Week 4 - Literature notes: Celine Frampton, "The Impossibility of Unreal Objects", MFA essay, 2021

Last week I read through an essay by recent MFA graduate Celine Frampton, which discussed "the positioning of objects of (un)reality and possibility within a sculptural frame of reference" and investigates concepts of speculation, modes of representation, and conflation, and the coexistence of the digital and analogue. Frampton's practice and her exploration of these ideas resonated with me, particularly her discussions around the liminality of unreal objects (although she explores the idea more from a design standpoint), and the difference of effect between digital and physical iterations when it came to experiencing them. Her work with speculative objects (some rendered in Blender) and her combined installation strategies of sculpture, AR, and digital image are examples of how multiple forms and iterations of an object or idea can sit in the same space as each other to form a network.

Above: Celine Frampton, HydExpRAM: CbDia + EMPV: PPL - AdjustBD, 2021, moving image, still and audio.

Frampton's recent works "explore concepts concerning reinvention, reconstruction, innovation, adhocism, future possibilities and speculation [and] currently utilises custom-made ad hoc objects, 3D modelling and AI technologies to explore these concepts". On her practice, she writes in this essay:

A continual thread through my artistic inquiry is the question of what cements science fictions’, and even more broadly aspects of speculative fiction and fiction itself, commonality with speculative design. Commonalities such as a technological or object-focus, “fiction-focused” thinking: scenarios, events, contexts and characters (users); and purpose: to pose questions and incites critical reflection on pasts, the contemporary present and possible futures... Focusing on the object, science fiction not only provides imaginary prototypes of things yet-to-exist but also creates environments in which these things are discussed, understood, and used. (p7)

Below a some quotes from the text that I thought were particularly relevant...

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On speculation and the unknown:

“Fictionality can be considered a synonym of unreality but is commonly closer tied to untrue rather than possibly real. In the context of this essay, (un)reality with parentheses will be used as it evokes the idea of the blurring, and the possibility of both, of the unreal and real... and incites critical reflection on pasts, the contemporary present and possible futures." (p3)

"Within my practice, operating within methodologies of fine art opens the parameters of speculative design to greater extremes, without ties to the everyday or having to clarify that the objects aren’t “real.” Therefore, I am able to explore a greater scope of possibility, playfulness and flux through my artistic making." (p7)

"Surveying science fictions’ relationship to reality, Donna Haraway notes in the essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1991), that the cyborg “fictionally maps our social and bodily reality, and acts an imaginative resource.” One way the cyborg dissolves the illusionary boundary between science fiction and social reality, artificial and organic, man and machine, is through bio-technologies... These technologies explore “a regrowth of structure and restoration of function” with the constant possibility of regeneration and replication without birth, inline with the ideologies of Haraway’s Cyborg."

"In contrast to my works from 2020 which utilised moving image and the spectacle of a digital space, my approach has shifted to explore the object as form or conduit of an idea. In this way, my use of a low-frame rate moving image, more akin to a double take, localises to the object and places the context of the object within the speculative capacity of the viewer. Utilising moving image, projection and sound, HydExpRAM: CbDia + EMPV: PPL- AdjustBD (2021, henceforth HydExpRAM), explores facades of accessibility: where different modes of representation (and communication) attempt to delineate and foster understandings of a “component form” or part and the object the “component form” is a part of, and its processes. In HydExpRAM the “component form” is an expanding ram, the “object” an electronic adjustable bed, plastic extruder and plastic bed replica, and its “processes” are lifting the bed and plastic extrusion. In gathering these elements, I was interested how an “object,” both real and plastic, and its “component forms” image, construction and action in a process are explained via different media. When lacking basic supplementary information (diagram explanations, explanative titles or definitions of jargon) or combined with other complex representations (audial processes and schematics), I have observed that delineation becomes disorientating - making the explanations appear more esoteric than accessible. Although the work on HydExpRAM remains at an early stage, it is fundamental to my research, as it highlights my interest in multiple modes of representation in one installation, ambiguity and accessibility, and slippages between understanding and mis-understanding, which creates a space for speculation and possibility." (p10)

