Wednesday 29 March 2017

Thoughts begining to crystalise after further discussions with Dr Anna Powell

After a short review with Doctor Anna Powell on Friday 17th March, I recall discussing some of the recent photographs that I had been taking by using an extended monopod, to capture images from an unusual height.

The extended monopod is approximately six feet in length and when held at my own arm's length,  with a remote camera shutter trigger, I have been able to record images from approximately twelve to fourteen feet above ground level. I explained my conscious choice to do this, despite getting some
strange looks from passers-by who were out walking or exercising their dogs!

Nevertheless, I recognise it is important to let go of how people receive my work both in terms of how it is generated and in terms of my outputs.

However, I also need to recognise and ask myself the question as to how do I engage the prospective  viewer, to ensure that their interpretation of my work outputs are relevant to the subject and context
in which I am trying to research and articulate?

In considering my own work, I explained in brief, that I am trying to join together very ancient philosophical ideas with very new ideas. Together my output is formed through the human act of obsessive observation, and in this case through literature.

In a way I could call this a collision, a collision between ontology, that is speculative realism, with digital media (and in particular digital drawing) together with the literature of the book  "The Peregrine" (Baker, A.J. 1967).

Dr Powell replayed the message I gave, back to me as "living and thinking in the world from a different point of view" which I'm glad to say fits precisely with my objectives!

As an exercise, these objectives properly articulated, intertwined with my methodologies and practice, together with a third area, which is a description of my various interests will become areas of discussion for my critical reflective summary for this module.

I feel well placed in being able to articulate these several points sufficiently over the next few weeks and start to form a cohesive document.

A further conversation with Dr Powell on 24 March helped me towards thinking about creating and maintaining my body of works. This was directly related to the workshop that we conducted around postproduction earlier in the month and explores and expands on the ideas of practice being a series of fitting and finding concepts theories and imagistic references (and often the other way round) of finding and fitting images of the moments.

This reminded me of previous reading that I had recently made regarding Henry Cartier-Bresson, who described "The Moments" of photography.

Images of the mind are equally fleeting, but they need to be recorded and maintained as a body of work develops. In my own case, I think the "where" (that is the location), is not so important, but the "what" is vitally important as content for me to capture and go forward with. The workshops and tutorials with Dr Anna Powell together with Dr Juliet MacDonald have been particularly useful and I'm looking forward to working with them a little more closely in the third semester.

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