Study week - summary of key blog points so far

Since I've done a lot of writing this term, I thought it might be helpful to have the key points from some of my blog posts listed in one space. Below are notes from the entries relating to my studio practice, as well as a Mindnode map that I'm working on around key themes :)

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Statement thoughts

• I want to examine two core ideas: boundaries between ourselves and the world as we experience it, and the perception of reality.

• I am particularly interested in these ideas in relation to digital technology - how the experience of the offline world is facilitated, affected, or mediated by digital information and devices, as well as the role this tech has as a mediating tool in shaping understanding and experience

• I am curious about the idea of pieces of digital information as artefacts

• I am interested in looking at these ideas both in isolation (exploring existing iterations of these effects) and as a transformative medium (actively using digital tech to facilitate alternative modes of seeing, looking, thinking, experiencing)

• In relation to the latter, concepts of Object-Oriented Ontology, ecology ("The Mesh", rhizome, etc.), liminality, cognition and non-human agency are overlapping ideas I would like to explore

• Concepts of data, mapping, and documentation are ongoing themes that also interest me

• I am interested in creating visual/sensorial experiences using new media, video, installation and drawing in the expanded field throughout these investigations.

Works for critique:

• Orakei Basin Tracking?

• fictional pond?

• LIDAR sculptures?

• Bark landscape (confirmed)

Thoughts on this term and timing:

• This term will be for up-skilling, experimentation, and play

• I want to learn a lot more from the programs I have been using over the break (Unity, virtual reality drawing programs, Blender)

• I want to focus on exploring video works/presentation (in terms of the new media things I'm experimenting with, I think this is the most accessible form for an audience to engage with)

• video as a kind of looking glass? ability to see beyond usual human scope (see Pipilotti Rist)

Thinking about ecology, interconnection, boundaries, and the natural world

• all things are interconnected in such an inextricable way, a sprawling mesh of information and being, and that all things are made up of other things

• the environment of a space is its own unique ecosystem; a whole layered process of cohabitation, amalgamation, flux, and exchange

• Object-Oriented Ontology and Vital Materialism

• thinking about cognition, layers, boundaries, and agency... I keep coming back to a curiosity about organic systems in the world around us

• Want to revisit Jondi Keane’s theories around how humans, the environment, and its non-human agents all engage in collective knowledge-building in the space we share

• The theme of broader interconnection (see Tim Morton and Donna Haraway)

  • Donna Haraway - "practicing new forms of storytelling to strategise alternative futures" and suggests that humans are not the central subject in our lives but part of a deeply interconnected web of existence, symbiotic relationships and ecology. Through storytelling, Haraway states that we can "create attachments with other beings, like in the string figure game of cat’s cradle where two parties must cooperate in order to tell the story through forms in the string".

Thinking about digital technology

• the questioning and exploration of boundaries - physical, psychological, and conceptual - and a desire to visualize that state of flux

• Unsure how I want to be engaging with digital media this year

  • the idea of digital mediation or interfaces as a core theme?

  • to work with digital tools as a medium outcome?

• I don't simply want to document or pick things apart for the sake of collation or recording, I want to figure out how I can do so in a way that offers a meaningful view

• a medium will always lend its history to a work

• At the end of last year, digital tech was both a convenient and effective choice of medium for me as it allowed me to explore themes around body, cognition and space

  • ability to work in installation art at the time,

  • to visualize the concepts very quickly, I was exploring by literally being able to draw and put my thoughts in frame

• the flow of information and data has been a core theme explored in my work

• Post-digital describes a world where emerging digital technologies are no longer simply being explored but are a standard part of daily life

  • In an artistic context, it describes "where technology and society advance beyond digital limitations" to achieve a totally fluid combined, seamless multi-media reality free from perceivable digitality (pixels, noise, etc.)

  • Post-digital is concerned with the changing relationships humans have with digital technologies and art forms.

  • Contrast: Hypermediacy, where work actively reminds viewers of the medium it exists in or that they are experiencing things through

• parallels between the idea of a digital landscape and a personal or organic ecology (assemblage? space?)

• the flux between self and environment that I want to continue to explore

• The rhizomatic nature of digital spaces

Artist model thoughts

• Emily Simek

  • post-humanist theory and the notion of all matter and all beings being interconnected/interrelated

  • exploring what constitutes a lifespan and the conditions that sustain lively ecologies

  • acknowledges the agency of materials and their situated, interdependent relationships.

  • Materials, living beings and technologies are approached as collaborators and companions during processes in art-making."

• Pipilotti Rist: the "melting of knowledge and feelings", the collapse of mind-body-self-environment boundaries, and ecologies of knowledge last year

  • Sleeping Pollen - use of multiple audiovisual components in creating a reimagined idea of nature

  • Rist's goal: "to take this cold, technical media and make it warm, to reject the divide between organic and mechanical" (“Works in the Exhibition Pipilotti List: Your Eye Is My ...”)

  • Camera as extension beyond our usual viewpoint of the world

• Deborah Nora

  • “Documentation of physical object and places occurs when we want to encapsulate a sort of knowledge to extend the memory of it.”

  • digital landscapes, assemblages of information

  • the idea of capturing an impression or an idea of a thing, that then itself becomes a digital artefact

• Lauren Moffatt

  • new media as mode of ecological exploration and method of storytelling

  • how digital technology stores, shapes and forms the world we occupy; asking questions how we construct the realities we inhabit through different media

Most recent work of mine: Bark LIDAR

• continuing with the idea of mapping, translation, the slippage between reality, object & translation, perception and actuality...

• captured the surface of the wood and has created a digital idea of what the underside of it may be beyond it

• inside-outside/digitally imagined object, a little surreal

• both incredibly accurate and a little too real, while the shape is both authentic in its capture and completely wrong

• parallel between the idea of a machine "image-ining" an object's properties and us as human beings maintaining a curiosity about the natural world (including the unseen parts of it that escape visibility or comprehension)

• The wood feels like a landscape which for the spider that lives there may be the case (Is it worth thinking about things like that or is that bordering on green romanticism?).

• There are moments where the bark feels like it is warping or moving of its own accord

• I think when we capture something digitally like this, we capture the idea of it as seen through the device, and the language of that technological view creates a sort of mythological object

• in doing this repeatedly, we build a broader conceptual idea/sign(?) of the thing, which may not be as authentic as the original that was being captured but that holds its own power nonetheless

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MindNode

Yesterday Elvis and I had a call about our practices and took turns writing up notes for each other (sometimes its a little easier to conceptualise my practice and what I've been up to when I'm describing it to someone else!).