Month: April 2020

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.

Marcel Duchamp, 1952

No matter how large a work is, it can exist in, and emerged from, the mind. The mind is at once an infinite and without boundaries and a confined claustrophobic space. The translating a work made to exist in the real world into the virtual world of computer generated illusions is such a case.

I came across a paper by Susan Rosenbaum, ‘Elizabeth Bishop and the Miniature Museum’, that has got my mind firing away at a thousand beats per minute. This idea is nothing new for me, I have always worked on a small scale ocassionally straying into the large and at times monumental. But my daily thinking is firmly fixed on what I can encompass with my hands. This may be because I am shortsighted; maybe it is because I micro manage elements in my life while trying to keep an eye on the whole. It could also be a constraint of the practicalities of making work that would soon outgrow the studio and need resources that would project me into the world of project management rather than creation. All these explanations are valid but the fact remains, that what I do is conceived in the mind to begin with: the physical scale is not so important.

With the end of year show, the limitation of not being able to finish work due to lockdown has validated the small works I have made along the way. They are models, therefore ideal representatives of the large scale works. Scale becomes irrelevant on screen. In the physical world, scale is a primary element in how we relate to an object, but on screen, even the infinitessimal can take on the proportions of giants and vice versa.

But I consider scale, even in the illusory world of the screen, important. The online show offers the opportunity to subvert scales of things or augment relative sizes. For example, the large pieces or microscopic worlds under scrutiny. This might also relate to differing time scales, in a space that may offer ambiguous frames of reference due to the lack, in this case, of imposed architectual constructs.

What all this means is that I could envisage the online showing as a museum in miniature.

This morning, under the ever-present auspices of the linden tree, I completed the restoration of over two hundred posts plus the remaking of the entire blog which was lost on 15 February. All I had to work from was an XML file (just a very long list of HTML) and the images. It has been a long task, but I am pleased to have completed it by around the time I had hoped to.

I feel this is a moment of release when I can now concentrate fully on the completion of the MA and curation of the blog. The process has given me a deep insight into what I had done up to and until the Low Residency, and a clearer understanding of the development of my skills, thoughts and methodology during this period.

I am tidying the studio for another phase of work and these three little lumps keep coming up on the work surface. Funny how the development of Logos started from such a small and unformed beginning. Only a few centimetres across, I think of it as the equivalent of making a sketch on a napkin. However, at the time I rejected this attempt as clumsy, unclear and inadequate. What it did, though, was to set my mind working on the problems and solutions that presented themselves when translating a projection in the mind to physical reality.

Tube Clamp Suppliers

Rubber Tube Instert – Feet Suppliers

For cutting 27mm pipes I can get a pipe cutter

Soon after the start of the MA, I began writing about ritual; how the notion of it would be embedded in the work. But these notions lay outside the process of making.

The process of preparing for the show, now online, has made me reflect on this in a different way. The act of keeping a journal and thinking of the online show as referencing physical work and these references becoming work in themselves, I now see how the process is the ritual. The theme itself is no longer the ritual, it is the thematic context. The process has become the ritual as I embed ideas, thoughts and feelings in a repetitive set of actions that accumulate and accrete into final works over time. The final works become reifications of ritual in the context of a theme. The works have become way-markers in the development of a philosophy.

A few days ago arrived the green screen cloth, all 3 m² of it. The piece is quite unwieldy and I shall have to build a frame for it. The resaon for such a long screen was to cover a wide field of view and ground area for filming and photography.

There a lots of tutorials on how to use green screen. In photoshop using the colour range filter is very simple and straight forward. However, the green screen does tend to distort colour in the image (see above) and this has to be accounted for. If shooting in RAW this can be done post production but it can also be done by adjusted the white balancen in-camera. As always, there is more than one way of achieving a result.

The above example is a very rough mockup. Lighting is all important to give a realistic collage matching the background with the object.

With respect to video, the process is not that different but I suspect it will take up a lot of memory. As I aim to shoot and post produce a number of short clips, this should not be a problem.

Finally, I have done the same sort of thing without a green screen before but this process is vastly faster and easier than anything I have done before. Additionally, it is clearly better for complex shapes and scenes in which I would want to isolate a number of objects.