Tuesday 7 March 2017

Practice - Digital Media Processes - A few days devoted to practice!

During the last months and more so, the last few weeks, I have been increasingly conscious that I need to devote a significant amount of time towards my practice so that I can develop a repeatable workflow or method of artistic practice.

For the past couple of days, therefore, I've been working on various sets of photography collections that I have made during the past year, and I have also supplemented this with a full days photography of some of the local topology and landmarks.

This is being done in the context of trying to explore further the ideas of Gestalt, and some excellent suggestions by my tutor Richard Mulhearn to explore proximity and composition, but in the sense of associating it with my theme of the Peregrine (the nonfictional book by JA Baker, 1968). Tying this together with digital media and speculative realism I have started to look at how I can intertwine the concepts of using drawing from those photographs, to convey an alternative point of view. That is the view of the Peregrine Falcon.

Spending a few days away from the academic environment and just only photographing and drawing at the same time has been extremely beneficial for me, both intellectually but also spiritually!

I'm still trying to play with the text of Baker's book, and by reading selected days activities that he recorded, I've been able to recontextualise and therefore reinterpret his writings with what may have been a kind of conscious experience from the Falcon's vantage point. This exercise must continue through the reiteration of these drawings, and comparing it to Baker's original text to find alternative suggestions of the reality that he saw.

Conclusions

I must continue to develop my drawing on the original themes and experiment with photography to try to capture alternative points of view.

The speculative element of the Peregrine's perception might not only manifest itself through drawing, as audio, taste and smell also would play a large part. It is unlikely that touch forms a significant proportion of the Peregrine's perception, as touch receptors on the peregrines body are far more limited in their acuity if compared with say a mammal or primate.

Because of the dependency of all birds and in particular falcons and raptors in their use of sight as their primary sense, I still feel that from a human's point of view, the primacy of drawing provides a sort of halfway method of articulating their perception from their free point of view.

I am avoiding the use of colour simply because our understanding of it could be vastly different from that of a raptor. This has already been proven to a great extent through studies of other animals' visual perceptions of colour ranges, where their sensory abilities to detect variations in the wavelengths of light far exceed our own capabilities.

No comments:

Post a Comment