Claudio's Thesis - FIRST EDIT
finish edit writing TUE MORNING
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make draft of bibliography, filmography, references TUESDAY AFTERNOON
CHOOSE images TUESDAY AFTERNOON
INTRO - BW SKECTHES FROM FIRST MONTH
CHAPTER 2
SCRRENSHOTS FROM ANECDOTES,
IMAGES FROM ASSESSMENT PRESENTATION
IMAGES IM WORKING ON NOW
CHAPTER 3
put everything in a folder on hd
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word count, indesign test layout with printout form from wiki and black boxes wed/thu night, FRIDAY
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES. A STUDIO DIARY. (word count:xxxx)
Foreword
I wrote this thesis to annotate and field-report the unfolding of my work over the course of the second year of this program.
It is intended to be a complement to "making". A direct, on-going reflection on/of it. A device to think through, to delve in, to dissect and clarify the reasons and stakes of the practice I am establishing and the stances I am taking as a visual artist.
It is therefore hardly an academic writing. Its mode of address tends to be that of a studio diary, a reasoned compilation of notes. I decided to keep the date of the day I wrote each piece, as a way to follow the progression of my practice over time. I chose to minimally re-edit older pieces of writing, as I am interested in tracing the unfolding of my work, witnessing its shifts, changes, contradictions, rather than trying to make it retrospectively look like a straightforward path.
A critical engagement with theory and other artists' work is a substantial part of my practice, yet I decided not to directly address those in my writing and leave them in the background, only to compile them as a reference list at the end. I claim an unruly approach to theory - hand-picking bits and pieces from different sources where I find resonances with my own intentions and interests, making for a loose constellation of references, without the overwhelming weight of having to fully master the whole of it.
While editing this thesis, I acknowledged and decided to embrace some distinctive traits of my writing, which seemed to recall some features recurring in my work: repetitions, mirroring, binomes of opposites, fragmented form, recursive elements, feedbacks. An intertwining between writing and making seems to appear also in such formal devices.
something else needed?
CHAPTER 1: (INTRO)
20-11-2023
This text is titled (INTRO).
(INTRO) is a general outline of the starting point of my graduation research project, BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES. It will present its premises, the topics that the project will try to cross and address, the questions driving it, the tools I plan to use, the attitudes I will rely on.
(INTRO) is a self-analyisis of where I am at right now. Now that I have written my first Project Proposal and I am starting to grasp what I am dealing with yet I know much will change and evolve. Also, it will serve me as an exercise to reach a temporary state of clarity over the next month and devise an effective and convincing way to present and frame my intentions at the assessment in January.
I will write another text - (OUTRO) - just before the final due date for thesis. It will be a mirror text to (INTRO), an attempt at recapping the work made and reflecting on its achievements and failures, its discoveries and future trajectories. Also, a more detailed description of the form that this project will take in the graduation show. It will be interesting to witness the way this project developed, the changes and contradictions arising from its first draft.
During the first year I focused on a rather broad yet quite specific field of research, which I would frame as the theory and practice of image-making, and, conversely, of the experience of images, considered in their complex implications - technological/technical, material, semiotic, affective/existential - between their digital and analog nature. In other words, I have been concerned with the conditions of possibility of images by constantly lingering on their limits. This project belongs to the same research path.
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES will be an elemental exploration of fundamental questions about seeing and being: the way we see, what we see, why we see, and where we stand. It will give form to a critical discourse and practice that weaves together and questions the experience of the world by seeing it, through and as light, on images and screens, the materiality of these - as physical/analog and virtual/digital objects, and the related quest to find meaning and stand in between these, living the tension between nihilism and the sublime. A personal reflection on the experience of seeing as well as a (self)reflection on the possibilities of the medium of (moving) images.
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES will take the form of a cumulative, open-ended, expansive work on visual material from different sources and with different qualities. Its subjects will be
piercing light leaks and dark black holes, over- and under- exposed shots, webcam shots of empty beaches, blinding flashes and fast flickers, windows, curtains, screens, empty/lost eyes, pixels, digital noise, black and white blank frames [tbc...]
collected and choreographed together in short, stand-alone sketches/fragments. An annotation process will run parallel, unfolding meaning in written form, producing text material that will end up in this thesis work and in the final piece for the show.
