In his book ‘Ghost and Ghoul’ (1962) Thomas Charles Lethbridge writes of a theory that stone architecture and natural materials like quartz have the ability to serve as recording devices, capturing historical traumas that can later be teased out by contemporary bodies, who act as organic detectors, decoders and amplifiers. This was popularised by the 1972 BBC Television series ‘The Stone Tape’. Further information of the Stone Tape Theory can be found below:
Following the movie’s popularity, the idea and the term “stone tape” were retrospectively and inaccurately attributed to the British archaeologist turned parapsychologistT. C. Lethbridge, who believed that ghosts were not spirits of the deceased, but were simply non-interactive recordings similar to a movie. (Wikipedia: Stone Tape)
There’s a piece of music called Rocket by Alex Giannoscoli that was released around a year ago now. At the beginning of the song one can hear the sounds of restless dogs, collars jangling and claws skitting and tapping the floor feverishly. Paired with the music, it creates this weird sense of nostalgia for an existence that I haven’t quite lived, conjuring imagery of the fields that I’ve experienced but in a context seemingly more meaningful in a way that I can’t describe. It makes me remember things differently which is a strange feeling. This is what I think I’d like to be able to do with my paintings. When I was younger I used to be really into open world gaming like Skyrim, but was really bad at combat control and so instead often opted to spend hours walking or swimming around the virtual worlds mapped out to explore. It was always so exciting to stumble across a randomly generated event or encounter in the middle of a deserted valley or cave, a series of code not waiting to be triggered by your proximity as a “conscious” character but one that would’ve run whether you were there or not.
The other feeling generated by those games that I never quite managed to experience when out by myself in reality was that of being totally alone in these landscapes, being able to enjoy them without risk of surveillance. I grew up in a small rural village where everyone knows everyone and I worried that if someone had seen me out walking by myself it would look weird and awkward, something that as a younger teenager I was overly self conscious about. Again, this feeling that maybe what you see could only be experienced by chance, the end of it being caught whilst wondering alone, is something I want to achieve within my work.
Recently I’ve been reading more than looking at art works themselves, something that I’m aware of and will try to balance more successfully next term.
TRACEY ROSE – TKO
This piece comprises of a six-minute recording of the naked artist striking a punching bag with a camera attached to it with increasing force, slowing the footage down in certain parts before speeding it up again when impact occured. The physicality of the work was modulated by its subsequent projection onto a transparent scrim, which rippled and crumpled as if being physically affected by what was being projected onto it: a punching bag for the image.
(1)
According to ArtThrob.co.nz, “Recently, Rose’s work has become more abstract. The piece Rose refers to as “my masterpiece” is TKO (2000), which had its roots when Rose took up boxing and trained at a downtown Johannesburg gym for an extended period “because I wanted to beat up a curator who I thought put up an extremely crap show – I decided not to participate” Invited in 2000 to take up a residency at the prestigious ArtPace Institute in San Antonio, Texas, Rose proposed the piece which became TKO, in which the artist, unclothed, boxes a punching bag in an ever increasing crescendo of blows and cries, under the surveillance of four spy cameras, including one in the punching bag itself . “Monet’s waterlilies struck me – that commitment to the surface – my understanding of boxing was that it was an art, a passion, like dancing, and the intention was that each punch would be a mark, a gesture, building up to something”. The images are pale and shifting, the sounds urgent and guttural, and the artist/protagonist is both victim and aggressor, implicating the viewer in this complex visceral exchange.” (1)
RICHARD PRINCE – COWBOYS
I am not a fan of Richard Prince at all. He’s extremely problematic and I don’t believe that any his recent work does much to redeem himself as a white male artist with a considerable amount of power. However, I did find his 1989 piece Cowboys fairly interesting, in the sense of a male dominating a landscape in the name of advertising. (2)
It reminded me of the tourism leaflets with the figure gazing across the Grand Canyon/New York City/A Norwegian Glacier etc. that were talked about in Nick Kaye’s book on Site Specificity and Performance, which of course hark back to those romantic paintings of male figures standing over a sprawling landscape, displaying Caspar david Friedrich’s idea of the landscape being something to be both coveted and feared. I recently photoshopped the protagonist out of Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (as a pastiche of Paul Pfieffer), but I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with it.
