Jen Southern

I’ve just come across 7scenes, free software for iphones and android phones that allows you to make locative narratives.

http://7scenes.com/

Here’s a nice example of one called ‘Walking Shoes:Directed by DAMMSel‘ made by an artist Leola LeBlanc in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Tullio Crali Nose-Diving on the City, 1939

“Painting, he declares in his “Manifesto of Aeropainting”, is best done from an aeroplane: that way, the contraints of perspective are overcome, sky and landscape superimposed and jolted into motion, their elastic crescendos and diminuendos engendering new progressioxtns of forms and colours. Half-way through that particular manifesto, he more of less leaves off considering what painting from a plane might look like, realising that the very fact of being in a plane itself contitutes a radical, dynamic form of art, an “aerosculpture” formed through a “harmonious and signifying composition of coloured smokes offered to the brushes of dawn and dusk, and long vibrant beams of electric light”.

Ghosts in the Machine
Tom McCarthy
Guardian 24.07.10

review of Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting at Estorick  http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2005/jan/05/1

I spent this afternoon wandering around Grizedale at the AND festival, mostly following Rob Ray’s ‘GET LOST’ disorienteering project.

I wanted to get lost. I had decided to try to commit to doing this piece of work. So I set off without any other map of the forest, just the booklet for ‘GET LOST’. (Actually I hadn’t considered taking another map, if the point was to get lost, then why would I need it?). The booklet asks you to put a compass in the middle of a page and follow the instruction that it points too. It also suggested that a GPS could be used, but the compass pointing to one of three options was much more satisfying, almost like spinning a pointer in a game to see where it lands by chance or by fortune. The GPS option just didn’t point so literally. I followed a couple of instructions which led me back to the same page without even moving so I started to follow the instructions more loosely. After a few e.g. to count the rings on a tree stump and imagine how big a tree my age would be, I  soon found that I had no other options but to find Carron Crag. With no map of the forest, I had to ask other walkers and cyclists where it was, and follow some of the forest walk markers. (Strange that I’ve been coming to Grizedale most years since about 1975 but never really remembered names).

I’d thrown myself into the idea of trying to get lost, but stumbled at the first hurdle of actually almost needing another map to find a specific location…….. how was I supposed to get properly lost if I needed to get to a named location in the work? I’d have to be pretty lazy or unresourceful to not find my way there, and then I wasn’t lost. (or am I just being too pedantic, too efficient, too obedient or too literal?) I had a Garmin GPS with me and an iphone with GPS but neither had maps that went beyond road detail.

What I really enjoyed though was having time ambling around paths and try to get lost, not having a time that I needed to be back, but a booklet making suggestions of things I might do. Usually if I go walking I set out with a route, but this time I set off with the artwork as the plan, so it was good to break with habit and meander. I still stopped short of retracing my steps in order to follow an instruction, the compulsion to always go forwards is strong when walking. I’m probably not the ideal person for the work as many of the tracks I recognised and knew their spatial relationship and rough direction to the visitor centre. I stopped doing the work after about 1.5 hours when I was asked to go to anther location without  a map to find it. I did a few more of the tasks picked randomly from the pages. In the end the artwork didn’t really change much for me, except for getting me out there in the first place, with no other purpose than to walk. It was great that I could do this alone, there was no obligation to make any of my reflections public, no reason to perform. So many ‘locative’ works make me feel self-concious in a way that restricts my movements and participation.

But I was glad I’d been led to Carron Crag, the panoramic views are amazing, especially with some snow on the peaks, the cloud base sitting just below the highest peaks, and the view clear to Morecambe Bay. In the mean time I had looked at the maps on my iphone where it was all green and roads and no names.

(ignore the address on the phone, it was the last place I looked for directions to).

It was interesting orientating to such an empty map – thinking about how it will be to orient to only water in my new work for Cheshire.

Also a nice chance to put old and new forms of mapping together, Trig points are like monuments to a time before satellite images.

