Practice as research

Week 48: 12th – 18th August
As we’re technically in the summer holidays at the moment, I decided to catch up on some professional development and to learn a new skill. I’d always wanted to try out laser cutting, specifically in relation to paper cutting and editioning books, and thought it might be a good way for me to explore producing more intricate book designs. I’d noticed online that Duke Studios in Leeds were running an Introduction to Laser Cutting course for the bargain price of £55 for 3 hours tuition, so I decided to find out a bit more about it to see if it would be suitable to use in my practice.

Laser cutting
We were given a quick tour around the office space, which had been built, rather ingeniously, out of laser cut cardboard. It was a nice touch to see the corrugated material walls slotted together, and it set the tone for the evening to see how far the possibilities of the production technique could go. We were given some basic information relating to the process and laser cutting including links to vector designs licensed through Creative Commons, such as the Noun Project.

Our introduction to laser cutting began with an explanation of how the laser cutter actually creates the images on the material, namely by burning the design with a laser according to an vector image sent from the computer. Although this course didn’t require a prior knowledge of illustrator or another vector based programme, it would be necessary to format images in this way, if I wanted to create my own laser cuts in future. Thankfully, there are loads of tutorials on the internet in creating vector art, which would also come in handy if I ever want to upscale my printed work in future.

Paper cutting
I’m still considering how I might use this process and I think it will best come in handy for cutting a number of more intricate designs. However, trying to decide this also led me to research into the crossovers between paper cutting and ritual, as my work is currently based around what might be loosely termed paper artefacts, or fetishes.

Examples of this form of expression can be found throughout the world, beginning in China in the 1st Century. This page from the Museum of International Folk Art describes how paper cutting spread around the globe: ‘For 500 years the art of paper making and paper-cutting was confined to China with historical writings naming Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese court official, as the inventor of paper in 105 AD. Paper-making and cutting made its way into Japan around 610 and Central Asia by 750. The Moors who occupied Spain from AD 714 – 1492 had trade routes with faraway China. They introduced paper making and paper-cutting to the Iberian Peninsula establishing a paper-making mill in AD 1150. In strict observance of Mosaic prohibitions against graven images Islamic paper-cutting was primarily based on geometric and calligraphic expressions of scripture. In the centuries that followed the flowering of Arab culture in Spain, both paper making and paper-cutting spread to the rest of Europe. In Germany it became known as scherenschnitte, in Poland as wycinanki, and in France as silhouettes.’

However, the spread of paper making also had implications for traditional crafts and materials: ‘When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico there was already a tradition of paper making that was called amatl in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The native peoples of Mexico produced a type of paper by mashing the pulp of the bark of fig and mulberry trees between rocks. Once dry the paper was then cut with knives made from obsidian. The paper cuts made from amatl were primarily of a ceremonial nature and included images of the numerous Aztec gods and goddesses, a practice that was discouraged by their Christian conquerors.’

This therefore links the history of paper with the history of colonisation, creating further implications in my use of this material to create charms and fetishes.

Week 47: 5th – 11th August
Given my interest in all things museal at the moment, I decided to investigate the local museums and archives, to supplement my knowledge in the field. Unfortunately, despite my researcher status, it can still be fairly difficult to access these kinds of objects, and even more so to handle them. Thankfully, here in Leeds, we have an organisation called Artemis, formerly known as the Schools Museum and Art Loan service.

Artemis
Artemis provides a wide range of artefacts and original art for classroom teaching, and their collections consist of around 10,000 objects from areas including natural history, ethnography, geology, sculpture and textiles. This kind of handling collection allows audiences and learners to experience the objects as they would have originally been used, rather than through purely visual means. Developing fully accessible and haptic museum collections allows audiences to engage more fully with historical objects and their narratives, and Artemis even provides a handbook for potential teaching plans and guides to working with the artefacts.

Obviously, my purposes were somewhat different to the designated use for these objects, so I arranged to visit the collections to see if there was anything of interest to my project. Actually, the first time I heard about Artemis was back in 2011, when a group of artists produced a group show for Project Space Leeds using the collections.

