phoebefrancesamis

The Internal Slipping Out into the WOrld at Large

2010-03-31T04:10:00.000-07:00

mariele neudecker, using 'florescent fishing line'

increidble visual effect, illusion of light manifested in physical form, using a well known common material, depicting. 3d model/photograph.

my actual door to door idea, space, distance, place etc- use fishing line or thread to create a palapable space between two doors, corresponding to an actual set distance. this creates a medium for something else to happen. meshed space between the two doors exists only to connect the two places

measuring liberty with a dollar, cornelia parker. exact length of statue of liberty drawn out into wire from a silver dollar piece.

girl in a peach

2010-03-15T04:17:00.000-07:00

better?

2010-03-15T04:09:00.001-07:00

onscreen

2010-03-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

Spliced image--> Mask --> Recreate Mask with face

2010-03-12T08:56:00.000-08:00

cant decide which is the best so will try to onscreen collage best bits of all

(reverts to form of the 'original' image)

291 Journal, Visual Poetry- MEntal Reactions

2010-03-10T03:45:00.001-08:00

Agnes Ernst Meyer Apollinaire; design by Marius de Zayas. Published in 291, No 2 1915

Manual Video Collaging

2010-03-03T04:10:00.000-08:00

Sorry there was a train, half and half glasgow central, clapham junction from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

revideoing and revideoing found footage (culminating narratives of found material from 'top results' of youtube, information democracy, informational, post-industrial, abstracted from physical manufacture, society)

layers of new transmuted information- site of making, reflections of passersby in videoed reflective computer screen.

Spatial perception of real space/virtual space.

Video and cameras and the 'fourth dimension'

issues of authorship- public/private boundaries. Controlling and using other people's footage and images/'author cannot abide near his work'/working within the confines of found imagery-constraints similar of working within the confines of language, social institution or structure of words, meaning-making, and behaviour.

individuals form language, without them speaking and communicating words would not have any designated, standardised, widely communicatable specific meaning or rules for society---

----yet language also forms individuals- we think consciously in language, we cannot think of what we do not have words to think of...

'of what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence' wittgenstein.

opening sequence- lorry reversing beep beep and multistorey car park.

2010-03-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

collage- shop front/bleeker cafe

2010-03-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

Collating footage for collage

2010-03-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

footage for collages- whale song

2010-03-02T06:24:00.000-08:00

footage for collages- elk bugles and fish hearts

2010-03-02T06:12:00.000-08:00

Footage for collages

2010-03-02T06:07:00.001-08:00

here- this is perfect! doppler effect+ motorbike footage all in one!

f18 speed of sound jet(saw it on blue peter I think)

footage for collages

2010-03-02T06:06:00.001-08:00

The Wild One

2010-03-02T05:44:00.001-08:00

Collecting footage for collaging narrative

2010-03-02T04:21:00.001-08:00

Visuals from footage of Monica drawing from sound clips

2010-02-28T12:55:00.000-08:00

Drawings responding to Degenerating Sound Clips from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

Interested in different ways individuals would approach task of drawing the sounds of the abstracted (sort of- reversed).filmed as monica drew.removed the audio from the visual-not sure why but maybe I've become interested in separating the two parts ofthe way we think and communicate after starting to read bits about mind separated from the physical body- plato and descartes. originally filmed with dv camera. then used inbuilt computer webca to film the footage as it played back on the dv playback small touchscreen. (i had to position the laptop lid, i played about with angle of the compact dvcamera screen. I then photographed on 'continuous' setting as the second stage footage played on my laptop full screen. Added stills to make this short video.

closer look at Pisano's practice...

2010-02-28T12:46:00.000-08:00

these phrases picked out from a listing of a talk by Falke Pisano at the CCA:

a circulation and exchange of language, ideas and forms...

A transfer from one work to another often involving a change of

formulations of ideas for works become works; ....

descriptions of works are used in preceding or following works and there is an exchange between descriptive or explanatory texts about the work and the work itself.....

this following on, transferring from one form to another, ideas for works becoming works, is what I've been sort of doing this afternoon with my constant refilming from medium to medium, changes of form making me think of different things to do.

Falke Pisano at Transmission

2010-02-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

this show was about all the things ive been trying to read up on and get me head around in my research into linguistics and language, and the act of communication, and how making art and presenting it to a public is an act of communication, and the power/knowledge relations at work within that.

I spent a couple of hours reading the artist's books. HIs work there seemed to compromise the 'performative act' of giving a talk on his work, the publication of his book, and the work in the gallery space.

however, perhaps most useful to me was the fact that though I liked the show, that was because I enjoyed the environment within the gallery where I could read his book and take advantage of someone else pulling together lots of terms and definitions and theories on speech, language and communication for me.

the actual gallery show itself was not exciting visually. it was diagrams on paper cut and stuck neatly but obviously on free standing presentation boards cut into geometric but not very interesting (and not very many) shapes. maybe this was the artists intention, for it to look a bit like a temporary education stall in a community hall, but to be honest it was only because I had been trying in this project to read about the things he was trying to explain that I stayed and got into reading his publication- which seemed to be the main bit of his work.

this has made me realise that I need to actually make work which communicates something to its audience, not just try to explain, and never very well, someone else's very complicated theories about speech acts and the act of communiction.

drawings from sound clips

2010-02-28T07:12:00.000-08:00

visual thinking--> julie mehretu's drawings abstract but spaces somehow, and also Monica Grzymala's show at The Drawing Room last year.

Mapping speech patterns + testing communications

2010-02-28T06:38:00.000-08:00

based on interest in chat roulette (which neatly brings my research into internet culture and my research into semiotics and structures of language and communications together).

Short chat roulette smalltalk and gestures of webcam whore:

im phoebe

how are you

yeah

test; reversed chat clip for drawing acts of speech from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

maxfield parrish- Greenberg and kitsch

2010-02-27T03:29:00.000-08:00

appropriated in this michael jackson video )with his then wife whatsit Preseley

and this is just amazing.

saatchi&saatchi advertising

2010-02-26T08:28:00.001-08:00

Marina Abromavic and Ulay- Rest energy

2010-02-25T05:45:00.000-08:00

this testing of physical materials, weight, strain and balance is what I would like to explore with my perfromance proposal from somehow enacting a moment of touching, a moment of 'intimacy' between something that the writer worte becoming 'the work' as it touches the reader who makes the work out of the book.

this is just amusing, but also, like the framing, and the sound-

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee be beeeeee beeeeeeeeeee

Eva and Franco Mattes, Synthetic Performances

2010-02-25T05:33:00.000-08:00

Second Life re-enactments of three famous performance art pieces-

1) Gilbert and George, Underneath the Arches, Living Sculptures

2) Vito Acconci, Seedbed

3) MArina Abromavic and Ulay, Imponderabilia

links to other videos on youtube- 'embedding has been disabled on request'

2)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRXOmLC_mD0

3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8aTHkjaOF8

Chat Roulette

2010-02-25T05:24:00.000-08:00

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Kurt Schwitters Ursonate, performed by Steven Schick and Shahrokh Yadegari

2010-02-25T05:04:00.000-08:00

be- sound poetry

2010-02-23T04:59:00.000-08:00

particle sturcutes of the universe in descartes principia philosphaie 1650

2010-02-22T09:51:00.000-08:00

the mechanical universe link

http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/ideas/mechuniverse.htm

cartography- as cultural representation/politics of maps

2010-02-22T05:20:00.001-08:00

peters projection

How to illustrate language?Make it exist physically?

