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 watched Tacita Dean's Disappearance at Sea, a film I had known about for a while but never managed to find online until now. I came across it 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 superficially self-reflexive but also narrative and speculative. All elements that I can see in my own work and practice and that also came out in comments that were made 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.

The 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 an installation with a 16mm projector running in a loop.

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

A parallel between the cyclic disappearance of the world/landscape/horizon as the sun sets in the night and the disappearance/destruction of the image, as sunlight - its raw material - is gradually replaced by darkness. A gradient 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.

there is a narration, even though it is not established by means of words. what is this common narrative about

excessive duration of each shot. each shot is held longer than we need to recognize the image. this makes us begin to sense something else, something outside the film, which is where we are actually located in time and space. ... it is through duration that the temporality in the film opens out onto a space which intersects with the spectator's own narrative configuration of experience.

This is similar to what I am trying to do in my piece.

Yet, TD's work is one-way - only focus on 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 emerging from darkness, coming to light/sight at sunrise. 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 - 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.

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?

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

the film created a cumulative sensory effect that united its disjunctive cuts.

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

sound?