Learning Outcome 1 - Practical and critical skills - also - Learning Outcome 2 - Debate and evaluation

These two learning outcomes are quite tied together for me in this unit.

Where I was in April
At the beginning of this unit I was talking about having layered ‘moments’ from history that the viewer would experience all at once. They were going to be multi media, some would be computer based and projected. Some would be printed photographs and bits of paper. Some would be objects. So it was going to be gallery based. There was going to be a level of interactivity but i wasn’t really sure what. Basically, I wanted to make something that was similar to horror vacui art. A space full of stuff. I’m still interested in doing this, if I can find the right context.

Where I am in November
This space full of mess approach has disappeared and now I’m doing a questionnaire. It’s online and the home audience member is at an advantage over someone seeing it in a gallery as they’ll have more time. I still want it to be viewable in a gallery. It’s all quite streamlined, and might stay that way. The more streamlined I get it the more I like it. An important part of my unit three could be doing things and then not using them even though I like them.
So how and why has this happened? Why did I change my mind?

Why I changed direction

Experiments
At the beginning of the unit i decided to start from scratch almost. I wanted to fill the space with mess but first off I needed to get lots of ideas about what exactly that mess would be. Between April and July I made quite a lot of experiments (nothing is nothing, pixelated motorway, milk, butter, ice . All of these have fed in to what I’m doing now in different ways. The pixelated motorway is there in the back image of each question in my questionnaire. The milk, butter and ice were an interesting process. I got quite obsessed by them, these processes of one thing becoming another and then having the potential to return to the same state. Units and masses. They’re both different ways of looking at all.
Reading
I also carried on thinking about interesting things (Mythology - The Prose Edda, the history of the Edda, Hugin and Munin, also from the Edda. Science - The history of the universe and the Big Bang. It’s all been a bit of a mind bender. I didn’t know anything about the theory of relativity, or the way mythology grew by passing from one bard to another before starting this course. I’d done a lot of thinking and felt that any work I made would take a lot of thinking from my viewer too. I needed to make that explicit. I also didn’t want to take any one of the many elements of the project out. If I do it will become weaker. I need to thread them all in to one simple, elegant whole. This is, naturally, ongoing.

August show at the House Gallery
In early August I used the House Gallery as a studio space for two weeks. I had planned on doing a show but decided I wanted to change it all as I was went along. I’d learn more that way. So I used it as a studio. The open nature of the show further encouraged my thinking about the benefits of getting people involved in the work at the point of production. The art is alive when you’re in the middle of making it.

Here are the most important blog posts I wrote about this show.
Show summary
Questionnaire

In my proposal I said I was planning on doing a questionnaire. I put this questionnaire in the show. This questionnaire ended up being the most fun thing about the show. Quite a few people said they really enjoyed doing it. It was obvious that it had value in its own right. The process of thinking through the answers to the questions was a good way of getting people grappling with the things I wanted to present. From there, the die was cast. I was dong a questionnaire. I’d had a hunch this might be the case before the August show when I wrote this post. I’ll also note that this was a key point in realising that a questionnaire might be enjoyable in itself, largely because I enjoyed the process of writing the questions.

My dislike of private views was strangely important too
The other key moment in deciding to do a questionnaire was the end of year show in July. This was important because I didn’t and don’t want my project to be defined by that kind of space or event. If I work really hard to make something that exists for only one week I don’t want it to be just one thing stuck in a flood of other things seen by crowds of people drinking cheap nasty wine from small plastic cups. I find the whole private view thing really off putting. Gruesome, even. But more specifically, in an end of year show context, the whole experience of going from one piece to the next is so awful. I automatically find myself starting to go, ‘yeah, I like that one. I don’t like that one. That’s crap. Oh that one stands out. Look at it for five minutes. Move on. That one’s crap. Oh, that’s clever. Oh, it’s only superficially clever. Rubbish.’ Clearly, this is an utterly unfair view of the work. I’m writing a lot of people’s projects off before giving an appropriate level of thought. But in that environment, for something to work, it needs to have an immediate quality about it that grabs the attention and asks people to spend a bit more time with it. Otherwise you’re just wandering round a shooting gallery taking pot shots at clay pigeons. How depressing is that? In the end of year show, even if something stood out I just ended up admiring the fact that it stood out, I wasn’t really admiring it as art. That was my feeling at the private view anyway. My work has to have an existence outside of that environment, outside of the art establishment even. Would showing in a Shoreditch gallery be that different? I want it to have the potential to be shown in that setting but not be tied to it. This may look on the surface like a shirking exercise but it’s leaving me with a lot of really interesting questions about the nature of digital art and how to distribute my work. And how to sell it too. I’m enjoying these questions.

After the gallery show I spent ages doing my PGPD. I enjoyed doing my PGPD. I spent ages doing the reading, which did mean that I had less time to do actual project work. It really changed me, though. It changed my outlook on being an artist. But more about that later.

