Novel
(2023)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single channel digital video, with photography and text, 5' 41'', 2007
'Novel' is a half-photography, half-fiction digital video, which was inspired by my temporary dwelling in different cities during the period of a year. For my contribution to this catalogue, I briefly discuss the artistic process and thinking behind the project. In parallel, I reflect upon the possible theoretical links between visuality, narratives, architecture, and urbanism. I suggest that personal associations are definitive and significant in the ways we tend to occupy and subjectively interpret contemporary urban spaces.
After a lengthy process of collecting photographs and digital film footage, as well as selecting written material, some of it in the form of quotes, from my journal, I completed the video in 2007. My method was:
- I made preparatory sketches that I included in the video (film still 1).
- I used a montage technique I saw in one of Peter Greenaway's films: the separate 'window' on the top or bottom sides of the video (film stills 2, 4, 5) that denotes parallel action.
- I overlaid photographs (film still 3), a technique that allowed me to create the animating effect of the moving image, without using film footage.
In painting, the artist can make layers out of collaged material that might be unconnected or purposefully juxtaposed to the painting's subject. Using the above method, I asked the viewer to watch the video more like a moving series of paintings, rather than as a film.
The video, like my other video art work, was exhibited and archived under my artist's pseudonym, Betty Nigianni.
Written in 2012, the essay is a separate piece to accompany this exposition.
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Talking field: listening to the troubled site
(2017)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition examines my recent multi-channel sound composition 'Decomposing Landscape' (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous, and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field-recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognisable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialisation techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and a portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is, how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.