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES will find its outcome at the graduation show as an experimental moving image work, in an installation form. I envision it either as a single-screen compilation or a multi-channel installation comprising of different speculative scenes/parts, mutually interconnected yet self sufficient. They will be exercises of/attempts at/challenges to the act of seeing. For me while making, for the viewer watching.
Hereafter, I compile an expansive list of keywords that will somehow be called into question by BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES:
seeing/not seeing
showing/hiding
seeing/watching/staring/gazing
vision/blindness
visibility/invisibility
materiality/abstraction
edges/borders/thresholds/margins/limits/interfaces
errors-glitches-artifacts-failures
flashes, flickers
immateriality-materiality in/of (digital) images
blind spots
gaze/image/screen
physicality of images and image-making devices
depth/surface
lenses, sensors, screens, human eye structures
software/hardware, digital/analog, virtual/physical
technology/the technical
existentialism, nihilism/sublime
In working on BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES I will rely on some tools and attitudes that I want to set myself both as guidelines and prompts for my practice.
I want to embrace and develop an approach to images that is sculptural and open-ended. A DIY, constant sketching, “non-finito” approach. Make rapid, rough, short sketches, yet consistently, as a way to explore possible forms and meanings. To keep eyes and doors open, to open eyes and doors.
I want to work with images in a more dirty, reckless, less polished way. This does not mean I want to work carelessly. But carefree. I want to give more space to establishing a process and a practice rather than polishing projects. Develop a practice against - or devoid of - the fear and the fetish of the final result. It is the way of working that I feel more at ease with and I believe it can be the most effective one in exploring and reaching the core topics and interests of my work. This does not mean I am not interested in reaching points in which I can show completed works to an audience. I see this ongoing practice as the source of a body of pieces whose meaning is made by their whole, and whose whole will be the foundation for the making of my final graduation piece.
I want to work and convey meaning mainly with and through images. I want to use text and sound as secondary devices to facilitate this.
While I will still be using found footage, I want to work again also behind the lens, making and working with my own images too. I plan to use different media. I will rely on my handy Canon camcorder as a visual note-taking device, to capture images on the go. I am getting familiar with more advanced cameras from WDKA's rental facility to be able to make more high-quality footage. I also plan to try my hand at working partially with 16mm. I want to work exclusively in black and white, as a way to reduce the information to the essential elements of images that I am interested in - light and shadows, textures. I might withdraw this choice later on, but color feels superfluous right now.
I want to simplify my editing workflow. Keep my timeline slim, avoid excessive use of editing trickeries and rely more on the simple act of juxtaposing images together.
I am currently in the process of making more concrete plans to present at the assessment. Also, I am trying to react, through what I am making, to two recurrent remarks that are being made to my work, which address the need to
- open up my practice, considering using more images "of the world" - less abstract, less self-referential, consider the agency of my work in the outer world
- the necessity to find narrative lines of some sort, how and to what extent give information and entry points to bring in the audience.
CHAPTER 2: STUDIO DIARY
21/11/2023 - An anecdote from last year. (1)
For the "Writing through editing" workshop last year, we were asked to make a short video piece using footage from an online Dutch archive. I made a piece titled A cameraman filming aka FILMINGWATCHINGBURNING. Digging in the archive, I had found a rather intriguing clip from the archive showing two cameramen filming each other on top of a skyscraper being built in New York in the 1920s. Its self-reflexive nature immediately attracted me: its subject was not New York's vertical growth - which stayed, literally - in the background, yet the very act of filmmaking, of making images of the world, by means of cameras, on film. The subjects were the two filmmakers, filming each other while filming the world in front of them. I built my piece around that clip, editing it together with other footage - this time intentionally looked for, not found - to develop that self-reflective nature even further. A film projector, a film strip burning, as well as various shots of eyes. I intended to weave together the act of seeing/watching, the act of capturing the world through film, and a more intuitive notion of burning - light burns the chemicals on the celluloid, eyes burn when they stay open for too long, or, also, a burning desire and need to see things. Along the whole piece, with varying intensity, I layered a flickering effect, as a device to make the moving image apparatus visible and sensible the viewer; as a metaphor to recall the blinking of the eye; also, to trigger the physical perception of moving images and further play with the provoking idea and feeling of burning eyes.
