Tutorial - 11/02/13

What are the aims, intentions and interests that you are exploring through your practice/written work?

•    something that impacts on and effects the audience the audience + makes their suffering come across.

• using appropriated images / footage based on eating disorders and the mental disturbances of it. particularly emphasising on footage found on rhodes farm.

•  Highlighting aspects of their illness or discomfort

•  I want to make something unpleasant/ disconcerting/ attacking to watch and experience.

Describe three issues in your practical/written work that you need to address and discuss in your tutorial    

•   Whether the topic of eating disorders is important to me and/or what im trying to achieve with my work
• Booking out a project space – what I should show in it, how should I arrange it 
•  Trying out multiple screens

Agreed Actions

• monika oeschler - video
• fat is a feminist issue - susie orback
• book space - email ersan turk + katrine - look what space i want 
• kutlug atsman - video installation 
• julie kristeva - abject 
• maria walsh 
• make on footage ?

I showed this video as well which actually isnt finished 

.......

Jean Baudrillard and Simulation - the copy

We had a lecture the other day which was very relevant to my work and my essay that I'm currently writing. Due to it's relation to appropriation and the copy.

The idea of the copy 

• uncanny repetition 
• feelings of deception and anxiety 
• de-establishing singularity 
• with the twin towers they had to destroy both of them to make it meaningful - with this though we weren't seeing anything new it was a replication of a hollywood film.
• blurring between reality and fantasy 
• Plato said reality lives in a world of ideal forms 
• we see a world of shadows 

• Albrecht Durer replicated his work but his signature made it original
• He set what a rhinoceros looked like as he drew one from a description and other artists would look to his drawing and replicate it in their work as they didn't know what a rhinoceros looked like - but there copy is still original in their work

• Eduard Manet - portraiture - he wanted to make a copy of life and not make n idealistic image. 
• Georges Seurat - turns painting into something mechanical like photography - which copies life and is made up of tiny dots, so he painted in dots
• Roy Lichtenstein-relates to 4 colour printing of dots, pokes fun at authenticity and looks at pop culture and comics
• Andy Warhol - did painting by numbers works showing its mechanical process . when images are massed produced they loose their impact - eg. with his car crash images theres so many you just see the image and not the devastation 
• Charles Ray - life size model of a model fire truck - a moment of certainty to uncertainty
• Thomas Dernand - Makes models or real things / sites with significance and photographs them so they look actual size. 
• Allan McCollum - Thought he didn't need to make any new pictures as theres so many already . He took pictures that he saw on the tv behind actors and photographed them and blew them up. He thinks they are surrogates of the real images and are standing in for the need to make any new images. - but he did make new images doing this !

• At Disney World people think the have experienced something simulated and when you leave , you leave into the World of America where things are real. When really it isn't and disney world is actually showing you everything is fake.
• Sherrie Levine - rephotographs famous photos from books.
• Hiroshi Sugimoto - Photographs wax works to make it like a portrait of the actual person - uncanny 

• The copy can be thought of as an issue of plagiarism but a way of thing about how to make something new, when both nothings of originality and authenticity seems open to question.

Hitachi consulting opportunity

A few weeks ago I went with a group of students for chelsea to Hitachi consulting's office at More London Riverside, which consist of some amazing modern architectural buildings by London and Tower bridge. 

We looked round the office and had a talk about the company and the opportunity we have to make some work for their offices. 

Things they want and points made - 

• work to respond to the building/area/company/history or the way the space is used. 
• has to be robust and be able to last a year. 
• can't be to controversial 
• would be good if it was a talking point.
• reflect hitachi spirit and values
• complements the surroundings

• hitachi means sunrise - and the symbol is a combination of the chinese symbols for that
• they aim to create a better society through technology as our society changes
• they desire a reputation of being knowledgeable 
• founded in 1910
• 940 companies around the world  
• hitachi consulting was born in america 

• we have to make a proposal for our work that we would want to make for it and present it to hitachi
• 8 people will be chosen 
• given £250 to do the work

I have a meeting on monday to discuss our ideas we have as a group - need to think of something ! 

Repetition compulsion

So I was looking into the nature of compulsive and repetitive behaviour on the internet and I came across the term Repetition Compulsion which I found quite interesting.

It's a psychological phenomenon where a person repeats a traumatic event or circumstances over and over again. It includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. It can also take the form of dreams and feelings of what happened are repeated.

The term also covers the repetition of behavioural life patterns. Freud says it describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviours which were difficult or distressing in earlier life.

There is a lot more too this and the theory why people do it etc. but just this brief overview of it had aspects which I find really interesting in relation to making my art. I would kind of like to do this in a way in my videos with my use of repetition and reenact a traumatic event/situation/time and put that on the audience.

AL tutorial With Fran Cottell

Here are some suggestions she made about my work

• I should try showing different versions/experiments of my videos in a project space and get feedback from people to see which is the most successful
• maybe have something with a beginning and an end to draw people in to watching it.
• talked about how it is art and how to make it more art than just a comment on something.
• I explained I wanted the videos to be an experience and she related that to bill viola who said something similar about his videos.
• maybe have more abiguity so its not so obvious what it's about.

You talkin' to me ?

Douglas Gordon : Through a looking glass.

I saw this last year at Tate Liverpool as part of an Alice in Wonderland exhibition. It takes a scene from the film Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro asks "You talkin' to me?" whilst looking into a mirror and holding a gun .

"The two facing images, which begin in sync, progressively fall out of step, echoing the character's loss of control and his mental breakdown. These discordant projected images seem to respond to one another, thus trapping the viewer in the crossfire. In its almost dizzying play of dualities, through a looking glass perfectly articulates the dialectical inversions, doublings, and repetitions that are the central concerns of Gordon's work." (guggenheim) 

There are two screens facing each other which play this scene, they start synchronised and then become out of sync so becomes a dialogue between the 2 screens which you are stuck between. 

Lux

I was told to look at this website called Lux  (theres a .org on and a lux online one which are slightly different)in one of my tutorials. So glad I was its a great website for videos artists to look at. Theres quite a lot of resources and essays to read and videos to watch about film making and video art which I have found quite good to read through and for looking at artists.

I have been looking at installation on the website so here an example of something/