________shoot and scram

Burroughs Cut-ups

2012-02-25T22:50:00.003-05:00

Burroughs on dreams

2012-02-19T13:06:00.000-05:00

A lecture by William S. Burroughs on public discourse, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Topics included are nuclear weapons, disarmament, the Equal Rights Amendment, aliens, dreams, function of the artist, mind-altering drugs, reincarnation, space travel, television, and economics. Keywords: beat generation, literature and the state, technology and literature, literature and society, protest literature.

"It's important not to give a shit"

2012-02-17T22:09:00.002-05:00

ghost

2012-02-16T17:59:00.003-05:00

Marco Brambilla

2012-02-13T21:12:00.002-05:00

Parting Message to the People of the Future

2012-02-12T20:10:00.001-05:00

Can't say that I agree with everything, but.......

portrait 12

2012-02-09T10:06:00.003-05:00

lou

2012-02-07T11:35:00.001-05:00

intermission

2012-02-02T08:56:00.003-05:00

Errol Morris: Two Essential Truths About Photography

2012-01-02T09:33:00.004-05:00

The Internet in Society

2011-12-23T13:48:00.000-05:00

CF 2.0

2011-12-18T16:39:00.008-05:00

CF 2.0

It's been a while since I've actually written anything on this blog. But having gotten passed the thesis work I have a little bit of breathing room. That said, I believe that the above work needs some explanation.

Way back I remember hearing about Lambroso's work and theory that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by multiple physical features. This has always intrigued me and having been working with layering of portraits I've had him in mind.

Although I try to keep to using my own work, once in a while I look for material on the web to experiment with. This is where Claire Felice's work comes in. In Here are the Young Men "her series of triptych portraits of marines of the 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps. The series, Here are the Young Men (Marked), shows close-cropped portraits of the Dutch marines before, during and after they were deployed to Uruzgan, Afghanistan in 2009-2010."

All of the subjects seem to have changed so much that I couldn't help myself, I had to use them just to see.

Cesare Lombroso

2011-12-18T13:01:00.002-05:00

Lombroso's general theory suggested that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by multiple physical anomalies. He postulated that criminals represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man characterized by physical features reminiscent of apes, lower primates, and early man and to some extent preserved, he said, in modern "savages." The behavior of these biological "throwbacks" will inevitably be contrary to the rules and expectations of modern civilized society.

The Unseen Eye

2011-12-16T09:40:00.003-05:00

"I maintain that photographs are ultimately unreadable. The seeming representational nature of the medium is misleading because we will not find any real truth. As viewers, we should recognize how much subjectivity we bring to understanding images. We act like prisms. So I have to remind myself that my reaction to or reading of a photograph is mine alone. It is only my truth."
- W.M. Hunt (in: The Unseen Eye, Aperture, 2011, p. 60)

tonight you belong to me

2011-12-15T19:36:00.000-05:00

what is crowdsoarcing

2011-12-04T10:32:00.000-05:00

(Untitled Post)

2011-11-18T08:45:00.003-05:00

same but different

2011-10-25T16:57:00.001-04:00

anonymous

2011-10-09T15:34:00.011-04:00

anonymous |əˈnänəməs|

adjective

(of a person) not identified by name; of unknown name : the anonymous author of Beowulf | the donor's wish to remain anonymous | an anonymous phone call.

• having no outstanding, individual, or unusual features; unremarkable or impersonal : the anonymous black car waiting to take him to the airport | a faceless, anonymous group.

• [ postpositive ] used in names of support groups for addicts of a substance or behavior to indicate the confidentiality maintained among members of the group : Alcoholics Anonymous | Debtors Anonymous.

DERIVATIVES

anonymity |ˌanəˈnimitē| noun

anonymously adverb

ORIGIN late 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek anōnumos ‘nameless’ (from an- ‘without’ + onoma ‘name’ ) + -ous .

Hello World!

2011-10-04T13:16:00.001-04:00

Christopher Baker

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

sphere

2011-09-28T21:33:00.001-04:00

social sphere

WTF!?