PAUL PFEIFFER
The Pfeiffer work that I was recommended was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series, where the artist selected imagery from the NBA’s archive and ‘camouflaged’ critical contextual details of the scene, such as the basketball, players’ vest graphics, and even background players, leaving behind these eerie images of solitary figures lunging at nothing, followed by the wide eyes of a baying crowd.
These works were a follow up to an earlier series of work by the artist entitled 24 Landscapes, which at first do seem like ordinary seascapes, until you start to notice a sourceless shadow, or a set of tracks leading to the centre of the image before halting. These used to be images of Marilyn Monroe, but Pfeiffer edited her out of them, shifting the focus completely without giving the audience a choice. This process of digitally ‘camouflaging’ is very interesting, and something I’d like to explore myself.
SHOWS (Painting)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye/Cecily Brown @ ‘All Too Human’, Tate Britain
Michael Armitage @ SLG
Kaye Donachie @ Maureen Paley
(1) https://artthrob.co.za/01mar/artbio.html
(2) https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/cowboys
All other photos my own
I’m new to the idea of Affect, and it seems to be a tricky subject to breach. However, I think it could be useful when looking at the fictionalised physics of cartoon imagery and some of the other things I’m trying to understand within my work.
Below are a few branches of the theory, as summarised by Sean Owczarek. (This is for initial personal reference only: I will look into these further before accepting these brief explanations as accurate.)
” Brian Massumi: Affect is a visceral, raw pre-feeling. Feelings are socially constructed distortions of affect. Affect is the manifestation of the body’s internalisation of an intensity. It cannot be rendered by language or any other kind of transmittable information. Affect is perpetually undulating and reforming. It is more bodily than cognitive. The body is integral to the understanding of affect. (***This is something else I’m looking into, with essays such as those in Carnal Thoughts exploring this***) Massumi describes the “walls” of the body as sensory receptors which allow for the intensity of an experience to be transmitted and internalised. The transmission of affect is not the exchange of affect from thing to body or body to body, it is the infolding and unfolding of intensities between the two bodies, which can be virtual or flesh. These intensities resonate apart from intended meaning of context.
Theresa Brennan: Teresa Brennan defines affect partially as, “any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation towards an object.” This idea identifies affect as a judgement rather than an emotion or an expression of an emotion. The parts of affect that can evaluate and judge will distinguish the physiological responses it evokes from those associated with influxes of passion or emotion. Brennan surmises that this is the important distinction between affect and emotion, as what one feels with and what one feels are two separate phenomena. She affirms that emotions correlate to pre-existing affective connections. However, she maintains that affects are physiological things. Emotions are forceful projections which are deposited or “dumped” after they are expressed, whereas affects can move more freely. Affects have the ability to intensify or weaken. Brennan defines the transmission of affect as the idea that our energies are not exclusively ours and that there is no distinction between the individual and their surroundings. Affects are continuously flowing in and out of both.
Patricia Clough (commenting on Massumi): Clough begins with Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as bodily responses which are removed from consciousness and arise instead from “visceral perception.” Massumi’s affect is about identifying the body as a hub of indeterminate responses. Affect is in a virtual space containing infinite potential. Massumi preserves the unconscious quality of affect by affirming that there is always a virtual “remainder” after emotion, language, and conscious perception. Consciousness is mundane in comparison as it reduces the complexity of affect. Massumi points to the emergence and potential of affect as it moves through a loop between virtual and actual. Clough specifies that Massumi’s idea of the body’s indeterminacy is not looking to the “pre-social” body. Massumi clarifies that affect is “open-endedly social.” In other words, that affect comes before the formation of distinctions between individuals. Affect exists in the temporality of emergence. This virtual temporality is the force that gives affect its autonomy from language, sensation, and emotion.
Sarah Ahmed: In contrast with Massumi, Ahmed doesn’t believe affect to be autonomous. Affect is a corresponding element of a preexisting object. She observes affect through how it relates to the experiential, and how our surrounding worlds effect us. Ahmed states, “Happiness remains about the contingency of what happens, but this ‘what’ becomes something good.” Happiness connects us to the objects we find pleasing, and we form profound bonds with these things. This pleasurable affect sustains itself through the comings and goings of the objects themselves. The ways in which our bodies relate to the things we find enjoyable also changes over time, as our impressions change as our bodies change. Affect arises through the evaluation of thing.