Feedback - The group show at the House Gallery. 4-18 December

I’m co-organising a group show at the House Gallery which will be called Feedback. Noel, Simon and Tim have all been very helpful with this. It has a page on the wiki which contains most of the emails I’ve written about it. It’s been a good learning process and will hopefully set us all in good stead for June and July. I might propose doing another one in April. Let’s wait and see how this one goes first.

Learning outcome 3 - Contextual implications

1. Participation - In this post I talk about some of the reasons why I like participatory art and why I’m enjoying playing with it now.
2. Changes in the internet and the world are going to change art. This post was reflective of my head being ready to melt after writing my PGPD. Most of the thoughts in this post are still a going concern in my head.
3. I spoke about some key misgivings but also good things about digital art in this post about the Tony Oursler exhibition. This show seemed to me to sum up some of the problems we face as digital artists. It suggested some ways forward formally but got stuck on other issues. I’ve since realised I’d misunderstood Walter Benjamin’s writing about the aura. I have his collection of essays Illuminations and will read it soon.<.li>
4. Here’s my PGPD. It’s about the history of participatory art in practice and theory with a view to applying these lessons to the internet. The process of following up the reading I did for this is massively ongoing. I read quite a few papers about interaction in museums for example. I’ll blog these in time. They feel to me like they’re related in part to unit 3 issues though. Final presentation stuff. Reading the essays on Lev Manovich’s website also set my head buzzing. I think that’s obvious in the ‘My Head Hurts’ post I link to above.

I was inspired by the approach of Cornelia Parker and wrote about her work here. The way she ’sparks the imagination of the viewer’ is definitely a goal I want to aim for.

5. My Discussion paper is also about participation but concentrates more on computer based participation.

I’m very conscious of the effect that Web 2.0 could have on participation in art. it’s such a huge subject though that I’m only just getting started on it. I want to look at a few specific, quite daft examples at some point, just to try and join the dots between something like lolcats which is perfect (if stupid and usually slightly lame) Web 2.0 fodder and art. Could art ever co-opt those processes? I’m also thinking about new movements in folk traditions. Folk tales were passed on from bard to bard. Now we pass tales or equivalents on via del.icio.us and facebook.

I’ve covered Learning Outcome 4 in my prototype post. I’ve also been giving thought to presentation of the finished piece in this post.

Nothing’s gone wrong in this unit as such. The main thing is the development of the project from mess to clean questionnaire. I wish I could have spent more time on it all. On both the essays and the project. I am on schedule though, happily. I feel a bit weird wrapping this unit up because I’ve still got so much to do and it feels like this is bringing an end to this part of the MA. Unit 3 is new. My next post will be laying out some of the things I want to do next in unit 3. It’s good to wrap up unit 2. It’s good to take stock. It’s helping me get perspective. I’m enjoying the whole process of doing the course a great deal and am really looking forward to making things come together in unit 3.

I’ve done three versions. One main one and two using less of the same ingredients.

1 - questionnaire with both flash and backing pixel picture.
This is the key one. I’ve talked about the flash bits in my previous posts. I talk about the backing pixel pictures below. They were originally made to go behind the flash relatively unobtrusively. I’m now wondering if they’re not just better than the flash bits.

2 - questionnaire with pixel picture but no flash.

The big pixel pictures are there because I wanted to have some colour and I really liked the big pixel images I got from doing the zoom in flash things (audience, sea and birds and hill) earlier on.
I like the fact that pixels are single elements that add up to making whole pictures. This is an important underlying thought that I’ll be teasing out and playing with. All is made of individual parts. I’m thinking of having each ‘pixel’ square as a rollover that launches something in a lightbox style popup. There are a lot of places I can take this. Some of those might have to be explored after this ma.
Another thing i like with the pixel thing is that it’s all in a grid. I think a grid is useful in the context of all. It’s referent to systems of classification and measurement. It makes things look organised too. That means you can kick on from there and have branches and come back to the grid. Somehow grids just work for me. I tried this one because the couple I don’t have flash bits for seemed to work really well. It’s almost as if the whole thing works better with less information and competing thoughts. But the colours do give it a bit of a push. In some cases they work better than others, but they were done to go behind the flash bits and weren’t originally intended to be seen in full. The reason this version is here is purely that the ones without flash seemed to be working nicely and I thought I’d give the idea a bit more of a proper look. It’s becoming more of a going concern though.

3 - questionnaire with flash but no pixel picture.
With this one I wanted to see what it would look like as a more minimal design. I’m not that keen on it. It just doesn’t do that much for me. Glad I had a look though.

My main concern is really that I haven’t had time to do the MySQL. I can have the form sending to an email address for the time being. At least that way I’ll have any new answers on file. I spent ages scratching my head over the php. I’m glad about this because now I understand a few basic things about php, which is a huge step forward for my web design generally. This term has been about essays and php though. I’ve not done much else. This has been excellent for my development. So, at the moment it’s a working front end prototype but people can’t check other people’s answers, which is very much part of the long term aim of the whole thing. I definitely want to get this figured out for the house gallery feedback show, though. My original idea for the house gallery show was for us part time second years to road test our prototypes. It’s kind of spiraled beyond that, which is good. But this show is another issue and I think I’ll blog it more later on, when the show is on. Anyway, I’ll be unhappy if I can’t road test the database.

