Fast- and Stop- frame, and Real- time: video's comment on matters of observation of perception considered through drawing
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft, Safa Tharib
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition is a presentation of work in progress, also involving reflective commentary, by two collaborators in a research project titled 'The Observation of Perception: considered through drawing', hosted by i2ADS Research Unit of the Fine Art Faculty of Porto University. The collaborators, a digital visual artist and an analogue-focused fine artist, are respectively involved in the research through visual story-telling and video, and drawing and its audio-visual recording. In the present circumstances, each of the works is considered through its video element specifically in relation to several manifestations of time. In the digital visual artist's case, time is formatted through and as fast-frame and stop-frame, and in the fine artist's case, real-time and a psychoanalytical inflection on real, often appearing in the literature capitalised as Real. The first author, who provides the written reflection, is the fine artist, while substantial visual work, a published paper, and some critical intervention is provided by the digital visual artist as a second author. The first author takes as a directive, aspects of the second author's paper, and reflectively critiques both his and his research collaborator's time-based work in their video manifestations. Theoretical references are to the digital visual artist collaborator Safa Tharib, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The exposition ends with a question that emerges from the commentary, as to the applicability of the indexical signifier to consideration of digital as well as analogue practice.
Diagramming Perception
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
This artistic research is a contribution to a larger research project titled ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through drawing’, hosted by i2ADS. The research begins with the hypothesis that perception can be diagrammed, in this case through and as a form of drawing that indicates how perception is for this investigator conceived and works in action. One of the two visual motifs of the work is also a meta-motif, in that as an action-camera placed over the eyes, it is the means by which the investigator records himself at work on the second main motif, which is his image as viewed in a circular hand-held mirror. The investigator approaches the initiative as a question of diagramming the self-same initiative, accepting whatever are its developed implications as the aesthetic of the work. Peirce's division of the diagram into elements of firstness and secondness, with the elusive recognition of diagram as an abstract entity before any communicative purpose, keys into a working practice that in any case veers towards the diagrammatic. The investigator's tendency to audio-visually record his working process has led him to a position where the logistics of the purpose paradoxically reveal the subjectivity – if not absurdity – of the self-same process. In this case, little by little, a contingent factor of a wart takes centre-stage as blind spot; at-once a torn hole within the drawing's material surface, the action camera as an illusory obstruction, and a factor that oscillates with and as the circular self-portrait. The presentation takes the viewer/reader through the process, largely perceptual, that is diagrammed on and as the artifactual outcome, the drawing.
Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice
(2021)
author(s): Marie Fahlin
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The purpose of the artistic research, Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice, has been to consider choreography and curating in their similarities and differences. Thus, at different phases of the working process, choreography and curating were treated as one and the same artistic practice; while, in other moments, as practices that are distinct from each other.
Curating has been implemented as a ‘taking care’ principle and a relational activity impacting the production, presentation and documentation of choreography. Choreography has undergone a process of self-reincarnations, or rather, of trans-carnations, whereby the entire body of work has been scrutinized and altered. Key figure/body/agent of these trans-carnations has been the horse, or rather, the assemblage of human and horse, women and horses, here called ‘Centauring.’
Curating and choreography have been integrated to a scrutiny of the art of riding, specifically, the choreography of dressage. In dressage, the research has identified the rigor needed by the research to both steer and unleash the working process.
The research has been pursued by purely artistic means, within a circumscribed field. Different perspectives and the making use of ramifications and loose ends, has proliferated into a plethora of intra-related works, objects and choreographies within which research result and artistic result coincide. The research har proceeded in consecutive phases. Each phase has developed its own specific artistic methodologies.
The overarching methodology has provided for a clear navigation of undetermined directions and dramaturgies. The concept of ‘One’ has produced and collected both core outcomes and residual manifestations. The exhibitions and the exhibitor have carried, pursued and embodied the works and otherwise choreographies, throughout the research process.
A Change in Perception
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Garry Barker
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
An artist’s narrative that sets out to introduce the starting point for a new body of evolving work that will grow out of an interrogation of somatic perception and interoception.
As the corona virus pandemic emerged the artist Garry Barker had just been given a commission to develop a series of playing cards that were designed to help people develop conversations about their bodies. However lockdown prevented many proposed activities taking place, initial packs of cards were produced but they couldn’t be used to play the suggested games, and the artist was asked if he could develop an online version. The artist’s research then began to change direction and questions were asked about the nature of perception itself, the body and somatic awareness. Research was refocused on inner body perception and neuropsychology and associated drawings were made in response to a growing awareness of internal body schemas, together with visualizations of relationships between interoception and exteroception. Gradually what emerged was the artist’s realization of how important his own imagination was in building images of how we feel about our inner bodies.
Cultural and Deliberative Public Ecologies
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Adelheid Mers
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From 2008 - 2010, I served as an embedded artist with the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) at the City of Chicago, accompanying the development of the Digital Access Agenda, and the Smart Chicago Recovery proposal.
In 2012, a new mayor initiated a Cultural Plan process for Chicago. Invited by the director for Cultural Planning for the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, I conducted a Cultural Plan open house for attendees of the Chicago Creative Expo.
This opened a door, locally, for organizations to consider more formal inclusion of art inflected perspectives in community and urban planning processes. Between 2012 and 2014, I was invited to work with the Foundation for Homan Square, the South East Chicago Commission, the Evanston Art Center, and the arts funding organization, 3Arts. SAIC graduate students participated in all Deliberative Cultural Ecology projects.
HOW DO YOU WORK? Conversations, drawings and responses (Vienna)
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Adelheid Mers
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Preliminarily in 2012, and formally in 2013/14 , I asked experimental musicians and composers in Vienna "How do you work?". Based on those conversations, I created two drawings of what I call each artist's "epistemic engine", or the way I understood them to work. One drawing was a free form exploration, and the other mapped my notes onto the "Fractal 3-line Matrix", a diagrammatic instrument that emerged in my work in 2011, after the informal round of conversations. On sharing the drawings with them, artists were invited to produce a response in a medium of their choice. This project was supported by the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna.