Thought diary chaos below, images to come (I've been terrible at documenting my work recently)
Studio work updates
Following conversations with my supervisors and lecturers, I've decided to move away from anything that involves directly imaging specific locations or subjects relating to tupuna maunga. I feel there is still so much self-educating that I need to do, even if my intentions are good, before I can confidently or ethically engage with these subjects in my work. So for now, while I will continue to be inspired by the abiotic mountainous entities around me, I am refocusing back towards experiments I began earlier in the year and looking more broadly at the idea of geological time and abiotic ecology.
After the feedback I received in Seminar, with the help of Sonya, I've begun reaching out to people around me who have knowledge of Te Ao Māori for their perspectives on the imaging of whenua. At present this is taking the form of conversations with friends, who I am extremely grateful for and trust to call me out on my own bullshit. I don't want to be yet another Pākehā person coming into Māori spaces and demanding emotional labour, nor do I intend on simply running with whatever perspectives are shared with me in order to facilitate or justify my actions as I think doing so would be another act of colonial violence and all in all a pretty shit move. As I've mentioned on this blog in the past, while I don't intend post-colonialism to be a central topic or focus in my work, as an artist working both in the context of Aotearoa and with the environment it's absolutely crucial for me to develop as much knowledge as possible around how to engage with these subjects ethically and with sensitivity to Te Ao Māori. And frankly, if I'm dealing with the issue of ecological perception and geo-human relationships in a globalised industrial world, in a country with a colonial history, how could I not address such an central topic.
Continuing on from the sound work I began last month, I've decided to expand into broader geological recordings - still thinking about volcanic entities and materials, but exploring beyond the scoria material and their peaks of origin in Central Auckland. This has involved recording concretions (found at the bottom of Auckland Domain), roads, sea walls, and other places where aggregate can be found around the city. I've also started collecting iron from sands around Tāmaki's beaches again in hopes of creating some objects from it in future - either alternative photographic images or sculptures. The material connection between this element and the temporal geological states shared across Mars, Rangitoto, and these beaches (emergence-stasis-dispersal), and even as an element of our own blood and being, still fascinates me. Next month, weather permitting, I'm planning on returning to Rangitoto and doing more field recording and video documentation.
These subjects to me, in one way or another, connect to the idea of ecological slippage and the flexibility of existence - the concretions for example are formed over millennia, starting with a kernel of calcium-rich material from a living being; the beaches speak of eons of time and the gradual changing of the shoreline and cliffs; and the volcanic rock speaks of moments of geological emergence and the creation (or transformation)... As quiet, seemingly constant entities in the landscape, their lasting presence and materiality offers an opportunity to consider the depth of ecological interdependence that exists around us, and their imaging a chance to explore the conceptualisation of nature (I hope).
Ideally, weather and time permitting, I'd like to venture a bit further afield too, but am still mulling over how this could happen and the whats and whys - I'm also not adverse to reaching out to other people in similar fields of enquiry (perhaps the geological department at UoA or other institutions for data).
The purpose of the sound recordings is still unclear to me, but for now, after a fairly intense year so far, it's a way for me to reengage with ecology in a way that makes sense to me - reenchanting myself via technology, and using it as a means to explore less the perceivable or imageable qualities of these spaces. I hope I can either create a stand-alone work from the recordings, or perhaps use them as soundtracks for moving image works.
Point cloud imaging has also returned. I know it has been suggested that using so many tech-heavy methods of creation creates a kind of distance between myself and the subjects, but to me it feels no more distant than taking a direct photograph. Photographs are a form of data; videos a form of drawing with light. In my mind, it makes sense that data itself can stand as a kind of photographic entity, and if used mindfully, science and technology may offer just one possible way to reenchant ourselves with the natural world. As always, it is never my intention to try and replicate nature, but to find ways to engage with it that dip below the surface of everyday perception or encounter and that challenge humancentric views in a meaningful way. How successful I am, we shall see.
My thinking around all this relates back to the idea of interconnected ecology that I explored this and last year. In exploring states of geological and abiotic existence, I hope to explore the idea of duration through the various stages of geological existence that span within and far beyond our own timelines. I hope that by exploring the presence of material emergence, erosion, liminality, and place, to reflect on our existence as humans within a vast network of happenings and concatenations that we exist alongside. I also wish to explore the expansiveness of existence beyond what is classically understood as living or of note in Western ideologies surrounding nature. This relates back to the quote from Ursula K Le Guin that formed the basis of my work in the first Seminar: the idea that existence is a concatenation of things coming together for a time. Le Guin's perspective on rocks in relation to human timescales is also a driving factor, and builds off of my writing on Richard Coyne's Network Nature and Timothy Morton's The Mesh from this year and last.
In terms of images, the politics of looking via the camera is still a central question in my work - I have begun delving back into alternative imaging methods (point clouds, reenvisioned LINZ data, photograms, solargraphs, etc.). I came across a passage in a reading recently which raised the idea of fossils and geological structures being forms of non-human photography, and in turn the idea of photographs being fossils of light and time: fixed moments in history suspended in their respective mediums.