Another thing to do before the show is to write an introduction telling people what the questionnaire is and explain a little of what will happen to the answers at the end. and make it clear it’s all going to be under creative commons. I’ve done this on the printed questionnaire.

ps - My friend Chris just wrote me a script which I’m in the process of implementing. That will send all answers to text files. I’ll then be able to put those online fairly quickly. I need to debug it abit first though. So front end is till there but this extra back end bit is on the way. Thanks Chris!

NB - I wrote this on 19/11/08 and then made lots of these ideas in flash. I’ve now reflected on them a bit so I’ll put my reflections below each idea I’ve done in italics. You’ll be getting action and reflection in one sweet sweet pill. Also, I’ve figured out a few bits of the php in that time and managed to get a version of the questionnaire online. I should add that the from isn’t yet linked anywhere. Click here to see it, though it’s likely to change every other day now. Today, it still needs design work doing on it. Maybe I should stick the flash files up here separately. Not sure about the best way of doing that. Okay, I’ll make an archive page somewhere. Soon.

I’ve just had a scribbling session thinking about how I’m going to make visual accompaniment for each question. Below is a pretty good typed version of that.

General usage

1- How often per day?
Word all made of flashing numbers
Counting board like a digital clock. Or maybe old fashioned cricket/tennis scoreboard.
I’m unconvinced by this in practice. It just seems too obvious. Also, the movement agitates me and stops me from thinking. I don’t want to distract people from the questionnaire. I must complement the questionnaire. Also tried a panel full of lots of instances of the word all in grey, with one at a time going from grey to black. every half second or so. this was quite irritating though.

2 - Logical / Figure of Speech?
Two halves of the word. One clean and one messy. A moving layer mask to float over the top looking like it’s making a tug of war between the two.
This one doesn’t really work either. Too obvious and isn’t asking me to think about the question in any useful way. Feels flat.

3 - Proverbs and Songs?
Would be nice to have little animations of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men and similar but that will be impossible. No time. Unless I did that with really simple kid like stick men. Which could be fun. But would still be a big time sink.
Haven’t done one for this yet. but saying that, i like it as it is with the picture in the background. It’s of a person and they’re sitting at a table after dinner. I think that shows somehow, and works with the question. Almost makes me think I want to get rid of the flash bits. I’ll talk about this separately though, as I’ve done a flash free version of this questionnaire.

4 - Context needed to make sense?
Initially all in big fullish screen serif font. Then zooms out to reveal is part of a sentence. Sentence changes every couple of seconds or maybe less.
Quite like this one but it’s actually full of proverbs and sayings. Maybe should go on question three and I should think of something else to go here. I haven’t done the zoomy bit. One to continue experimenting with, I think.

5 - What would you take with you?
List of things taken with you. Possibly drawn or photographed. Similar list of things left behind. Perhaps placed in columns.
I quite like the list but need to look at the presentation. Does it work in its current two column list format?

Perception

6 - immediate impressions?
Legion of small things? Could be similar in effect to Bob Milner’s cups.
Tried photographs instead. It’s a bit boring isn’t it? Maybe should be quicker. Will try legion of things idea too. ended up doing legion of people thing.

7 - Wholeness, completeness or both?
Hand drawn circles all made up of many shapes that are not circles. Perhaps a grid of them or shown in sequence. Perhaps spinning round.
I like the more abstract ones; the ones that aren’t overloaded with information and obvious ideas. So I quite like this. I think a circle represents wholeness and completeness. I’ve looked at putting circles inside circles and having circles made of circles. Wholeness and completeness which is made of smaller wholeness and completeness. Almost a contradiction. For this version, most of these circles are made of straight lines and squares or from really imperfect circles. the idea being that wholeness can be made form different elements. I’ll note that this is a step, not a finished thing. could be an ma in its own right probably, if i was doing a drawing ma.

8 - Change in perception?
ealle, which is the fifth century version of all, in some dialects at least. Animated to change from medieval calligraphy font to times new roman to helvetica. The two letter es at the beginning and end fade out
I tried to do the tweening for the fonts but couldn’t get them working as well as I would have liked. The changing of the parchment into paper into a screen says all the same things but doesn’t have such blatantly large clunking sounds in the background. it suggests something of the changes in modes of communication and is a nice base for thinking about the question, i think. i might make the screen one pixelated with a flashing cursor.