Hunter Gatherer
The resulting exhibition Hunter Gatherer was a good indication of the kind of work I wanted to make, and reflected my own previous gallery interpretation practice as part of Visual Dialogues. The collection of works as a gallery exhibition produced in response to artefactual objects also reflected archiving and organisational processes: ‘The title of the show ‘Hunter Gatherer’ refers to a term used by anthropologists to describe the way in which human beings collected food before the advent of agriculture. Here it references the artists and the processes they have employed to sift through the vast Artemis collection. The resulting works include sculpture, installation, film, prints and drawing which form part static exhibition and part on-going project within the space.’

My preference was for the works that functioned as both interpretation and artwork, as in they aimed to make connections between the objects and deduce meaning from them, whilst also producing installations of new work. In particular, Amelia Crouch’s ‘visual manifestation of her thought processes using drawings, diagrams, objects and photographs’ created in response to John Wesley’s 1780 edition of ‘Primitive Physic and Receipt’ used objects from the Artemis collection as visual representations of early medical treatments. This kind of intervention appealed to me both aesthetically and conceptually, as it reinforced the idea of a collection as a kind of knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge can be interpreted.

Visiting the collections
On entering the room I was faced with rows and rows of shelves, piled high with objects and artefacts dating from the 13th Century to the present day. I started to feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material but began methodically working from one side of the room to the other. I quickly decided to focus on my main areas of interest, concentrating my efforts on textual objects from the Medieval and Early Modern periods, which helped me to narrow my search. My first finds in this section were original and replica versions of the Book of Hours, a Christian devotional text popular in the 13th to the 16th centuries.

I’d recently seen an exhibition of Books of Hours at the Stanley Burton Gallery and was interested to find out more about them in future. However my most interesting find turned out to be a collection of horn books, a kind of instructional text from the 1400s. Often used by school children as a way of learning phonics and the alphabet, the page was usually pasted to a wooden paddle and covered with a softened horn in order to protect it and help it to last. With a strong link to the history of learning, knowledge and print, it seemed like the perfect object to work with, so I resolved to create an object in response to it.

I’m trying to focus on visiting exhibitions that are more relevant to my research interests at the moment, so the reference library-cum-conceptual art installation currently on show at &Model Gallery in Leeds seemed the perfect place to start.

&Model was developed by co-directors, Chris Bloor, James Chinneck and Derek Horton to create more opportunities for showing and selling contemporary visual art in the city by local and international talent. Speaking to Simon Zimmerman in The City Talking, they describe their links with RTTA (Regeneration Through The Arts) as a not-for-profit organisation, and how they are interested in developing a commercial art enterprise for Leeds, whilst still maintaining opportunities for artists to explore more conceptual lines of enquiry.

Pretty Brutal Library
The current exhibition definitely falls into the latter camp, as it focuses completely on words, with each interpretive text emblazoned across the wall in big letters above more discreet wall-mounted artist books. The 10 books included in the library are available for audiences to take and read in the gallery, and succeed in creating an immersive experience, both through their surroundings and in the process of reading the books.

The books, which explore the relationship between text and speech, range from phonetic re-presentations of art history classics, through to texts written to induce stuttering. As it explains in the gallery information: ‘Each book confronts the old and new forces that function under the surface of language to objectify speaking and the spoken, be it for better or for worse. Each book has been authored by someone who has taken the double risk of calling that exploration poetic and making it public in print.’

Of the Subcontract
The project, initiated by Nick Thurston, also features his book ‘Of the Subcontract or Principles of Poetic Right’, a collection of poems about computational capitalism, which incorporates two specially commissioned essays by Mackenzie Wark and Darren Wershler. On approaching this work. I purposefully decided to avoid reading any contextual information, which while confusing in parts, allowed me a sense of experiencing the work before intellectualising it.

