this is a brilliant piece of work and uncanny in the extreme
this image is from the Physics and astronomy art group at the university of sheffield
this is a brilliant piece of work and uncanny in the extreme
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I think when I make things like this I am trying to make things which make you feel like this looks or simply just look like that
I've just come across this... which I really like, especially the bollocks. Its also rather like this... one of the taxidermy pieces I did during the Bank Street Art residency 2010 entitled 'X is very Useful' from Dr Zeuss' 'ABC. "X is very usful if your name is Nixie Nox. it also comes in handy spelling ax and extra fox."
In the same one to one session with Warren Neidich I showed a short clip from SBSBI where Steve B is a tree He seemed quite surprised I had come up with this work without knowing the work of Tony Oursler. So I checked out Tony Oursler and yes I can see similarities. Here's some of his work off his website. I think it looks great - will investigate further. I didn't show Warren neidich these clips...! I'm fairly confident that despite surface similarities our work will prove to be very different. After all, all of it also looks like this... Fornasetti... Dali... and Dada. Is originality still possible? Was if ever? If art reflects the human mind this is perhaps evidence of both similarity and difference.
Warren Neidich looked at a few snippets of my work. I showed him a couple of clips from the Media Research Group Walking Project. I described the work as sketches. the above is a still from 'belper 1' the above is a still from 'belper 2' He said it was quite interesting but suggested it might be better if it were black and white. He also suggested that walking in the country wasn't very interesting and that I should do a piece whilst on a protest march and use more camera angles. This is a still from 'canal'
Although the protest march film idea is a good one, it is not what I am exploring nor is it my idea. I had a one to one session with Warren Neiditch this morning. He made no attempt to disguise his disgust for neuroscience / art collaboration after I described my intended behavioural and fMRI surveys. He went as far as to suggest that scientists and artists shouldn’t collaborate at all.
My project will produce both a scientific paper from Dr Yael Benn and an experimental film by myself. This should, if nothing more, open a dialogue about the methodologies and consequently the potential scope of these diverse approaches to investigation. It was useful to be made aware that this is potentially such a controversial area. He looked at some of my work and suggested I look at; Tony Oursler Catherine Malabou Anthony Vidler (whom I am aware of through a book about the uncanny and architecture) Visualising Science by Luke Paul (I think this is right but I can’t find it on-line) The Beautiful Brian by Noah Hutton And that I must look into; Anthropocene (esp Amselm / Dewelt) Specular ontologies or philosophies Default mode network Excelarationism Cognitive capitalism He also suggested I join the neuroaesthetics facebook group, however the previous day at the seminar he said he loathed Facebook. So lots to be getting on with! He concluded by saying that it would be a year before I realised how much he had given me. A case for neuroplasticity was presented. I need no convincing of this, nor any persuasion that much neuroscientific research is concerned with understanding how people’s minds work in order to better target them as consumers. I also firmly agree that greater understanding of neuroscience may lead to the contemporary brain being shaped and that shape would likely be homogeneous and in line with capitalist aims.
Neiditch spoke passionately about the power of the artist as a counter force against this. Referencing his new book ‘The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism’, (which I’ve just downloaded from http://www.artbrain.org/), Neiditch suggests that contemporary illness and conditions such as ADHC, panic attacks etc are a product of our times in cognitive capitalism. Mark Fisher ‘Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures’, talks of digital capitalism. The book seems to suggest that there is a post millennium creative vacuum. Initially I considered this was perhaps due to how information is accessed. Fisher makes reference to music throughout the latter part of the 20th century, however he doesn’t make any point about the fact that the work he is looking at was available through established, mainstream, TV and radio platforms. Could this apparent lack of innovative work in the early 21st century be more a case of the interesting stuff is being distributed elsewhere. For the time being the internet is awash with material and consequently everything is difficult to find. Maybe the internet will continue to ‘grow’ hubs whereby information can be accessed. It could also be the case that there isn’t any interesting work being done these days as people are too busy answering emails and responding to Facebook to make anything. Time will tell. Neiditch and Fisher have collaborated on writings which I believe I will find on artbrain.org. I will try to get to that soon. Sokushinbutsu refers to a practice of Buddhist monks observing austerity to the point of death and mummification. Northern Japan between the 11th and 19th century. It is believed that many hundreds of monks tried, but only 24 such mummifications have been discovered to date. 1,000 days of eating a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another thousand days and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and most importantly, it made the body too poisonous to be eaten by maggots. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. After the tomb was sealed, the other monks in the temple would wait another 1,000 days, and open the tomb to see if the mummification was successful. If the monk had been successfully mummified, they were immediately seen as a Buddha and put in the temple for viewing. Usually, though, there was just a decomposed body The practitioners of sokushinbutsu did not view this practice as an act of suicide, but rather as a form of further enlightenment No shit! Uncanny?
There's no doubt now that they are dead but corpses should always lie down. And that space of just the bell ringing, and then not ringing and then the wait, and then the answer. Quite outstanding. Mirror (Zerkalo)Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. With Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Larisa Tarkovskaya
Soviet Union 1975, 35mm, b/w & color, 108 min. Spanish and Russian with English subtitles “For the first time,” he resolved, “I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kind of tricks.” Tarkovsky needed twenty rough cuts before arriving at the film’s intricately interflowing system of flashbacks and archival footage, often interpreted as unfolding in a dying artist’s final rays of consciousness. While Mirror, like all Tarkovsky’s films, pays homage to painting, music, and poetry, it also makes plain that the Russian director understood Mnemosyne to be the mother of the muses. Being a poet, he sought not only to retrieve the past but to reveal its essence—and in so doing to redeem an inherently flawed present. “The story not of the filmmaker’s life,” observes Tarkovsky scholar Robert Bird, “but of his visual imagination." I'm interested here in Robert Bird's description of Mirror. The attempt to render visible the visual imagination is certainly a claim of the Surrealist manifesto and is also an intention for SBSBI...not that I anticipate it being anything like Mirror. In an essay written just after Ivan’s Childhood’s release, Tarkovsky held that “[a] larger portion of the film must be devoted to the slowly passing minutes of anticipation, delays, and pauses, which are far from being ventilation holes in the narrative progression.” More than twenty years later, in his book Sculpting with Time, he offered a variation on this same theme: “I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience.” Tarkovsky placed his trust in the idea that an essential experience of cinema would convey an essential experience of life, as both are made of these same “slowly passing minutes.” In each of his films Tarkovsky struggles to find the form that will hold time’s intimacy and mystery. If there is finally something quixotic in the notion of “sculpting with time,” it is, if nothing else, an idea that reflects a strong faith in the audience’s experience. “You are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part,” Tarkovsky reflected. “The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence.” For Tarkovsky, as for all seekers, the only necessary goal is the impossible one. His films live on in the spirit of that search, with all their extraordinary ambitiousness pointing to a finally unfathomable sense of purpose. – Max Goldberg, writer and frequent contributor to cinema scope. (the above minus italics is from http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2014janmar/tarkovsky.html accessed 24/10/14) |
Susannah gentThis blog is a repository for thoughts and miscellaneous material whilst undertaking a Phd on the subject of the uncanny Archives
December 2017
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