Phone and GPS reception are both really good up there, so much so that I ended up having an incongruous feeling phone conversation standing on the Crag. And later was able to phone someone to say I’d just seen a deer on the path. Thinking about co-location, sharing events at a distance, wondering what it would be like if someone else had been connected to comob so that they could almost be with me while I walked.

I went to see the Decode and Quilts exhibitions at the V&A yesterday. I was really disappointed by the Decode exhibition of digital design. The most positive thing about it was that it was showing digital, interactive and networked works in a major museum space, and its three themes of CODE, NETWORK and INTERACTION made the exhibition very accessible. But where was the content? Even the social media works felt devoid of social impact. The works that were chosen made digital design look like digital wallpaper and mirrors most of the time. At times I was reminded of seeing a video camera linked up to a monitor in a TV shop window when I was a kid – we could have played in front of them for hours, with the novelty of seeing ourselves in real time on a screen. There were four pieces in this exhibition that did almost exactly that, but with different technologies and at different speeds. To me, none of them were as interesting as Bruce Nauman’s 1970′s video work ‘Live-Taped video corridor’. It reminded me of the best of our undergraduate degree work for the BA Multimedia Design course at Huddersfield, although of course some of their work was inspired and influenced by some of the older works in this exhibition. A good exhibition for introducing techniques of digital design, but disappointing if expecting a reflection on the current state of digital design.

Then on to the Quilts exhibition, still thinking about code, network and interaction, and immediately Ele Carpenter and Open Source Embroidery came to mind (a great project in which the shared ethos of open source software and embroidery are brought together).  The code of the complex patterns handed down from person to person through patchwork and quilting patterns, each adapted and developed by subsequent stitchers. These networks evolving through design are also reflected in the communal production process and the social use of quilts as objects passed down between generations. And the codes really are complex, the patterns of tiny pieces in traditional patterns that evolve over time. For obvious reasons a favourite of mine was the Mariners Compass quilt design and a sampler made by 10 year old Ann Isabella Reader in 1800, “Silk satin ground with a design showing a map of England and Wales, with the counties outlined and labelled in stitch. Embroidered in silk in running, outline, split, stem satin and long and short stitch.” (from V&A collections). Each county stitched around with at least 4 silk threads, for her eduction in needlework and geography, an interesting link for me to other textile maps.

In the quilts exhibition code, network and interaction also became social actions, political commentary, historical record, tactile experience and adaption through everyday use. What was disappointing about Decode was there in abundance in the quilts, and is there in other digital work, just not the ones exhibited here.

One of the best contemporary works in the Quilts exhibition was Jennifer Vickers work ‘The Presence of Absence’ (as described here) a quilt made of paper with a square of blank newsprint for each person who has died in the second Iraq war.

Janet Cardiff’s ‘The Forty Part Motet’ has come to Leeds. Its a work I’ve never seen, although I’ve been a fan of Cardiff’s work for a long time. A lot has been written about this piece, but for me the revelation of the work was that it’s a visceral experience.

Audio speakers are arranged in an oval, filling a whole room, mounted on stands at head height. Two benches are in the middle of the space, and the room itself has benches built into the walls around the outside. We entered just as clear choral voices began to sing from each speaker. Each speaker is used for the sound recorded by a one microphone, for just one singer in a choral group. Each speaker is one voice. Standing or sitting in the middle you are immersed in the sound of the whole chorus. Instead of coming from one direction, it comes from forty, the parts moving around the space as the arrangement developes. A spatialised chorus. If you walk close to one speaker you can begin to take apart the job or role of each singer, listening to their part in the chorus. A deconstruction of the whole into parts played or sung.  It is at once a view of the role of the individual in making the whole, and a spatialised choral experience.

