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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!

Emblems on the Streets

I'm doing a project at work right now involving transcribing and working with listings from old Bristol directories. My work involves looking for artisans and artists and creating relationships of place and time for various trades. However, one of the things I'm struck by is the vast variety of different shop signs there must have been.

green man

squirrel

ship

ring of bells

little tower

white hart

fountain

crown

hole in the wall

bear

white horse

black horse

etc, etc. Some streets must have been teeming with animals, ships, kings and miniature architecture of all kinds. It would be an interesting art project to realise a couple of 18th century Bristol streets by their shop signs alone. Especially when we consider what the urban landscape has become because of adverisements.

Borges Quotation

"People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading," says Borges. It is interesting that Borges, who, if anyone could, could see the way that the alphabetic world composes the life we live in, post-Gutenberg, bothers to set a distinction between the two. We are situated readers of the world itself, characters in our own emplotment.

I'm working on material that will help me towards expressing this. Mostly involving music stands and bits of paper.

Technorati Tags: reading, review, studio log, writing

imaginal method

The use of allegory as a defense continues today in the interpretations of dreams and fantasies. When images no longer surprise us, when we can expect what they mean and know what they intend, it is because we have our 'symbologies' of established meanings. Dreams have been yoked to the systems which interpret them; they belong to schools – there are 'Freudian dreams,' 'Jungian dreams,' etc. If long things are penises for Freudians, dark things are shadows for Jungians. Images are turned into predefined concepts such as passivity, power, sexuality, anxiety, femininity, much like the conventions of allegorical poetry. Like such poetry, and using similar allegorical techniques, psychology too can become a defense against the psychic power of personified images.

If the mother in our dream, or the beloved, ar the wise counselor, says and does what one would expect, or if the analyst iterprets these figures conventionally, they have been deprived of their authority as mythic images and persons and reduced to mere allegorical conventions and moralistic stereotypes. They have become the personified conceits of an allegory, a simple means of persuasion that forces the dream or fantasy into doctrinal compliance. The image allegorized is now the image in service of a teaching.

In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The 'worst' images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul.

James Hillman Re-Visioning, 8

Have we in book arts, come some way along the path of turning our field into an allegory, thus limiting its power to cross boundaries and do its work of transformation in culture? What would the remedy be? Where should we turn for palliative/transformational images of what the work is?

Technorati Tags: art, book, reading, review, 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

red key, blue castle

From a group of pictures I worked on back in summer 2005. This has come back to me now because it seems to touch on the whole Hidden Fortress and shows how I could be using text differently from how I do now, at least in disparate pictures.

This also made me think of the old Atari adventure game (which i was thinking of when made the picture. This was a computer game with the most basic of plots revolving around solving puzzles and threading mazes and killing the odd dragon in order to unite keys with castles, releasing dragons to slay and eventually getting hold of the chalice. I got pretty good at it. I found the instructions here. The simplicity of the thing holds up and seems to strike a chord in this more numinous quest.

An evil magician has stolen the Enchanted Chalice and has hidden it
somewhere in the Kingdom.The object of the game is to rescue the
Enchanted Chalice and place it inside the Golden Castle where it belongs...

There are three castles in the Kingdom; the White Castle, the Black
Castle, and the Golden Castle.Each castle has a Gate over the
entrance.The Gate can be opened with the corresponding colored Key.
Inside each Castle are rooms(or dungeons, depending at which Skill Level
you are playing). 

I loved that game! I wonder how I can thread this into the work?

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Also today, I had a fantasy about using the graduate project space to work on this project: big screen grab printouts from Kurosawa, a model forest with strings leading off to pictures stuck on the walls, me at the centre playing Adventure. With or without a suit of armour? What's the meaning of the mystery? What's it about?

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Another part of the day was spent photographing material for the library for Abolition 200. The above image has nothing to do with it, of course (it was part of a poster advising people to carry on working for the continued prosperity of Bristol and never mind that cholera nonsense). There are great scrapbooks filled with all sorts of fascinating ephemera that bring out a sense of the great unknown history of life in Bristol.

Perhaps some of these images might turn out to be the 'treasures' associated with the hidden fortress that must be put together? Maybe the quest to find the hidden fortress is actually solved by getting a library ticket (!).

Funnily enough, this is a theme I've already explored with Holden's Silence. But now I have another dimension in terms of folding different 'domains' together. The woods are a map to other places, including the library, which is, in the best Borgesian tradition, the map to all the places human minds have been.

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Finally, there was a peacock butterfly sitting on my wheelie bin when I got home:

The rest of the evening rubberstamping borders on my Turndust covers, and cooked dinner for Lindy.

Technorati Tags: atari, adventure, forest, key, photo, hidden fortress, leigh woods, art, BookArt, eason, cholera, abolition 200, map, library, borges, butterfly, rubberstamp

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Tartanry

Away with all this tartanry, this obscene and irrelevant clutter of sporrans and gewgaws!

Alasdair Maclean, 31st March 1980

(A handy quotation for use on Princes Street or the Royal Mile, or merely when confronted by plaid.)

Technorati Tags: quotation, tartan, scotland

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The Past Inside the Present

This is what I mean.

"The past inside the present."
a quotation from Boards of Canada: Music is Math

Some more cogitation on Whistling Copse as being at the centre of a number of different possibilities. The hidden fortress is not merely a stronghold but also a doorway. I'm thinking of Mythago wood again, I think. I haven't made work about it since I was a teenager, but it seems to be interesting me again. Let's describe it a different way. It's a special context wherein our thoughts and unconscious imaginings take on physical form. It shouldn't be too difficult to see the original fantasy setting recast from that into something a bit closer to the more widely-acceptable context of the social construction. Something entirely imaginary which impinges on the real because we, collectively, believe in it. (This encompasses our major social bonds and beliefs like money and marriage. They are real because we believe they are, and they and constructions like them exist at the pinnacle of causal force for us and our societies).

What Mythago Wood can do is allow these beliefs to take on form for the individual: the individual, in this context, takes the responsibility/unconscious responsibility, for generating the materials he or she encounters. It conjures up those moments where we are 'running offline' from the rest of society: we still carry those social structures in our heads, but it is up to us how we administer them when we are alone, in a dark wood. And perhaps, the wood is right there in the room with us.





Technorati Tags: hidden fortress, BookArt, art, sketch, sketchbook, drawing, studio journal

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inconsequentialog

Link: inconsequentialog.

Ruth Millar's blog often features book arts links and things that cross over between (as might be expected of an Interactive Media Publishing student) digital, print media and forms of making and consuming.

She hasn't posted in a while, but I'm looking forward to having a good dig in the archives.

ship's sails

ship's sails, by aesop

I'm at home with a cold today. Imagine my joy at finding an unexpected read come through the laetterbox in the form of the Patrick O'Brian book The Far Side of the World. In celebration of this I've drawn the ship that usually graces the frontispiece to inform us less nautique readers what the hell Patrick means by a 'ship'.