2011-09-28T18:48:00.000-04:00

Reconstruction

2011-09-23T15:17:00.000-04:00

Brain scanner can record your dreams on video

By Evan Ackerman
Berkeley, via SciAm

mobs

2011-09-23T14:31:00.006-04:00

2011 London Riots

Marshall McLuhan speaks

2011-09-23T11:08:00.003-04:00

Auspice: Director's commentary

2011-09-19T21:23:00.005-04:00

Idiris Kahn revisited

2011-09-18T11:55:00.000-04:00

Konstnärspresentation, Idris Khan from Isak Bodin Alfredsson on Vimeo.

Gerhard Richter - Portraits

2011-09-17T23:25:00.001-04:00

Photo Opportunities by Corinne Vionnet

2011-09-17T19:14:00.001-04:00

mainstream?

2011-09-14T16:01:00.005-04:00

The following commercial was aired during Monday Night Football (9/12/11).

Granted, it is for G+ and Google Chrome, but what makes it is that it featured the Johnny Cash Project. Having been looking at the whole internet collaboration/crowdsoarcing phenomenon, the whole thing makes me wonder if this means the future is here? After all, there is not much out there more main stream than Monday Night Football.

According to "Google Chromes Crowdsoarced Tribute To The Man In Black", Google seems to be taking credit for the project instead of the creator Aaron Kobin. Just saying....

containment

2011-09-03T15:44:00.002-04:00

2011-09-01T22:54:00.001-04:00

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village

2011-08-29T23:16:00.003-04:00

for shit and giggles, a twist on last semester's favorite.

Artfully visualizing our humanity

2011-08-29T13:56:00.000-04:00

as a crowd gathers

2011-08-15T17:33:00.002-04:00

As A Crowd Gathers from Red Channels on Vimeo.

"as a crowd gathers is a selection of video essays constructed through an autonomous collective approach to research. of interest are the ways artists and social theorists, as well as evolving media and technology, have attempted to understand, represent, and control the potential of crowds. the crowd is a social relation that is never separate from artist/researcher/theorist. this is one potential manifestation of a co-studied genealogy of crowds, affect, and cinema; historical and represented. toward new understandings, crowds, collectivity, and its affective political potential, we think of our work together as studied experiences and repetition of new social forms we want to express in the world." more here.

Dunbar's Number

2011-08-08T16:34:00.000-04:00

Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends

by NPR STAFF

GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. It centers on the guy who founded the company, Bill Gore.

"When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.

From its modest beginnings, GORE-TEX grew and grew, Dunbar says, until Gore opened up a large factory. That, too, continued to grow.

Then one day, Dunbar says, Gore walked into his factory.

"And he simply didn't know who everybody was."

Gore wondered why this was. "It was his gut instinct," Dunbar says, "that the bigger a company got, people working for the company were much less likely to work hard and help each other out."

Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. People couldn't keep track of each other. Any sense of community was gone.

So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees.

"Whenever they needed to expand the company," Dunbar says, "he would just build a new factory. Sometimes right on the parking lot next door."

Things ran better this way, Gore realized. In smaller factories, Dunbar says, "everybody knew who was who. Who was the manager, who was the accountant, who made the sandwiches for lunch."

Business was never better. One-hundred fifty, it seemed, was a magic number.

The Truth About Your Facebook Friends

Most of Dunbar's research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed "Dunbar's Number."

Ironically, the term was coined on Facebook, where 150 friends may seem like precious few.

"There was a discussion by people saying 'I've got too many friends — I don't know who half these people are,'" Dunbar says. "Somebody apparently said, 'Look, there's this guy in England who says you can't have more than 150.'"

Dunbar has found 150 to be the sweet spot for hunter-gatherer societies all over the world. From the Bushmen of Southern Africa to Native American tribes, a typical community is about 150 people. Amish and Hutterite communities — even most military companies around the world — seem to follow the same rule.

The reason 150 is the optimal number for a community comes from our primate ancestors, Dunbar says. In smaller groups, primates could work together to solve problems and evade predators. Today, 150 seems to be the number at which our brains just max out on memory.