2010-02-21T16:22:00.000-08:00

braille-

even this image itself, is not a true representation of braille because it is not physical.

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/braille.html

god webpage, russian, greek, chinese etc braille.

how to illustrate prepositions?

2010-02-21T16:05:00.001-08:00

The 17th century British Alchemist Robert Fludd devised an elemental universe concerned with qualities of light, fineness and density of matter and different kinds of movement. In his notion of the Celestial Monochord he thought he had worked out the music of the spheres, the harmonious sound of the universe. This painting is inspired by his theories and drawings. '

saussure- mapping language/language as 'structural'

2010-02-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

The focus of Saussure’s investigation is the linguistic unit or sign.

The sign (signe) is described as a "double entity", made up of the signifier, or sound image, (signifiant), and thesignified, or concept (signifié). The sound image is a psychological, not a material concept, belonging to the system. Both components of the linguistic sign are inseparable. One way to appreciate this is to think of them as being like either side of a piece of paper - one side simply cannot exist without the other.
The basic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign (l'arbitraire du signe) in the extract is: there is no natural reason why a particular sign should be attached to a particular concept.

The value of a sign is determined by all the other signs in the langue.

language is "a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangements of its terms"

SOURCE TAKEN FROM WIKIPEDIA-

pay attention to this- informational society + instant feedback information +

'cult of the amateur

i could do this to this?

2010-02-20T03:35:00.000-08:00

i could do jan dibbets style perspective correction adding a mouse click icon or egg timer icon

(egg timer could be kinectic as it turns, rotary motor)

VAn Doesburg+ The international avant garde exhibition

2010-02-20T02:48:00.000-08:00

self referential

the new adam 1924

sandor bortnyik

el litssinksy's proun 1c is depicted top left!

Mark Napier Makes me make images

2010-02-20T02:28:00.000-08:00

questions of authorship and ownership, and craftsman ship
image made on '3dots' online program

image made in a squares program.

Mark Napier- The Waiting Room

2010-02-20T01:47:00.000-08:00

'The Waiting Room is a virtual space that 50 users share through the Internet. In this space the visitor becomes a participant in a moving painting. Their actions activate and shape the artwork, shifting the screen through moods, from hard-edged to atmospheric, from dark to light, from quiet to chaotic. Each click creates a shape, a shadow or a wall, a suggestion of architecture or a dissolving light.

The interesting thing with net art is how to install it, show it in exhibitions in physical not virtual spaces like the gallery context.

stills taken of the 'interactive' painting over a period of 1minute.

Collage, availability of images in informational society

2010-02-20T01:34:00.000-08:00

-Collage

----> Mark NAPIER net artist. huge source material onscreen/online.

and this is 'cyclops bride', a video of the empire state building giving birth to a primordial creature monster.

-what it is to be able to try and participate in 'discourse' about right-now 'culture'

-internet as tool

2010-02-20T01:30:00.000-08:00

-Tools- technology- technology is not a random sudden change- technology is developed as it is demanded by people and societies. we make tools, and they change us.

interdependency of tools and humans

notion of human 'progression' in modernism, and post modernism.

i can liken language to the internet in this way.

i could make a set of tools? each new tool i made could develop and change what i expect from technology.

language as a network, independency

2010-02-20T01:27:00.000-08:00

-Language as a network---> Saussure, Barthes, the author dies, sound of word + word concept, language as a TOTALITY, it is either everything, or there is nothing; the individual is dependent on language, it is a social institution which cannot be instantly changed by the individual, it develops over a long period of time, and we could say that the individual is formed by language, the parameters of what they can understand and communicate they can think of to do or think of to think is restricted to what words (word sounds/look on written and also word concepts) have been developed by a progressing majority---->

a word can have no meaning or function if it is only made by one person and never communicated- if it is never communicated does it exist?

so language is everything, or we can think of or discuss nothing.

we form language, but not individually, language is something we develop as a social institution, and thus it can be said that language also forms us.

-cartology--->

2010-02-20T01:25:00.000-08:00

-cartology---> 'the political mapping of cyberspace'--->function of mapping, colonial, Bourriand's key concept of contemporary artist as explorer/nomad---> Charles Avery The Islanders, Darren Almond's FullMoon series in China, RAchel Harrison's anthrolopolgy 'Second Voyage to the Beagle.

-networks

2010-02-20T01:24:00.003-08:00

-networks

('horizontalising', 'decentralising' of world map and globe)---> cartology

------------> language as a network---> inter-dependency---->meaning as context specific/meaning not as a 'nomenklatura' of naming objects.

-networks

2010-02-20T01:24:00.001-08:00

-networks

('horizontalising', 'decentralising' of world map and globe)---> cartology

------------> language as a network---> inter-dependency---->meaning as context specific/meaning not as a 'nomenklatura' of naming objects.

-individual's Perception of space/cyberspace

2010-02-20T01:23:00.001-08:00

---> Lucio Fontana

-----> layers----> David Noonan

Reading Objects as 'Texts'- Roland Barthes to Lucy Skaer

2010-02-20T00:38:00.000-08:00

The VideoSphere, Gene YoungBlood, 1970

2010-02-19T09:12:00.000-08:00

"The media must be liberated, must be removed from private ownership
and commercial sponsership, must be placed in the service of all of
humanity. We must make the media believable. We must assume conscious
control over the videosphere."

Radical Software (magazine front covers)

2010-02-19T08:37:00.000-08:00

Link to RAdical Software Vol 1. (entire scanned in edition)

http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume1nr1_pics.html

Google results

2010-02-16T01:59:00.000-08:00

cyberspace

mapping cyberspace

mapping

Final: How to arrange the Photographs in Space?

2010-02-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

Original assumption was that I would exhibit the photographs as a sequence; in the order they came out of the disposable camera. This would relate them to time.

However, this would also render the photographs as just documentation, whereas my projects working from my has been more about treating photographs as objects in space, not as facts.

Also I feel that my project has been about understanding that perception of space in photographs and photograph-objects in space has been about investigating power and management.

Thus I feel that just putting up the disposable camera photos, [which were taken by peer participants (and not by me) as a way of reneging control over the spaces depicted in photographs] would be losing TOO MUCH CONTROL over the presentation of my project, which would not work because my projects been about the inherent act of control within any act of representation.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Relating each photograph to the others in the pack.

Relating the different perspectives to one another.

Sequencing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Comparative Analysis and Organisation-

1)Dependent Variable used to classify and organise the photos=

size of

(Outcome= proximity to the wall/3d construction)

tissue paper tracings of each size, linked to form a 'graph'.

Included this photo to show that photographs are themselves objects in space, no matter what illusions/manipulations/depictions of space they have within them.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

outcome: proportionate amount of space the shelf appears to take up in photograph.

causes: height of participant/proximity of participant to construction/angle (looking up or down) of participant.

illusion: That this somehow is time specific, sense of movement through space, dropping in height. this is because we are associate vertical with lists, one event happening before and after the next event, dush, dush, dush.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

outcome: centred-ness.

Cardboard Macette tests.

2010-02-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

getting little sphere in line with the biggest bright spot from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

objects suspended in space- like SecondLife!

the viewfinder ended up so much smaller than I had expected.

Development: Images within Images creating Tunnels.

