low residency

Low Residency: Day 4 – Sound Workshop

Alexis

 

 

It has been some time since the Low Residency. Many thanks to Ed Kelly for condensing into a relatively short time frame a great deal of theory and making. I was already very familiar with Audacity but there is always something to learn and I have taken on board a number of ideas. The great usefulness was to clarify and formalise certain practices that I have followed either intuitively or uncritically. The principle one is the idea of cutting or editing at zero. This avoids clicks and pops producing clean edits. The other is more a concept, that of fragmentation or deconstructing sound into atomic elements which can then be used as building blocks. This ties in with the introduction to Musique Concrete in a Skype lecture a few weeks ago.

We spent time harvesting sounds from a variety of objects. I was particularly taken by a small music box mechanism that Ed brought along. He turned the handle in short bursts while I recorded. This broke up what would have been a familiar melody into fragments of sound. It is a fascinating approach to capturing sound, so much so, that I ordered a number of mechanisms over the web with which I have started to experiment. 

Ed mentioned Pure Data, a visual programming software which was, however, too much of a learning curve for the workshop. Although I have started using it, it is too early to say if I shall be using it in the final works, much depends on whether I can find work-arounds to my aims rather than spending too much making-time learning how to use it. 

After collecting the sounds, each one of us put together a short soundwork (below). I was particularly taken by the reverberation in the stairwells  (pictured above) running up the new building at Camberwell. 

 

 

The rectangular spiral staircase resonated in my mind with the spiral stairs at the Queen’s House we visited in Greenwich.

 

 

Low Residency – Day 2: Group Tutorials

Alexis

 

The group tutorial was led with a light touch by former student Andrew Fairley. This allowed us to navigate one another’s practice openly. My presentation, based on the blog journal, allowed me to summarise what I have done during the course period in the context of my previous work.

Pav asked me what challenge, what question am I posing with my work? This question that can be opened out in many ways. For some, it is a simple case of stating concerns regarding an issue of social or cultural significance, for others it may be a technical or philosophical matter about their practice. However, I feel that it is important to allow the receiver to infer from what I present and do, any questions or challenges that they might see in the work. It is not for me to impose the questions I pose myself onto their contextual standpoint. Of course I have my own questions and challenges, they are in this sense a framework around which my practice is built. However, at the moment of presenting I am more concerned with what the response might be. 

Nevertheless, what I do feel important is, to give the receiver some sort of lead as to the provenance of the synthesis embodied in the work in the form of some text or conversation. Enigmatic presentations are all well and good in engendering debate, but they can also risk work being dismissed or, perhaps less importantly, deeply misunderstood. Minimalist works are especially susceptible to this as are conceptual works, particularly in the case of the latter if they are no aesthetically engaging. With more complex works, the obvious tensions and relationships between parts of a given work can furnish plenty of cues for conversation and polemics.

In the past, my work has succeeded in transmitting much of its content and given rise to much else without my having to give much of an explanation. But the nature of the affect is very much dependent on what the receiver brings: this is true conversation, an exchange of ideas, experience and perception. I find that people react very differently, from fascination and delight to repulsion and unease; they may wonder at the making process or pass it by and react to associations and allusions. All these response feedback directions and insights that help inform how I might go about things subsequently. But above all they give me a sense of external context.

I feel that all too often challenges and disruptions can become vehicles for some sort of power play. I feel that responses and reactions to life’s vicissitudes are important, no essential, but I also seek a balance between what is in my nature and how I navigate the social world. I am not about power play, if authentic an artwork should have a power from within to speak out in its own way. And whether this matches some current political issue or not is a matter of chance.

 

Low Residency – Day 1: Collaborative Project

Alexis

 

 

An introductory collaboration where we formed small working groups to work on a one day project. The starting theme emerged out of a poetic exposition of the art of seeing by Jonathan where an ideal society was likened to the growth of a tree: what if  society were to grow like a tree.

A tree displays its leaves so that each one can receive as much light as possible and the living mass above ground is balanced with an equal amount of biomass unseen, below ground. The leaf metaphor proposes an vision for human society where every individual is naturally furnished with equal nourishment and opportunities. I felt that the underlying theme aimed at seeing the groups as analogues for a wider society and the project each one embarked on was its development, growth and flourishing. 

We were given materials, artificial detritus, paper, plastic, leaves and threads amongst other things which could be inserted and composed in thirty-five millimeter slide frames and finally slide projectors.

 

 

We sat down and devised an initial plan to give us a framework to enable us to work together productively, creatively and enjoyably. At first we worked as individuals exchanging ideas but each one following their own initiatives, each slide being viewed with the projector and placed to one side. The variety of images was interesting and the whole process gave me ideas about how to create abstract images as a divertisment from my normal practice.

 

 

Having collected a large number of slides, a group self organised to create a slide show of the images on Apple imovie. They were captured by photographing the projections, scanning and photographing the slide in natural light with the outside environment as a backdrop. The confluence of approaches was collated on the computer selecting and composing a sequence that would be used for a final presentation.

 

 

While this was being done, I and Kelda created a shadow puppet show improvising characters and scenes with the materials available. The show was captured as a video by phone. The arrangement was awkward to film and the result had a perspective slant which had to be incorporated in the overall movie. A soundtrack was also created from the video sound and we also improvised sounds in a cupboard room to overlay on the movie video. 

 

 

The exercise was not so much about the finished project, not even the making process but rather the process of working together and how very different personalities could come together to form something that holds more than its content. Seldom if ever do I have to cooperate as an artist with someone else and this was a refreshing experience that allowed me to slough off the burden of personal responsibility. Under time pressure, often a stimulus to productive innovation, I was able do things that I can work on in the future. Perhaps not for the MA, but shadow puppets would make a wonderful hobby allied to my main. 

Obviously the final movie was incomplete, disjointed and at points incoherent but that does not matter. The overall did have a sense of narrative and humour evidenced by the laughter it elicited during its screening. The four groups produced very different final results perhaps showing that societies cannot all be the same and neither could they. 

 

 

Low Residency 2019

Alexis

 

The following blogs are a brief and partial record of the two week residency during February 2019. I write this anachronistically after three days before I post about the first day. I am also doing so because I am tired and it is perhaps a good way of getting the ball rolling and keeping memories fresh for recall later. 

How wonderful to meet the online students with whom I have been conversing over the last five months. On our first meeting, it was as though we have known one another for a long time. There was no awkwardness only excitement for the days that were to follow. All I can say is that I feel that life-long friendships are being formed and today we decided to continue our skype conversations after the end of the course in eighteen months time.