In the first half of the piece, I crafted a sequence featuring a fast edit of footage of the two cameramen, images of eyes and text-on-screen playing with variations of the words EYES WATCHING / WATCHING EYES. All of a sudden, the screens goes black, abruptly. After a few seconds, a new text-on-screen appears, white letters on black: EYES BURNING. A hard flickering sequence - white and black frames only - follows, emphasizing even more the sensation of burning eyes. The same text stays on screen, floating through the flickering frames. Then, a blurry countershot image of a projector beaming light towards the camera appears - as if it was the source of that flickering sequence, and brings back the piece to figurative imagery. The piece then goes on.
When the screen goes black, the viewer's eyes - until then overstimulated by the mass of fast edited images - are caught unprepared. On that sudden pitch black, afterimages appear, the flickering effect seems to continue, and what is felt is the physical trace of the images seen before, their backlash on the viewer's retinas. Then, on that same black, the text appears. EYES BURNING. A subtle yet precise description not only of some of the images seen before - eyes looking at the camera, shedding tears - but also of the actual physical sensation built and triggered by those very images, the way they have been edited, the way they are felt by the viewer in that specific moment of the piece. A coincidence, a coming together of what is seen, perceived, meant.
images seen, physical perception and conceptual meaning.
The editing of that sequence was rather intentional, yet the witnessing of this effect was rather epiphanic, unexpected and striking. I feel this is an effective reference point in showing me a direction I want to pursue in my future practice, and that contains, in a nutshell, some elements whose use and potential I want to explore in making this new project. Abstract, minimal imagery, working with light as a raw material, self reflection on the medium, embodied/physical/haptic experience of images. Engaging and challenging the viewer's experience of moving images, their position in regards to them, both on a conceptual level and on a physical one. Making the viewer conscious of the experience of seeing, of being, challenging their perception, working on liminal, extreme states/conditions of images; blindness and sight, visibility and invisibility. These are all elements I am interested in addressing in my work.
05/12/23 - (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 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.
../../.. - An anecdote from last year. (2)
Claudio: [...] (notes on the moment I discovered that pixelated edge around North Sentinel Island on Google Earth imagery, which then became a substantial element in the piece I made for the Eye) - I already have some notes from last year, I will include it if I have extra words. Seems another relevant anecdote to frame the course of my practice last year and to introduce some of the topics/attitudes that I am interested in exploring with BSLTTFF
(THAT one) 
../../.. - An anecdote from last year. (3)
Claudio: [...] (i thought about another very good one last night, but I can't remember now - but it felt almost necessary for me to write about that,
11-12/01/2024 - PROJECT PROPOSAL v.2
Towards January assessment, I wrote a new version of my proposal, which renders the way my plans have progressed in the past one and half months, after I submitted the first Proposal and after some critical mentor sessions which pointed out the limits of those first intentions. More specifically, I was being told that I was only playing around with formal aspects, without considering - or even worse, withdrawing from doing so - the agency that my images could have in the "wider" world. I was also told that it was very hard to engage with what I was making= because of its extremely self-referential, abstract natrure which could hardly offer any grip on reality for an audience to access it.
My plans seem to have taken a more tangible form, that of a proper project. It will surely evolve and change, yet I feel that, finally, I have something solid to stand on. I feel as if - suddenly - I could link elements and thoughts that were already there - yet scattered - in a more stable and meaningful constellation. There's a series of elements, and a clear, sensible idea of the way I want them to be made and to stand in relation to each other.
As Steve pointed out on the day of the assessment, I am "constantly chiseling my own works and words". I feel that this relation between writing and making is working out fruitfully, allowing me to focus on and bring out my own reasons and motivation to do this project, and therefore to develop it steadily and substantially.
Hereafter, I compile some relevant excerpts from that text, to present this new iteration of my Project. I introduce its structure, outline its (four) parts, and their relations. Each part is described more specifically, taking into account both their content as well as the practical process of their making. Finally, I write some notes about some of the choices I made in drafting this new proposal and list some elements that I am considering to include in it.
As of now, BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES will consist of four sketches (or: scenes), to be presented as self-standing video loops on four different screens.
Their (working) titles are:
1) SENSORS
2) W-O/A-NDERCAMS
3) L S T O L T O S L O S T T O S L
4) Untitled, or: SCREENSHOTS
Together, these sketches (or: scenes) explore and articulate in various ways and from different angles the field of research that I outlined above.