2010-02-07T08:30:00.001-08:00

Photo of viewfinder finding view of phots of gallery space projected on to drawings of gallery space from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

Paper >< Reflected Space

2010-02-07T08:22:00.000-08:00

using 3.5 appature, Digital SLR imitating way eye can only focus on one image at a time; my was taken with phone camera, no control over what it focuses on.

Objects at a distance- Seeing in VIsual Space&Geometric Space

2010-02-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

Objects in visual space get smaller and squashed. from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

so there is no 'absolute' space, 'space' is hetereogenous; there are different perceptions of 'space'.

if an object is moved in geometric space, it remains the same size.

but if an object is moved in 'real' space, visual space, it appears to get squashed/smaller the further away it is.

what is true?

we would say that the object is of course the same size at whatever distance from us, as I have tried to negociate by 'printing' each side of the objects in their new positions.

Yet what we SEE, ('eye-witness accounts' being best proof, justice, truth we can get apparently, cctv etc) is not that-

what we see, is the objects growing and shrinking in size.

what should we believe?

5

2010-02-07T08:05:00.003-08:00

4

2010-02-07T08:05:00.001-08:00

3

2010-02-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

2

2010-02-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

Original Image

2010-02-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

Photographing two sites in one picture plane.

2010-02-07T06:39:00.000-08:00

Here I have tried to make it easier for you to see the reflection of the back of the statue the drawing is of, in the drawing object itself.

Here are some more examples of photographing in a way to represent the way our eyes can only deal with looking at either the drawing, or the gallery space reflected in the drawing glass.

Photographing Spaces and Places

2010-02-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

Candida Hofer.

'By means of the print I then create my own space once again.

It is not my intention to show the space in a manner as realistic as possible.'

Photography as subjective, manipulative, though used for documenting, for evidence, as 'proof' and 'truth', and thus suggested it is objective.

Large Scale Projections on Lovely Found Big Wood

2010-02-07T03:36:00.000-08:00

Negociating myself as an object in space, projected photograph onto large piece of wood- the drawing is 'happening' between an object, through space, to a referencing machine (my eye in or projector here.

Small Scale Projections

2010-02-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

Material Tests- Projections

2010-02-06T06:18:00.000-08:00

Photo of projector light- moon like. Planetary.

image projected on to scratched plastic piece- creating strong reflection, with drawing behind. overlapping rectangle shapes make me think of drawings of cuboids.

Image of gallery view straight projected on to black sketchbook cover. No intermediate plastic screen. produces effect of painterly dabs.

Photograph similar composition and situation as 2nd photo down. Except with different light settings. The reflection of light on the plastic screen and the sellotape is quite exciting! The amazing bright blue florescent hues intantly made me think of SecondLife, and some of the sculptures by other people on the GSA island- like Harley's.

---

-Experiments with projections of various images, at various distances and focuses.

-I also tried projecting on to different surfaces, onto the white wall, on to a drawing stuck on the wall, on to my thick piece of clear plastic i found. The interesting thing about my heavy piece of plastic is that it is worn and scratched, and there are two blobs of glue on it which are similar in position (central) and obviously shape as the bright spots in my .

-The third variable is the resulting photographs themselves, results of me playing about with digital slr settings.

Material tests for 3d drawing lining up yah

2010-01-28T02:39:00.001-08:00

2010-01-28T02:18:00.001-08:00

http://www.robmulholland.co.uk/#/vestige-2009/4535738995

BALLS

2010-01-25T03:28:00.001-08:00

BAlls from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

forms occupying one pictorial space

2010-01-25T03:20:00.000-08:00

Occupying space between 0+ and avatar... from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

second life + camera phone + computer screen angle + finger tip

Enough for now

2010-01-25T02:58:00.001-08:00

2010-01-24T06:40:00.000-08:00

I need some second life experience

2010-01-24T05:58:00.001-08:00

lived experience as most respected knowlegde getting

fish will gladly interact when they are fed with the push of a button from your control console

2010-01-24T04:05:00.001-08:00

subject myself to official avatar website (immersive atmospheric music repeating itself), sploshy sounds and sights from the poseidon underwater resort hotel website brochure, and dabbles and adventures in second life on my desk while I work...

probably make me feel very ill.

record all sound using inbuilt webcam, play back on repeat to add to noise and chaos. record simultaneously using a different mac program. eg garage band.

Looking up Underwater from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

This video of MOUSELOOK experience of my avatar looking upwards underwater is interested- computer graphics of rippling water- usually an unpredictable, exciting thing to watch- made even more hypnotic by the repetition and sequence of the 'animations' of the water.

2010-01-24T03:56:00.001-08:00

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upsidedowninsideout.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/mehretu.jpg&imgrefurl=http://upsidedowninsideout.org/&usg=__J-Ces3KU3dr2HmZ8MRwTuEhUn2Q=&h=350&w=450&sz=67&hl=en&start=21&um=1&tbnid=AAyihseNAbZlsM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djulie%2Bmehretu%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DN%26start%3D20%26um%3D1

Barry Doupe- Computer aesthetics as 'at once familiar and out of reach'

2010-01-24T03:17:00.000-08:00

Barry Doupé, in ''shudder" at The Drawing Room

Barry Doupé, still from ‘Whose Toes ’ 2009, computer animation, 33 mins,

Courtesy the artist © Barry Doupé

“The unnervingly seductive videos of Vancouver-based artist and animator Barry Doupé blend painterly skill with the look of early 3D video games in gothic dreamscapes, at once familiar and forever out of reach.”

(programme note, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago)

In his new animation Doupé is investigating formal aspects of image making and how hand drawn images translate into computer graphics through a series of video portraits. “I'm interested in the reproduction of personality and countenance, and in the artifice of facial expression through animation. I'm also interested in how a characters' personality alone can carry a film, how their perception and reactions of the world provide a particular spectacle.'

link here to rest of exhibition:http://www.drawingroom.org.uk/shudder.htm

2010-01-24T03:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.whitecube.com/artists/mehretu/

'Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian Futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of Abstract Expressionist colour field painting. ...

In her highly worked paintings, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies ...'

2) is called Congress.

Immediately I associate the thin meandering lines with movement of people, of the perspectival lines drawing eye into a central core in the distance, a tiered, order structure, triangles for bunding and civic festivities...so for me mehretu's drawings work with seemingly abstract shapes, paired with prescriptive titles, to reveal the images and symbolsand codes of visual and verbal language we are all culturally naturalised to, to make big visual statements about the systems around us, of our art history, or political systems and civic life.....la la la arg.

1) is called The Seven Acts of Mercy. The colour and long horizontal shape of it reinforce biblical associations in my head started by the title, furthered by the red sea parting look of it too..

Itseems to beordered, tiered, with lines suggesting movement, triangles reminding me of bunting, and civic festiviteis, a sense of perspective into a central, distant, busy core--- these are all associations, nauturalistions i make immediately with the word of congress, so for me Mehtru

2010-01-22T15:00:00.001-08:00

2010-01-22T14:58:00.001-08:00

2010-01-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

2010-01-22T12:46:00.000-08:00

to upload this i had to upload the .tiff file onto facebook, drag the image onto my desktop, then it was happy to be a .jpeg.

2010-01-19T04:26:00.000-08:00

Susan Sontag...

