Research Catalogue

Degree: Bachelor, Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg (United States), recipient: Mari Amman
Graduated with honours

Event: Workshop, Mari Amman, artist(s)/author(s): Mari Amman, Mari Amman
PATTERN RECOGNITION, (teaching and artistic process), meditation, drawing, movement, writing, video. A process for multiple applications such as art making, teaching and workshops, psychology and counsel. Pattern Recognition was built alongside the Afjordance artistic research project. Pattern Recognition Projects apply principles and ideas in John Haugeland’s book on Artificial Intelligence to develop a method of learning through doing. These methods of learning are designed to develop critical thinking skills, while forming healthy relationships and understandings with terrains and temporality. Pattern Recognition involves understandings and practices in the field of Embodied Cognition. The Pattern Recognition projects work dynamically with individuals in the Vision and Body Relationship, coordination and motor skill development. The Pattern Recognition projects work together and with memory, behavior, lineage, choices, and agency. There are presently 5 Segments in this ongoing process development. STEP ONE The first step is to experience a sensitised exploration of the environment. Through meditation and movement to go into contact with intuition. The intuition guides the gathering of materials from the environment. STEP TWO The second step is to draw the materials, following an axial rotation similar to the scientifically reported rotation of the earth. The drawings were made, then traced with the visible under-layers onto the new top layers with the idea of impressions being visible in memory only up to a point until visibility fades but does not erase the existence of the under-layers. STEP THREE The third step is involves Memory. The lines are performed as body movements. The exercises are carried out independently, and then if in a group environment coordinated independent movements to arrange a group movement. Records of these practices are used for reflection and to witness the development over time, among different groups and various places. STEP FOUR To experience nature and nurture concept of impression and transference, two transferrable materials are used with water and pigment. Other materials can be useful. For the sake of providing an example, gouache paintings with two pieces of paper follow 2 different impulse. 1 impulse to paint from memory. The 2nd impulse to paint from a photo. To look at the difference between making something look like something else or using memory (embodied sense of experience) – the gouache painting exercise was carried out by making compositions based on memories of witnessing detailed areas of water flow, and composing paintings based on looking at a photograph. Viewers could immediately see the difference. The gouache paintings were done on the “wrong side” of Japanese Washi paper, to transfer the pigments onto acid-free, black papers. The pigments left traces similar to the way a memory becomes a trace of lived experience or ways communication of forms become transferred onto what is underneath or nearby. In addition to discerning difference in how forms are made by hand from referencing external or internal referents, is also considering the process of transfer. As the original can become a symbol for reading-as reading a book or remembering a book, the paint transferred to the surface under becomes the information absorbed. STEP FIVE A mirroring exercise can be completed with language and/or illustration. The exercise in writing a letter in reverse, to see how it appears through a material and in a mirror. The practice is based on the mechanics of a single-reflex camera and the way the eye perceives reality directly which is then flipped in the brain. This practice develops understanding of communication and the two-way nature of the way read symbols are transmitted and interpreted.

Art object: Visualisation, Mari Amman, artist(s)/author(s): Mari Amman, Mari Amman
Monoliths, 2013 – ongoing, size noted under each image. The nature of desire and ways post-modernism was a reaction to modernity motivated these works. Forms in water and terrain are used to create visceral imagery engaging in viewers subjectivity. The aesthetic relationships appear at first glance as mirroring, and with longer looking nuanced differences. This type of individuation is engaged by the scale of the prints demanding the viewers confrontation with projection based on ideology with what is observably here.