Janis project proposal

Tentative Title

Personal judgment, finding the form: copy, transform and combine

General Introduction

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” Picasso

My work has recently been concentrated to the re-mixing, re-making processes and to the reflections of it in nowadays visual culture. Copying is one of the things how we learn. Before introducing with something new, we need to be fluent in our native language. Taking a raw material and mixing it together with other stuff we can create variations of things that can be meaningless. For to create new, meaningful work we have to look back in history and understand what has been done so far, learn how to use ready forms, combinations.

Creative leap can be made by combining different ideas, and figuring out the right combination of ingredients what will mix in a natural and successful way and ideally create a new meaning. Interpretation of things with a contemporary vision can create new work by using well known raw materials, the initial content can be combined and transformed in another level. Susan Sontag said that just about everything is photographed, Oliver Laric claims that just about everything has been photoshopped. An interpretation of an preexisting action each time will be different, because in the new version the author is not revealing the original idea, but him self. All out comes exist simultaneously but do not interfere further with each other. In every interpretation a new, parallel world is created in which it’s interpretation is true. Nicolas ‪Bourriaud‬ in his book Postproduction is giving to understand that, my work it self is to absorb the forms and understand their meaning, which is actually my artistic practice.. postproduction is this kind of methodology.. To learn how to use forms is the question how to make them Your own? I arrive to the question, how I am going to be different from the floods of other meaningless stuff, initially the copy can stay also turn out bad, loose the meaning from the raw material not even talking about creating a new one.. Bourriaud‬ suggests, don't look for the meaning, look for the use. Zone of activity, is not the part of finding a meaning but the part of use, for example use of data.

There are different methods of developing new forms, at the moment I would like to propose to start a simple copy/paste process by collecting an image map of the stuff that inspires me. I will be conscious about the things that I like and instinctively I will try to absorb the forms of these works. After examination, I will try to analyze the forms, re-enact processes, interpret and hopefully establish my method of successful personal judgment, my own sort of form.

The question is, where is the boundary of remaking things, how to define the added value? What is considered to be the raw material?

Main concerns: What ingredients do I need for to establish my own visual language and make a use out of it?

The questions could be answered through the practical process, creating the mead which has more than one platform and is floating around in different outcomes. I will start to examine digital images, and try to focus my self to something specific.

Relation to previous practice

In my previous practice I was obsessed with different visual experiments, editing and postproduction techniques. I came up with short fictional stories that I was dreaming about or simply imagining. I was curious how can I visualize those stories by using photographs or moving images.

The video "My slothful dreams" was created in an experimental process as a playful visualization of a recent dream. A tired man with a big bushy beard stands in the bathroom and looks at himself in a mirror. He feels ugly. He wants to shave the beard but he is too shiftless and lazy to do it. He takes off his shirt looks around and suddenly instead of taking a razor he has an idea to try to shave off the beard with his nails and finger tips. He tries to touch his face and the finger tips are becoming razor sharp as well as the nails. The surreal and absurd situation contrasts with a dash of humor within the story line where our reality goes hand by hand with our dreams. The dream translated it self during the editing process and the short storyline established towards laziness and unreal wish theme about avoidance and imagination.

By making "My slothful dreams", I was interested to explore and visualize the absurd situation that I saw in my dream. As the outcome I made an stop motion image sequence that displays the fictional reality.

After that I continued with the dream theme and the explorations of the digital lens based media and experiments with digital images. I was referring to the several exposure technique by overlying images one on each other. I was mixing together several visuals, women characters who are lost in their space and nature landscapes. I was trying to construct the connection and search for an ambiguous space in-between where the character and the two environments would some how fit together. I was pleased by the fact, how two different spaces can merge together and create a third one, construct an photographical, even photorealistic, aesthetically nice imagination.

