Why can’t everything be wireless?
I’m sitting at the desk I have set up in the gallery, the desk with the laptop and projector…and 5 wires surrounding it. Although it is supposed to represent an ordinary working space, the university has gone health and safety obsessed and so everything must be secure and out of sight.
To ease this problem I had thought of readjusting the projector’s space, having it face another wall (so that the wires fit closer together) but it meant changing the way the work would operate…it was more difficult to read the projected image, and it lost the intimacy that it had when it sat in line with the laptop. Luckily I was advised to change it back to the way I had it originally, meaning that you could stand behind the person typing, and while it is projected onto the wall, there is still a distance between the viewer and the person interacting with this blog and contemplating the work around them.
“As Wolfgang Laib sees it, the potential of his art is diminished when it becomes disconnected from everyday life.”
Nathalie Bouleau Chabot
When he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?[i]
A system has become necessary: action interrupts contemplation. The computer plays an important role in defining my practice; the “medium” of the blogosphere has opened up a space where I can focus my practice on daily writings that chronicle the process of the work’s creation. A number of fundamental questions have been raised, which I work towards answering through a series of experiments. This development is directed in equal measures at the action and its temporal uniqueness; each piece of work has the possibility to last forever, transform or be erased completely.
The fragmentary images are echoes of unread words and a translation of them is not necessarily required; they form visual patterns, or codes, which communicate the logic of language, but one that on first inspection refuses to provide an accessible denotation; as meaning, description and narrative appear to have been eliminated. By collapsing and restructuring the text, the viewer’s gaze does not become distracted, but becomes more refined, creating an active rather than passive perception.
Paradoxical qualities dominate: reveal/conceal, substance/light, fragment/whole. Through the immaterial and transparent nature of projection, an internal process is transferred in to an external world; and a transfer of thoughts and experiences can literally be cast on to the viewer. There is a battle between aesthetic values and practical realities of production, which rests somewhere between our bodily experience and our intellectual understanding of the work. How can it be absorbed, and where is it’s relevance outside of the artists thinking?
[i] Plato (1991) ‘The Allegory of the Cave’ found in The Republic Benjamin Jowlett translation: Vintage
Degree show prep is coming along quite smoothly…surprisingly!
The projection works and looks good in the space (my biggest worry!) and I have decided to include the books I made from the installation in the same space as the blog. This means that I have included a piece which could last forever, one that has been transformed and one that will be erased quite soon!
A final statement will be added tomorrow.
Repetition–even in its most mechanical, quotidian, habitual, stereotypical forms–has a place within art…. For the only esthetic problem is how to insert art into everyday life. The more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, submitted to the accelerated reproduction of consumer goods, the more art must become part of life and rescue from it that small difference which operates between levels of repetition…so that, in the end, Difference can express itself…even if it’s only in the form of a contradiction here or there, thereby liberating the forces needed to destroy this world.
Gilles Deleuze, Répétition et différence