"[Artist Rachel] Rossin utilises virtual reality environment imagery and the notion of “the computer,” to reshape the human body to a “digital phantom” and transposes it across different media: oil paintings, melted plexiglass sculpture and Augmented Reality (AR) computer vivariums. This transference across media and utilisation of the body as an essence, rather than a definitive form, explores “disembodied consciousness’ within the digital sphere. The virtuality of the digital sphere consequently frees the body from limitations or the accepted conventions of our physical reality, such as anatomical correctness and physics. The body then becomes open to alternative possibilities via malleability, disfigurement and “entropic deterioration.” I’m also interested in this notion of freeing a thing from limitations or accepted conventions of accepted reality as it widens the range of possibilities a thing can be. In my research, this thing, is existing objects assembled into new forms that cannot be pinpointed to a proposed category - (un)real objects." (p11)

"Materialising speculative objects, as physical forms, is a concept I find intrinsically problematic, as physicality significantly reduces speculative condition and rather places it in relation to tangible existence. In exposing the object’s capacity to exist and function, the speculative object is then subjected to re-categorisation and becomes an impossible, dysfunctional, realised or anti-aesthetic object: physical, interactive design or counterfactual artefact; a diegetic prototype; a model or prop; or sculpture.

This idea of the speculative and the virtual is addressed by Carin Kuoni in Speculation, Now (2014), who points out that physical outcomes of the speculative process can be paradoxical: "What emerges from the speculative process is and remains virtual....What emerges [does not] lack reality, but rather it remains in a process of potential realisation. The speculative outcome cannot then be made in the object of the real, but in an image of virtuality, in which any actualisation....corresponds to a virtual multiplicity." An example of a virtual medium I use in my practice is 3D computer modelling and renders. Borrowed from the design, manufacturing and entertainment sector, computer modelling allows an image of a thing to be virtually described. In only being an image of a thing, and not the thing itself, the 3D model ensures form has no functionality and only an illusion of physicality."

"In retaining a sense of virtuality, the 3D printed, resin model balances between not-quite-idea and not-quite-object. This quasi status innately links the model to unreality and its blurring of boundaries as previously examined. Models are then props or approximations, suggestive in their form or ability to exist, but speculative in their functionality, context or idea."

On the combined object and ad-hocism

"Dissectibility, in relation to the unselfconscious, refers to the concept that “any system is made up of a series of interrelated parts all of which have a certain autonomy and independence from each other.” But, also work together to create a whole - one that is sometimes function and at other times isn’t. Sometimes the integration of these systems is so complex the whole cannot be disrupted by its parts, meaning there is a partial autonomy or partial dependence present."

On the co-existence of digital and analogue

"[The text] Now: practical, Later: aspirational, initiated my interest in how distinctions of time and physicality could be conflated, making them less binary, and more manifold. How, in my explorations, the speculative didn’t have to be tied to existence but could be more widely associated with being a non-definitive or non-standardised form. The possibility that existence, form, representation and materiality aren’t permanent characteristics of an object, and instead they can shift and oscillate - sliding up and down on a scale or spectrum. The idea that just as an object is made up of multiple characteristics, formal and aesthetic, it is made up of multiple spectrums - that exist simultaneously. Thinking about the spectrum between the digital and the analogue re-raises questions such as: how could they interact, coexist or feed into one another? And how is this feasible when seeking to retain speculation and possibility?" (p41) "A Cyborg Manifesto (1991.) The text explores the concept the cyborg, as a hybrid form, and it consequences for the future and gender identitity. Rejecting the American goddess feminism, which promotes women’s return to nature, Haraway offers the cybernetic woman. “That of machine and human, a co-created techno-social assemblage with the capability of transcending “the polarizing binaries which have dominated identity, gender, self and the body: self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/ appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/ wrong, truth/illusion, total/ partial, god/man. As previously noted bio-technologies are examples of how science and technology hybridisation with the corporeal, has complicated and dismantled traditional boundaries, and binaries, in favour for a more representative “matrix of complex dominations.”" (p42)