'an anthropology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.'

explains why I want to photograph and map and take down details of all plastercasts in maps, to trace copy back to copy to original- from original to displaced context/site- why it got from one space and time to another separate space and time.

Altermodern anthropological trends in art- Claire Doherty writes that ....

Rachel Harrison,

Second Voyage of the Beagle, 2008

In Altermodern exhib, Tate Britain.

Susan SONTAG On Photography, DG text

2010-01-19T04:11:00.001-08:00

'to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed'

Susan SONTAG On Photography, DG text.

as commented on by Sherrie Levine's 'After...' Series. Appropriating becomes a way of commenting on what has gone before e.g. she appropriates work of prominent household name male artists.

feed://arts-numeriques.codedrops.net/spip.php?page=backend&id_rubrique=4&lang=fr

Joseph Kosuth- Three and One Chairs-

Object, Representation, Definition- which is real, what space would they exist in, on, within.

Life of Dogs program on iplayer, Betsey the dog...

trying to paint sellotape and crease of paper

2010-01-16T09:26:00.000-08:00

2010-01-16T06:54:00.000-08:00

2010-01-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

2d/3d cutting image into wood- not very successful/only existing as a photo/controlling perspective

2d Image contained in glass= 3d object, dimensions of reflected room/site/context

2010-01-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

By photogrpahing this drawing within its frame in the exhibition, the Reflections in the glass covering this image have become the image, the nature of the photographed 2d image means that the original drawing co-exists on the same plane with the reflections.

This could be interesting to explore these patterns made on the glass by the reflections, actually making them static with glass paints, painting directly on to the glass, then shift the glass plane so that the painted reflections and real 'live' reflections are similar but shifted and different perspective/angle. THIS WOULD LINK TO GLASS PAINTING and the lovely, characteristic painted glass panels which characterised the glasgow style which the exhbition and community at the MAckintosh glasgow school of art continually evoked and celebrated-notions of tradition, posterity, history, modernity...

particuarly striking are the reflections of the row of gallery lights, which seem to perforate the body. this could translate in a 3d wood carving quite well?

also- project static images onto each side of a piece of glass, as in Douglas Gordon's "between darkness and light".

Glass-

MAINLY INTERESTED IN WHY THE GLASS IS HERE OVER THIS DRAWING-

ARCHIVE/DISPLAY/EXHIBITION TECHNIQUES AND MATERIALS- the process of this.

This has been mainly drawn to my attention by seeing the work of Goshka Macuga, first at the Turner prize 2008 exhibition at tate britain last year, and also her show at Whitechapel Gallery.

On both visits to her shows, i felt alienated, and confused by her work. HOWEVER it has remained on my mind for a long time, and over this long period of time i have come to understand what it is trying to get at, though my first impression was very different.

follow this link for a TATE essay on her practice and turner prize nomination:

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnow/goshkamacuga/essay.shtm

Site-Place-Context: geometry and experiencing/perceiving space

2010-01-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

Georges Rousse, Mairet, 2000.

El Lissitzky, 'Proun 19D', 1922

construstivist composition, exploring 2dimensional space and 3 dimensional space, creating a new sort of non space for itself, between fine art and applied art, between art and architecture,

making technology and dynamism a subject for art, for aesthetic yum yum, and the political ideology behind its construction, and also constructed within and by it.

i like it because its engaging, makes me think about what im supposed to think of it, think of the constructed space around it, wonder what its for, whether the shapes make up, me finding my own narrative and purpose for it, wondering why it is that i feel the need to do this, wonder if it is a continuous 'it' or if it is many components, 'hetergenous' or homogenous- as introduced as different ways of thinking about and DEFINING 'space' as in book I'm reading- 'the culture of time and space, 1880-1918'.

Jan Dibbets Perspective Correction

1969 '12 hours tide object with correction of perspective', as film stills from 'LAND ART', a television broadcast- only existed as an artwork in the short period in which it was broadcast, AND CRUCIALLY, viewed by an audience. because on the ground, it is not the same art work.

follow to this website to find restaged more recent images of dibbets doing '6hours...etc'

http://www.skor.nl/artefact-3985-nl.html

all this perspective stuff, about composition, works back to things i was thinking about when looking at the exhibition upstairs in the Mack- the compositions of paintings- affect of renaissance- historiography of antiquity to modern times- always returning to classical age-

history used as a vehicle to literally construct constructs such as posterity, and tradition, and all the political social uses of these to create places that dont really exist- idealised past seamlessly produces a kind of idealised future, with the present as a wholly different plane/medium/material- just the non-place, transitionary, like an airport, between past and future.

perspectives changing the actual nature of an object, in that case, the fact that students had to draw a statue of Apollo...(cant remember rest of it), construct a 2d drawing of it, encouraged to draw academically, 'realistically' (i need to interrogate notions of 'real' and 'realistic')- as though taking it as TRUE, real, even though it itself was constructed by another artist, who had to make subjective decisions and choices, margins for human error, and ...

to explore these ideas about 2d and 3d, tensions between them and the perspectives and perceptions of space constructed within 2d or 3d, I am starting with this drawing and statue, photographing, going to abstract it down naturally as its rolling transitions from drawing to photo to diagram to model to photo to drawing...until i can try to shake off my knowledge of what it once was and try to employ a new way of looking just at what i see, actually see, as though beginning a new language, trying to understand and construct my own cultural 'naturalisations' for a new code of abstract meanings, values, symbols, codes..arrrgh.

i am using the word construct because our second life induction has put the idea of constructing with the second life building blocks called 'prims' (short for primative).... i will do this later and collect some screen shots of prim buildings...internet as funny sort of reality- does it physically exist...google is actually a huge compound of warehouses containing thousands of linked computers- is this true?research more.

the language of defining space, links to perception- both have limits, both heterogenous, what is universal?what is the level at which we all share a continuous perception of space we are in?same as with language- language is linked to meaning and communication- to what level do we all share a continuous space, perception of ourselves and other...arrgh

2010-01-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

Mountains- Foreground/Background

2009-12-06T03:49:00.000-08:00

When I was working with wood, I lined up these slices to try and explore the notions of foreground and background that Mariele Neudecker was discussing in her talk at the Friday event. Neudecker's tank pieces are 3-d, which changes the pictorial space and illusion of space within the picture plane of a painting. She works from German Romantic LAndscape painters such as Freidrichs. At the bottom I have included this landscape painting 'Glencoe' by Horatio McCulloch which I discovered and really really really like at the Kelvingrove Museum on my visits to do my essay for H&C.

I think the reason these tank pieces are so popular, and so many people feel so in awe and moved and just LURVE them, is because they are small, they are the art equivalent of playing God in Age of Empires computer game, or even playing with brio traintracks as a child. The takeable, contained size of them- 'He's got the whole world in his hands, he's got the whole wide world in his hands' etc...

They're cute, and we all want one. Somehow, these seem to me to be very consumable, very buyable.

Public/Private Space- Rise of 'bourgeois public sphere' Enlightenment to Now

2009-12-05T03:00:00.000-08:00

'The Habermasian model has been criticized on all fronts by historians. That it was bourgeois is contradicted by the many examples of noble and lower class participation in areas such as the coffeehouses and the freemasonic lodges. That it was independent and critical of the state is contradicted by the diverse cases of government-sponsored public institutions and government participation in debate, along with the cases of private individuals using public venues to promote the status quo.'

this relates back to Paolo Bronstein's drawings and comment on the thatcherite hijacking of public for private- e.g. styles usually associated with the public domain, democracy and all things Greek and civil, being used for private corporation buildings, yet feeding off this illusion of public.