All four are, at their core, exercises in/attempts at/challenges to the act of seeing and of making images. They are so both for the audience - experiencing them in an exhibition setting - as well as for myself - while engaging in their making.
They are in fact outcomes of an experimental - literally, made of trials and errors and feedbacks - approach to moving image-making. Results of extensive acts of watching and filming, challenging the technical limit of the devices - of capturing images, of showing them. Filming from very far, from very close, blinding the cameras, scrutinizing and screen-recording hours of footage from online webcams ...
They all move on and question the fine, blurred line between human desire/need to see and to make sense of the world by seeing and making images of it, and the impossibility of such an attempt, when seeing and image-making happen to fail.
They address the experience of the world by seeing it, through light, on images and screens, the materiality of such devices and the related quest to find meaning and stand in between the world and its techonology-mediated representations.
They shape a speculative reflection - personal and analytical, structural and poetic - on the experience of seeing as well as a (self)reflection on the possibilities and limits of (moving) images.
They stem from - and thus require - a contemplative and speculative attitude.
I will now provide a draft outline of each of the four sketches that make up BSLTTFF.
1) SENSORS (8-10 minutes)
The first sketch will consist of closeup shots of empty/blank/lost eyes of classic greek sculptures, filmed either in the Greek section of the Louvre Museum in Paris or at the exhibition on classical greek sculptor Phidias that is currently being held in Rome. I intend to shoot these images on analog film; either on a high contrast, black and white 16mm stock, or as still pictures on 35mm photographic film. Images of these statues and their eyes will be slowed down and will appear on screen as shapes that are continuously, gradually lost and found. They will be seen and then lost and then seen and over again. The viewers will find themselves actively looking for something to appear, and what they will see are eyes - or traces of now lost, blinded eyes - looking at you. When you see it, you are seen too. The eyes’ shots are spaced out by blank frames of various length. These images are accompanied by a text - ideally in the form of a voiceover - that will draw a speculative parallel between:
- how eyes were crafted in classical greek sculptures and how they decayed and they are now lost, their symbolic/cultural value and the link between such representation of the eyes and contemporary philosophical theories of vision (very physical/material - images as objects colliding with eyes, eyes shooting rays towards the world)
and
- the current, failing state of technologies for bionic eyes - experimental implants of nano-sensors on damaged retinas to (partially) recover vision of blind people. the eye becomes a digital camera)
I am still in the process of researching these two subjects. However, I am interested in articulating this analogy between these small high-tech objects, made of precious materials, speaking of a persistent human quest, a need, an obsession for the eye/vision/seeing over time. Both are reflections of contemporary cultural constructs around vision. Both are on the edge between a material loss of vision and the creation of a sense of it - of seeing, of being seen.
The whole sketch revolves around a quest for seeing, for "making" eyes, while the viewer is drawn to look for and “make” the eyes on screen, actively engaging their own vision.
2) W-O/A-NDERCAMS (12/24 minutes)This sketch will be a compilation of footage from 2 webcams set up on dutch beaches for safety and weather reporting reasons and available as 24/7 live-streams online. These webcams perform automatic Pan-Tilt-Zoom movements, according to internal algorithms, which make their movements look unpredictable and absurd: they continuously scan the beach, the sea, the horizon, zooming in and out, and the feeling they provide is that of a constant quest to see 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? Lost eyes, stranded, blind.
Every day, at sunrise, over the course of an hour, the image they provide transitions from a digitally-grained, black and white, opaque, “blind” image, to a well-exposed image - yet always artifacted - of the beach they are on. The same, in reverse, happens at sunset. From seeing almost nothing, to seeing something, then everything in full sunlight, and back. I have collected such footage from these two webcams on the day of the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year - both at sunrise and sunset, capturing the transition from full darkness to full daylight, and back. I will edit it in a 12/24 minute loop. The edit will jump between the two webcams, yet staying "chronologically" true and render the transitions between darkness/blindness and light/vision during the day.
The subjects that this sketch deals with are multiple and interconnected.
The webcams’ contemplative, absurd quest across the sublime, yet eerie landscapes they show. What are these wandering cameras, lost eyes, looking for, what are they absurdly aiming at?
