Claudio's Thesis - QUICKNOTES
CURRENT STATE OF MY PLANS FOR JAN ASSESSMENT
4 sketches (or: scenes, episodes, parts), ideally shown as loops on 4 different screens.
1)
Closeup shots of empty/blank/lost eyes of greek sculptures. Filmed in the Louvre or at the Phidias (most iconic sculptor from Athens V BC) exhibition in Rome. Filmed in 16mm, slowed down, high contrast. The abstract(ed) shape of the statues' eyes gradually forms on the screen, is lost and found continuously. You see it and you don't, and when you see it you are seen too. Continuously looking for something, and then losing it, and what you see are eyes looking at you. The shots are repeatedly interrupted by black frames of various length.
Images are accompanied by a text (ideally, on screen - maybe as a voiceover - need to figure it out) about:
how eyes were made in ancient sculptures (inlays made of precious materials or painted on stone, very detailed, accurately, realistically) and how they decayed and they are now lost
facts about the current state of technologies of creating so-called bionic eyes - nano-sensors to be implanted inside the eye to (partially) recover vision of blind people ( these researches are still failing - the Nanoretina model - the most successful so far -only provides black and white pixelated impression of light and darkness - an abstracted experience of the world through light and darkness. )
In both cases, small technological objects, made of rare/advanced materials, that speak of an obsession for the eye/vision. Both are implants, both related to a loss and a failure of vision - both creating a sense of vision - of seeing, of being seen.
A quest for seeing, of "making" eyes, while the viewers is drawn to look for and “make” the eyes on screen, actively engaging their own vision.
Other possible elements to speculate about:
threats to vision by screens and modern lifestyle - rise in myopia and vision loss - because of staring too close to things and screens, not being in nature ancient greeks theories of vision - very physical - images as objects colliding with eyes, or eyes shooting rays towards the world
...
2)
A compilation of footage from 4 webcams on beaches in South Holland (from the strandweer.nu database). These webcams are set up on beaches for safety and weather reporting reasons. They perform automatic Pan-Tilt-Zoom movements, according to an internal algorithm, which makes them move unpredictably. They continuously scan the beach, the sea, the horizon, zooming in and out, and the feeling they provide is that of a constant quest for something, a quest that is always bound to fail. They seem to be seeing everything out there, yet what do they see? What are they looking for? Sidenote: these camera movements remind me vaguely of works by Michael snow (Wavelength, La Region Centrale), but in a lo-fi, internet-aesthetics way.
Footage fro these webcams will be taken on the 22nd of December 2023, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the day in which the amount of sunlight is lowest. The darkest day of the year. The footage will be taken in correspondance to the sunrise and sunset, capturing the transition from full darkness to full daylight, and back, and edited in a 2 hour loop - 1 hour at sunrise, 1 hour at sunset. . The edit jumps from one to another webcams along the 1 hour timeframe. From seeing almost nothing, to seeing everything in full sunlight. But what is this everything?
Long shots, slow movements, a contemplative mood, a quest for what? What are these cameras looking for? What are you - staring at these cameras - looking for? Also, the staging of a process of making - and unmaking - of an image, through natural sunlight, through a camera sensor, on a screen.
Extra element to explore, maybe in form of text on screen:
staring at the sea/horizon/sky as a primordially human act of seeing and of being in the world - the sea and the horizon as "screens" / to appear and disappear
to relieve eye strain they suggest to look out to open spaces/horizons
A parallel between the automatic Pan Tilt Zoom movements of these cameras and the 4 types of movements that human eyes can make (saccades, smooth pursuit movements, vergence movements, and vestibulo-ocular movements)
3)
A word - LOST, as found by chance and screenshot as part of a title of an article I was about to read on my computer - keep the same font, same typography - is blown up on a large LCD screen. The screen is filmed by a handheld 4K camera which moves in front of it, scanning the letters and the surface of the screen. The screen in filmed at various distances and angles. Letters are mixed, reversed, fragmented.
L O ST L S T O L T O S T O S L
The structure of the screen appears - as squared edges of the letters, as a grid of pixels, as flickering light interfering with the camera's own shutter speed.
A short (1/2 minute) video loop, with an equally short music loop/beat as a soundtrack . A sense of loss is evoked, literally and lyrically. The camera constantly loses its object, loses itself in the surface of the screen. A sense of loss that resonates with the other parts of the work. Loss of vision, lost eyes, lost at sea, lost in screens, pixels.
(2 and 3 could be merged into one single scene as there are some obvious links - scanning movements along a surface/screen, losing your eyes in the sea/in the pixels, looking out in the distance/looking very close up to a screen, the sea/horizon as a screen (devices of appearing/disappearing)
4)
(still figuring it out)
Abstract imagery - probably resulting from the various technical/structural experiment I made/will make in testing the possibilities of image making by staging extreme, absurd interaction/interference of cameras, screens, light - is run through some artificial intelligence application for visually impaired people that provide description of images. Confronted with such imagery, they can't but fail in describing them. One of these apps often uses the formulas “I am not sure but this might be …” “I have doubts but…”.