But what does this all mean if you're not Amish — or the CEO of GORE-TEX?

A Friendly Network Stretched Thin

"We developed this 150 limit at a time when most of those people lived geographically close to you," says David Dobbs, who blogs for Wired magazine. His own network of relationships is an example of how Dunbar's Number is facing modern-day complications.

Dobbs has a father in Texas, a sister in California and close friends in New Hampshire and Illinois. Plus, he's got business contacts all over the world.

It all adds up, Dunbar says, to a very fragmented 150-member network.

"You grow up somewhere, you go to school on the other side of the country, you get a job, you go to Europe for a bit — it's much harder for us to keep those relationships working and good when they're that distributed," Dunbar says.

Dobbs offers another modern challenge: What happens when your work relationships have elements of social relationships as well? Who has the time for both?

For workers in smaller companies, Dunbar says, that problem is often solved for them. In companies smaller than 500 people, his research has shown, "there's a very strong tendency for colleagues also to be your friends."

How about if you're employed by a larger corporation, upwards of several thousand people? You're more likely to venture outside your vocational network in your social life.

Community Over 'Friends'

Dunbar says there are some neurological mechanisms in place to help us cope with the ever-growing amount of social connections life seems to require. Humans have the ability, for example, to facially recognize about 1,500 people. Now that would be an impressive number of Facebook friends.

Yet the problem with such a large number of "friends," Dunbar says, is that "relationships involved across very big units then become very casual — and don't have that deep meaning and sense of obligation and reciprocity that you have with your close friends."

One solution to that problem, he adds, can be seen in the modern military. Even as they create "supergroups" — battalions, regiments, divisions — most militaries are nonetheless able to maintain the sense of community felt at the 150-person company level.

"The answer has to come out of that," Dunbar says, "trying to create a greater sense of community.

"In a way, Americans are lucky in that respect," he adds. "There's this long tradition of commitment to ideals that binds Americans together. That isn't always true elsewhere."

While modern society does make it hard to hang on to friends who aren't geographically close, Dunbar says, his research shows family is different.

"Friends, if you don't see them, will gradually cease to be interested in you," he says. "Family relationships seem to be very stable. No matter how far away you go, they love you when you come back."

LISTEN TO STORY

THE DEMO

2011-08-08T16:02:00.006-04:00

The Demo

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

The original 100-minute video of this event is part of the Engelbart Collection in Special Collections of Stanford University. This original video has been edited into 35 segments and reformatted as Flash streaming video clips. There is a brief abstract of the subject matter treated in each segment.

face in the crowd

2011-08-03T17:56:00.002-04:00

face of the crowd

face of the herd

herds

2011-08-02T13:55:00.003-04:00

inaugural

festival

protest

mob

Experimenting with different crowd images pulled from the web.

Fred Ritchin, What's Next

2011-08-02T10:28:00.003-04:00

the "internet"

2011-07-31T09:50:00.002-04:00

digital nation 1

2011-07-25T14:35:00.007-04:00

digital nation 2

2011-07-25T14:34:00.005-04:00

crowd

2011-07-25T11:41:00.000-04:00

WOLFGANG TILLMANS AUDIO SLIDESHOW

2011-07-23T11:50:00.002-04:00

Wolfgang Tillmans from Photoworks on Vimeo.

3:49

2011-07-22T11:28:00.006-04:00

Still experimenting with video. Not sure if it's something that I will use come January, but.......

5th and final round

2011-07-22T11:03:00.001-04:00

With the last residency down there is no turning back. Everything went better then expected and I had some of the best crits so far. In many ways, it was a Blue Ribbon semester for sure. That said, I still have a couple of things that need some figuring out and am feeling pretty confident.

Below are the two that got the best reaction during the last residency.