Staring at the sea/horizon/sky as a primordially human act of seeing and of being the world; the sea and the horizon as “screens”, whose staring at has to do with appearing signs, passing time, understanding someone's own position in the world.
The cyclic construction and destruction of the image, the staged process of its material making and unmaking, by means of natural sunlight, through a camera sensor, on a screen.
A state of hyperpresence of machinic, technological gazes and of over-production of images, that are continuously made, yet never watched.
I am also interested in questioning the position of the viewer - myself in the first place - in relation to these images. Not only, then, what are these wandering cameras looking for? But also, what am I - are you - staring at the images made by those cameras - looking for? I am therefore considering the possibility to embark on a journey to go find and see these webcams, and the places they depict, in real life, in first person. Again, an absurd quest to see, and to see what? To cross, to challenge the threshold between the world and its representation, to physically engage with the materiality of such immaterial processes of image-making and mediation of reality. I will film and field-record these trips and find ways to integrate such materials with the webcams' actual footage.
3) L S T O L T O S L O S T T O S L (3-4 minutes)
The image of a word - LOST - as originally found by chance and screenshot while browsing the internet - is blown up on a large LCD screen. The screen is filmed by a handheld digital camera moving in front of it, very up close. It scans the letters and the surface of the screen. In the edit, letters are mixed, reversed, fragmented, repeated.
L S T O L T O S L O S T T O S L
The viewer can never see the full word, but has to make sense of it by following the camera movements through the piece.The hidden, opaque structure of the screen is seen through - as squared edges of the letters, as a grid of pixels, as flickering light interfering with the camera's shutter speed.
A sense of loss is evoked, literally and lyrically. Visually too: the camera constantly loses its object, loses itself in the surface of the screen. A sense of loss that resonates in various ways with the other parts of the project. Loss of vision, lost eyes, lost at sea, lost in screens and pixels. The slow, scanning performed by the camera also resonates by contrast with the webcams' movements: the infinite open of the seascape against the fractional units of the screen's pixel grid. The footage is edited in a loop form and accompanied by a short sound fragment, whose hypnotic repetition matches the visual work that is made with letters on screen.
4) Untitled/SCREENSHOTS (5-8 minutes)
This sketch stems from a practice of "technical/structural experiments" that I engaged with in the past few months consisting of staging self-reflective, absurd interactions/interferences of cameras, screens, light sources, objects, my own figure, with the ultimate intention of exploring, exposing, exhausting the possibilities of such devices involved in making and experiencing images.
I am currently working with two staged scenes - that I might want to eventually film in 16mm too - which are intended to cross-reference, respectively the eyes/heads of statues seen in 1) SENSORS and the seascapes of 2) W-O/A-NDERCAMS .
The first scene features overexposed, closeup pictures of my own face that are shown to the camera by a flash light, while I am being blinded by that same flashlight. My eyes are caught wide open or fully shut.
In the second scene, a picture of the sea, with a sunlight reflection, is shown on a desktop monitor. The screen is flashed, the flash instantly shows the picture of the sea on the monitor while, at the same time the flash is seen back as a light trace on the glass surface of the screen.
Both the two scenes are repeatedly brought to light by a flash - they emerge from and then drown back into the darkness of a blank black screen. Their sudden, intermittent apparitions act as bright flashes on screen, provoking a paradoxical blinding reaction in the viewer. Their repetition is always similar, yet always different, as the interaction between the flashlight, the camera, and the staged scenes is hardly controllable.
I intend to run these scenes through apps for visually impaired people that provide realistic textual and audio description of images. Confronted with such imagery, most often, these apps can not but fail in their task, and make up unlikely descriptions or use such formulas as: “I am not sure but this might be …”, “I have doubts but…” or "Unable to generate captions".
I intend to edit these scenes as long black sequences, interrupted by sudden images as bursts of light, paired with together with the dubious audio-textual descriptions that these apps provide.
I am still figuring out the most effective way to make this piece work, but I am interested in bringing together these "structural" experiments on the techonological limits and intentionally-induced failures of image-making and seeing and the - equally induced - failure of such apps intended to making meaning out of images. I want to explore the blurred lines between seeing nothing, everything, something. I want to question the impulse to make sense/meaning out of what is seen, challenging the supposedly realistic content of images. Guessing what is seen is what our eyes constantly do, making sense of the world as we see it.
