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Water of Leith weir

The weir on the water of Leith near the Dean village, where L and I visited a few weeks back. My gran told stories of delivering milk in the Dean Village area as a girl.

pill orchard

pill orchard, originally uploaded by aesop.

This image comes from some work I did yesterday at the community orchard in Pill. I've been thinking about a 'book distributed in space'- one that happens as a real space (either as an installation, or, as here, only at the point of recording).  This has obvious similarities with the way that our experience of the environment works on a semiotic level. We read a city's signs much as we would a multi-authored text. some of what we see is in fact signification of the most classic sort: signs, writings. Others include behaviour and historical traces left on the environment.

With this idea I'm trying to work on a form of 'book-making' that tilts my point of view out of the reverie of the page, and into real life. As you can see, it's obviously still at an experimental stage, but I'm finding things out about the different rhetorical effects that the combination of space, word and camera achieve- to say nothing of the aspects of the installation that briefly exists. In this image I've come a little further along the road to clarity with the large bold words (my first experiment was illegible because it was just handwritten on paper), and elements like the path have been used to reinforce the spatial aspect. There's an argument between flat and deep readings here, because the simple left to right flat reading doesn't work. It has to be read as a space in order to be construed. When finally presented in book form, on flat pages, this technique will, I think, become even stranger than it is now. It also suggests a commentary on or echo of our 'reading tactics' in/of the world. Are we reading surfaces or structures? Straight lines or spaces? Is there an element of time to our perception, or is it more-or-less instant, arriving at the speed of perception (usually light)?

I also want this work to fit into my series on Whistling Copse, though here, the commodity and land are public, in contrast to Whistling Copse, which was emphatically and tragically not.

In this picture I'm starting to learn more about how I might use the contours of different objects to play with the space more: the grass obscures the feet of some of the stands- why not play with this? A sign could peer out from behind a bush.

I'm aware of the fact that the signs would present an even more unsettling, flat appearance if they were more carefully placed facing the camera, ie not at slight angles, but I'm entertaining the idea that I want to retain lots of evidence of the artifice (hence also the unashamed use of masking tape, which was nonetheless very necessary in the breeze).

As it happened I didn't have enough juice in my batteries to finish this shoot, which I initially cursed as it would be next to impossible to set up the shoot again, but I have enough of a sequence here to study the effect, and I will continue the experiment, with the added experiment of a caesura into a different spatial arrangement, most probably an entirely different space.
I'd like to continue in an urban setting, where the signs would become softer edged by comparison with the more similar environment, but I can't afford to leave a half dozen music stands in the street to get pinched! I need a half dozen assistants to hold onto them!

trust me, I'm an ordinal

trust me, I'm an ordinal, originally uploaded by aesop.

I'm working on a project with andrew Atkinson at the moment that seems to be about various subjects to do with space: its measurement, transgression, depiction, the social conventions that describe it, the ways in which it is transformed, compressed and folded. This fits in a lot with my "whistling Copse" series, which was about poaching and evidence, and with my "Hidden Fortress" idea, which is about, for want of a better description, 'ghost-space". The idea of a space that is hidden, one that is RIGHT HERE, but unavailable, that is hiding behind the air.

We're going to be working with images that work with or against photographic conventions, the various codes drawing has for space, and things like city codes, maps and stories, to investigate the sorts of spaces that are created by the intentions of another order of planning. For example, the forbidden spaces in the undergrowth beneath the elevated road, or the forbidden space created by the ownership of land. There are texts, too, underpinning things. We've yet to agree, but de Certeau and the acts of Enclosure, and stuff pertaining to the career of Robert Moses, the NY city planner, are all in our sights.

Technorati Tags: art, book, report, studio log, writing

Ashes and Snow

www.ashesandsnow.org

An intriguing exhibition featuring photos/film/novel/bookart (the 'Ashes and Snow Codex'), travelling the world with its 'Nomadic Museum'.

The Nomadic Museum restores the possibility of wonder to museums whose excesses of clarity and light have banished the shadows. The power of the show and the power of the building are so reciprocal that it is difficult to separate the dancer from the dance. Colbert and Ban condition the senses of the visitors to facilitate their psychological entry into the space of the photographs, to deliver the message that man is not, and cannot be, separate from the nature within which he evolved.

Modern Painters

Gregory Colbert's photographs are the center of a huge undertaking. The site, intriguingly, doesn't show us much of these. Still, the ambition behind the work is to create something rather wonderful. I'd go to find out about this if I could. They're currently erecting it in Tokyo. It'd be great if it came to London.


Technorati Tags: ashes and snow, photography, art

Under the Wire

Under the Wire

Twelve O' Clock Wood

Twelve O' Clock Wood

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library, originally uploaded by aesop.

From a set of photos I took for the forthcoming book on the library, which celebrates its centenary this year.

Bristol Flickrmeet

Bristol Flickrmeet, originally uploaded by aesop.

the glass is half...oh

Bristol Flickrmeet, originally uploaded by aesop.

flickrmeet

...was good. About 300 pics incoming on Flickr (occasionally interesting, largely not). I may even edit them one day.

In the meantime, thanks everyone for being such good company, and happy anniversary to S&V!