These were my goals for the DIY residency:
- Time – a protected uninterrupted block of time to keep my head down and make work
- More space – Physically, bigger space – I hope to work at a different scale, or with materials I can’t use in the home perhaps? At home I have a tiny desk, and have to clear away after use …
- A place where I can leave the work out, and not have to tidy away all the time
- A change of scenery – taking myself out of my usual setting – inspirational. Putting some distance between me and my usual daily routine to make space for more creative habits.
More …
- My art career so far has centred around experimental storytelling – usually social comment & political/ news
- I make multi layered stories – experimental stories – location based – psychogeography – interactive – digital – random/ chance – generative – diaristic
- I want to continue this, but less digital, more off line, back to basics
- Would like to explore character development – short stories (comics?)
- through drawings, zines, grids
- Be inspired by the new location – things around me
- Explore the territory – Chania – the coast, climate, locale, people, culture, history, politics
- Wild crete – learn & explore
- Mix this with my own thoughts, story writing, politics and news, comment
- Aim to take my work to a new level
- Read a lot, get lots of inspirations
USING CHATGPT TO IMPLEMENT SOL LEWITT’S WALL DRAWINGS
https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/chatgpt-sol-lewitt-wall-drawings
https://massmoca.org/sol-lewitt/
https://massmoca.org/event/walldrawing414/
Drawing Series IV (A) with India ink washes. (24 Drawings.)
March 1984
India ink wash
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut
In the early 1980s Sol LeWitt began to use India ink and colored ink washes. The ink is applied with soft rags and dabbed onto the walls. The technique gives the works a fresco-like quality. LeWitt frequently applied the same systems he had used when working with pencil to the new medium. Wall Drawing 414 and the drawing located on the opposite wall, Wall Drawing 413, are both iterations of LeWitt’s Drawing Series IV. Between 1969 and 1970 LeWitt created four drawing series on paper. In each series he applied a different system of change to each of twenty-four possible combinations of a square divided into four equal parts, each containing one of the four basic types of lines LeWitt used. The result is four possible permutations for each of the twenty-four original units, which are presented in a grid of twenty-four sets of four squares, each divided into four equal parts. In Drawing Series IV, LeWitt used the Cross Reverse method of change, in which the parts of each of the original units are crossed and reversed.
While Wall Drawing 413 illustrates the drawing series in color, Wall Drawing 414 illustrates the series in gray ink washes. The former wall drawing mimics a colored pencil iteration of the drawing series where the lines are simple, or unlayered. Wall Drawing 414, on the other hand, is based on a version of the drawing series where the artist superimposed the four types of lines on top of each other. Translated into ink, this process of layering lines becomes a process of layering many coats of ink wash. These layers produce four distinct gradations in gray tone.
Article on Constraints for artists
https://rhizomecollaborative.com/the-beautiful-side-of-constraints/
Brian Eno’s integrating randomness into the work:
Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by musician/artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975. Physically, it takes the form of a deck of 7-by-9-centimetre (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black box.[1][2][3] Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
Osborn’s checklist
https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/dmg/tools-and-techniques/osborns-checklist/
How to Harness the Power of Constraints
If you’re looking to tap into the creativity of constraint, here are a few strategies to consider:
- Set Clear Boundaries: Define the scope of your project, whether it’s a deadline, a budget, or a specific set of tools. Clear boundaries provide a framework within which you can innovate.
- Embrace Challenges: Rather than viewing constraints as obstacles, see them as opportunities to think differently. Ask yourself, “What can I create within these limitations?”
- Think Small: Start with a micro-challenge, such as writing a story in six words or creating a meal with just three ingredients. Small constraints can lead to big ideas.
- Collaborate Within Limits: Working with others under shared constraints can lead to surprising synergies. Group brainstorming sessions with specific rules can yield more focused and creative results than open-ended discussions.
- Reframe the Problem: Constraints often force us to redefine the problem we’re trying to solve. Instead of asking, “How can I make this better?” ask, “How can I make this work within my limitations?”
https://www.thoughtlab.com/blog/
Claire Bishop’s book ‘Disordered Attention: How to Rethink Contemporary Spectatorship’ talks about how shifting forms of audience attention have shaped contemporary art.
The opening chapter on ‘research-based art’ considers how the trend for information-overloaded archival and document-driven work, welcome during the 1990s for its potential to enable counter-histories and the use of fiction has been overtaken by the internet’s calamitous blurring of fact and fiction, leading to a more brittle, activist form of research-fetishising art – such as in that of Forensic Architecture – and a more anxious need to reclaim a verifiable truth from the glut of information (or disinformation).
She talks about how Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme.
She describes how the Internet has changed art and its reception. Viewers no longer watch in reverent silence or follow a linear narrative.
Their attention is ‘ radically dispersed between elements across a ‘free-flowing structure’ that blurs into the world beyond ‘. Bishop “identifies trends in contemporary practice – research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture – and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.”
In terms of my ‘grids’ – I often see them as mind dumps or screen shots of my mind at a particular moment. I’m well aware of the lack of linear narrative present, particularly as the works have a comic feel about them, with their panel to panel format a sequential narrative is expected. For sure my attention and thoughts are radically dispersed, and perhaps I dont need a linear narrative, I’m not looking to provide one. Perhaps I’m being influenced by social media feeds, which present stand alone items without a grand narrative or obvious theme? Maybe my work is heavily influenced by the internet and networked media, and how I expect people to view (or consume) work? In the past I have thought of this work partly as a flattened Twitter …