SHOULD I KEEP THE FOLLOWING PART? ONLY IF I HAVE WORDS LEFT (SAM told me its interesting)
POSSIBLE NEW ELEMENTS
There are some elements and ideas that I am currently considering to integrate in the work, yet I haven't found a convincing way to do so yet.
Possibly the most important one - I am thinking to bring in a narrative line made of meditations on my own, personal possibility of losing vision because of a genetic predisposition for a degenerative retinal disease. I am interested in using this private circumstance as a prompt to speculate further about the act of seeing, and the possibility of its failure. Also, I feel that this would introduce a more evident first-person involvement, which would enrich the work and open it up, making it more relatable for an audience.
Also, I have been reading about the way the increased exposure to digital screens is causing rise in myopia and vision alterations. I am interested in the paradoxical correlation between digital screens - as primary supports for images, devices to see the world - and their potential to affect and alter vision. Also, I am interested in the advice that is often given to relieve eye strain by excessive screen staring to look out to open spaces and to the horizon - which strikingly resonates with the seascapes of Part 2.
I would like to draw a parallel between the automatic Pan Tilt Zoom movements performed by the cameras in part 2 and the four types of movements that human eyes can make.
9-10/01/2024 - (ASSESSMENT'S AFTERTHOUGHTS)
My presentation could have been more synthetic, but I feel that research questions, approaches and practical plans seemed to match and be coherent. I was told that I should still work more on finding the right form and making entry points for the audience to engage more, and more directly, with my work, which still has the tendency to be quite cryptic. David said, it's probably a matter of "noticing" those moments, those events, those collisions in which the work sparks meaning further from/outside of itself. The personal circumstance of my family predisposition to develop a retinal disease was received as a convincing element to open up what I'm making.
I feel I could show more control over my own, self-defined "sculptural" approach to moving image-making, arguing its different stance - and needs - from more narrative/storytelling-focused filmmaking practices. I feel that my so-called sketching practice is coming through as a way of making that - through its tentative and truly experimental nature - has the potential to produce outcomes that are nonetheless coherent, making sense as a whole, in their variety of media, forms, qualities. I was encouraged to bring this sculptural, sketching approach further, to fully embrace it. This was mainly pointing at considering presence and relations in space as inherent elements in the work.
I also feel that my intention to partially work with 16mm film was also well-received, as a choice that could match the premises and questions of my work. Valuable remarks were made: why shoot analog to then show it digitally? why not keep it as a film projection? If I use film, I need to have a critical reflection on its role in the work, and make it fully clear - to me in the first place - why and how its medium specificities are relevant to my project. I will think about it, and try to research more about contemporary expanded moving images practices with 16mm film. However, as I am also interested in digital screens as light-emitting objects we are persistently exposed to, I'd like to bring in this element in the final display of my work. As my whole practice moves at the edge of analog and digital, I can see my project eventually coming into being through both analog film projection and digital supports.
I was warned that I should consider narrowing down my plans and let go of some parts, to make my project realistically attainable in the time that is left, to make it more precise and less loose. While I see the reasons for such remarks, I am also convinced that a fundamental specificity of my practice is precisely this expansive, constellation form of fragments and layers. I understand the need to make choices, to let go of certain parts while fine-tuning what stays, yet I would like to keep the multifaceted nature of my work.
I have been told that it is not fully clear why I am making all this, where do I stand, what is my personal involvement within this project. I find this observation - which has been recurring during mentor groups and tutorials - a bit frustrating. I feel I am in the position - that of an artist - to claim a certain degree of opacity. Being generous to the audience is one thing, being fully transparent is another. But I will think about this too. Also, I have been asked to make it more clear why and how my work relates to - and how it proceeds further from - a certain tradition of minimalist/conceptual art and experimental/structural filmmaking. I will try to do this by engaging with an exercise of annotating other artists' work in Chapter 3 of this thesis.
9-10/01/2024 - CHALLENGES FROM NOW ON or: HOW TO MAKE THIS WORK WORK
- Make good research - mostly for 1) SENSORS - and effectively translate it into the project through a re-writing practice. Do not overload it, keep only information which is essential to the aims of my work.
