User:Yoana Buzova/ thesisdraft

Workname

Intro

collecting / encoding/decoding / voice

I have a fascination for looking at short-lived, transient situations and objects, I see them and want to collect them, transform them and bring them back in another form. In my work I focus on simplicity and invisible information layers in our environment. I like finding minimal situations in uncommon, contrast places. In most of my works I look for tangibility and materiality, low-tech, diy and found object/moment strategies. I find and collect self-organized structures that i could translate, disassemble, modify so that the emerging form is my work. This is the role of an observer that choses, collects, transforms and makes something new. My methodology is to immerse myself into situations and find in them other ones. I immerse myself trough looking and listening, with or without passing judgement on the collected impressions. I like to take a break and be slow, catch my breath and look around. In unconscious structures i find unpredictability, unrepeatability, algorithm, randomness, endless combinations and recombinations.

Part 1

Past work and contextualisation

/Descriptions of previous projects/

Monologue Machine is a prototype machine that consists of two elements.It works with an arduino microcontroller, that uses simple open source hardware and simplified programming language to make process of using electronics more accessible. The machine consists of a set of light dependent resistors that receive light and transform its values into a pre programmed musical scale. They are mounted closely to the screen of a tv, modified into an oscillator. The Tv transforms the audio signal into bright white scribbles on the black screen. The sensors measure the light and the values transform into sound. That is how the data loop is created and the machine processes and generates its own data again and again. However, the data never remains the same. The signal is in constant flux, due to the noise that appears trough environment and viewers. The machine talks to itself in a dynamic, nonsense, annoying melody. It is a prototype. If and when an upgraded version is developed it would be displayed as an installation in an art space.

Window Compositions is a custom made music box set. It is a simple automatic, hand-cranked, programmable musical machine that creates sound by the use of a set of pins that pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb. The programming object is a punch card, having holes to express a program. The mechanism is mounted in a wooden box (cube with 13 cm sides) with a metal crank and two holes for the punch card to go trough. It is built to be a simple, low-tech, intuitive, instantly accessible object. The process of creating the card melodies is closely connected to photographs. I observe the streets at night and take big scale panoramas of the whole lenght of the streets. After i examine the photos, I take lit windows of the street buildings and apply themas holes in the punch card. The card, decoded by the music box transforms the chaotic noise of the city into a minimal, analog melody. My current intention is to bring the sound back to its original birth place to complete into a feedback loop. This part of the project is still in development. The compositions will live back on the streets in small, concrete speakers, placed in the city, looping the melodies until they get broken or stolen, which hopefully will take long time before happening. The speakers will be built so to be weather and vandalism proof. the only information on them will be the time and place the windows were photographed, thus the moment the melody depicts.

I discover these methods in the projects that started in the first trimester. In message delivery, work from first trimester with Mathaijs I focus on self-driven , chain reaction urban encounters. A very primitive, manual adventure of hand-written notes that travel trough the city from person to person and we (the project initiators) serve only as couriers to facilitate, observe and document the randomness of manual interactions. In my video feedback experiments I also take the position of a viewer rather than a director of the work. I record a generative, self-generated visual result.

In my previous work in the context of photography, I gained considerable observer skills/ silent/ looking/ listening/ taking with me.

In my imagework, I have been dealing with subjects somehow similar to my current interests, mostly observation and isolation of neglected objects and situations. In my photography work, I took portrait shoots's trash and used unwanted moments (images desired to be deleted) as a critique to set up, posing and artificiality in photography. In illustrations for a short story by Boris Vian, I isolate existing trivial objects, details and put them in the context of the text to give them a new meaning. I also did image works, fascinated by minimal light compositions and irregular visual perception. Recently I seem to be shifting to using photography as a tool for documentation, going back to basic purposes. Using it as initial input, a sketch to use later and build on. Is no longer a final presentation medium. I now use it to examine and explore it later as source of information.

Personal context and relation to project

just a start/very draft/unfinished

Looking back into personal moments and detail that occurred in my life and recalled a few things that seem relevant at this point to what I am doing / working / writing.

As a child, for some months my parents would leave me at my grandmother's house, until the afternoon, when my they came back from work. I remember she kept me busy with helping her or stuffing me with food, neither of which I enjoyed. The brief moments that I could escape her attention, I would use to make audio recordings on the cassette recorder that she had. Short voice recordings, registering the moment of freedom, transient moments in between. Feelings, observations, singing/performing, laughing, silence, reading. These short recording were made in a long period of time, snippet after snippet. Recorded one after another brief moments of time. Listening to these recordings I listen to condensed content of compressed time. It is like a map, one can look on a macro level, observing a small area, and one can look at the whole area. It is nice to say look, while it is actually about listening.

That house had lots of books, probably an over amplified conclusion of a seven year old. Among all I discovered only one that seemed somewhat interesting to me, what made it so, what the methodology, the process of its making. Each chapter of this book had been written by a different author, in a different country. I imagined the different pieces of the unfinished book, in envelopes, traveling to get to be completed by another person.