How these ideas manifest in my work, or whether they all have to at once, is still uncertain to me. But I am excited to figure it out...
Literature and Oral Presentation plans:
Brainstorms and rhizomatic maps have become my go-to for planning and thought-sifting (here again, mapping has returned!). Below is a brainstorm for my contextual portfolio text - I've decided to use my essay from last year as a base and to expand on it through the literature reviews I've been doing this year. For the forth and final review, I am leaning towards discussing Zac Langdon-Pole's Pourous World exhibition, as his exploration of NASA imaging and visual artefacts connects several dots in my studies.
For my oral presentation, similarly, I am drawing on some of my contextual work from last year as I feel the base of ecological investigation and curiosity around the role/power of the camera in relation to viewing/conceptualising the natural world is still a central element of my work this year. Feeling a little nervous about the sparse nature of my studio work, but I will push on.
In terms of upskilling, and in relation to Zac Langdon-Pole's work The Dog God Cycle (2022), I recently came across a course on imaging via the Planetary Society, which goes in depth into how images for NASA and other space agencies are created. Still a lot to finish, but so far is proving interesting:
Some notes from recent readings:
The texts below build on the work of Richard Coyne, Timothy Morton, Joyce Campbell and Geoff Park that I have been exploring this year. All connect in some way to either the idea of the Anthropocene, non-human agency, or the politics of imaging.
Heather Alberro, "The Anthropocene Fights Back: non-human agents still have the power to destroy us"
Alberro's blog post reflects on the impact of the Covid-19 virus, and the implications that its effects on human life in a globalised world have in regard to the Anthropocene and nonhuman agency:
Since the industrial revolution, humans have developed the capacity to alter the very chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere and strata. Significant disturbances of landscape, soil morphology and earth sediments resulting from such activities as deep mining and fracking have far exceeded those of any non-human organisms. Our inscription in deep geological time scales is all the stranger in the light of our absence throughout most of the Earth’s 4.5bn-year history, as well as the likely lingering traces of our presence in the form of plastics and the like long after we are gone. This is what makes the Anthropocene epoch so unprecedented, and also paradoxical. On the one hand it is characterised by the ubiquitous presence of homo sapiens, an organism that has been in existence for a mere fraction of a second in geological terms. On the other hand, we are now witnessing a reckoning of sorts on behalf of myriad other co-terrestrials in the form of phenomena such as infectious diseases, locust swarms, increasingly violent storms, wildfires and CO2. These powerful agents, fuelled by repeated human transgressions against natural systems, challenge notions of human supremacy and our supposed monopoly on agency... We are not – nor have we ever been – alone. Our skin and DNA are composed of other organisms; we can breathe thanks to cyanobacteria, plants and other photosynthesizers, whose efforts over millions of years have made the Earth hospitable. We can no longer continue to act as though the Earth is the mere objective foundation of our existence for us to exploit at will... how do navigate our entanglements with others in a more mindful, ethical way?
Joanna Zylinska is an artist, author, curator, and a Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. I came across Zylinska's work when looking for texts around nonhuman timelines (expanding on Richard Coyne's theories in Network Nature). Her book Nonhuman Photography explore the subjects of technology, culture, art and ethics, specifically in the context of the digital and its presence in daily life.
Zylinska argues... that even those images produced by humans, whether artists or amateurs, entail a nonhuman, mechanical element—that is, they involve the execution of technical and cultural algorithms that shape our image-making devices as well as our viewing practices. At the same time, she notes, photography is increasingly mobilized to document the precariousness of the human habitat and tasked with helping us imagine a better tomorrow... Zylinska claims, photography functions as both a form of control and a life-shaping force [and] explores the potential of photography for developing new modes of seeing and imagining, and presents images from her own photographic practice. She also examines the challenges posed by digitization to established notions of art, culture, and the media. In connecting biological extinction and technical obsolescence, and discussing the parallels between photography and fossilization, she proposes to understand photography as a light-induced process of fossilization across media and across time scales.
Re. Lauren Greyson's book Vital Reenchantment and the imaging of space:
Thinking about the concept of "re-enchantment" - the concept that the language of technology and science may, if examined, interrogated and used consciously, be used to bridge the distance between ourselves and non-human existence, offering perspectives into the complexities of existence that go typically unseen or unnoticed from our viewpoint...
"Wanderers is a vision of humanity's expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available. Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea of the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds - and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there."
Artwork for the film was created in collaboration with space art painter Chesley Bonestell, drawing on imagery from Earth's own geography as well as that of space probes and satellites. The narration comes from the voice of astronomer and author Carl Sagan, who reads a segment of his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space - a work inspired by the first images of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe on Valentine's Day, 1990, as it left our solar system.
Above: the pale blue dot of Earth, viewed for the first time by Voyager 1
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