After my first meeting with Shellburne Thurber, I have a few new ideas. She was very receptive and I had a great time talking with her. All in all, it was a very productive meeting and I walked away feeling good about where I'm at right now. More on that later, need to digest a bit. As is, I don't want to jinx myself, but everything seems to be lining up at the right time. At least, it feels that way. I'm sure that I'll be singing a different tune in a couple of months when I'm knee deep.

chances are

2011-06-06T18:09:00.004-04:00

The following picture is one of the first that I took when I started this Chatroulette (CR) piece that I've been working on and one of my favorites from the series. It was images like this that sucked me into the process.

The image below I found on a blog CASIE STEWART: THIS IS MY LIFE while I was doing some research.

Being that this is one of my favorites out of thousands, I though that it was funny that someone else was able to capture and post almost the same image. And all along, due to the randomness of site, I felt that the pictures that I was getting were unique and one of a kind.
I know that there is nothing special about someone else being on CR and coming across the same individuals on say a Saturday afternoon, Feb 27, 2010 (to be specific). Chances are that you are likely to cross paths with the some of the same people, as long as you are on around the same time for long enough.

15 minutes of fame

2011-06-03T18:47:00.003-04:00

then and now

2011-05-30T16:49:00.001-04:00

Edie Sedgwick
1964

unknown
2010

2011-05-29T21:03:00.003-04:00

Trying to see if I can make this dissolve video effect work better. This one is using two frames per subject. Need to work on the timing and how to group them since I'm not sure that the random route works that well. Working on a couple of others but figured that this would be worth posting. The sound is a bunch of random and looped audio taken from sites like Chatroulette and Justin.tv. Not quite sure about the audio or the format for that matter, but....

mosaic(s)

2011-05-29T13:28:00.001-04:00

Trying to figure out if the mosaics are worth pursuing. The above are three examples, two of which are new in the sense that I had not used them before for this purpose. The one that I had and was told by my mentor that it works the best is the one in the center.
In the coming days/hours I will be posting what I hope will be what I go back with for the next residency in a couple of weeks.

2011-05-29T12:32:00.003-04:00

civil rights marcher
mugshots

Amalgamation of civil right marchers arrested during the first Selma to Montgomery march on "Bloody Sunday" which started on Mar 7, 1965. Over 600 were arrested, the above includes 66 mugshots including that of Rev. King.

Mitch Epstein

2011-05-24T22:54:00.001-04:00

Mitch Epstein explores how privacy is acted out in the public spaces of New York. In this video he tells the story of one such time when he disturbed a strangely 'ordinary' exhibitionist couple from his rooftop.

Ryan Lobo: Photographing the hidden story

2011-05-22T22:34:00.001-04:00

Emotional Haptic Communication with Yourself

2011-05-20T19:36:00.002-04:00

The Human Touch

2011-05-20T18:59:00.000-04:00

The Computer Generation

2011-05-10T13:19:00.005-04:00

other

2011-05-09T10:56:00.003-04:00

Herd 2

Been meaning to post a sample of some work that I've been doing. Not sure if I can relate this to my school work, but.....

This is a result of playing with collages, layering multiple exposures and mosaics.

MISC

At this point I'm not sure if this is too gimmicky or whether it works with every type of image or content. I'm also aware that its way too easy to let the process take over making them look over done, so I'm still experimenting.

53rd St

Last Suppah

Drummer

rink

So far I like the results and have had some good feedback. Even coming off last residency, the couple of similar pieces that I took with me went over well. The only difference now is that I'm incorporating pictures from my stock pile, which means endless hours of fun.

Academically, I just got done with the last paper before thesisville and hope that it sets the table for my the thesis outline. As my old buddy and veteran of the program tells me, "peaks and valleys", so, lets see what happens.

progress?