Megan Watkins: Affect has the ability to rouse people in one moment, and then move quickly away from the minds of the affected. Watkins questions whether or not there are residual effects of affect. She notes Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the force of the object catalyzing affect), and affectio (the impact of affectus). Affect has the ability to leave residual pieces behind which can then influence an individuals’ subjectivities and perceptions. This differs from Massumi, who believes affect to be a fleeting escape from confinement. The accumulation of information is seemingly reserved for phenomena such as memories, which then cause emotion. However, Watkins understands affect as having the capacity to collect over time as a bodily memory that can both effect cognition and move outside the parameters of one’s consciousness.
Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg: Seigworth and Gregg begin An Inventory of Shimmers by identifying affect’s “in-betweenness” (in this case, the in-between-ness to act and be acted upon). Their theory describes affect as both a movement within a state of relation between different things or people, and the exchange of intensities (as well as the duration of the movements between these intensities). Seigworth and Gregg view affects as forces that: exist on a guttural, Ur level; are removed from cognitive “knowingness”; and move beyond emotion. Affect spurs people to move, think, extend, and intensify. Seigworth and Gregg also note the problem with interchanging the word “force” with “affect,” considering affect is not necessarily forceful in every case. Affect is more of an event which occurs during exchanges and movements between intensities. Affect is created within an in-between space. This space exists between two or more intensities. Affect is the state that exists between the utterance of a word and the meaning of the word. It rises from in-between-ness and lives in a state of beside-ness. ”
I’ve started reading ‘Ordinary Affects’ by Kathleen Stewart, and there’s a section within the first chapter that seems to allude to Seigworth, Gregg, Ahmed and Massumi’s lines of thinking. This idea of Affect as something accumulating and moving between bodies, objects and places, never quite reachable through language or emotion, and, as described “at once abstract and concrete”. It’s this kind of constant shifting that I was to explore in relation to the imagery and ideas I’m looking at, as stated above.
Books and Essays still to read:
Jill Bennett – Practical Aesthetics
RARA Series
Kathleen Stewart – Ordinary Affect
Simon O’Sullivan – The Aesthetics of Affect
Through the consumption of many American coming of age films; American punk tour documentaries like 1991: The Year Punk Broke (Sonic Youth) and I Hate The Way You Love (The Kills); books like Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre and an endless stream of VHS midwestern emo garage show recordings on YouTube, suburban and rural America (if a little romanticised) always intrigued me greatly throughout my teen years. There were so many parallels to growing up in rural England yet it seemed intangibly alien, and on a very trivial level, so much more exciting. It goes without saying that America is dealing with a lot of really terrible issues at the moment, and again, it goes without saying that it often doesn’t deal with them very well. These impacts often with documentaries like Tracey Droz-Tragos-directed Rich Hill revealing this. I’m not sure what it is that’s so incomprehensible and exciting to me about the idea of growing up there – maybe it’s because as a destination it’s so much more expensive than Europe and so always seemed inaccessible, I don’t know.
Equally, the landscapes seem familiar yet more expansive, again more exciting, as if you could disappear into them and actually find something interesting. I grew up surrounded by fields but never really felt this, and of course don’t now that I live in London. There seem to be more in-between spaces to explore in America, which makes sense considering there are some towns and areas that can’t be traversed without a lengthy car drive. A few pieces come to mind when thinking of these American in-betweens, such as Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic. The artist took the bus from New York City to his birthplace of Passaic, new Jersey, taking with him “a note book, a camera, The New York Times and a science fiction novel by Brian W. Aldiss entitled Earthworks.” (1) What resulted was the aforementioned essay along with a selection of photos displaying the ‘holes’ that Smithson saw in Passaic, a place on the brink of death and birth simultaneously.
