^ Ary Jensen's NPCs in the sky
Curator Tendai Mutambu talks to Sorawit Songsataya and Ary Jansen about their works in Otherwise-image-worlds, a group exhibition presented by CIRCUIT in partnership with Te Uru. Otherwise-image-worlds brings together five newly commissioned artworks from artists working in animation. Working against the commercial demand for spectacle and efficiency, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Juliet Carpenter, Tanu Gago, Ary Jansen and Sorawit Songsataya, all expand and reconfigure the conventions of image-making, asking what modes of interaction, imagination, attention, and refusal animation can cultivate. This conversation was recorded at Te Uru in front of a live audience and has been edited for clarity.
Notes:
Curator and talk host: Tendai Mutambu; guest artists: Sorawit Songsataya and Ary Jansen.
TM: the phrase "otherwise world" is a term derived from the work of African-American scholar, Ashon T. Crawley. It is a nebulous phrase that at its core means the idea of thinking otherwise - what is at play in the world of politics, art, gender, etc. and how can we think otherwise? what allows us to push against these boundaries and what stops us? I wanted to bring together artists for this exhibition that looked at this; lurking underneath is perhaps some identitarian logic that they didn't want to tackle head on - how to we approach something without touching it?
TM: What's your relationship to animation outside of art making?
- SS: used to think of it as separate to art-making or art practice; cartoons, illustrations, another aspect of entertainment; these days my relationship to it is very immediate - I think of animation even when moving through the world (breathing, moving; how I'm moving, how my body functions and how that bleeds into other mediums)
- AJ: my relationship to animation stems from childhood, watching anime and cartoons. I think something that has always captured me about it is the potential to show really big stories in a really simple way, and also the painterly aspects of it - you can do anything you want with animation, represent reality and not-reality, and merge the two together
TM: What are the different forms that you use? i.e. point cloud system
- SS: the work I made for the show is called Mnemosyne, the name of the Greek goddess of memory; the way I approached the work initially was wanting to make work that I had a relationship with - work that wasn't a representation of an idea but rather an attempt to build a direct connection to the material, because I've been working digitally with different software since 2012. Once of my ongoing questions is how do I feel located or situated with this technology, so the technology I use for this work is to do with GPS data; sequences made are based on video footage my mother took on her mobile phone that in turn recorded the coordinates of her location. You can tract via images and footage where you were or where you are in the world, and I saw that as an important tool to help me map where my mother was and how far away she is from me (Thailand). I think the work to me doesn't feel like an artwork to me so much as a process or method of understanding the literal physical distance I have with my mother and also my country. The point clouds, the little cubes in the animation, are polygons assigned to point clouds - representatives of the latitude and longitude of the objects my mother way filming: a small lotus pond in her garden - and I used Blender to navigate these clouds and treat them as a kind of landscape or land. I also experimented with Blender by animating the camera and I became curious about making moving image via a cameraless process, controlling an invisible camera with different depths of fields, etc. I approach animation by trying to understand the equipment, the process, the mechanisms of the software etc. This becomes the act of animating, rather than trying to make a moving image.
- AJ: what I've done is a large AV collage, which has footage from videogames (played myself and captured by other people) and collaged together with "real" footage of GoPro footage of me going around Auckland, along with recorded conversations with friends... I didn't guide the conversations, but the starting point was making my friends watch the latest Matrix movie. The way I see them all connecting together is the more digital our world becomes, the less we experience it in a singular or linear way - we experience the world through many channels; my brain has 30 tabs open at once, and I think this is becoming increasingly common. I also wanted to make my process something I enjoyed doing - talking to friends, exploring and playing videogames is fun to me.
TM: The use of sound in each work - very subtle in Sorawit's work especially. What is your relationship to this soundtrack and to music?
- SS: I purchased a twinkling sound effect of water dripping, different types and collections of this noise; I also make sculpture (carved limestone), so to me the work speaks to the physicality of stone that I have ongoing in my studio on a personal level. I thought of the lotus basin my mother was filming, water, it rains a lot there in Thailand; I tried to look up what the atua for memory was in Te Reo Maori, but couldn't find it, but did find mention of water holding memory in Te Ao Maori, so that sound speaks to that - to memory, to time, to materiality...