Concept outside of language

9 - Opposite of All?
Better version of butter animation as a way of thinking of different concepts of what all is.
I’ve already done this here. Will have a go at shaving it down. Though perhaps it should stay loose. The looser it is the more abstract it is. I do quite like that it takes in measurement and also refers obliquely to the disparity of applications of all. We can say all of the butter about each of those images but on each occasion it’s talking about a different quantity. ps 02/12/08 - Okay, I’ve done an actual animation for this but have put it on the next question. I like it though. I think it works better than the butter animation, at least for now. I’m still wondering about the benefits of butter’s physical properties. It’s spreadable, and meltable, and choppable. In all of those states it is still all of the butter. That’s really interesting, I think. There’s a good sense of that in the line version. The line one is clean, too. That’s always nice.

10 - Centre?
Different versions of all’s centre. Dot in a circle. Circle in the middle of lots of circles. Continually zooming out. Needs some kind of acknowledgment of the grammatical wrongness of the question.
tried doing this but got dangerously close to making a version of the mandelbrot set. the world does not need another mandelbrot set. one is enough. For the sake of pondering I have put the animation for the last question, the opposite of all here. This is in part because I like the dark brown pic for the opposite of all. Looks a bit like Ginnungagap, the wide open space at the beginning of time in Norse mythology.

11 - Feelings about what is beyond the universe?
Universe diagrams? Would be nice to incorporate a sense of movement in here though.
Ended up doing ‘Something. Nothing’ boxes. I quite like them. Again, they’re a bit abstract and not too obviously linked to the question but do support the thinking behind it. Pretty much the point of it being there, really. The reason it supports the thinking is linked to an earlier blog post about the big bang and the crazy nothingness that (presumably) came before it. The big bang means the universe expanded in to nothing, and still is expanding into nothing? No-one really seems to know, perhaps unsurprisingly.

I haven’t really blogged about my PGPD in any direct way yet. It feels kind of rude not sticking up a link about it though. So here you go. Regardless of any dissatisfaction I may feel with it, it did help me think through a lot of things, and I’m finding I’m taking a few things more seriously as a result of it. I’ve already said that haven’t I? I’ve also already said that it’s left me with more questions than answers. But such is the way of these things.

I think one of the key reasons I’ve been getting interested in participatory art leading up to writing my PGPD is remembering an exhibition we had at the house gallery years ago, back when it was still just a gallery and not a gallery and cafe. The exhibition was called the Library of Unpublished Books by a woman called Caroline Jupp. I thought it was rather wonderful, not least because my friend Ben and I contributed a book to the project, which in itself was brilliant fun. My memories of the show are that it had a lovely feeling about it. It was very open. And i felt truly privileged to have been asked to take part, even though Caroline obviously just wanted to get as many books as she could. It was quite liberating creatively to do something for sake of it. We ended up binding the finished book together with old socks.

Beyond that, though, I was really won over by her show proposal and previous work. It was very professionally presented and more importantly the work in it was great. The two things in it which stick in my mind are ‘Limo (no such thing as a free ride)’ - in which Caroline dressed up as a limo driver, hired a limo, gave people lifts around Leicester and filmed the resulting encounters, and a piece in which she borrowed lots of famous people’s shoes, laid out a red carpet in the back room of a department store and gave people the opportunity to take a walk in a pair of purple velvet platforms once worn by Lenny Henry. Looking at the photos it was obvious that people had a whale of a time, especially young kids. That really stayed with me, quite strongly. Why shouldn’t art be about people having a whale of a time? Why is it that art is so rarely any fun at all? This saddens me.

Caroline Jupp’s work is often about fulfilling dreams. It has a sense of meeting people, us, me, in our quite grey existences and brightening them up in a way that offered the chance to do (perhaps just a shadow of) something many people only dream of doing. Walking in Lenny Henry’s shoes might be the closest you’ll ever get to fame. It’s a good way to reflect on one’s own yearning for a more glamourous existence. This may also be compounded by the fact that Lenny Henry isn’t even that famous anymore. The potential for deeper reflection is here, if you want it to be.

I think getting people involved in the process of the work is surely the way forward for art. Not the only way forward, but a truly significant way forward. Thinking about it purely on the level of my questionnaire, if you’re asking people to do a lot of thinking there’s a good argument for being direct in the way you guide that thinking. And the process of putting that thinking on a page or screen, seeing it there in front of you has the potential to take those thoughts to another level, to become more solid. I’m still cogitating my way through some underlying questions here, though. I might well need a few weeks off thinking about cheese, dumb films and random novels to let my brain slacken off before I can properly come back to it.

I’m glad the show we’re doing at the gallery is taking this participation theme in. It’s something I really want to explore more and see in action. One thing I learned from my PGPD was that there are ways and means of making it work. This is likely to be partially down to trial and error so I’ll be taking notes at the show.

I started writing this post ages ago and in the meantime wrote my Discussion Paper, which takes in similar themes so i may as well link it here. As I say, I’m still thinking all of this through. What’s exciting me, though, is the fact that it feels like a path forward after this course. My final show in July will be a step on to my next project rather than a finished ‘masterwork’. This is probably as it should be, I feel.