2011-04-23T18:13:00.019-04:00

Warhol’s Screen Tests are revealing portraits of hundreds of different individuals, shot between 1963 and 1966. The subjects include both famous and anonymous visitors to Warhol’s studio, including poet Allen Ginsberg, actor Dennis Hopper, and artist Salvador Dali, along with many other diverse individuals. When asked to pose, subjects were lit and filmed by Warhol’s stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film. Each Screen Test is exactly the same length, lasting only as long as the roll of film. The standard formula of subject and camera remaining almost motionless for the duration of the film, results in a “living portrait.” The films, projected in slow motion, last four minutes each. Outside of Warhol’s standardized process there are subtle lighting and focus variations in the Screen Tests. Jane Holzer’s is in soft focus and suffused with light, creating an ethereal, hypnotic effect while Piero Heliczer’s is darker in mood. In addition, there are a number of Screen Tests that diverge from this format entirely, the sitter purposely moving, gesticulating, or using props.

“Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person. It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph. Photographs usually bring in another half-dimension. (Movies bring in another whole dimension. That screen magnetism is something secret – if you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you’d have a really good product to sell. But you can’t even tell if someone has it until you actually see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.)”

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 63.

“The resulting films drastically reduced the roles of director and viewer alike. The director’s function was limited to choosing the subject, setting up the shot, turning the camera on and off and deciding whether or not to exhibit the result. And the viewer, for the first time in the history of the commercial exploitation of persistence-of-vision, was relieved of the obligation—perhaps even a large part of the desire—to pay attention to the screen. The standard ‘film-as-wallpaper’ definition of the early Warhol films doesn’t stand up, since their entire meaning and effect spring from the fact of their projection on a screen in a darkened room.”

Tony Rayns, writer in “Andy Warhol: Film Factory”

“The many Screen Tests evidence a variety of behavior of its portrait subjects, but amazingly little improvisation. The subjects actually look like they are captured and about to be interrogated, but the interrogation never happens, because Andy wanted to capture the essence of the person only, no interference, just like no interference with the camera as it recorded each “moving” still-life. The “Screen Tests” rank in the Warhol pantheon along with the Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyns, and self-portraits.”

Billy Name-Linich, Factory photographer

So, looking for more of Warhol's videos I came across a few stills from the Screen Test series. I started to see the same expression and overall feel of these images that attracted me to the Chatroulette portraits that I have been working on. It's that same "in between time", a term used by Walker Evans in Many Are Called to describe his pictures of NY commuters.

That said, time is running out on the semester, thesis outline breathing down my neck so its getting harrier by the minute.

AI_Waiting Room

2011-04-11T17:23:00.000-04:00

The Waiting Room from Studio Next on Vimeo.

Came across this while looking for stuff dealing with the gaze and waiting. Could be the most beautiful bag ad ever filmed.

Connected Lives: The New Social Network Operating System

2011-04-03T13:59:00.000-04:00

Eva and Franco Mattes

2011-03-30T18:01:00.000-04:00

No Fun from Eva and Franco Mattes aka 01.ORG on Vimeo.

This one had evaded me....

Michael Wolf

2011-03-20T19:13:00.004-04:00

Michael Wolf speaks of his Google Street View work from Olivier Laurent on Vimeo.

Kool-Aid Man

2011-03-18T08:48:00.000-04:00

A Conversation with Jon Rafman from badatsports on Vimeo.

William Klein

2011-03-16T17:25:00.000-04:00

three minutes with a stranger

2011-03-09T17:09:00.003-05:00

The above are a sample of the techniques that I've been experimenting with. Typically I've been using a combination of different characters/portraits taken from Chatroulette but am trying to go with the multiple slides of the same person. I still can't get much when I've tried to engage these people so I'm just taking what I can get away with. Now I'm wondering that if interaction will change the results so much that it will take from it. So far it seems that most encounters are well under three minutes, which is why I didn't use all of the images on the video, figuring that it might keep it close to the actual experience. Like before the sound I gathered from other sites like http://www.justin.tv/ and layered them. The video needs some fine tuning.