- AJ: I've been playing music for a long time, I make music; for this work I made the soundtrack first, then made the video, and edited the music to match the video, swapping between the two. I wanted there to be moments of direction in the soundtrack, coming from left or right speakers, like hearing an NPC shouting out to you while in a game. I downloaded a pack of mp3s from every Grand Theft Auto game and manipulated those sounds, as well as made percussion sound effects myself; my intention was to merge so many times and places and realities together so that it was indistinguishable - you can't tell what is what, you can't tell what is "real" or not, much like The Matrix.
TM: The idea of substances having a memory is interesting - the idea that they have a history feels quite poetic, it captures much more than just a simple history
- SS: tried to think of work as having a concrete kind of capacity, much like stones are concrete. I think of water as a measurement unit of time - how water can carve stones over time drop by drop.
TM: How does the LED sequence in your work (SS) relate to the projection work?
- SS: there are two sequences in this work, one of falling digital blocks - derived from a video taken with my mother on a visit to an ancient city in Northern Thailand. Wanted to play with digital medium that can contain a sense of place and locality; I visited those sites, and couldn't help but think back on those times and histories. I think the context of those sites for me and how it sits in the work talks through a lot of things I've been thinking about around belonging, not just my position in Aotearoa but also in Thailand - it's new every time I got back to my country; and when you're at those ancient sites you feel like you should know something, even if you know nothing about them. In terms of movement of people in those regions, it's something I think about. I thought about how, working with limestone and developing body of sculptures, building and structure act; this work is called Building Block, which plays on both that physicality and the "building blocks of life" in a playful way.
TM: There's a moving through different orders of magnitude or scales in your work (SS), of cutting across the definite taxonomies of how we talk about life and categories; cycling through different forms, also a good way of thinking about the world perhaps - always coming in and out of focus, not always clear...
- SS: when you're talking about things having motions, I think that's the visual key element of animations, but we don't actually talk about often how memory and history shifts and change. One of the purposes behind the work was to approach how ideas and memories move.
Audience member question: both SS's and AJ's works relate to people - to a mother, a friend group, etc; and how animation perhaps, or these intermediate worlds, connect us to people. Have you found this medium to be a tool for connecting?
- SS: in one of the sequences you'll see the footage my mother took on a mobile phone; for me though I see my mother. The function of the GPS records is useful in archeology - people working in cultural heritage in Ukraine before the war began rushed to map heritage sites and collect that information, which is how that data functions for them in the world, not in an art context. I guess that sense of trying to keep something is in the work, for me keeping my mother - this is something I can look at when she's not around any more and I will know she once stood at some point in time this distance from the lotus basin
- AJ: In videogames, we take on the role of the character running through the world, forming your identity based on your experience through them and based on interactions with other characters; I like that element in movies too, how we see the world through a character's eyes and the narrative happening around them. As a youth worker I talk to a lot of people struggling with their identities, asking "I just want to know who I am, I don't know who I am" - who knows who they are? I think we exist in terms of other people, in our relationships with other people, they make us who they are. Though you can't see my friends in my work you can hear their voices and words and feel their emotions as they talk, and those relationships and conversations are things I really value, they are my own form of research. I hope that with my video you can see it through that point of view - as a character running through this world, having these experiences, thoughts and dreams.
Audience member question: What is your relationship to place and location?
- AJ: as a Pakeha artist, relationships and connections to space, I've lived in Tamaki Makaurau my whole life. It's hard to me - all these spaces are so familiar, but at the same time this is not my space, this is not my ancestral home. I think Pakeha are constantly renegotiating our relationship to a land that doesn't belong to us. I think my work has a lot of questions like that in it, not answers, and I'm comfortable sitting in that question space.
- SS: I feel like we need a full day of conference for that question! I work in Otepoti in my studio in Dunedin. I can only make work from where I stand, from my position, and I think the idea around place is getting more and more complicated each day. Through technology, this kind of mapping 3D space and reconstructing a new space is in itself speaking to distance as a subject, which is something I constantly negotiate with in terms of "this is my distance from my home country, from friends, from mana whenua, from Dunedin and my studio...". Everywhere I go I am so aware of that position and how I navigate around it. What I reconstruct through these polygons is my attempt to make land for myself, a space for myself. I see it as a process of understanding where I am, where and how I stand, and who I stand next to.
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