For my unit 2 prototype I’m planning on making a very basic version of the online questionnaire I’m planning. I’ve been learning PHP so that I can put the whole thing into a MySQL database and it will be searchable. We’re doing a show at the house gallery in December. I’m planning on showing this basic prototype then. Clearly I want to present something a lot more developed for the final show. But I’ll get to that.

I’ve just had a quick review of the questionnaire in the show in August. I’ve broken the questions down in to three categories. These are as follows:

Common day to day usage

1 - At a rough estimate, how often do you say the word all on any given day?
2 - When using the word all, how often do you use it in a completely logical manner? How often do you use it as a rough figure of speech?
3 - What proverbs can you think of which use the word all?
4 - Do you think the word all, of itself means much, or do you think it needs the context of a sentence sitting with it?
5 - If you were to leave it all behind, what would you take with you?

Perception

6 - When you hear the word all, what immediate impressions come to mind?
7 - Does all imply wholeness, completeness, both or neither of these things?
8 - How much do you think the common perception of the word all has changed over the past hundred years? How about over the last thousand years?

All as an abstract concept outside of language

9 - What is the opposite of all?
10 - Where is all’s centre? Do you think this question makes sense? In which contexts do you think it might or might not make sense?
11 - When you consider what might (or might not) be beyond the finite, yet expanding universe, how do you feel?
12 - Do you think that whatever is or isn’t beyond the universe is part of all? In other words, do you think this unknown is nothing, a total void, and if so, is that void part of all?

I think I might try to expand these questions so there are fifteen. Three of each. That would mean there was a pleasing symmetry. Maybe that’s unnecessary. I want a bit of structure though, and an equal number of questions per section feels more structured. I was expecting to have more to say here, but I don’t. Maybe it’s just late and I want to go to bed.

The next step, then, is to develop the visual accompaniment. My plan for the prototype is to make a flash animation or illustration of the word all to accompany each question. I think this will be simple and effective. It’s not how i see the final piece working (I want that to have more detail and more interactivity) but it’ll be a step in the right direction in the short term.

I have been attempting to learn PHP. I could probably substitute the word ‘attempting’ with ‘failing’ and not compromise the truth of that sentence. Here is a paste from an email I sent to a friend who knows PHP well. For me, it sums up some of the frustration of trying to learn something new in programming.

the problem i invariably have with using other poeple’s html or script or whatever is that i don’t really understand it.
i just tried to have a look at html quickform 2 downloaded from pear. i can’t get it to work and now i’m a bit pissed off.
but that’s mainly because i don’t know php. if i knew php i’d be able to diagnose the problem. but the only way to really get a grasp of these things is to use them.
so in that regard i’m better off saying forget html quickform. i’ll use it in a few months when i actually know what’s in it.
by which point it may well be effectively meaningless anyway. in fact it probably will.

i’m also a bit annoyed because there’s no clear demo or read me in there. i’ve no idea what it’s even supposed to look like.

Ach well. I’m sure I’ll get there in the end.

Okay, so that’s the pgpd out of the way. I loved doing all the reading for mine but am a bit unhappy with the end result. I feel like I’ve learned lots though. And it’s got me wanting to read more theory. I’ve also begun to think that writing this blog is becoming very important in the process of actualising my thoughts and taking them from vague mumblings toward genuine orientation. So, I’ve found myself sitting with the seeds of a few thoughts/questions that I want to write down here, so I can see how they look on paper (sorry, screen) as much as anything. Some might either be obvious or plain wrong, but I want to get a bit more of a grasp of how these things fit together.

Nicholas Bourriaud argues that modernism never died, it just shifted shape and found a new dream. Read this PDF to get a fuller idea. It’s a decent chunk of his very useful, if slightly full of itself book Relational Aesthetics.

Here’s Bourriaud’s definition of art, found in the glossary at the back Relational Aesthetics.

Art.
1. General term describing a set of objects presented as part of a narrative known as art history. This narrative draws up the critical genealogy and discusses the issues raised by these objects, by way of three sub sets: painting, sculpture, architecture.
2. Nowadays, the word “art” seems to be no more than a semantic leftover of this narrative, whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.

In the main body of the book he builds up a picture of art as a game where the main playing arena is the mind, the viewer’s own experience. He makes reference to the Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty along the way. It transpires I must read some of this guy’s work. He had many thoughts about language and related issues. Phenomenology, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is ‘the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.’ Art viewed phenomenologically becomes - instead of a static object - an experience waiting to be completed. This isn’t a new idea. Bourriaud quotes Duchamp’s lecture The Creative Act which argues “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

So, if art is a game and the definition of the word art is open to change, how is it changing? I’ve suddenly got a feeling that there’s soon going to be a massive paradigm shift of how art is made, seen and thought about on the horizon the likes of which hasn’t been seen for 90 odd years. I’m really posting most of this stuff here more because I’m asking myself the questions than wanting to make a big statement, but I do think they add up to the likelihood of interesting changes. If anyone reading this has any comments (including ones clubbing me over the head with the munter stick) please do e-mail me.