For my own part, in the continual process of making sense of what I do and what the role of the artist, or the artwork, is this work was a powerful reminder of the artist offering an experience unavailable elsewhere. As the music and voices offer a visceral experience that has the ability to move the audience, beyond the intellectual, social or moral. On a second listening I caught the first part where the singers are chatting before performance. This interruption of the real, the coughs, the discussion of the incidentals of life brings their ethereal voices back to the ground, to time, history, place and situation.

A few days later in London I saw Simon Pope’s work ‘A Common Third’ at Danielle Arnaud gallery.  Again the only physical presence of the work were two speakers on stands, very similar shape and size to those used in the Janet Cardiff work, mounted at head height they have the scale of people in the space. The sound was incredibly clean and good quality. (and as an aside this is something I’ve re-learnt in the past week, that making sound or video that is of such high quality that you don’t notice the means of production is a key factor of these works, although it tends to lend an air of dislocation to the voices too, as if the voice can exist outside of other sound and interference, almost out of history). The two voices are Simon and Pamela Woof, a Wordsworth specialist. They are describing what they remember of a walk from Grasmere up to Easedale Tarn, a walk that co-incidentally I have recently done. They discuss the route, what they saw, what they know about the rock of the mountain, what the ground felt like beneath their feet, how they found their way, how the path held them at times and not at others, the weather and how it has shaped the environment around them, and the nature of a path that is sometimes firm and definite, but at other times is something evolved incidentally from the landscape, the sheep, the rain, at others it is permenant and well trodden like the drovers path they use. Their conversation ebbs and flows as each of them get involved in a stream of remembered walking, much as their pace may have done while walking. The colour of the landscape is always present, grey, brown, red, the visibility and the presence of the mountains, or knowledge of what is over the horizon.

This stillness in the middle of London is striking and out of place. It is rural against the bustle of the urban. In this gallery space, a georgian town house (?), with ornate molding on the ceiling and coving, worn wooden floor, antique furniture in a corner, yellow walls, contrasts the rural with the historical. The drovers path with the worn floorboards, two very different ways of life and sets of repetative footfalls.

My memory also intervenes in the story. I’ve done this walk and I recognise part of the path, although I’m unsure if their route back was my own.

This painting was in the exhibition curated by Mark Wallinger “The Russian Linesman: Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds” at the Hayward gallery.

As the accompanying text describes their technique in drawing from an airplane (note its 1919), the painting tells nothing of the experience of being in the plane, only the distanced, overarching view.  A small plume of smoke is all that speaks of time and living.

label text:

Richard Carline
Jerusalem and the Dead Sea from an Aeroplane, 1919
Oil on canvas
Imperial War Museum

Just after the First World War, Richard Carline and his brother Sydney were jointly commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to make a pictorial ‘panorama’ of the Middle East from the air. Sydney Carline described their method: ‘one has to work very quickly, because of the rapidly changing scene. Our plan, therefore, was to fly to and fro over the selected view until one had sufficient details to complete the picture on landing’. As he pointed out, ‘seen from the air, historic places seem to take on their more permanent aspect, since one’s attention is not disturbed by the modern and incidental details’.

South London Gallery.

The information with the exhibition says that the work “takes as its starting point an extract from an interview conducted by the artist with a west African national seeking asylum in London, the work picks up on one strand from his life story and embeds it in several scenes that repeat in each film”.

The three films are progressively longer, and presented in successive rooms within the gallery. The central story is about how to make a trap to catch a bird, out of two sticks. In the first film a man is making a trap, there is a voice over describing making a trap. The second film is staged as an interview in which a man describes making a trap, but gets muddled about what the trap is for. More sinister overtones about his life story, his reasons for being interviewed, and the reasons for making the trap become apparent. The third is overtly fictional, in which a white man is in a country in which black people have the power. The story of making the trap goes around this circular film, the man over hears the story being told by a girl in class, he then tells the story to someone who might be a social worker, she then tells it to her lover, her lover then tells it to his daughter who then tells it in class. There is also another thread in which people are trying to escape a post apocalyptic city of the past, via the tube lines, but are being hunted down as if they are trying to gain illegal entry into another country.