I also recently watched a documentary directed by Monteith McCollum about his grandfather and farmer in the Depression era, Milford Beeghly, who grew obsessed with developing a hybrid species of black and white corn, and how this impacted his family and, eventually, the whole midwestern farming system. Although a strange topic for a film, it was a beautiful study of pragmatic spiritual values and emotional inhibitions, as well as showing light, form and space in a surprisingly interesting way. The film featured many strange stop-start animations, for example. Dirt would begin to creep into frame and cover family photographs, and ears of corn would start dancing across work surfaces, jerkily revolving on their axises.
The film is beautifully shot, with many of the lingering landscapes and Bresson-esque close-ups of hands making a particular impression (see below):
Although not directly (or maybe not at all) related to my work, these strange American ‘slice of life’ movies always attract me, and makes me to make more films.
A couple of months after having initially heard about it, I recently downloaded open-source 3D rendering programme ‘Blender’, and have since been trying to teach myself how to use it to make simple figurative animations as well as create fake landscapes, with the ultimate intention to combine the two and ‘paint’ fake happenings in made up landscapes.
I’m wary of delving too far into the internet/vaporwave ‘aesthetic’ that seems to have already reached cliché territory within contemporary art and mainstream youth culture, but using the programme has been interesting in regards to how I’m trying to think of information and object. What I am looking at when working on the platform is always just a group of RGB pixels; a single, flat layer of information that allows me to experience the illusion of form by constantly shifting when I use my mouse to command an orientation around the ‘object’ I’m working on. This makes the image feel like a sculpture but unlike seeing a sculpture from a single point of view in real life, there is nothing behind it at that point, which significantly broadens the potential of what the object could become visually when rotated, a simulation of walking around it with your body. It brings to mind the Minimalists’ (specifically, Rudolf Arnheim and George Kubler) idea of The Good Gestalt, the relationship between body and world and how one should be able to correctly predict what a sculptural object will look like from the other side, an answer to creating form from chaos. For example, when viewing a cube from one central vertex and only being able to see three faces, we can predict that the cube is actually made of 6 faces, the other three of which would be visible if we stepped around it to view the other side. You sense more than you can see: there’s nothing to discover. TIn turn, a sensation of meaning is produced: The Good Gestalt. This was later fought against by Anton Ehreschweig, who was then followed by Robert Smithson and Robert Morris, and so on.
Whilst thinking about this, I rendered a few variations of the same scene, whereby two wrestlers, frozen mid-pose, are covered by a falling sheet that encloses them before falling to a resting position.
The process of digital rendering offers an exciting opportunity to debunk this Gestalt idea further, as rendered ‘objects’ do not have to comply with any kind of time or force based physics, which gives much potential to create something that can trick peoples’ initial assumptions of what’s on the other side.
This is the one of the few instances where my distrust for what I can’t see actually rings true. Once the sheet covers the figures, they are lost until I tell them to reappear by deleting the sheet. The way we see digital space is the same as how we interpret physical space but the two are not the same, and this is amplified when rendered as a single image. Even the way social media apps are designed feeds into this imaginary 3D space that we envision when experiencing them. Menus seem to be set adjacent to each other, and you can translate yourself from one to the other with a swiping motion, implying that there’s an invisible space to the right or left of the visible screen in your hand, waiting to be revealed. This of course is not true, but it’s easy to envision otherwise.
The writings of Merleau-Ponty on our bodily, grasp-based understanding of natural and physical objects, and the consequent questioning of this in relation to technology in Paul Virilio’s Vision Machine come to mind here, and these are definitely writings that I want to explore further in relation to my own digital practices.
When you commit to a final render in Blender, anything outside of the confines of the camera box, which is moveable and represented by a pyramid with an X interrupting the base, becomes unrecoverable data, existing only as the memory of the original creator. The pixels are not simply ‘frozen’ in the past, as the areas outside the periphery of a real camera lens are, but are lost completely. The contents of the lens is suddenly alone in the middle of a void. This is not the same as taking a photo of a place before leaving it, as that place still exists whether you’re there or not, just not as it was in the photograph. The artist Ed Ruscha featured in Joachim Koester’s book ‘Of Spirits and Empty Spaces'(in unknowing collaboration with Koester) did undertake a series looking at this in 1970, where he documented a number of empty lots under the titel Real Estate Opportunities. Koester then photographed some of those exact locations – spaced that by that point had sold, built up and been transformed. When looking at digital landscapes, this progression does not naturally happen, but what would it look like if it was programmed to age?