Anyway, here are the reasons:

1. We’re still digesting the full implications of Web 2.0: Wikinomics Folksonomy, Creative Commons, networked, participatory web experiences in general. These things are all going to change the world outside of the internet as well as the internet itself. They’re also going to change the way we view the world and consequently the way artists view the world. Ergo…?
2. 17 year olds can’t even remember ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s. They weren’t alive when people actually used them. How sick is that? We’re on the cusp of a generation of adults who’ve always had pentium computers. There are going to be less and less people who opt out of using computers because they’ll barely know anything else. So we’ll have very computer savvy users. Sophisticated users make for sophisticated demands on the Human Computer Interface front. Demand will be satisfied sooner or later.
3. Increasingly, users are the people who can satisfy this demand as much as big corporations. I’m looking at learning Processing. You can use Processing to make pretty data heavy interactive animations and applications. When people as (relatively) technically inept as I am can use things like that, it might be time to run for the hills. Imagination will meet with technical ability in new ways. Where is it going to stop, though? And where did it start? Another thing this means is that there’s going to be a lot of rubbish to sift through. If almost everyone is an author, what happens to the reader?
4. The blurring of the boundaries of art experiences. Often television can look like art, art can look like a bowl of soup, a bowl of soup can look like a urinal, a urinal can look like, well, like it was way ahead of its time. Does anyone even care anymore what art is or isn’t? When people stop caring about this boundary, what does art do? Where does it go? What does it become? If this boundary continues to blur, what will happen to galleries?
5. The internet has barely gotten started, in an art context at least. It’s still in its incunabular phase. Lots of internet art is still awful (At least I think so) and doesn’t follow basic rules that should have been learned from art history. Some of it remains at the level of gadget. Bourriaud talks about technological advances influencing the way artists think but having little effect on the materials they use; meaning he thinks the effects of current change can be seen in non internet based art. But internet art is going to grow up soon enough. Then what?
6. The long tail. This is the idea that business is changing because space is changing. A jukebox can hold hundreds of thousands of songs instead of merely hundreds. I buy music and books from Amazon because they have all the obscure stuff I want. Now I pretty much only buy obscure stuff. Shops would often box me in to buying more mainstream records and books. I’m not sure how, but they did. What this means is that all of the obscure, cultish stuff put together adds up to something bigger than the mainstream in a way that was never true previously. The thing that I’m curious about with the Long Tail is, what does it mean for the small time artist, musician or film maker? It’s great for Amazon, but what about us? The long tail only really means anything when all of the content is put together in one accessible place, like iTunes, or Amazon. Looking at point 3, though, it’s bound to mean something in terms of the variety of things produced.
7. Whenever there are new technological advances afoot, art changes too. The printing press and the multitude of advances around the turn of the 20th century are prime examples. Do current advances compare with those?
8. Tightening spirals of progression. We’re getting faster at getting faster. We’re also getting faster at understanding how things are getting faster. There’s just too much media coverage out there and too many people gabbling on about pretty much anything. Another question: Is time moving more quickly, in the context of art progression? Is time linear when thought of in terms of art history? What happens to it when so many things are being discussed? Many years ago, stories grew very slowly over hundreds of years and would be told by many storytellers. Progress was slow. Do we cover the more ‘mileage’ in less linear time now? Is that mileage of the same quality? Or is everything being stretched too thin?

I’m not suggesting that painting, sculpture, printmaking etc will disappear. They won’t. But it seems so obvious something utterly mental is going to happen very soon on the art scene that there’s almost no point writing this post. I’m also not saying any future change will necessarily be focused on the internet. It will be profoundly influenced by it though.

Also, of what is this paradigm shift likely to consist? Or am I just totally wrong? None of the above is particularly new, and there’s stuff I’ve missed, but what does it all mean? I think I’m going to have to leave that for another day.

PS - I quite liked this video. It’s about the development of web 2.0 and is by a Cultural Anthropologist called Michael Wesch. Not sure what to make of the implications though. They’re actually pretty well documented by now, I think, but I’m still digesting it all. The thousand odd words above should make that pretty clear, though, right?

PPS - Has anyone read any good books dealing with all of this stuff?

PPPS - Completely beside the point but does anyone else feel like that whole baddies are the goodies are all in a confusing moral universe skit has gotten a bit old? Just watched a bit of Heroes and it was even more ridiculous than usual. Very tired and predictably unpredictable. And why do none of these people have utterly useless powers? I want one of them to do something with jam or something.

Andy asked us all to go to see the Tony Oursler exhbition at the Lisson Gallery. I wasn’t that impressed by the show, but it did deal with a crucial thing regarding digital art, namely taking something that exists as digital bits on a disc and turning that into a real, viewable artwork in real space. Oursler does this by projecting looped film on to sculpted objects, like ears, or patchwork dolls.