Observing Observation to the Power of 6!

2009-12-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Untitled from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

Appropriating Lucy Skaer's Process to Experience Materials

2009-12-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

These are prints I did with the handle of my wooden object I dissembled during the wood workshop.

I never quite understood what the object was, it seemed like a toolish, but it was a big heavy block of wood, so it was half tool, half clamp.

The only recognisable part of the object was this handle, which looked like a saw handle, and I easily found familiar- yet its material was not familiar- wood.

I used Lucy Skaer's investigative process of producing 2d prints from but also 'of' 3d objects. She used a Chair, and created marks accross a page which upon entering the gallery seemed immediately familiar, and in the format of text and punctuation. Yet upon second impression, I realised this wasn't an actual alphabet or character system of language I understood, yet it was annoyingly familiar, because the chair was such a familiar character in the language of everyday things around us.

This tension and investigation between the 2d, and the 3d, which could lead to a debate of the relationship between painting and sculpture, is one of the things I am most interested in. This is because there seems to be a power struggle going on here, for me there is notion of hierachy between image and object. Language in itself is also a means of power and authority- language controls what we can conceive of, nothing exists outside of language. The control complex that is language leads to the authority of information and notions of 'truth' and 'proof'.

Waves In Can at Eye Level/ Lindsay Seers 'It has to be this Way'

2009-12-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

photo of tin can installed on wall... and of someone peering into it.

individual emmersive experience- like putting eye to a mounted specimen slide, or a slide machine... ww1 images.

Cinema Box Installation view of Revideoed Video.

2009-12-03T05:17:00.000-08:00

I displayed my video, which come out of a project investigating Douglas Gordon's idea that 'real life is a reflection of what happens in the cinema', in a cardboard box with cardboard seats to make it into a scrappy plaything of a model cinema.

I thought of this presentation as a mcquette, a proposal for showing the film in an emmersive situation such as a cinema, or having a projector at least. Other people who saw it however liked the fact that inside a scrappy looking cardboard box, left on a table top, there was a mini world.

The seats I put in were important because I wanted to create sense of an emmersive environment; and this again takes me back to Caspar David Fredrich's painting, and the romantic use of the figure in the foreground, who looks at the scene before him from the same angle we do, and thus this takes us into the space of the painting, and more importantly, the experience the vision.

The work of Janet Cardiff and George Breus Miller creates seriously immersive environments...

text taken from their website:

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/paradise_institute.html

'With this work, originally produced for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Cardiff and Miller focus on the language and experience of cinema. Viewers approach a simple plywood pavilion, mount a set of stairs, and enter a lush, dimly lit interior complete with red carpet and two rows of velvet-covered seats. Once seated, they peer over the balcony onto a miniature replica of a grand old movie theatre created with hyper-perspective. This is the first in a series of illusions orchestrated by Cardiff and Miller. Viewers then put on the headphones provided and the projection begins.

'Extended Description

At least two stories run simultaneously. There is the “visual film” and its accompanying soundtrack that unfolds before the viewers; layered over this is the “aural action” of a supposed audience. The film is a mix of genres: it is part noir, part thriller, part sci-fi, and part experimental. What is more particular about the installation is the personal binaural “surround sound” that every individual in the audience experiences through the headphones. The sense of isolation each might feel is broken by intrusions seemingly coming from inside the theatre. A cellphone belonging to a member of the audience rings. A close “female friend” whispers intimately in your ear: “Did you check the stove before we left?” Fiction and reality become intermingled as absorption in the film is suspended and other realities flow in.

this attention to the viewer's experience goes way beyond standards for gallery exhibiting- the viewer's experience is the very subject and motivation for the work itself.

This again makes me think of the BEST EXHBITION IN THE HISTORY OF ALL EXHIBITIONS IN THE WORLD (OF MY LIFE SO FAR): Lindsay Seers' 'It has to be this way' at MAtt's Gallery in Mile End London, jan-march 2009.

Film shown through binoculars...

Final Installation View of Cross School Project

2009-12-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

As a group we explored ideas of mirroring, observation and surveillance based on Douglas Gordon's 'Empire' sign in Tontine Lane.

Having drawn from Douglas Gordon's practice, who himself draws on Alfred Hitchcock's work, we concluded our project with a film.

First, we all pooled our collected images and video footage, giving each of us thousands of shared material to use, but also increasing the chance of our personal cuts of film containing lots of repetition.

We made roughly a minute of footage each, then lumped them together, cut and spliced, to add more repetition. The result was lots of repeated, unpredictable flashing images.

We chose to project the film into a corner, distorting the image, heightening the notion of mirroring which is so important in Gordon's work, let alone the mirrored, angled illusion of the Empire sign itself.

Furthermore, we decided to install a cctv style circuit, to further our questions about who is watching who, and add a live mirror so that the viewers observing the film could also be observed, and themselves observe that observation.

A web cam was hidden in a street light and the footage was fed and played live on a screen to the side of where the film was being projected and observed.

Casting Process- Wax and Plaster combines

2009-12-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

I dropped hot wax into cold water, making a wax piece I had had no control over its form.

I then built plaster (at its thicker, paste consistency) over it.

My hope was that perhaps the heat of the plaster as it reacted and set would melt the wax form inside, leaving a cavity. This did not work so I submerged the whole object in boiled water in a bucket.

This interest is related to strata of rocks, which Tony Cragg's 'Stack' made me think of.

I took this photo at a bus stop while working in the casting workshops, it reminded me of the junk art of Arman and Cesari, and how Tony Cragg's 'Stack' seems sort of geological in its 'stacked' layers, like strata, which made me think of Nicolas Oddy's enthusiasm for the story of an urban environment told by its rising road levels, 4 feet/or was it inches more road since 1950s, as revealed by the tram line working...

Tony Cragg Group Project

2009-12-02T04:41:00.000-08:00

Waves in Can

2009-12-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

waves in can from phoebe Amis on Vimeo.

idea of waves/blurring horizons. Situated in a tin can.

Prints from Wood Slices/Series of Possible Combinations

2009-12-01T08:12:00.000-08:00

Each wood piece is numbered, and given a colour from a consecutive order of colours dictated by my shop bought watercolour set.

The space between the two possible wood pieces is called 'the product'.

There are two possible sets of information because each wood piece has a 'first' side and a 'reverse side'.

Given the slice is slice number 'n', these would be written 'n' and 'Rn'.

There will be three sections of series of 'products':

series 1:

n + (n+1).

series 2:

Rn + (n+1).

series 3:

Rn + R(n+1)

series 4:

n + R(n+1)

I need to talk to a real mathmatician, and look up mathmatical 'combination theories'.

I think combination theories are used by big businesses for trade, or something? this could be an interesting link to my interest in 'power/knowledge' relations.

There is a power/authority/surveillance control mood to this slightly obsessive repetitive- the same motivation as the wish to be the All-seer, omniscience. ---

Jorge Luis Borges' story: The Aleph-

http://www.phinnweb.org/links/literature/borges/aleph.html

Drawing as products of instructions and execution not expression: my work here is clearly influenced by processes Sol Le Witt started and made famous.

taken from MoMA retrospective text:

'LeWitt—who stressed the idea behind his work over its execution—is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual art, and is known primarily for his deceptively simple geometric structures and architecturally scaled wall drawings. His experiments with the latter commenced in 1968 and were considered radical, in part because this new form of drawing was purposely temporal and often executed not just by LeWitt but also by other artists and students whom he invited to assist him in the installation of his artworks.

