Sunday 9 October 2016

Further thoughts on Digital Media Concepts

In thinking about building a project body of work and driving development in creative realisation, Richard Mulhern in the previous lecture and tutorial session described that to feed your own creativity,  to look at the work of others is crucial, so as to put your own work into context with them.

In considering his work "perfect relationships of objects, both moving and static as an arrangement in time and space" (quotes).

I thought quite deeply about that statement and how the idea of seeing the world (i.e. objects in time and space) can be re-described through an alternative narrative. An example that Richard provided was "the baby and a Duke Box" in the photograph by Robert Frank and also Gary Winogrand in his work "cafe" shot at Beaufort Carolina.
Work by Henry Cartier-Bresson would also be useful to be studied in connection with this notion

The idea of interpretation within the photographic "moment" is what is at stake here. By creating an image that re-evaluates the moment and re-presents it in a new narrative or alternative experience or perception places it in a way within "the unconscious".
Practitioners in this area include Jeff Wall, Mitra Trabizian, Philip Lorca DeCoste amongst others.

Key texts to look at might be "Click, Double-Click".

Think carefully how one communicates in these terms, but above all else show the pictures that you are taking to make your own narrative in what you see around you.

In my own case I asked myself who it was that influenced me?
For example, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhardt Richter, and Werner Hertzog are all currently deeply embedded in my thinking. They will shape what I want to produce next year, and in particular, I'm interested in the ideas of the obsessive and compulsive, which was spawned from reading the book by John Baker, "the Peregrine" during August this year.

Richard suggested that I should not limit myself and consider others such as Onorato and Krebs, "The Great Un-Real", which is a book that provides a beautiful view of making "the moment" defining it and choosing it, but then changing it!

In reflection, people used to think that photography was truth… How wrong they are.

Richard suggested that perhaps I could create a "document of the unknowable" which brings forward the idea of the uncanny (an interesting word, which really means "unhomely", and perhaps "not of this world" rather than the more usual misinterpretation of sinister-ness). Create something that is outside of the convention.

Chop up the experience of living into discrete parcels of time. Make gestures that are out of context: Disrupting the "natural world and common sense" notions of the world around us.

Explore things that are outside of the usual convention: This has been written about extensively by Pierre Bordeaux, where he talks about the idea of a subversion of convention. He speaks of the theory of habitus, (unreadable pictures of undefinable gestures) and so on. He tries to get at the heart of how as humans we try to automatically make sense of things, and our challenge as practitioners is to engage viewers by making them confused enough to ask their own questions of what things might mean to them but to subtly displace them.

e.g. images that we take must invite enquiry.

An example of that might be found in the writing of Tim Creswell, "Place" (page 16).

Conclusions;

Challenge conventionality.
Use the articles and websites for further research.

Start to develop a body of work.
The importance is not in manipulating an image as such, but it is making a series of pictures and understanding how to develop the narrative of how the series of images are then presented to a viewer in a new way.

Complete the assignment of finding a single text to connect with your current area of practice identifying relevant points and write a summary of the texts as to why it might be appropriate for your new work.
Submit it to turn it in by 17th of October in readiness to present it to Dr Liam Devlin for the next tutorial.

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