My favourite piece there was the huge talking ten pound note. It was horrible. The mouth itself seemed to be really similar to how the Queen’s mouth looks on money. That in itself was unsettling. I didn’t catch many of the things she was saying but her voice sounded quite queen like. Money talks, huh. Here was the key thing that bothered me, though. Even with this piece that was quite effective, I still stood there wondering why I was being shown this grotesque thing. All of the work in the show was grotesque in some respect. It’s all about addiction and other things that tend to isolate people. At no point in the show did I think, ‘Oh, that’s made me look at that in a different way’. At no point was I asked to think about any assumptions I may have taken in to the gallery (of which, no doubt, there are/were plenty). If work is gruesome but doesn’t challenge me, why should I spend any time with it? I ended up walking through it thinking ‘Dammit, where’s all the fun? Why am I not having any fun?’ Fun is good. Why is there not more fun artwork? I don’t mind not having fun if I’m having something else. Here, I was having reminiscences of school education videos warning me of the dangers of smoking. I shouldn’t need to persuade anyone of the wrongness of feeling this in a gallery setting. Maybe he set out to achieve this, but it didn’t work for me.

My second issue was the simple fact that the painted elements looked underworked. To me, they looked like the daubings of a hungover first year BA degree student rushing for an end of term deadline. There was no love of paint there. There didn’t seem to have been much thought given to the surface of the finished product and how that would effect the reading of the work. The relationship between the video and painting seemed crude too. It didn’t look to me like there was much effort to integrate the two media.

The weird thing about this was the fact that, conversely, the best thing about the show was the way the artist dealt with projections. The use of prepared objects in combination with projected film felt like a good way of beginning to make digital art properly inhabit a space, instead of looking like it’s just a cold ghost. This is something we all have to think about. It’s been handy to see someone doing it in ways that I’ve liked and disliked.

A key problem that always seems to come up with digital art is the fact that it’s so cold. You could never love most digital art. It just doesn’t have the warmth, presence, or the raw traces of human engagement that you get with, say a Robert Rauschenberg piece. The point where I begin to question this, though, is the fact that I get similar warm fuzzy feelings about a beautiful photograph, and I’m getting to that stage with really wonderful web design. I think this issue of aura is really about the level of ease the viewer feels with the media in front of them. The aura is inside of me, in partnership with the work. I’ve just ordered a book featuring Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I’m hoping this is going to help me think this aura thing through a bit further.

So often, digital art is cold because it offers precious few routes in to an understanding of the work. Or it consists of a film of a woman standing in an empty room wearing black t shirt, tights and white face paint saying ‘no’ over and over and over in a completely deadpan voice. That’s a cheap, outdated stereotype but seriously, I’m sure a lot of people will know where I’m coming from when I hold my head in my hands at the thought of it. There are plenty of highly intelligent, open minded people who get alienated by art with the image of that kind of thing in mind. I didn’t really feel this exhibition did that much to negate that common impression. The problem was that the routes in were there, they just didn’t lead that far. Boo. Now I feel like a bad, churlish person.

I’ve had an idea in my head for the past few weeks, since the house gallery show, really. It’s of projecting my final site/questionnaire onto a big sheet of slate. It’s inspired by the grey I used for those canvases reminded me of slate. I think the image of slate is a really nice one. I like the feel and the weight of it. I’m considering trying to get a massive piece of slate and projecting my finished website on to it. I think that would help give it a bit of a presence. However, I’m wondering about the wisdom of privileging one showing of the piece over another. One thing I like about digital art is the fact that it’s such a level playing field viewing wise. Showing it projected on to slate in a gallery context would be a privileged viewing situation, I think. The version with the slate would be more privileged than the one you see online. It also changes the status of the work in a participatory context.

The thing I like about the slate image is the weight, coldness and the fact that it reminds me of a fairly romantic, victorian idea of school. That in itself is interesting. It also reminds me a bit of how I (thoroughly incorrectly) imagine the ‘moment’ before the big bang. Questions about this idea then, are:

How do I find a piece of slate roughly three by four feet and half an inch thick? Does such a thing even exist?

How expensive will it be?

How would I hang such a ludicrously impractical object? Would I be able to hang it? Would I need to?

Does participatory work need less weight attached to it to work?

A key concern raised by usage of a slate is Tabula Rasa, the blank slate. This was Aristotle’s idea that people are born as a blank slate and they are formed by their subsequent experiences. In a linguistic sense at least this idea has been attacked by Noam Chomsky and the theory of Universal Grammar. Universal Grammar states that people are born with a language learning facility present, almost like an organ, in our brains from birth. All languages follow similar rules grammatically speaking and this is as a result of this organ. This theory is not universally accepted but it’s been important in 20th century linguistics to say the least. The term Tabula Rasa is tied fairly strongly to Universal Grammar. If I use a piece of slate, blank or not, the end result will be referent to both Aristotle and Chomsky’s ideas and a fair few other things besides. This seems a bit heavy bearing in mind the main reason for my liking the idea is the simple physicality of the object and some vague, quite personalised associations.

