The past is rotting in the future: Exploring the Aesthetics of Absence in the daily life
(2024)
author(s): Alexandra Corcode
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
The Past is Rotting in the Future: Exploring the
Aesthetics of Absence in Daily Life, embarks on an
exploration of absence within the human daily life, examining
its manifestation through relations, processes,
and objects. It seeks to understand how absence is not
merely a void but a significant presence that shapes perception,
memory, and imagination. Through a multi-disciplinary
approach that integrates personal narrative with
academic writing, this research investigates the ways
in which absence is performed, textured, and materialized.
Central to the thesis is how photography, as both a
personal and artistic practice, serves as a critical medium
for discussing and visualizing absence, navigating
through personal experiences of loss, and broader philosophical
questions about how absence influences and
constitutes our understanding of the world.
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.
Note: Please disregard comment I posted about a notification that doesn't appear anymore.
We Three, Kinged: Crowning the Aural on 9/11
(2018)
author(s): Isaac Vayo
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This study examines the present predominance of visuality in relation to narratives of 9/11, concluding that aurality, typically undervalued in such conversations, is a more accurate and effective representation of 9/11-as-event. Within the broader field of 9/11 aurality, three specific examples are subject to more lengthy analysis in terms of their original context and their presentation to audiences via popular media: the voices of pilot-hijackers Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, the impacts of those jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers, and George W. Bush’s 14 September 2001 speech delivered from atop the rubble at the World Trade Center site. 9/11 aurality, then, succeeds where the visual imagination fails, allowing its account of the event to persist generationally, its internal logic to exist rationally, and its chief interlocutor, Osama bin Laden, to continue the discourse verbally.