The poems created a jarring sensation when reading, as each voice differed from the last one, and also from my expectations as a reader, creating a sensation of reflecting my own reading process back at me. Upon further reading, it was explained that the poems were generated through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a web service which “offers access to a virtual community of workers” where tasks can be distributed online to be completed by users for a predetermined fee. Nick writes: “Of the Subcontract reverses out of the database-driven digital world of new labour pools into poetry’s black box: the book. It reduces the poetic imagination to exploited labour and, equally, elevates artificial artificial intelligence to the status of the poetic.”

The politics of labour
Despite my interest in these types of work, it raises certain ethical questions about the use of these methods, akin to other works which deal with models of labour and capitalism. In particular, the works of Santiago Sierra, who often uses marginalised or itinerant labour to highlight capitalist constructs and power exchanges. For example, is the process of implicating workers in the production of artwork which highlights their exploitation any better than the systems themselves?

However, this question also presumes an intention on the part of the artist to rectify the situation, as opposed to reflecting our own complicities in these practices through the products and services that we buy. Nevertheless, as Rani Molla discusses in her article on the Gravity and Grace exhibition by El Anatsui, although these abstractions reflect wider societal concerns, it is important to remember that they are also representative of real individuals and their labour. In relation to my own work, these issues also serve as timely reminders to my questions around appropriation and attribution of cultural artefacts.

NB. Opening times of Pretty Brutal Library have been extended to 14th September

Related links:
http://www.hannahfestival.com/2013/07/13/this-woman-noticed-me-mai-lin-li-future-libraries
http://www.corridor8.co.uk/online/review-nick-thurston-pretty-brutal-library-model-gallery-leeds/
http://www.hnf.de/en/museum/the-mechanization-of-information-technology/early-automatons-miracles-of-technology/wolfgang-von-kempelens-chess-turk.html

Week 45: 22nd – 28th July
Sometimes the most interesting finds are the ones that you stumble upon by accident, and walking into the ‘Emporium of Optical Novelty’, by photographer and film-maker Simon Warner, was one such occasion. This pop-up curiosity shop was created as part of the Corn Exchange Leeds’ Grand Weekend and allowed visitors to examine a variety of Victorian optical toys including stereo cards, kaleidoscopes, zoetropes, flick books and magic lanterns.

An experience that combined the translation of print into performance with audience participation seemed particularly relevant to my research, so I set about perusing the reference books on offer in search of more information about these kinds of objects. Included in the stack of information was an exhibition catalogue from the 2004 exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusion at the Hayward Gallery, which consisted of ‘more than a thousand instruments, images and devices drawn from the remarkable collection of the German experimental film maker Werner Nekes [alongside] major works by internationally renowned contemporary artists showing how optical phenomena continue to fascinate to this day’.

Despite not wanting to get too caught up in ideas about visual perception and opticality, it seemed pertinent to consider how a viewer’s attention can be drawn away from questions of artistic intent, and back towards an investigation of their own experience. These objects seemed as fascinating today as they must have been before the advent of film that they heralded, so I decided to find out more about these different optical devices in order to see how I could develop new versions in relation to my own practice. Here are just a few of them:

Thaumatrope
Credited to the astronomer Sir John Herschel, the Thaumatrope is a small disc with an image on either side. A string is attached to opposite edges of the disc, and when it is wound up and released the images appear to merge

Phenakistascope
Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau created this optical toy, a precursor to the zoetrope, in 1832. The object uses 2 discs, one with images and one with slots, which when viewed in a mirror caused the appearance of motion.

Zoetrope
Invented in 1834 by William Horner, this object was originally referred to as a Daedalum (‘Wheel of the Devil’). It consists of an open drum with sequential images drawn around the inside and slots cut around the top. When the drum is spun, viewers looking through the slots will be able to see a moving image.

Stereoscope
The stereoscopewas originally invented in America by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. He first developed the process using drawings before the use of photography became widespread. A stereoscope produces a 3D image through mounting two images of the same scene next to each other. Each picture is taken from a slightly different viewpoint that corresponds closely to the spacing of the eyes. When observing the pictures through a special viewer, the pair of two-dimensional pictures merge together into a single three-dimensional photograph.