Other alternatives are a school blackboard, also a carrier of many connotations, and a blank canvas, which is probably the worst of the lot. I’m not sure what to say, then. It’s something I need to be conscious of, though.

Consider the question raised. Do I want to project my finished piece on to a prepared surface?

I’m still interested by this reconstruction thing. I’m interested by the idea of there having been an event, a moment, something, and someone taking whatever traces of that which there may be and assembling them in a manner offering us a fresh (also dead?) angle on it. I’m reminded, funnily enough, of Damien Hirst saying we have to kill something and put it in a tank in order to look at it. By that point, of course, it’s long since ceased to be the thing that really interested us.

My previous post about the British Museum touched on this. We can look at the chess sets of days gone by but what can we know about the conversations people were having when they were playing chess? Would we be better off looking at ourselves to answer that? Or was their consciousness massively different to ours? I can’t help but feel that over the past thirty years - ten years even - consciousness has changed. The way people see life and the world has changed. Mobile phones, the growth of the internet, the increasing choice in varieties of porridge; all of these things are changing us. I watch my own mind and the way I react to the films I watch and I’m sure I see things more meta-textually than people did twenty years ago. Maybe I’m completely wrong. Looking at the teenagers I know, though, they seem to be another step on from me. It’s not that I think I’m from this generation that invented sex, rock ‘n’ roll and anything daring. Things are always changing. People react differently. So what did anglo-saxon consciousness look like? I can’t realistically answer this question, just like i can’t answer many others.

One artist who does offer a route into this problem is Cornelia Parker. I’m especially taken with her piece ‘Einstein Abstract’, which consists of small details of a blackboard used at a 1915 lecture by Albert Einstein. The board has been wiped off but some of the traces of chalk remain. I sit looking at it wondering what he said. What equations did he write on the board? How did his audience feel as he told them of his world changing thoughts. These thoughts he was speaking of did change our view of the world; then subsequently the world itself.

The Science and Society website says of an exhibition of this work that “The artist is fascinated by the idea of animating and transforming historical objects and representing them in a way that sparks the imagination of the viewer.”

She’s possibly more famous for suspending things in mid air. Here are a couple of good examples of this. The first one is of fragments of a church hit by lightning. The second is of fragments of the cliffs at Beachy Head in Sussex. A chunk of cliff fell off. This is the remnant.

I love the simplicity and the discipline of the presentation here. They’re so squarely done. I feel like I can appreciate them as beautiful items in themselves, purely abstractly as sculpture. It also gives a solid ground from which to take in her theoretical concerns.

Here’s a link to the Tate website talking about Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. It details the process of making the work as well as the finished thing. Indeed, the process is integral to the piece, bearing in mind she’s looking at the controlled explosion of a garden shed. The end result is the documentation of the explosion with the end result assembled in the space.

Here’s a bit of text from the site that I like.

What does the title mean?
‘Exploded View is a kind of technical term, which you get in, say car manuals or motorbike manuals or sewing machines. It will show you an exploded drawing of the piece of machinery to show you how it works. So it’s a diagram or a technical term for a diagram really and so, and everything’s labelled in the ‘Exploded View’ drawings in these manuals to tell you what each part does, so it’s a kind of way of mapping and understanding something. Cold Dark Matter, the other part of the title is stuff in the universe that you can’t measure, it hasn’t yet been measured this material that a lot of the universe is made up of that we can’t map.’

Obviously, I love the bit about dark matter. It becomes reminiscent of the big bang, but freeze framed. The one thing I’m a bit disappointed about is the fact that I can’t see the Shockwave version on my computer for some reason. I like that juxtaposition between the mysteriously cosmic and the completely mundane. That wellington boot is dark matter? Yet the way ordinary things get invested with so much emotional power is mysterious isn’t it? How does that happen? How can we map that? Cornelia Parker doesn’t suggest she can answer this question but at least she helps us to ask it.

My project is reaching for this. Obviously, a history of the word all is impossible. I could put together the bare details of the etymology but to perfectly honest they’d bore me. There’s something happening every time someone says the word that’s just incredible. The fact that we can make a sound or set of shapes that is capable of conveying so much is incredible. I think there’s something at the root of that which is beyond mysterious. This isn’t really expressed by a map or chart of etymological movements.

Daniel Spoerri has a similar approach. He owned a restaurant in which he would stop people from eating their food near the end of their meal, send them away, glue the leftovers to the table, then hang it on the wall. imagine being a customer in that restaurant. It would inevitably make you look at the finished piece in a different way, particularly if there were an unexpected spillage or an odd object on there. His most famous work is perhaps An Anecdoted Topography of Chance in which he lists and describes the objects on the table in the room in which he was staying, also telling the viewer how he came to own the item. An unassuming picture of the quotidian details of his life develops. It gives a nice look at how his attachments to these ordinary objects have arisen, which leads on in a way from the Exploded View by Cornelia Parker.