Working on the failure of images as well as the failure of making meaning out of images.
Guessing what is seen is what our eyes constantly do.
Doubting about images, about their supposedly realistic content.
All 4 parts are at their core attempts at seeing. Quest for seeing, and to make sense of what is seen.
Losing/Failing vision and attempting to see. (expand)
challenges for assessment
presenting convincing visual and text material
write 2/3 loglines for the whole project / research questions
28/11/2023
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tonight, i was trying to film the screen with a more advanced camera, that i rented at the rental station at wdka.
i was trying out different settings - shutter speed, focal length, focus - to get the best, most clear image of the screen's grid structure.
lights were on in the room, long led tubes, whiteblueish light.
i started filming the screen, once again. in the camera's electronic viewfinder I see something strange happening. apparently random flashes of reddish/orangeish light appear on the screen I was trying to film. the camera is still, the screen is still too, but i see this light moving, flashing, dancing
i keep filming. it must be some sort of weird interference between the screen's led structure, the room's lightning system, the camera's sensor.
I go back to my studio desk, willing to see the result. I open the file, no trace of that light, juts the plain, white, griddy surface of the screen. that lght i saw while filming was gone, didnt see it anymore. is this what I'm interested in?
(tbc...)
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am i losing myself in a rabbithole of self referential formalistic shit without any interest for others? am i just staying on the surface of things and not really trying to go beyond the formalistic refelection on images? this is what david is warning me about
should i try to get out? how can i do that?
he said that the more interesting parts are the blind spot and the idea of failure of images. work more on that? on what they actually mean?
24/11/2023
there s something with the surface+
its observation/exploration/scanning and its rupture/deformation/alteration/profanation
profanation of the dispositif (Agamben, always comes back)
interventions on the surface
ideas for final output?
a 16 mm film - screened as a analog projection loop - made as a compilation of short sketches - in between: short still fragmented texts that loosely relate to the images and partially elaborate on the topics involved
use 16mm print stock film - very high contrast, I feel it very much suits the premises of my project - and cheaper
[Steve suggests: in the piece described above, you are also making the viewer conscious of the experience of viewing the piece, which is encoded with 'burning eyes/eyes burning'. 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.]
1 - THAT DASH SLASH / IS THE EDGE, THE TRESHOLD. ALL MY PROJECT IS MOVING ON THAT EDGE, ITS AN EXPLORATION OF THE EDGE BETWEEN
REFLECT ON MY USE OF IT, BRING IT OUT AS A METAPHOR/SYMBOL/IMAGE FOR THE SUBJECT OF MY WORK, TO TALK ABOUT MY WORK - ITS THEMES BUT ALSO ITS TOOLS
/ AS SEPARATION BUT ALSO RELATION, CONTRADICTORY/PARADOXICAL VALUE
/ IMPLIES A DOUBLE SIDE, THE POSSIBILITY OF A REVERSAL - I USE SIMILAR FORMAL DEVICES - THE INVERT EFFECT (FLIP IMAGES ON SCREEN AND POSITIVE/NEGATIVE REVERSAL OF AN IMAGE)
2 - Aitana also pointed out a certain redundancy in the stuff i showed in mentor group.
I feel it's actually a strategy that I am trying to develop. what does that mean? how can I use it effectively/intentionally?
is redundancy the right word? maybe repetition/layering?
(for part 3 / concepts)
other devices i use
slowing down almost to still frames / speeding up footage to a flickering flashing deconstructed perception of footage, altering the time images are given on screen
23/11/23
slowed down Louvre statues (excerpt) https://youtu.be/FfkTtrCsTFQ
make a 2 min piece of
shot:statue
countershot: balck dot on white background
shot: statue (opposite direction)
countershot: again black dot on white backgroud
loop
(an LCD screen filmed very very close)
(De Rotterdam's façade filmed form the Erasmus bridge)
sketch 1 https://youtu.be/ac1rEIsvwpA
sketch 2 https://youtu.be/IVagyN1DFVs
(Agnes Martin, Wood I, 1963 Watercolor and graphite on paper, 15 x 15 1/2 inches (38.1 x 39.4 cm))
(Agnes Martin, Aspiration, 1960 Ink on paper, 11 3/4 x 9 3/8 inches (29.8 x 23.8 cm) )
a refusal to make a fetish of the final “work” - to operate almost exclusively on the level of the sketch. - what is the value of this stance as an artist?
thinking about self imposed limitations to my practice
black and white only
16mm (limitations in shooting and editing)
when digital editing - keep it simple - 4 tracks + effects - aka not make things that would not be possible to make in analog editing
1 channel only? or can you make split screen in 16 mm?
sound? - no input mixer feedback loops