In the following term I was interested to investigate how a software can generate visual information in between, knowing two coordinates and creating the third one. The visual material consisted from a lot of still images, the sequence was a bit reformed and processed on a computer by using after effects software. There were two results, an high quality, large scale printed image and a fast moving image sequence, both displaying a digitally generated movement. The motion was corrupted by the software, in a way representing time and deforming the natural body moves. The video is the hidden augmented world of the work, it can be revealed when a smartphone is directed at the photograph. On the digital screen the hidden reality unfolds engaging the spectator and resulting in a strong connection with the photograph it self.

Again, it explored the boundaries of lens based medium, unfolded another way of a visual interpretation and raised a question why the post-photographical qualities are interesting in nowadays? It is yet another way of manipulating reality, another way of experiencing it by using these contemporary tools. At the moment I am questioning myself, what qualities from these experiments I can borrow and put into my visual language grammar section, what does it add to my working methodology?

In the last trimester of the first year, I merged my ideas with Javier Lloret and we created the project "Human Stock". It is a video presentation about a fake media company which actually does not exist. In the video actors are describing the utopian plans about the platform and how it is going to change the visual media industry.

The platform is offering an online stock library of 3D photorealistic visuals of real human beings. Customers from the industry can browse an online store, purchase and download any of the 3D model stock visuals. It has a potential to create wholly new markets and employment opportunities, and change the visual language of perceiving images.

Conversely, the Human Stock is offering to anyone the opportunity to have their body digitized for the 3D stock library, using the automated, easy-to-use 3D full body scanner booth. Each model/supplier can earn a fixed percentage of the revenue generated with each download and use.

The video advertisement consists of interviews in which the founders explain how it works and some of the users are giving feedback of their experiences. It is a trailer/mockumentary which gives a short description about what Human stock is and how it works.

The fake company has been created as an inspiration by Apple and other powerful companies and service platforms, admiring their aims and products. Sometimes they are producing utopian things, and representing them in an even more bizarre level, they are real but kind of "on the edge" with the reality, revolutionary as they say. Promising one thing, but behind it stands something else. For example a track for online marketing tools.

Any how, it is interesting to see how people are reacting to these kind of revolutionary services and products. Also, what kind of questions are raised after seeing Human Stock "proposal"? Do people believe that it is a real company or just a fiction? How far can I go to make people believe and convince them that its harmless? Do people understand that it is a fiction or it does not matter?

With the technology that is out there some company could actually provide this service. Would people use it and do not think about the consequences? For example, that it is possible to loose the track of their personal digital image and the way how and where it has been used? How much control do we have currently with the real online services where we share our images and information with others?

Relation to a larger context

Macdonaldstrand

They reproduced a series of Most Popular of All Time photos, it is the result of a survey of the many online lists of the most popular photographs of all time. These photographs have become so ubiquitous that it is hard to see their content and they have become detached from their context. MacDonaldStrand have reduced them to a series of lines and numbered dots and turned them into dot-to-dot drawings for the audience of the exhibition to fill in.

DJ Danger Mouse?

He made The Grey Album, it is a mashup album by Danger Mouse, released in 2004. It uses an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album and couples it with instrumentals created from a multitude of unauthorized samples from The Beatles' LP The Beatles (more commonly known as The White Album). The Grey Album gained notoriety due to the response by EMI in attempting to halt its distribution, despite the fact that both Jay-Z and Paul McCartney said they felt fine with the project.

Omer Fast

In Brighton biennale I saw a film by Omer Fast, it had an interesting scenario. The film Five Thousand Feet Is Best, takes its name from an excerpt of an interview between Fast and a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator now based in Las Vegas and working as a casino security guard. The operator recalls his jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, activating the unmanned plane to fire at civilians and militia from the optimum height of five thousand feet. In Five Thousand Feet Is Best, we wonder what, if anything, we can trust, because it turns out that part of the interview is an re-enactment. In this project there is an investigation of authenticity and witnessing that is conducted through the context of film and its relation to trickery.

