A studio art course taught by Amber Frid-Jimenez on the use of computational methods and techniques to produce critical art projects about society and culture.
My project explores the narrative of the hidden space, and the tone and associations that are established by a space’s aesthetic components. Inside a quiet clearing of stones and a swing (tucked behind bushes on the corner of two well-traveled streets) is hidden an oddity: a large wooden box suspended above the swing and coated in soil. The box appears solid except for a translucent hole in in the top, which allows a diffuse light to illuminate the interior. The inside is viewed by kneeling on a cloth mat and inserting one’s head into the box. Inside the box is a model of the space around the box itself- a tree assembled from twigs and string supports a small wooden swing, in front of an arrangement of stones similar to the one in the real space. The tiny replica is an attempt to add an element of fantasy to the original space, through rescaling into a more extremely intimate enclosure, as well as through quality of light (the single diffuse skylight and a green LED that the viewer is instructed to turn on).
For my experiment I planned to find a way to collect narratives or myths about the site that I had chosen. The experiment was a failure in the sense that I had a hard time getting anyone to participate and those who did gave me stories that were not particularly helpful in visualizing a narrative of the tone that I felt the space conveyed. In a second attempt, I manipulated my original photos of the site in order to both remove background details and to give a sense of the tone that I felt the site delivered on its own:
Despite my efforts, I learned that the responses that I got would not be too helpful. By asking people for this narrative, I was asking them to already do what I want my piece to make them do on their own: view the site as containing some sort of narrative. I realized that I wasn’t going to do that by placing a strong referential narrative in the space, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that by outsourcing the task of consciously developing that narrative to others.
So my task is now to make the viewer appreciate the situation of possible narrative embodied by the space without laying out specific fantasies beforehand. I will accomplish this by placing a small scale model of the space itself in a box on the swing. The differences between the model and the space itself will create a sort of dissonance, especially since the viewer will only be able to view one at a time (he/she will have to put his/her head in the box to view the model). By recreating the model on a smaller scale, I can call attention to it as a site of contemplation and fantasy without attributing a limiting specific narrative to it.
Shrine Builder
Controls:
1. Click and drag white square to move selected stone.
2. Click and drag anywhere else to rotate selected stone.
3. Use the number keys (0-9) to select a stone.
4. Press ‘R’ to toggle rotate mode.
My new piece is an attempt to communicate the most important part of my videos of rearranging stones- the actual process of bulding. A three hour long building and rearranging session compressed into a sixty second video communicates little of the material process and the pacing of the actual construction. Through this interactive applet, the user may hopefully share a some of the experience of my performance.
My concept for assignment #7 is the overlap between two different prior pieces: My videos of rearranging stones, which where attempts to find a physical/material analog to editing film, and assignment #1; a collage that dealt mainly with accumulation. Through a combination of dropping on 3d objects and drawing transparent layers, the viewer will be editing, placing and accumulating, but also burying (as in the narrative of the second stone video);
My piece, Forms in the Dark is a response to the challenge of creating a self portrait with an uncertain concept of identity. The user is confronted by a swinging black web in a dark space that offers renderings in different lights and camera angles when the mouse is dragged over it.
Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) is a contemporary artist whose work is characterized by the foregrounding of process and the investigation of language and symbolic/syntactic structures. As the discussion of his early piece “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths”, a neon sign with the titular text around a spiral, Nauman investigates the language of art and the art of language through free play with meaning, without necessarily taking a firm stance on the seemingly didactic piece. Regarding the sign, Nauman says,”The most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the statement. It was a kind of test – like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it. Once written down, I could see that the statement [...] was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It’s true and not true at the same time.”
In other work, including performance/video and photographs, an actual performance on the part of the artist is the process investigated. This is true in “Self Portrait as a Fountain”, a photograph of Nauman spewing water from out of his mouth. Even in this piece, though, the question of language and play with symbolic structures is still investigated, through his play with an art historical trope.
My new piece, “A Proper Burial” engages in a similar sort of play with the structure of symbolic systems of language as Nauman’s work. As an extension of last week’s piece, “Stones”, I focused on the idea of creating a physical analog to the process of editing film. This desire for materiality exists as a counterpoint to the notion of digital film as a departure from the tactility of actual film stock. As I sat for forty minutes arranging and rearranging the piles of stones with aesthetic and structural considerations, I felt that I was formally engaging with the process of film editing without actually interacting with the apparatus. The narrative that developed, (the burial) exists as an undertone against which my structural play was based once I moved to the actual (digital) editing.
The simplicity of constructing and rearranging out of stone blocks serves as a more tactile and experiential analog to editing the film itself. I view this piece as such an analog, with the snippets of expeience with the stones not directly related to building adding a hint of narrative.
In this piece I attempted to show a slowed-down time through the relative uniformity of shots and sounds- their lengths and subjects (my eyes and fish tanks). As I watch the fish tank, a moment begins to crystallize around my viewing the sucker-fish, at the climax of which the piece ends. The sort of exaggerated low-drama of this moment underscores the slow expanse of time that preceded it.