So, I'm still experiment with the material and how to best present it. On the academic side, as usual I need to pick up the pace. Have less then four months to figure out what it is that I want to say with this and how. Easy...

herd

2011-02-28T13:19:00.001-05:00

ChatRoulette : An Initial Survey

2011-02-25T22:05:00.001-05:00

ChatRoulette : An Initial Survey

View more documents from GuiM _

3fer

2011-02-24T21:00:00.007-05:00

amalgamated savior

2011-02-24T12:21:00.001-05:00

Having been experimenting with layers and seeing the work of Corinne Vionnete and Idris Kahn has made me want to use different imagery. In thinking about it I started looking for an iconic image that everyone would be familiar with, up until now I had only been using my own pictures. The above is a result of a hasty search, but I am pleased with the outcome. I realize that this is a bit removed from my current direction but it's something that I want to examine a bit closer.

getting nexted

2011-02-18T16:06:00.001-05:00

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

ChatRoulette.com: Anonymous Intimacy and Why We Say Stupid Things Online

Many Are Called

2011-02-17T20:27:00.000-05:00

mosaic

2011-02-16T13:50:00.002-05:00

Still on the fence, looks like its going to take some fine tuning before i know if its worth it.

mosaic

2011-02-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

One of the many suggestions made was that I should try to play with the CR images that I've taken over the last year. As recommended, here is my attempt at creating a mosaic using one of my amalgamated images. For what its worth, I used a free app called AndreaMosaic, may pay for the full version to see how much i can tweak it.

Idris Khan

2011-02-15T09:47:00.002-05:00

Idris Khan’s multi-layered photos

Posted by Photo Slaves in PhotographersSep 28th, 2009 | 3 responses

Idris Khan creates multi-layered photos, often of appropriated art and books, in a way that both augments the aura of the original and reveals the idiosyncratic trace of his own hand. Khan’s work explores the history of photography and literature, the beauty of repetition and the anxieties of authorship. “it’s obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings – warmth, humour, anxiety – to what might otherwise be considered cool aloof image. You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering. It looks like a drawing. It’s not systematic or uniform. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision”. Idris Khan graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Royal college of Art in 2003.

Since completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, the young British artist Idris Khan (born in 1978) has produced an intellectually lucid and visually impressive oeuvre in only a few years. Khan’s subjects show his passionate interest in culturally coded works and artefacts from the spheres of literature, art and music. Photography and video are his media of choice. In his photographs he digitally superimposes pictures, texts or scores he has acquired onto one another. He has applied this method to postcards of Turner paintings, photographs of industrial buildings by Bernd and Hilla Becher, notations from Wagners Parsifal, pages of the Koran and from a treatise by Sigmund Freud. Idris Khan’s composites turn texts, pictures and music into a vibrating turbulence and give them a new dimension of presence.

Working with appropriated imagery, Idris Khan’s photos are all-encompassing composites, consolidating iconic cultural symbols of similar type into single ‘super-images’. In this selection of his every… series, Khan aggregates the work of renowned artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, famous for their vast photographic collections of buildings and industrial sites. Exposed in translucent layers, anchored by the compositions’ continuous shapes, the Becher’s gasholders and gabled houses loose their commanding simplicity and rigid formalism, descending into fractured and gestural blurs merely suggestive of the originals. Through this process of layering, Khan creates a poetic malleability from the fixed codes of history. Compressing the timeline of repetition into indivisible subsuming moments, his photos offer a glimpse into the sublime.

You integrate a wide spectrum of West European fine culture from the last several centuries in your work. Is there a political aspect behind your choice of material?

In many ways my work could be defined as having an undermining political aspect to it. When one looks at my name and then looks at the work and views the layering as an attack on the different sources then it could be seen in this way. For me this wasn’t the initial idea but I think art should provoke all sorts of discussions. I want my work to be seen as a homage to the art, literature and music that has influenced my mind and the way I see the world.

In many ways your photographic works are more like paintings due to the layers of material rather than “traditional” photographing. How do you collect your material? And do you photograph the original works “live” or from books?

