text stays on screen, floating through the flickering frames. Then, a countershot image of an unfocused projector beaming light towards the camera appears - as if it was the source of that flickering sequence, and brings back the piece to figurative imagery. The piece goes on.

Something very powerful seemed to happen here, which I only realised when watching the final edit of the work. The moment the screen goes black, the viewer's eyes - until then hit and overstimulated by the mass of fast edited images - are caught unprepared. On that unexpected pitch black screen, afterimages appear, the flickering effect seems to continue, the physical effect of the images seen before, their backlash on the viewer's retinas, is felt. Then, on that same black, the text appears. EYES BURNING. A subtle yet precise description not only of some of the images seen before - eyes looking at the camera, shedding tears - but also of the actual physical sensation built and triggered by those very images and the way they had been edited, and felt by the viewer in that specific moment of the piece. Then, a coincidence, a coming together of images seen, physical perception and conceptual meaning.

This effect was not intentional. Of course, it was the result, of a rational process of editing, yet I only realized its potential the moment I exported the final edit. It was an epiphanic moment, whose encounter was unexpected and striking. I don't think I got it immediately, I needed time to digest it, to think about it, yet - now - I feel it is an effective reference point in showing me a direction I want to pursue in my future practice, and that contains, in a nutshell, some elements whose use and potential I want to explore in making this new project.

Abstract, minimal imagery, working with light as a raw material, self reflection on the medium, embodied/physical/haptic (?) experience of images. Engaging and challenging the viewer's experience of moving images, their position in regards to them, both on a conceptual level and on a physical one. Making the viewer conscious of the experience of viewing,

Also, challenging their perception, requiring

MAKING THE VIEWER CONSCIOUS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF VIEWING THE PIECE.

These are all elements I want to deal with in making this new project.

Please consider what this mirroring of words does, EYES WATCHING / WATCHING EYES seems redundant, but for me it suggests a shift from the inside of the film to the outside, between the object (the film) and the viewer, between the semiotics and the affect. the dash / is like a hinge that meaning swings on. By this logic FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING could be FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING/BURNINGWATCHINGFILMING. The material and the experience of the material feedback. This is consistent with your desire to work on the border between blindness and sight; visibility and invisibility.]

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(WHAT) I'M INTERESTED IN (WHAT)

Here I try to write down, in simple sentences, what I am interested in, as an artist. (COULD turn into a separate CHAPTER OF THE THESIS?)

I try to define the field in which i am moving. As I often struggle to fully, ... unerstand and explain what I'm interested in, what and why I make, I will try to commit to an exercise of repeatedly writing short paragraphs

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 light as a raw material.

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 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.

The failure of images is another key notion I'm interested in. 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.

Hereafter, I compile an expansive list of keywords that are somehow called into question by BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES. I will consider translating it into a conceptual diagram/map to give a visual sense of their mutual implications, their relevance and position in the project.

This list is a prelude to the part 3 of this thesis (A CATALOG/COMPENDIUM OF CONCEPTS (Working title), which will further and deeper elaborate on some of these notions in closer relation to the actual development of the project over the coming months.

(edit it)

seeing/not seeing

showing/hiding

seeing/watching/staring/gazing

vision/blindness

visibility/invisibility

transparency/opacity

representation

materiality/abstraction

edges/borders/thresholds/margins/limits/interfaces

visual cultures, media theory

errors-glitches-artifacts-failures

flashes

flickers

immateriality - materiality in/of (digital) images

blind spots

gaze / image / screen

phisicality of images and image-making devices

lenses, sensors, screens

human eye structures

software/hardware, digital/analog, virtual/physical

technology/the technical

affective (?) effects of (digital) images

existentialism

nihilism/sublime

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A SET OF TOOLS AND ATTITUDES AKA HOW I WANT TO WORK

In working on BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES, I plan to set for myself a set of limited tools and attitudes

fragmented sketching - work against the fetish of the final piece

redundancy/repetition/variation

sculptural attitude

exercises in seeing. for me while making, for the viewer watching

TOOLS / SELF IMPOSED LIMITATIONS

black and white

simple images

two channels of edting (4 tracks in total in davinci + 1 adj layer) - keep the editing tricks simple

film 16mm?

sound?

there s something with

deepness and flatness

surface of the screen and its movement, its rupture

holes in surfaces

modules/units and structures/patterns/repetitions

redundancy to articulate tensions

use of a simple, reduced, minimal language

short video fragments, still images (often screenshots from somewhere else)

editing / post production techniques as ways of layering new meaning on appropriated imagery

lo-fi, DIY attitude

black and white / monochrome / grayscales

structural elements and devices of (mostly digital) images and image-making (pixel grids, screens)

(video) loop form.

minimalism

reduction

abstraction

. description - tautology - self-reflection

embrace an approach to images that is more sculptural and open-ended - a DIY, constant sketching, “non-finito” approach. Produce rapid, rough, short sketches, yet consistently, as a body of short fragments whose meaning is made by their whole. It is the way of working that I feel more at ease with and I believe it can be the most effective one in exploring and reaching the core topics and interests of my artistic work. I want to work with images  in a more dirty, reckless, less polished way. Also, while I’m still interested in using found footage, I would like to work more substantially behind the lens, making and working with my own images too.

Through a work of annotation, reflection and speculation, I will progressively track its unfolding and draw connections to those theoretical and artistic references that lay in the background of my work. In line with the open and explorative nature of the project, references and links will come up along the way. However, as a starting point, I will refer to two main fields of theory. On one side, media theory, visual studies, semiotics, aesthetics, theories of images, screens, of vision/visual perception/gaze. On the other side, I will reflect on influences from minimal and conceptual art tradition, structural filmmaking from the 60s/70s, as well as more contemporary moving image artists.

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WHERE I'M AT RIGHT NOW AKA WHAT I'M MAKING WHILE WRITING THIS TEXT

FEW LINES, NOT MUCH,it's already too long text

working digitally right now, plan to transition to 16mm from january, trying to figure out the workflow for that

working to produce something concrete for the assessment already

considering the place that text and sound will have, necessity of a narrative of some sort / how and to what extent give information to audience.

MANY DOUBTS, THE BIGGEST ONE:

IS THIS TOO FORMALISTIC, TOO SELF REFERENTIAL, NOT INTEREESTING, NOT SAYING ANYTHING ON THE EXTERNAL WORLD OUT THERE? IS IT JUST FORM WITHOUG T CONTENT - THIS IS WHAT DAVID IS WARNING ME ABOUT

- HOW CAN I MAKE IT MORE APPEALING, MORE RELATABLE FOR AN AUDIENCE, HOW CAN I FIND ENTRY POINTS FOR OTHERS?

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(END OF INTRO)

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1. A brief presentation of the project - title, topics, tools (from PP)

2. A reading of an epiphanic moment in my practice last year that I recognize as a significant starting point of this project (new text)

3. What i'm interested in exploring now. A manifesto (for myself) of interests and intentions. Written as a loose, expansive list of things I'm interested in dealing with. (already in PP + expand with new text)

4. How I want to work. A set of tools and attitudes (from PP mainly but expand with new text).

5. Where I'm at now / What I'm doing right now (from PP mainly but expand with new text)