Each wall drawing begins as a set of instructions or simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an astonishing—and stunningly beautiful—variety of work that is at once simple and highly complex, rigorous and sensual. The drawings in the exhibition range from layers of straight lines meticulously drawn in black graphite pencil lead, to rows of delicately rendered wavy lines in colored pencil; from bold black-and-white geometric forms, to bright planes in acrylic paint arranged like the panels of a folding screen; from sensuous drawings created by dozens of layers of transparent washes, to a tangle of vibratory orange lines on a green wall, and much more. Forms may appear to be flat, to recede in space, or to project into the viewer’s space, while others meld to the structure of the wall itself. '

SERIALISATION in Music-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialism

Six-element row of rhythmic values used in Variazioni canoniche byLuigi Nono (Whittall 2008, 16

The Aleph

by Jorge Luis Borges O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space...
Hamlet, II, 2
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place.
Leviathan, IV, 46

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity. I knew that at times my fruitless devotion had annoyed her; now that she was dead, I could devote myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation. I recalled that the thirtieth of April was her birthday; on that day to visit her house on Garay Street and pay my respects to her father and to Carlos Argentino Daneri, her first cousin, would be an irreproachable and perhaps unavoidable act of politeness. Once again I would wait in the twilight of the small, cluttered drawing room, once again I would study the details of her many photographs: Beatriz Viterbo in profile and in full colour; Beatriz wearing a mask, during the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz at her First Communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz soon after her divorce, at a luncheon at the Turf Club; Beatriz at a seaside resort in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekingese lapdog given her by Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, front and three-quarter views, smiling, hand on her chin... I would not be forced, as in the past, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books -- books whose pages I finally learned to cut beforehand, so as not to find out, months later, that they lay around unopened.

Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929. From that time on, I never let a thirtieth of April go by without a visit to her house. I used to make my appearance at seven-fifteen sharp and stay on for some twenty-five minutes. Each year, I arrived a little later and stay a little longer. In 1933, a torrential downpour coming to my aid, they were obliged to ask me for dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe sugared cakes, and quite matter-of-factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri.

Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy. Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian "S" and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-ranging, and -- all in all -- meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort -- less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. "He is the Prince of poets," Daneri would repeat fatuously. "You will belittle him in vain -- but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him."

On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it "interesting," and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.

"I view him," he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, "in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins..."

He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.

So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so -- that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he hd been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, with fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.

I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers -- sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library -- and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:

Mine eyes, as did the Greek's, have known men's
towns and fame,
The works, the days in light that fades to amber;
I do not change a fact or falsify a name --
The voyage I set down is... autour de ma chambre.

"From any angle, a greatly interesting stanza," he said, giving his verdict. "The opening line wins the applause of the professor, the academician, and the Hellenist -- to say nothing of the would-be scholar, a considerable sector of the public. The second flows from Homer to Hesiod (generous homage, at the very outset, to the father of didactic poetry), not without rejuvenating a process whose roots go back to Scripture -- enumeration, congeries, conglomeration. The third -- baroque? decadent? example of the cult of pure form? -- consists of two equal hemistichs. The fourth, frankly bilingual, assures me the unstinted backing of all minds sensitive to the pleasures of sheer fun. I should, in all fairness, speak of the novel rhyme in lines two and four, and of the erudition that allows me -- without a hint of pedantry! -- to cram into four lines three learned allusions covering thirty centuries packed with literature -- first to the Odyssey, second to Works and Days, and third to the immortal bagatelle bequathed us by the frolicking pen of the Savoyard, Xavier de Maistre. Once more I've come to realise that modern art demands the balm of laughter, the scherzo. Decidedly, Goldoni holds the stage!"

He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri's real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. Daneri's style of delivery was extravagant, but the deadly drone of his metric regularity tended to tone down and to dull that extravagance.

[Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armour of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:

But they forget, alas, one foremost fact -- BEAUTY!

Only the fear of creating an army of implacable and powerful enemies dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.]

Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.

Two Sundays later, Daneri rang me up -- perhaps for the first time in his life. He suggested we get together at four o'clock "for cocktails in the salon-bar next door, which the forward-looking Zunino and Zungri -- my landlords, as you doubtless recall -- are throwing open to the public. It's a place you'll really want to get to know."

More in resignation than in pleasure, I accepted. Once there, it was hard to find a table. The "salon-bar," ruthlessly modern, was only barely less ugly than what I had excepted; at the nearby tables, the excited customers spoke breathlessly of the sums Zunino and Zungri had invested in furnishings without a second thought to cost. Carlos Argentino pretended to be astonished by some feature or other of the lighting arrangement (with which, I felt, he was already familiar), and he said to me with a certain severity, "Grudgingly, you'll have to admit to the fact that these premises hold their own with many others far more in the public eye."

He then reread me four or five different fragments of the poem. He had revised them following his pet principle of verbal ostentation: where at first "blue" had been good enough, he now wallowed in "azures," "ceruleans," and "ultramarines." The word "milky" was too easy for him; in the course of an impassioned description of a shed where wool was washed, he chose such words as "lacteal," "lactescent," and even made one up -- "lactinacious." After that, straight out, he condemned our modern mania for having books prefaced, "a practice already held up to scorn by the Prince of Wits in his own grafeful preface to the Quixote." He admitted, however, that for the opening of his new work an attention-getting foreword might prove valuable -- "an accolade signed by a literary hand of renown." He next went on to say that he considered publishing the initial cantos of his poem. I then began to understand the unexpected telephone call; Daneri was going to ask me to contribute a foreword to his pedantic hodgepodge. My fear turned out unfounded; Carlos Argentino remarked, with admiration and envy, that surely he could not be far wrong in qualifying with the ephitet "solid" the prestige enjoyed in every circle by Álvaro Melián Lafinur, a man of letters, who would, if I insisted on it, be only too glad to dash off some charming opening words to the poem. In order to avoid ignominy and failure, he suggested I make myself spokesman for two of the book's undeniable virtues -- formal perfection and scientific rigour -- "inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of figures of speech, of elegances, is inhospitable to the least detail not strictly upholding of truth." He added that Beatriz had always been taken with Álvaro.

I agreed -- agreed profusely -- and explained for the sake of credibility that I would not speak to Álvaro the next day, Monday, but would wait until Thursday, when we got together for the informal dinner that follows every meeting of the Writers' Club. (No such dinners are ever held, but it is an established fact that the meetings do take place on Thursdays, a point which Carlos Argentino Daneri could verify in the daily papers, and which lent a certain reality to my promise.) Half in prophecy, half in cunning, I said that before taking up the question of a preface I would outline the unusual plan of the work. We then said goodbye.

Turning the corner of Bernardo de Irigoyen, I reviewed as impartially as possible the alternatives before me. They were: a) to speak to Álvaro, telling him the first cousin of Beatriz' (the explanatory euphemism would allow me to mention her name) had concocted a poem that seemed to draw out into infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos: b) not to say a word to Álvaro. I clearly foresaw that my indolence would opt for b.