- Rethink the structure of the project, the order and relations between elements and parts. Make it precise and synthetic; make choices, leave something out, do not overkill it. Match form with content. Be strategic in finding ways to open it up and bring in the audience.
- Carefully consider the implications of using 16mm. What would it add to the project more than digital video? Then, make the most out of the Filmwerkplaats membership.
- Keep in mind the constraints - space, time, tech facilities - of the final grad show in devising the outcome of this project. A multichannel, multimedia (digital video/analog film, projectors/screens) installation is a complex thing and possibly too much for the context of the grad show.
Possible directions to think about/test/ways to go in the next coming weeks:
- use writing practice to try and weave together the multiple elements that I have now.
- delve deeper in "reading" the circumstance of my own possibility of vision loss as a central element to understand and articulate my personal involvement with these topics, but also, delve deeper in understanding and including in my work the "socio-political" implications in the "wider world"
- try scripting the trip to go and find the webcam of Part 2. Make it clear to me what I am doing, what I expect to get from this act. Yet, be open to chance and unexpected findings that might come up in that process.
- think of alternative ways to use some of the parts of my project so far in an installation format. For example, some elements can be rendered and shown as series of still frames (the L-O-S-T part, the experiments with flashes...).
[...]
07-02-24 - ONGOING TRANSFORMATIONS/DEVELOPMENTS (1)
In the past weeks, following the assessment I have been making some critical choices for the future of this project. I resolved to temporarily carry on only Part 1 - SENSORS and Part 2 - W-O/A-NDER-CAMS of my Project Proposal - the statues' blinded eyes piece and the stranded beach webcam one - as I feel those are the ones that offer more space for development.
I now see Part 1 - SENSORS as a short (5/8 minutes) 16mm loop projection featuring images of those statues' eyes, filmed in black and white 16mm film stock at the Louvre museum and then edited at Filmwerkplaats - which I am now a member of. I will probably make use of so-called optical printing - an analogue technique of re-filming footage frame-by-frame, allowing to alter and affect it with effects such as slow motion, re-framing/cropping, focus/unfocus, over/under exposure. I am also considering to integrate in the edit - as elements fragmenting and layering the images of the eyes' statues - some added material interventions on the film surface that further contribute to the reflection on vision, blindness, physicality of images that my work is concerned with.
Concerning Part 2 - W-O/A-NDER-CAMS, my current plans are considerably different from the ones outlined in the proposal. I have decided to work with footage from another webcam. The premises are still the same - real-time, automated scanning of a beach in south Holland live-streamed online - yet this new webcam has some features that makes it more interesting for my purposes. For example, it performs a full 360 degree turn (and not just 180), scanning not only the seafront but also what is behind - an eerie, deserted industrial landscape. Also, the focus of how i intend to work with such webcam has shifted. As I have started visiting these places where these webcams are located, I realized that what is at stake is related to notions of real-time-ness, of actually being in those places, and wandering through them, and engaging bodily with them, with the experience of them as opposed to the screened experience from the webcam. Notions of and tensions between presence and absence, showing and hiding, being there but not being seen, seeing without being there. Staging acts of looking at, of looking for, of being looked at. I am therefore considering the intention of pairing the footage from the webcam with "stolen" countershots in the forms of a series of photographs that I take while crossing the landscape, trying to move in - or, to be - the blind spots of the webcam. A counter-act of image-making, where the scanning of the place is the one of my own body/eyes/camera crossing the landscape, revolving around the webcam, while hiding from its view. I am considering the possibility - and the implications - of letting myself, my own figure, be caught in between these two cameras.
Finally, I am thinking to bring in the essayistic, text-centered element - consisting of research notes, speculations that I am currently producing on the side - as a standalone element in the final grad installation rather than a text-on-screen - which would distract from the experience of looking - or a voiceover - which is a device that I don't feel belongs to my practice. I envision it as a fragmented moving text on a screen - automatically scrolling both vertically and horizontally - shown on a portable teleprompter, a simple reflecting device that is commonly mounted in front of cameras when shooting talking heads in TV/documentary settings to create eye contact with the viewers. The scrolling motion of the text resonates with the scanning movements of the imagery, and the teleprompter device references the act of image-making, of staging scenes and performing in front of the camera.
