Books……

This is an awesome book that I bought, it helps you when you have those moments of losing your  inspiration….Its such a fantastic book, it shows you that at any given moment, no matter where you are, there are hundreds of things around you that are interesting and worth documenting….For example:

Go for a walk, identify and document existing ‘art’ that you find, such as things that are not created on purpose ie, stains on the pavement, rust, paint, things that are damaged, bird poo or arrange different random objects that you find.

Record and document everything you consume or everything you purchase on one day, for one week.(i like this one, when i have some time will do it)

“Everyone is an artist”- Joseph Beuys

Tim Head…Installation Artist

Installation artist Tim Head had been around since the early 1970’s and when I came across his work i was immediately drawn to his use of projecting images onto gallery space walls and onto all sorts of everyday household objects.  

He said : ” The projected images cast onto the darkened gallery space conjures up the compelling suggestion of a ghostly presence, but are merely the pale residue of an intangible past, forever frozen in time and place ”  Tim Head 1989

Jordan Baseman

His practices focus on belief systems, the motivation of the human spirit and lived experience. The entire foundations of his current works are real and rooted in the unpredictable nature of the interview and observation processes. He has been filming, observing, recording and working with people in order to create edited, semi-narrative, poetic, documentary-like films. 

Current research investigates ideas around contemporary portraiture, narrative structure, the manipulation of recorded information, animation, authenticity and documentary. The resulting work seeks to question: image, identity, trust, desire, power, faith, belief, love, responsibility, hate, work, passion, religion, authority, aspiration, fear, life and death. 

We were lucky enough to have Jordan Baseman come to the SOA to give a lunchtime lecture, and afterwards some of us were lucky enough to have  a talk with him…I find his films very evocative.  His use of humour and way of editing make his films, both witty and upsetting.  

Check out his website….

http://www.jordanbaseman.co.uk/

I find him highly influential and find his visual style highly engaging, intense and sometimes disturbing.

Jenny Savage……

Jennie Savage has a research based practice which draws on documentary techniques. She has a particular interest in exploring the place between public spaces, town planning, constructed landscapes and the human story: the lived lives and personal narratives connected to those sites. Working through a process that uses archiving and intervention she seeks to map the other life of a place or community in order to reveal a complex situation, a micro- structure or simply an unheard voice.

Zoe Irvine…….

We were lucky enough to have Sound artist Zoe Irvine come to The School of Art to give  a lunchtime lecture last year.  In all honesty I wasn’t that into in her work at the tim, but I thought her ideas and concepts were really impressive.

However, after coming into my 3rd year and following a completely different artistic path than textiles (which i still love), having never thought I would be into Multi Media art, i was really impressed with her work when i sat down and had a closer look….

 

Magnetic Migration Music is an ongoing found sound work which collects, listens to and remixes ‘migrating tape’ – fragments of audio cassette tape found traveling through the landscape. The hub of the project is www.magneticmigration.net MMM is a participatory project and has made broadcasts, installations, exhibitions and publications. Most recently it was included in Save the Day at the Kunstbüro in Vienna, Borderphonics in Paris, the East Wing Collection at the Courtauld Institute in London and Interference: Public Sound also in London     Listen to an extract from Pas de Calais, which mixes found tape fragments, recorded interviews and soundscapes collected in the near the Sangatte Red Cross Centre in MMM’s first focus project in 2002.  Magnetic Migration Music – Pas de Calais was was released in 2003 with accompanying 30p colour book.

Irvine is an Associate Lecturer on the Time Based Art Course in the School of Television and Imaging. 

Irvine’s practice includes installations, audio publications, net works, participatory works and broadcasts.

More Janet Cardiff and George Miller…..

 

There are twenty-four antique loudspeakers out of which come songs, sounds, arias, and occasional pop tunes. There are almost two thousand records stacked around the room and eight record players, which turn on and off robotically syncing with the soundtrack. The sound of someone moving and sorting albums is heard. The audience cannot enter the room. To see and hear his world, they have to look through windows, holes in the walls, and cracks in the doorways and watch his shadow move around the room.

 

INFLUENCES……Multi Media Artists

JANET CARDIFF….

I came across her last semester and thought she was just brilliant…it’s a shame you can’t hear the sound as that’s the main part of the piece…..