As the simple story of how to make a trap is repeated and shifts meaning through the three films, this straightforward task becomes myth, memory, practical instruction, confession, show & tell. In the end the original meaning or intention of the story, and preconceptions about the background and history of the stories author have been challenged, shifted and  blurred.

The statement that the origin of this story is an interview with an actual person suggests a social starting point, a perhaps anthropological root to the work. This questions  the role of story telling in the work, who’s story it was to tell,  does the distortion and shifting meaning of the story in the film remove it from the original teller, and in doing so allows it to reveal a wider story, and more of the realities of storytelling and description in various accounts of a life.

What does happen in an interview when someone is asked about their past?

In thinking about art and anthropology there is always the issue of who ends up speaking for whom, how far the interviewer shapes the interview (and there are several interviews and conversations throughout the films), what roles the anthropology and the art play, and their capacities to both enhance and obscure the other practice. In this work ‘Nostalgia’, the process of storytelling weaves these questions together around the very material functions of two sticks being used to make a trap.

http://thaifilmjournal.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-on-apichatpongs-uncle-boonmee-and.html

I’d been discussing Art and Anthropology at a meeting in the morning, thinking about the different ways that the two fields deal with observation and representation of people. It turned out to be a good background to seeing ‘Primitive’ by Apichatpong Weerasethakul at FACT. The work is divided between four spaces, but is all the result of a period of times spent living in Nabua, Thailand, and of working with local young men.  There is in part, a feeling in the work that this is a document of memories about a place, and in part it is, the film footage of houses and interiors appears to be of actual houses in a real village, and that is supported by the narration. But the layered processes that are taking place make clear the flickering between fact and fiction, or the occupation of a space between the two.

Weerasethakul lived in the village whilst making the work. The project was to build a space ship with the sons of local farmers, and some elements of the films document this process. (particularly a film that had the invigilator sitting right next to the screen, in a way that made that the last bit of film I looked at in that space).  Parts of the conversation discuss a time when the village was occupied by soldiers, which appear to be real conversations, but then some of the young men then appear in military uniforms, but its unclear if these are parts they are playing for the film or not. Much of the rest of the films are obviously fictional, ghosts, lightening that is also explosives, the process of setting up those fireworks and part of that illusion. There is a flickering between states, by including not just the fictional films but the process of making them, and of living and engaging with the memories and lives of the place and people who live there. This work and approach to film making weaves fictional film making together with a social process of making, and an almost anthropological mode of living in a place in orer to live with people and engage with their lives and sense of place.

This image by the surrealist Oscar Dominguez looks strangely like a satellite photograph, despite being made in 1937.

Looking at some recent art works, there’s been a theme that seems to relate to  John Urry’s book ‘After the Car’

This work that was recently posted on nettime http://www.zorofeigl.nl/onshore.html suggesting the motion of being on a boat, in the confined space of a container.

Petko Dourmana’s ‘Post Global Warming Survival Kit’ http://www.dourmana.com/ which I saw at ISEA in Belfast, where viewers use infrared binoculars to view a post apocalyptic environment, the nature of which is described in an accompanying text.

Andrea Polli’s Cloud Car, visualising pollution with water vapour.

Anthony Haughey’s Prospect in which the immensity of both the desert and the sea, filmed from within them, are juxtaposed with audio and visual recordings of migrants descriptions of the terror of the journeys that brought them to the UK.

Each of these works that in some ways relate to forced migration, pollution, and post apocalypse, that may relate to a ‘regional warlord’ scenario from ‘After the Car’, in contrast the M.A.R.I.N project, a boat as research vessel, wired, tracked and automated relates more to the idea of a ‘digital nexus’ in which at the expense of the privacy we’re used to, technology systems and surveillance allow us to travel as much as we’ve become accustomed to, although this is not perhaps the original intention of this project.