PLANS FOR CHAPTER 2:
KEEP ON ANNOTATING THE PROGRESS OF MY WORK. USE WRITING PRACTICE TO RESPOND TO CHALLENGES THAT I AM FACING AND TO MAKE MORE CLEAR MY POSITION AND INTENTIONS.
CONSIDER INCLUDING THE SCRIPTS I AM STARTING TO WRITE FOR POTENTIAL TEXTS INCLUDED IN FINAL WORK. 1) ABOUT MY PERSONAL POSSIBILITY OF VISION LOSS 2) A SCRIPT TO GUIDE MY JOURNEY TO GO AND FIND THE WEBCAM ON THE BEACH
CHAPTER 3: CASE STUDIES (THINKING ABOUT MY WORK THROUGH ANNOTATING OTHERS')
how many? at least 2, maybe 3 or 4, I guess it depends on word count
18-01-2023 - Notes on and from Tacita Dean's Disappearance at Sea (1996)
I came across Disappearance at Sea 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 self-reflexive but also narrative and speculative. All elements that seem to resonate with my practice and that were also remarked during the assessment as something whose place in my work I need to consider. 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. (Part 2 W-O/A-NDERCAMS)
TD's 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 a 16mm projected loop.
Comparing TD's work to the way I want to go about my piece seems to bring together some thematic and structural similarities as well as some differences.
Three observations: 1) I feel both works imply a reflection on human-made technologies to see and, through seeing, to grasp the world, to know it, to hold it. TD's work speaks of such a human strive to see everything and, through seeing, to grasp the world, to control it, yet I feel the lighthouse - as a rather outdated device of seeing - places her reflection on a rather poetic, literary realm, rather than the sociopolitical one that appropriating a webcam's footage can imply. Also in TD's work, the material features of the 16mm film apparatus - light shining through film - are more directly referring and mirroring with the natural sunlight that is present in the film.
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 I am using - the camera movements, the lo-fi digital texture of the image. I feel I need to address it more directly in the way I engage with such footage and the webcam's own presence, as a physical object in a physical place.
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.
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? Is this what I should aim for when going and find the webcam? Maybe.
2) Both TD's work and the one I intend to make strongly call into question the notion and the experience of time, both in similar and different ways. TD's work addresses time as a cycle, as a perpetual repetition, rotation, again on a rather philosophical/phenomenological and poetic level. The perfect rotation of the lighthouse lamp is a strong metaphor for this.
The same happens wih the footage of my webcams, which also stage a cyclic structure of passing time. Yet, as they stream live, 24/7, they also confront the viewer with the continuity in time of the production of this imagery, with the specific nature of this digital gaze which is always on, as well as with the possibility/limits of a mediated, real-time experience of a place. The footage produced by the webcam can be retroactively watched for a limited period of 12 hours, after which it is permanently lost. A matter of disappearance here too, not only of a place into the darkness of the night, but of its volatile images floating on the internet.
3) In both works, the only human body that is at stake seems to be the one of the viewer, whose experience and position seems to be included as an inherent element in the piece through the durational, prolonged watching act that the work requires. No other living bodies are in sight in TD's film. What if - in my work - I appear in the webcam's visual field? That's another body. My own, but also a projection for the viewer. What would that mean, to place myself in that imagery? To let my own figure in it, caught by that gaze? What new relationships with the camera's point of view would be established? What tensions would become visible? What would that presence speak of in terms of contemporary states of image production and visibility?
4) Both pieces confront the viewer with a contemplation of a deserted seascape and its horizon. Despite the different qualities and textures of their images, they appear to me as allegedly universal objects of human gaze, as catalysts for a tension, for a quest for something that is expressed through its staring at.
Works with webcams by thomson and craighead? works on invisibility by steyerl?
xx-xx-2024 - Notes on xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Attempt at annotating another piece of work that relates to the statues' eyes piece I want to make - STILL HAVE TO FIND ONE - open to suggestions - the way i want to work with it - Runa islam busts?
CHAPTER 4: (OUTRO)
It will be a complementary, mirror text to INTRO, an attempt at recapping the work made and reflecting on its achievements and failures, its discoveries and future trajectories. Also, a more detailed description of the form that this project will take in the graduation show - as of April 2024. 1000 words?
contents:
- comparison with intentions in INTRO
- recap of past months - what has worked out, what hasnt
- latest plans for grad show
REFERENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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FILMOGRAPHY
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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