But first thing Friday morning, I began worrying about the telephone. It offended me that that device, which had once produced the irrecoverable voice of Beatriz, could now sink so low as to become a mere receptacle for the futile and perhaps angry remonstrances of that deluded Carlos Argentino Daneri. Luckily, nothing happened -- except the inevitable spite touched off in me by this man, who had asked me to fulfill a delicate mission for him and then had let me drop.

Gradually, the phone came to lose its terrors, but one day toward the end of October it rang, and Carlos Argentino was on the line. He was deeply disturbed, so much so that at the outset I did not recognise his voice. Sadly but angrily he stammered that the now unrestrainable Zunino and Zungri, under the pretext of enlarging their already outsized "salon-bar," were about to take over and tear down this house.

"My home, my ancestral home, my old and inveterate Garay Street home!" he kept repeating, seeming to forget his woe in the music of his words.

It was not hard for me to share his distress. After the age of fifty, all change becomes a hateful symbol of the passing of time. Besides, the scheme concerned a house that for me would always stand for Beatriz. I tried explaining this delicate scruple of regret, but Daneri seemed not to hear me. He said that if Zunino and Zungri persisted in this outrage, Doctor Zunni, his lawyer, would sue ipso facto and make them pay some fifty thousand dollars in damages.

Zunni's name impressed me; his firm, although at the unlikely address of Caseros and Tacuarí, was nonetheless known as an old and reliable one. I asked him whether Zunni had already been hired for the case. Daneri said he would phone him that very afternoon. He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.

"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."

"The Aleph?" I repeated.

"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."

I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.

"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."

"You wait there. I'll be right over to see it."

I hung before he could say no. The full knowledge of a fact sometimes enables you to see all at once many supporting but previously unsuspected things. It amazed me not to have suspected until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. As were all the Viterbos, when you came down to it. Beatriz (I myself often say it) was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance, but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also in her, and perhaps these called for a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino's madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other.

On Garay Street, the maid asked me kindly to wait. The master was, as usual, in the cellar developing pictures. On the unplayed piano, beside a large vase that held no flowers, smiled (more timeless than belonging to the past) the large photograph of Beatriz, in gaudy colours. Nobody could see us; in a seizure of tenderness, I drew close to the portrait and said to it, "Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it's me, it's Borges."

Moments later, Carlos came in. He spoke dryly. I could see he was thinking of nothing else but the loss of the Aleph.

"First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"

Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images."

Tired of his inane words, I quickly made my way. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway itself, was something of a pit. My eyes searched the dark, looking in vain for the globe Carlos Argentino had spoken of. Some cases of empty bottles and some canvas sacks cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up a sack, folded it in two, and at a fixed spot spread it out.

"As a pillow," he said, "this is quite threadbare, but if it's padded even a half-inch higher, you won't see a thing, and there you'll lie, feeling ashamed and ridiculous. All right now, sprawl that hulk of yours there on the floor and count off nineteen steps."

I went through with his absurd requirements, and at last he went away. The trapdoor was carefully shut. The blackness, in spite of a chink that I later made out, seemed to me absolute. For the first time, I realised the danger I was in: I'd let myself be locked in a cellar by a lunatic, after gulping down a glassful of poison! I knew that back of Carlos' transparent boasting lay a deep fear that I might not see the promised wonder. To keep his madness undetected, to keep from admitting he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. I felt a shock of panic, which I tried to pin to my uncomfortable position and not to the effect of a drug. I shut my eyes -- I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

"Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?" said a hated and jovial voice. "Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn't pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?"

Carlos Argentino's feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, "One hell of a -- yes, one hell of a."

The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on.

"Did you see everything -- really clear, in colours?"

At that moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one -- believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.

Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.

Postscript of March first, 1943 -- Some six months after the pulling down of a certain building on Garay Street, Procrustes & Co., the publishers, not put off by the considerable length of Daneri's poem, brought out a selection of its "Argentine sections". It is redundant now to repeat what happened. Carlos Argentino Daneri won the Second National Prize for Literature. ["I received your pained congratulations," he wrote me. "You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must confess -- even if it chokes you! -- that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the most caliph of rubies."] First Prize went to Dr. Aita; Third Prize, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti. Unbelievably, my own book The Sharper's Cards did not get a single vote. Once again dullness and envy had their triumph! It's been some time now that I've been trying to see Daneri; the gossip is that a second selection of the poem is about to be published. His felicitous pen (no longer cluttered by the Aleph) has now set itself the task of writing an epic on our national hero, General San Martín.

I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole. I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or whether he read it -- applied to another point where all points converge - - in one of the numberless texts that the Aleph in his cellar revealed to him. Incredible as it may seem, I believe that the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph.

Here are my reasons. Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña came across a manuscript of Burton's, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected. Burton mentions other similar devices -- the sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I, 26); the mirrorlike spear that the first book of Capella's Satyricon attributes; Merlin's universal mirror, which was "round and hollow... and seem'd a world of glas" (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19) -- and adds this curious statement: "But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court... No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum... The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: 'In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.'"

Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.

El Aleph, 1945. Translation by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author.

Charles Simonds and the little people (and Luca's fingers)

2009-11-30T12:32:00.000-08:00

source:http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa190.htm

The Clay Grows Tall: The World of Charles Simonds

October 16, 1999 - March 26, 2000

Jane Fudge, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, wrote the following essay for the Simonds exhibition. She has curatorial responsibility for photography and also a visual art and film critic. "My brother and I were adept at making portraits in clay," Simonds says of his medium, which he began using in the fourth grade at New Lincoln School in New York City. Impressed, the Simonds boys' parents sent them to study with two artists who did church reliefs. "I'm very good at angels," Simonds says.

Charles Simonds majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley and after graduation, taught college art in New Jersey. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan's older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Back in New York, where he still lives, he experimented with clay and sand, learning to capture the look of the American Southwest or an African savanna.

When he first began making these "urban landscapes" in the 1970s, Simonds attached them directly to the walls of dilapidated buildings in New York City. The sculptures lasted until the old buildings collapsed or were torn down. Simends doesn't fire his clay, so it is remarkable that the sculptures survived at all.

Later, he made hamlets that nestled in nooks and crannies of galleries and public spaces. Large installations like Floral Font seemed to flow or erupt from gallery floors and corners. Indoors, Simonds's sculptures are protected from immediate destruction, but permanence is not what his work is about. Each time Floral Font is put on display, the artist must partly reconstruct it, and inevitably some of the work is lost or changed forever.

For all their fragility and playfulness, Simonds's sculptures are as serious and eloquent as any work in metal or stone. Floral Font is a philosophical instrument of sticks and unbaked clay, a three-dimensional conversation about life and death, nature and humanity, and the way people go about living on the earth. It is a kind of equation in which landscape, home, and body are constants, but the sum of which is always zero.

Floral Font is grounded in the artist's longtime fantasy about the "little people" to whom this terrain is home. The notion of a race of diminutive humans is an archetype found in myths and folk beliefs worldwide. These wee folk are as diverse as leprechauns in Ireland, the small, fierce warriors of Native American legend, the citizens of Lilliput in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and the hobbits who inhabit holes in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. Science has not banished them; indeed, it has obliquely affirmed their existence. We know ourselves to be colonized by microscopic life from follicle mites down to viruses. Likewise, we crawl upon the skin of the planet, living in a conceit of human-sized time and space. Why should there not be other, smaller realms?