This led me to look at constructing made up landscapes that aren’t based in any kind of timeframe or reminiscent of any particular location. They exist only as the result of a number of mathmatical formulas, just as landscape paintings exist only as ‘mud on a surface’ (to quote Andrew Stahl’s apparent favourite phrase ever). These landscapes are made for the camera, with the grasses and weeds sprouting from the surface ceasing as soon as the camera lens’ periphery is reached, as displayed below.
Following on from my paintings last term, I made a couple of sketches using pretty awful free Photoshop-alternative platforms such as GIMP and a website called photo-warp.com in order to plan for future paintings whilst at home without any materials.
Initially inspired by a screenshot from an episode of the 1995 Japanese mecha anime series directed by Mavashi Ikea, ‘Mobile Suit Gundam Wing’ that I found on @thecableguy’s Instagram story, which depicts the surreal scene of two colossal robots relaxing on a mountain-side meadow. It reminded me of the painting I had completed for the show last term, a depiction of violence (or perhaps a temporary lapse in it) within a rural setting. It’s a strange image but one that I find quite beautiful. Although so obviously man-made, the figures become integrated into the landscape quite seamlessly, like rock formations or a strange kind of foliage.
It also reminded me slightly (of course on a very trivial level, as the image is completely fictitious and designed for entertainment and not documentation) of Aernout Mik’s two channel documentary film entitled ‘Raw Footage’ (1) The moments of quietness within turmoil are haunting enough as it is, but when set in the expanse of the countryside they seem even more precious.
I tried creating my own version of these fantastical and quite ridiculous scenes, using photos from my own camera roll and images taken from some bootleg anime VCDs that I bought from Pimlico market (one of which happens to be a few episodes from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing). I wanted to make these images obviously constructed (if you can get any more obvious than collaging cartoons onto a photograph) and so ‘looped’ the figures round the imaginary ‘back’ of the image. Where one of the images leaves the boundary of the scene, is is teleported to the other side. I don’t want these to look like some kind of DeviantArt fan art (see below) but I’m not sure if that’s entirely avoidable without some serious manipulation of the imagery. I’m also wondering whether painting the images will give them a different dimension, but have yet to discover the answer to that.
(2) This is what I want to avoid.
I also tried to make landscapes out of the pre-existing figurative imagery of anime fight scenes, creating expanses out of bodily form. This started out as a mere attempt to stretch out the figures I was using in the image above but quickly turned into a complete destruction of the image. I am aware that this has already been done before and find it quite cliché. It’s the kind of thing I see popping up on Facebook pages like ‘UrbanSpoon’ and ‘Graffiti StreetArt GLOBE 2’ and I don’t find it particularly interesting as a concept. However, I did do a similar thing in order to create some looser sketches of made-up landscapes, which I thought could be interesting in terms of form and colour. Indeed, the scenes I ‘created’, aside from their heavily pixelated aesthetic, could potentially be quite believable. However, there’s always an odd colour choice or angle that throws the whole composition off, turning it into something more abstract, a less clear field of vision.
When drawn or painted, and the signifiers of the initial process stripped from the image, I think these could be quite interesting. It also brings into play the question of whether this is still a portrait. The platform I used for this (photo-warp.com) has an extremely limited set of tools for warping images. The one that I used exclusively allows you to select points on the image via a mouse-click and pull them across the threshold of the image. The tool allows for very little control, and interestingly won’t let you get rid of information, only move it around and push it to the sides of the canvas until its no longer visible but is still, in theory, ‘there.’ This really interested me in the way that low resolution images and weavings have always fascinated me. Just because we have microscopes that tell us everything’s made up of tiny cells, and telescopes that can show us details of the moon, doesn’t mean that what we see with our eyes is any less real. We are still being given all that information, the only difference is that we don’t have the technology within our eyes to see and compute it. Similarly with these warped images, all the information is still there, it’s just been displaced. Does that make it less real? It changes the way we read it but does it change the subject itself?
(1) Aernout, M., ‘Raw Footage’
http://www.ubu.com/film/mik_raw.html
(2) Various Artists,
https://www.deviantart.com/?section=&global=1&q=gundam+wing&offset=48