It is very important to me to collect my material through existing objects in the world. So most of the work is produced by photographing or scanning from books that are accessible to everyone… .i.e books that anyone can buy. I always wanted to be a painter: I can’t paint. I’ve always wanted to be a musician: I was too lazy to learn to read notes and always wanted to play music by ear. I‘ve always liked the idea of becoming a writer: but I can hardly write and reading frustrates me, because I find my mind wonders with images too much. The words always seem to move in front of my eyes and jump off the page instead of dwelling on my thoughts. Like many, I have to repeat a page again and again and I like this process. With each media, there is the different act of looking that you have to adopt to with each one. The one to one aspect of reading a book is an intimate experience, viewing art in a museum is usually a shared experience with you and the space that it is positioned in, listening to music can be both intimate and shared. A book is taken out of its usual intimate experience and becomes a large piece of art that can penetrate and pulsate in front of your eyes. The Music pieces envelop in front of the viewer and have the power of art instead of sound.

It is almost impossible to define your works’ relation to time. What does a theme like “time” mean to you? And how do you handle it?

It is hard to avoid the aspect of time when producing what one sees as a photograph. The viewer observes one of my images as something that is not a frozen moment but an image made up of many moments and that is created over ‘time’ rather than taken. For me, photography is a constant battle with its surface. I like to think that when people look at my image that they no longer think about looking at what is photographed, for example a sheet of music, but look at the surface of the image with no real sense of depth but to push everything and flatten it to the surface of the paper. When the audience engage with the work, I rarely hear them discuss it as photography (but more about looking at the images as a series of marks or traces on a photographic surface). Its important for me to understand art without boundaries or constraints to what is or what isn’t a painting or a photograph. All my images become in some way painterly or have a drawn-like quality and when I hit that point when making my images I know I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve. It is a challenge to not define my work as a photograph but using the medium of photography to create something that exists on the surface of the paper and not to be transported back to an isolated moment in time.

It could be interesting to hear something about your working process in general?

Every layer is an effect that needs to be created. All the scans are done at 100% and then I choose the amount of opacity I wish to have with every layer. Each layer is a fallible human decision. When I layer each scan, there is a decision made as to what I want to stay and what has to disappear. This process allows me to cut out the camera completely. The decisions that are made become intrinsic to the work and how it looks at the end. How much I want each image to be aligned, or how much emphasis I want to give to certain marks. After the over layering I work on the image intensively with the paint tool and darken and lighten certain marks. When I feel a line meets a line or a mark distracts the eye I remove it.

It’s important for me to understand the disciplines of contemporary art without boundaries or constraints to what is or what isn’t – in this case – a photograph or even photography. I’m not sure what this is anymore myself. Thinking of analogue photography, I use to think of it as three objects. The object in front of the camera, the negative produced and finally the print. There is a spatial and temporal gap due to the analogue technical procedure. I like the fact that I use a process in which the negative is superfluous. Whether I photograph straight out of the book with a digital camera or scan every page, the image never becomes fixed in the form of a transparent negative. And the process of the image generation accelerates when working with digital processes. It seems to be reduced to making an image and then print and that is something I find interesting; the fact that the image doesn’t have a material existence and can be manipulated endlessly until it is finally printed.

Do you work with assistants? Which software do you use for editing…?

I work with one assistant, she has brown hair!, and I use Final Cut Pro and Photoshop a lot.

Do you want to unveil anything about future projects?

I have my first public art commission opening in April in London. The piece will be located in the pavement outside an old post sorting office that is being converted into gallery and studio spaces.

For this commission I have created a series of short films that combined my obsession with memory and repetition based on the historical significance of Howick Place as a Sorting Office for the Royal Mail. I built a post office film set out of cardboard and packing tape in my studio.

Contemporary society is increasingly dependent on digital communication and therefore communicating through writing is becoming obsolete. I became fascinated that Howick Place was a building that contained so many thoughts and words flooding through it daily and that its new function would also be a place of ideas and creativity. The films will contain different hand written or painted messages that shall be played in reverse. By reversing life we enter into a utopian world whereby complicated or the easiest tasks look beautiful and mesmerizing. I will be filmed ripping, throwing and sketching these messages, which could be seen as a message for our time.

The films shall be displayed on several plasma screens that will be embedded into the pavement directly in front of the entrance to the Design Studio. By placing the screens on the pavement the viewers shall have more interaction with the space and hopefully be mesmerized by my actions in the films.