Dr Duanus

The exhibition Dr. Duanus was presented in the Nederlands Photo Museum one year ago. The exhibition was sort of a retrospective of his work. His black and white photos about different comments of life, like metaphors, were placed in rows on the wall, they were nicely printed on A5 and A4 formats each placed in a mat and classically framed in black frames with glass. The exhibition continued with staged Magritte portraits and self-portraits. Many photographs were combined with descriptive comments. All of the writings and signatures were hand written. There were series of parodies about well-known artists and their work, for example a nice large format photograph of a cucumber smirking about German large format photographer Gursky and his works, or series of himself dressed up as the american legendary photographer Cindy Sherman. In the end of the hall were hanged half circle formats, those are his recent photographs about Japanese iconography. In the book store of the Museum I found one of the nicest of his books Duane Michals' "Photo Follies" 2008. How photography lost it's virginity on the way to the bank.

Banksy and Mr Brainwash

The street artist Banksy is combining things and expressing ideas in a really appropriate, clever and humorous way. He is creating new, iconic and meaningful visuals just by combining preexisting, well known images and transforming them in to stencils, paintings or installations. In the famous documentary about street art, Exit through the gift shop, it turned out that the movie is actually not about him or the street art history but about an filmmaker Terry Guetta from L.A. Terry followed and recorded the well known street artists in action, he got inspired and decided to become an street artist by himself. He had no clue about the traditional processes but he was really passioned, he was copying everybody. In a way he succeeded in a really short period, as Banksy said, if Andy Warhol made the statement by repeating famous icons by making them meaningless, Warhol was extremely iconic by the way he did it. Terry or the Mr. Brainwash made all of it really meaningless, he nailed it really..

I will describe more about the latest stuff that inspired me, for example from: Laric, Thomas Ruff, Kirby Ferguson, AES+F, Erkin Goren, Austin Kleon

Practical steps

Preparation stage

I gather together all my influences = observation, curiosity, appreciation. Analyze and state the things/aspects/aesthetics that I appreciate in art and that really mean something to me.

Incubation

The process of subconsciousness, the process when ideas are generating. For me there are two problems, it is really hard to make quick decisions and act fast, I like to think and over think things, thinking too much. On the other hand, if I push myself, I do not enjoy the process. At the moment I am looking for an alternative and it seems that I do not progress but arrive to the process of different kind of procrastination. I must change this.

Insight

Execution, the process of creation, I need to work hard with all my muscles of creativity, switch ON my critical judgement and be honest with my decisions.

References

Theory:

‪Nicolas Bourriaud‬, ‪Postproduction 2002‬;

‪Nicolas Bourriaud‬, Relational aesthetics;

Lev Manovich, New Language of Cinema;

Lev Manovich, Remixability;

Kant after Duchamp - Thierry de Duve;

Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again;

Nestor Garcia Canclini, Remaking Passports; Visual thoughtin the debate on multiculturalism;

Ann Sophie Lehmann, Hidden practice; Artists working spaces, tools, and materials in the digital domain;

David Joselit, What to do with Pictures, October 138 about Digital Arts;

Csikszentmihalyi, M. Setting the stage. About creativity. 1-21

Csikzentmihalyi, M. The flow of creativity, 107-126

De Mul, J. (2009). The work of art in the age of digital recombination. Digital Material. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 95-106.

Kessler, F. (2009). What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real. Digital Material. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 187-197.

New Media, Old Art Forms: Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde;

Artists:

Andy Warhol

Duane Michals

Thomas Ruff

Banksy

Oliver Leric

MacDonaldStrand

Ryan Mcginley

Omer Fast

Kirby Ferguson

AES+F

Erkin Goren

Austin Kleon

Veronique Bourgoin

Richard Billingham

Movies:

Good copy, Bad copy

Press pause, play

Vvversions

Everything is a Remix

Exit through the gift shop

Hugo

WHO_GETS_TO_CALL_IT_ART. HENRY!