Magic lantern
Magic lanterns are the equivalent of today’s slide projectors and have been in use since the 1600s. However, unlike slide projectors, magic lanterns used fire instead of bulbs to light the slides. Also, slides came in strips which could include complex mechanical features to allow the projectionist to create moving images onscreen.

Chromatrope
The chromatrope is similar to a kaliedoscope in that it creates a colourful moving pattern. However, they worked in slightly different ways, as a chromotrope is a mechanical slide, made up of several disks of coloured glass that turned when rotated by an exterior handle. When lit from behind by a magic lantern, the changing patterns could then be projected onto a wall.

Praxinoscope
The praxinoscope was invented in 1877 by the Frenchman Charles Reynaud, as a development on the zoetrope. Similar to the zoetrope, the praxinoscope is created by inserting a band of images inside a cylinder. However, instead of viewing the images through slots, they are reflected in mirrors set inside the cylinder, which creates the impression of a moving image when rotated. This was developed into a way to project images onto a screen, and from there Reynaud introduced longer rolls of paper, creating the ‘Theatre Optique’.

Further reading:
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal3/acrobat_files/Endt_review.pdf
http://wernernekes.de/00_cms/cms/front_content.php?idart=447
http://studio245.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/linda_bigness_final_lit-review-publication-on-blog.pdf

Week 44: 15th – 21st July
This week I attended some media training sessions organised by VOX coaching in an attempt to overcome my natural shyness of public speaking. The sessions ran over two days and covered presenting to camera, storytelling and effective networking. The company employs trained actors so a lot of the exercises focused on performance techniques, specifically ones which allowed the speaker to shift their focus away from themselves and towards the audience.

Success on camera
The first session considered how we approached the camera, including tips on stance, hand gestures and line of vision. Each person took it in turns to present a short introduction to camera before receiving feedback from the rest of the group. Although I was nervous at first I managed quite well with the task, despite a bit of fidgeting.

The audience reaction was generally favourable, however they did pick up on my descending intonation, a particularly British affliction, where the tone of voice goes down at the end of the sentence. Unfortunately, this can also contribute to the voice trailing off and losing authority. Thankfully, this can be counteracted to an extent by developing vocal strength through using simple breathing techniques.

Personal impact
The second session focused more on networking and the way we communicate. As researchers, we are learning to be experts in our field, that is, to be the voice of authority on our chosen topic. A large element of that role involves maximising the impact of our research, in other words how we share this knowledge and make people care about it. Unfortunately, the content that we are communicating only accounts for 7% of what our audience notices. The rest is divided between visual cues, including body language (55%) and vocal tone (38%).

This means that although the message is important, the way that the information is conveyed is even more so. Furthermore, when delivering research findings or facts, it is easy to slip into list based monologues which leave your audience uninspired. When structuring content therefore, it is useful to decide how you want your audience to feel as a result of your presentation, and select the content or style to suit that particular outcome.

Key points
The oveall aim of the sessions was to develop a performance toolkit which would be useful in 1-on-1 networking, presentation and/or media situations. My favourite tip however was the reminder of a basic, but often neglected, element of communication: the pause. Remembering to pause helps to break up your points to allow breathing space and for the audience to reflect on what you have said. A good exercise is to rehearse presentations out loud and force yourself to stop after each point.

Other ways to improve communication style include:
Variety: In the music of the voice and in the rhythm of gestures communicates passion
Relevance: What does your audience want to know and what do they need to know?
Keep it concrete: Avoid abstractions. Use accessible examples and strong visuals
Make it personal: Reveal a little of yourself
Engagement: Make contact a priority. Establish dialogue, keep it interactive
Tell a story: Stimulates the audience’s imagination and makes it memorable
Unlock your hands: This will allow your gestures to work without self-consciousness

Further Reading:
Franc Chamberlain, Michael Chekhov (Routledge: New York, 2004)
Patsy Rodenburg, The Right to Speak (Routledge: New York, 1992)
Katie Fox, Watching the English (Hodder: London, 2004)
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (London: Penguin, 2005)
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996)
Ed Hooks, Acting for Animators(Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003
Keith Johnstone, Impro (Methuen: London, 1979)