Photos:

[Slideshow]

Idiris Khan (Q&A)

amalgamation

2011-02-15T07:54:00.000-05:00

The Class of 1967
& The Class of 1988

Jason Salavon

ISOLATION

2011-02-14T14:56:00.004-05:00

So after a couple of weeks of wallowing in self-pity and being full of doubt the worm has started to turn. My semester summary was short and to the point, basically pointed out how i felt as if i had been smacked down a couple of pegs and where I was as a result. This is behind me so its time to get to it.

That said, and getting back to the summary, in it I explained how I had expected to base my work on Guy Debord's view that everything that was once directly experienced has become a representation of such. And how I saw that this representation has presently surpassed legitimate social interaction and where at one time Industry and mass transportation shaped our world, it has since been replaced by technology.

However, it was pointed out that one could argue that now we live in a 'bottom up' culture, where people provide the content for the corporate entities. This has made me rethink a couple of things, where before society was dependent on what was dolled out by industry its true that the tables are now turned. Technology has allowed society some leverage making it so corporations and industries are now dependent on information and access to the masses that is only possible through things like social networking. This has made it so our participation now is completely voluntary, has become second nature and spans the world. As a result we have isolated ourselves and are becoming dependent on gadgets to communicate with one another, no matter the distance or social or physical barrier.

This brings me back to 'Society of the Spectacle', Debord states the following:

Technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods are selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. #28

Key word in the above is ISOLATION and this is what resonates in my work and something that had to be pointed out (thanks OW). The plan is now to focus on finding material that relates to the idea that this technology does isolate and continues to push us appart while bringing in us closer. Like the work of Greg Van Alstyne, whose Cyberspace and the Lonely Crowd essay also uses Debord's theories to examine the effects on modern society.

Stay tuned......

'Alone Together'

2011-01-27T08:19:00.002-05:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Sherry Turkle

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

3rd resi aftermath

2011-01-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

So here it is, another residency down. This time next year, assuming that everything works out, I'll be able to relax a bit. In the in between I have a couple of things to do.

To start off, working with Alix Lambert was a great experience and am looking forward to working with Matthew Gamber who agreed yesterday to mentor me during this semester. In looking at his work and background I think that he will be a good fit. Oliver Wasow who will be my advisor this semester agrees. Speaking of advisors, it can only get better. The only real input from the last one was limited to the feedback/report card/advisor report. Way too little way too late....

That said, maybe I can figure things out and get back on track. As it was I thought that I was up to speed, after the ten days I'm not so sure. Feeling a little bit like I might be in over my head.

Time to get to it.

test run video with audio

2011-01-13T12:06:00.003-05:00

37in1

2010-12-26T16:08:00.000-05:00

day and night

2010-12-26T14:33:00.003-05:00

Catfish ~ Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman's documentary

2010-12-26T02:18:00.007-05:00

Auggie Wrens Christmas Story

2010-12-24T11:44:00.002-05:00

looking in

2010-12-24T11:40:00.001-05:00

collage 854

2010-12-17T16:15:00.002-05:00

strip grid

2010-12-16T20:23:00.000-05:00

20in1

2010-12-12T17:13:00.000-05:00

multi exposed

2010-12-12T15:17:00.002-05:00

insides overlapped

2010-12-12T15:12:00.001-05:00

outsides overlapped

2010-12-12T14:00:00.000-05:00

insides vid

2010-12-06T23:33:00.002-05:00

trunktrip

2010-12-06T19:28:00.005-05:00

crvid

2010-12-04T20:03:00.016-05:00

need to work on the audio part. not sure why the title slide shows feb 26. all images were captured after the summer.

millscope

2010-12-04T11:24:00.007-05:00

PLATE F

2010-12-04T10:45:00.003-05:00

"Man With A Movie Camera" (1929)

2010-12-02T09:42:00.002-05:00

William Klein

2010-11-26T08:08:00.001-05:00

fence

2010-11-25T11:17:00.002-05:00