However, Simonds's little people are conspicuous by their absence. Their kivas and dwelling houses, treasuries and reservoirs are empty. Either the buildings are not finished or they are in ruins, abandoned and slowly eroding away. Floral Font invites us to explore this world and, by extension, our own.

The landscape that supports the little people's architecture is an inhospitable desert. Baked by the sun, scoured by sandy, siccative winds, the desert is traditionally a place of death and refuge, renunciation and insight. In the desert the Israelites wandered for decades in search of a great truth. Anchorite saints went to the desert to pray. All over the world, people repair to the desert to die. In his meditation on the futility of human existence, the World War I soldier-poet Wilfred Owen wrote of the life-giving sun:

Think how it wakes the seeds--

Woke once the clays of a dead star. . . .

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

The law of Charles Simonds's realm is elegant and simple. Earth gives rise to living beings who in turn build towns and temples, disturbing and hallowing the mud that gave them life. Individuals die and the artifacts of their culture decay and return to the earth.

The cycle of creation and destruction informs Charles Simonds's microcosmic meditations. Yet the impulse to create things--including works of art--in the knowledge that they will eventually disappear is a godlike trait. In building his mythos, his topographies and landmarks, Charles Simonds arrogates to himself (and us) the status of deity, a perilous and ambiguous undertaking. Peer into the terraces and windows of Floral Font and into the world of Charles Simonds's imagination. Then suppose you were to glance over your shoulder and discover a vastly bigger eye peering at you.

Vija Clemens and the Moon

2009-11-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

From 1966 Celmins took photographs as subjects for paintings. In painted and drawn works since 1968 she drew upon photographs from books, magazines and those taken by herself, including views of the sea, desert and constellations. In such works as Moon Surface (Luna 9) No. 1 (1969; New York, MOMA) she carefully built up and layered marks to create a distance between photograph and painting, also calling attention to the paper surface. Her persistent attention to the psychological implications of the artistic process in relation to the formulation of images made the images objects for contemplation. One of her most visually and conceptually challenging works is To Fix the Image in Memory 9 (1977–82), a series of 11 stones, both real and cast-bronze, painted with acrylic.

We saw her work in Edinburgh. Even up close her drawings look like photographs. Photographs of the moon surface would be impressive enough, let alone the fact she rendered these by looking and recreating by hand. This replication by work of hand, real objects into made impressions is clear in the idea behind 'to fix the image in memory'.

drawn to this work because I have become interested in images and visuals of cosmology, relating this to my new interest in the gap between ART and SCIENCE, particularly looking at the emergence of science as a POWER/KNOWLEDGE complex, particularly looking at the making of 'modernity', and the events and changes in history as I try to understand and learn about ideas about 'the modern condition'.

science- comes out of protestant reformation- science evolves as a way of 'demystifying' and understanding God's creation- was this the skeptics/the 'rationalists'- relearn and research.

http://www.frontline.org.za/articles/howreformation_changedworld.htm

Gaileo, Da vinci, looking at the moon-

telescopes, and new ideas that the moon had an 'imperfect', landscaped surface, mottled with heights and valleys and craters- this was shouted down by The Church, who held belief that the moon was a perfect creation of God's, nothing like the Earth, with all its mortal imperfections and variations. These sorts of images and ideas came to mind when I was working through our drawing and visual abstract mark making language project.

Crumbling matter of chalk and charcoal, and forces acting on them as they fall, moving and staining the paper to record and mark movement on a suface, using 2d photography and 4d film to create an illusion of space and try to distort understanding of scale.

To come

2009-11-29T16:30:00.000-08:00

Tadashi kawamata – wooden architectural sits

Charles simmonds

Mariele neudecker

Vija Clemens

Olivia plender

Spartacus chetwynd

Sacred made real

Tate turner prize, Lucy skaer, roger hjorns,

Keith Tyson, grayson perry

Exhbition on at tramway

Foucault,

That woman who takes pictures of places like museums, in art now.

Jean tinguely

Bruce

Douglas Gordon

Alfred Hitchcock

Peter wiebel

Bruce nauman

Woman who videos herself as filmstars

Duos- marina ab and ulli, smith/stewart

Caravaggio

Look up time out/first Thursdays/ cut up/flood tide/ outsider art/anselm kiefer/

landscapes

phoebefrancesamis

The Internal Slipping Out into the WOrld at Large

girl in a peach

better?

onscreen

Spliced image--> Mask --> Recreate Mask with face

291 Journal, Visual Poetry- MEntal Reactions

Manual Video Collaging

opening sequence- lorry reversing beep beep and multistorey car park.

collage- shop front/bleeker cafe

Collating footage for collage

footage for collages- whale song

footage for collages- elk bugles and fish hearts

Footage for collages

footage for collages

The Wild One

Collecting footage for collaging narrative

Visuals from footage of Monica drawing from sound clips

closer look at Pisano's practice...

Falke Pisano at Transmission

drawings from sound clips

Mapping speech patterns + testing communications

maxfield parrish- Greenberg and kitsch

saatchi&saatchi advertising

Marina Abromavic and Ulay- Rest energy

Eva and Franco Mattes, Synthetic Performances

Chat Roulette

Kurt Schwitters Ursonate, performed by Steven Schick and Shahrokh Yadegari

be- sound poetry

particle sturcutes of the universe in descartes principia philosphaie 1650

cartography- as cultural representation/politics of maps

How to illustrate language?Make it exist physically?

how to illustrate prepositions?

saussure- mapping language/language as 'structural'

i could do this to this?

VAn Doesburg+ The international avant garde exhibition

Mark Napier Makes me make images

Mark Napier- The Waiting Room

Collage, availability of images in informational society

-internet as tool

language as a network, independency

-cartology--->

-networks

-networks

-individual's Perception of space/cyberspace

Reading Objects as 'Texts'- Roland Barthes to Lucy Skaer

The VideoSphere, Gene YoungBlood, 1970

"The media must be liberated, must be removed from private ownershipand commercial sponsership, must be placed in the service of all ofhumanity. We must make the media believable. We must assume consciouscontrol over the videosphere."

Radical Software (magazine front covers)

Google results

Final: How to arrange the Photographs in Space?

Cardboard Macette tests.

Development: Images within Images creating Tunnels.

Paper >< Reflected Space

Objects at a distance- Seeing in VIsual Space&Geometric Space

5

4

3

2

Original Image

Photographing two sites in one picture plane.

Photographing Spaces and Places

Large Scale Projections on Lovely Found Big Wood

Small Scale Projections

Material Tests- Projections

Material tests for 3d drawing lining up yah

BALLS

forms occupying one pictorial space

Enough for now

I need some second life experience

fish will gladly interact when they are fed with the push of a button from your control console

Barry Doupe- Computer aesthetics as 'at once familiar and out of reach'

Susan SONTAG On Photography, DG text

trying to paint sellotape and crease of paper

2d Image contained in glass= 3d object, dimensions of reflected room/site/context

Site-Place-Context: geometry and experiencing/perceiving space

Mountains- Foreground/Background

Public/Private Space- Rise of 'bourgeois public sphere' Enlightenment to Now

Observing Observation to the Power of 6!

Appropriating Lucy Skaer's Process to Experience Materials

"The media must be liberated, must be removed from private ownership
and commercial sponsership, must be placed in the service of all of
humanity. We must make the media believable. We must assume conscious
control over the videosphere."