User:Nicole Hametner/Graduate Research Seminar 2013-TM5.01

Nicole Hametner, outline for praxis based thesis 

Abstract

The following essay is an attempt to disclose my artistic research over the last two years. Parallel to my visual working process, some theoretical aspects will be treated, will complete and come full circle with my practice. This is why the main part of this text contains a description of the aspired outcome in constant dialogue with theoretical inputs. Through the writing and working process an initial draft will lead to a modified version, up to the final description at the end. Therefore this text can be seen as an insight into the process as well as a documentation of the final graduation project. Inside this linear order through my practice based research and methodology there will be three main fields approached. First I want to focus on photography's main concepts insofar as they relate to my own practice. Second I want to shift to the cinematographic image and its relation with time. Third I want to create a link to the video image and apply the former concepts to the mechanisms of the electronic moving image. My conclusion then leads back to my practice and investigates how the treated points are reflected in my graduation project.

Introduction

Having a background in photography, I now work with the intersection of the analog still image and the electronic moving image. Within that juxtaposition my interest focuses on their media specificity. An observation between stillness and movement leads to different temporalities, from instant to duration and ends with the question about their materiality and thereby inherent constitution. I am using their mechanisms as a conceptual framework in a rather metaphorical way to reflect about the passing of time. The shift from stillness to the moving image is based on my interest in the threshold of something that is in constant movement, and thereby articulates the theme of presence, absence and disappearance. In addition to that, the confrontation of the analog photographic image and the digital moving image evokes as mentioned above the question of materiality and thus its character of indexicality. My essay Black Box written in the second trimester explores what is being transformed or "lost" in the analog-digital conversion. For the thesis I would like to key into this point and investigate the construction and dissolution of the image itself.
One of my aims to do a master was to achieve a better understanding and to strenghten my methodology. One aspects of studying is the inevitable confrontation with ones own practice and the thereby connected doubts. These uncertainties are inavoidable while being in the process, where the work is very vulnerable. My practice is strongly based on intuition and rather focus on introspective than the outer world. Furthermore come the often quiet abstract themes, that are difficult to get to the heart of, what challenges a clear articulation of my own work. Therefore this thesis aim is to translate my practice based research into words. I use this rather methodology based essay mainly to achieve a clarification for myself. Nevertheless my intention is to end up with an artist statement that addresses the audience. During my research there is a struggle to translate something that is based on rather unconscious mechanisms. This is why the theoretical aspects help me to structure this text in an ongoing reciprocal dialogue between intuition and theory.
With photography I try to get closer to my interest in the invisible and what I am actually searching for. My work allows me to reflect about and get a better understanding of abstract concepts like presence and absence. Through the deepened confrontation with my research in the last year a repeated topic became evident and seemed somehow to summarize most of the aspects I am dealing with: the passing of time. While reflecting on the different temporalities in photography and the video image, the intangibility of time somehow stands here as analogy for the conflict to translate my research into words. As Laura Mulvey points out in Death 24x a Second, Stillness and the Moving Image: There is a difficulty articulating the mediums relation to time, that lies "beyond the verbal language" and description (p.182). That even becomes clearer while thinking of the general struggle to understand the passing of time itself and "the conceptual space of uncertainty: that is, the difficulty of undertanding time and the presence of death in life"(p.53). This is probably one of the main reasons why I work with photography and trust sometimes more sometimes less, its ability to communicate my thoughts.

Images