She’s gained international recognition for her ‘walks’, in which participants are led through a building or an area of a city by an audioguide or while watching the screen of a camcorder. These walks reference key themes in Cardiff’s work such as architecture, the cinematic and the structure of narrative. Shifting between past and present, memory and fact, Cardiff’s stories blur reality with the participant’s own hopes and dreams. These themes are also brought together in this piece, The Muriel Lake Incident, the title referring to a lake in the artist’s native Canada.

Inside a simple plywood box the artist has constructed a period cinema in miniature. On the small screen a complex story unfolds. Stylistically film noir and set in midwestern USA, the film presents the viewer with almost stereotypical motifs and characters, such as a gunshot, a ringing telephone and a cowboy. When the viewer puts on the headphones, apparently to listen to the soundtrack, they are virtually transported into the miniature space, sitting in the cinema with a female companion. Already mid-conversation this woman relates her dreams and anxieties, and it quickly becomes obvious that there are coincidences between the stories on screen and off.

Using literary and cinematic forms Cardiff explores memory, fantasy and contemporary cultural ritual. Playing with scale and using high quality audio technology Cardiff investigates the viewer’s personal relationship to the physical environment, to their own bodies and to each other. In The Muriel Lake Incident the very public experience of being in a cinema becomes a personal one, as the entire effect is created in the mind of the viewer.

At least two stories run simultaneously. There is the “visual film” and its accompanying soundtrack that unfolds before the viewers; layered over this is the “aural action” of a supposed audience. The film is a mix of genres: it is part noir, part thriller, part sci-fi, and part experimental. What is more particular about the installation is the personal binaural “surround sound” that every individual in the audience experiences through the headphones. The sense of isolation each might feel is broken by intrusions seemingly coming from inside the theatre. A cellphone belonging to a member of the audience rings. A close “female friend” whispers intimately in your ear: “Did you check the stove before we left?” Fiction and reality become intermingled as absorption in the film is suspended and other realities flow in.

 

Janet Cardiff Muriel Lake Incident 1999
Courtesy of the Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaundengo per L’arte, Turin. Photograph courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine © Janet Cardiff

 

More  Janet  Cardiff……

She is best known for her numerous audio works and films, often created in collaboration with her partner George Bures Miller.

Thomas Tallis, one of the most influential English composers of sixteenth century, wrote Spem in Alium nunquam habui, a choral work for eight choirs of five voices, to mark the fortieth birthday of Queen Elizabeth I in 1575. This piece of music deals with transcendence and humility, both important issues to a Catholic composer during a time when the Catholic faith was suppressed by the Sovereignty.

Using this piece of secular music as a starting point and working with four male voices (bass, baritone, alto and tenor) and child sopranos, Cardiff has replaced each voice with an audio speaker. The speakers are set at an average head height and spaced in such a way that viewers can listen to different voices and experience different combinations and harmonies as they progress through the work.

A few moments before the music begins the choir’s preparations can be heard along with fragments of conversations and the choir leader’s encouraging comments to the performers. All of this builds up to the sublime moment when the first solitary and plaintive voice is heard.

With Forty-Part Motet Cardiff offers a very personal and intimate engagement with the Tallis music, but one that is experienced in an open and public way:

Even in a live concert the audience is separated from the individual voices. Only the performers are able to hear the person standing next to them singing in a different harmony. I wanted to be able to ‘climb inside’ the music connecting with the separate voices. I am also interested in how the audience may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.

 

 

It’s been too long…!

So here I am back in the thrust of it, having been taking a bit of a back seat of late with my work.  But seeing as It’s all over in 11 weeks!! EEEK!! I thought I’d better put everything else on hold and get on with it  ( apart from my gentle yoga on Tuesday mornings with the WI!!) But that’s another story.   😀

Last semester went really well, (get my results tomorrow!) and I’m focused on what I want to achieve for my final exhibition…Having completed a few ideas last semester in the project room I have now decided that a sound installation is definitely the way I want to go.

I feel focused and determined to pull something off that will hopefully be successful in what I’m trying to convey, although, I need to learn how to edit sound to a high standard and learn lots of technical skills in less than 11 weeks!! I’m sure it can be done…. eeek!!