The artist is present.

Window

BEA1991 Screenshot, Preview.

04_Picture frames

I’ve just had a cool idea which I might hopefully put into practise. My idea is to design my own picture frames and 3d print them. I realise my blog is all over the place, which is a mirror of my workflow to be honest but oh well.

Here are some reasons why I am interested in making 3d printed frames.       

#1 is that I believe a frame is context for the content, so it is true that a frame changes the way that we understand the image because the surrounding environment always changes the way we understand an object within it. 

#2, leading on from reason number 1 is to combat the boring frames market. On 23/10/2017 I thought that maybe; ‘as demand increases, elaboration decreases’ or at least I thought this was the case in the building of new houses in Middlesbrough. In my view, the houses that are currently being built in Middlesbrough are boring and plain, they are not even decorative in a minimalist sense they are just... bland. I was 19 years old when I first noticed the cornice and picture rails in my friend Charlies house. I would never have conceived of installing either in a house myself for the purpose of decoration and hanging frames. I wonder if there is hanging rails and cornice in these new homes that are being built and I doubt it, because they are being built at such a speedy rate to combat the housing crisis. This ‘increased demand = decreased elaboration’ theory is possibly also applicable to the fine art world. Since there is a very small demand for fine-art relative to the demands of the economy as a whole, it tends to be the most terrifically elaborate work that exists. This encroaching blandness is something I would like to combat. My friend Rachel Jones-Jones (an inspiring and genius jeweller) once told me “two very human instincts are the need to decorate ourselves and the creation of symbols”.

#3 I saw the artist Ben Edmunds experimenting with the shape of his canvases and using shock cord and carabiners to hold his canvas together which I think is so cool and I have never seen it done. 

#4 I have a cool idea for making frames where I will create depth maps of digital toolbars and then 3d print them or laser cut them to make beautiful meaningful frames. How many times have I had a nice photograph that I want to display but I can't find a good cheap frame for putting it up on the wall. Well now I can custom make frames and sell them online. OH and they're all going to be square ;)

Off the grid

The control of fire by early humans was a turning point in the cultural aspect of human evolution. Fire provided a source of warmth, light and a means to cook food. Only those with access to smartphones can benefit from the virtual luxuries of an augmented fireplace. Homeless people, and others who are ‘Off the grid’ are only able to benefit from the real world properties of the fireplace, cardboard used for insulation from the cold ground. 

003_Blogging

I’ve realised i need to blog more. I need to have a conversation with myself about the things i’m interested in. I need to stop agonising over what i post and just post. There is a good argument for being selective about the content if i was writing for a website or something but that doesn’t matter here becasue this isn’t my professional space, this is a personal space. Therefore i need to feel more free to post whatever the heck i want and less scrutinised. I wouldn’t use facebook in the same way as im using my tumblr account.

At the moment i’m writing an essay on AR in social media apps and how that relates to Marshal McLuhan’s definition of mediums, therefore i suppose im going to be exploring how social media is a medium by McLuhan’s broad definition. How features of social media as a medium have affected the way that we communicate. I will need to do some primary and secondary research to answer these questions and really analyse the way in which, from my network of followers and friends, we use these platforms.

Anyway if anyone is reading this, cheers for being interested in my brainfarts (a term my friend Falkona coined and i really like). I guess i was inspired to blog more because Hito Steyerl writes in a very impersonal and unrefined way (from my very limited reading of her essays so don’t think that opinion is concrete) but she is considered a real genius and we read her works at university so she must be good so that makes me think i can also be good, just by writing on my blog. It would probably be good for my blog to have specific content that would make it more interesting for people to read but at the moment i’m just using it as a personal log in order to make my thoughts somewhat more concrete and give myself a bit of mental stability.

“New technology is usually pitched to us as an improvement. But progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we give something else up. I’m interested in looking at some of what we are losing.”

— Zoe Leonard. See her Zoe Leonard: Survey, on view through June 10.

Snakes, with human traits. They breathe, watch tv shows and cough.

Clement Valla

Clement Valla is a New York based artist whose work considers the way computer vision systems apprehend the world, and the way in which automated image production entangles people and things in increasingly complex ways.

Valla interests me so much because his work takes from objects that are born in the digital realm and then are made physical rather than the other way round. As with documentation of sculpture in a material a digital photograph is taken and thus the object then exists in a digitised form but it was born in teh physical world and therefore that is the home of the artwork. Wheras with Valla’s work the piece is born from digital technology and then documented through physical reproduction. Using a printer, 3D printer or milled foam to materialise.

Evan Penny.

I saw Evan Pennys work at Kunsthal Rotterdam at the opening day of the exhibition ‘Hyper realisme Sculptuur’ and it stood out to me. It was my favourite art in the exhibition. I’m not a huge fan of hyperrealism, not that im particularly knowledgeable about it but it just doesn’t appeal to me because i dont see the point in making something exactly as it exists. I prefer an exaggeration or some sort of humour in a piece of art, the same goes for old classical paintings, i cant get inspired by them because they are simply a representation or a framing of reality. Not that i think theyre bad or dislike them i just dont love them.

I like two things about Penny’s work:

1. Digital to analogue. I love it when a native digital process is taken and realised in an classical analogue media like clay or paint. Penny does this by takiing a 3D scan of the head and using 3D modelling software to flatten or warp the object, then carved out of foam to produce the basic shape. Then he refines and reworks his figures with clay. I love the idea of a piece of art, born in the digital realm and manifested in the physical one. It’s cool to start with computer software and then use traditional media later.

2. Distortion. I really like it when something, especially the human body, is distorted and stretched, its really interesting to do this using digital media and 3D scanning just gets me even more excited. I think there are processes you can generate using digital media that we are completely unable to conceive of without experimenting in that media, i like to think of computer functions in themselves as mediums with which to create work. AKA screengrabs. Stretching and distorting is somehting that is a process natural to computer programs, they can do it without meaning to to create accidental results we could have never imagined otherwise.

002_

Valentines day today and my girlfriend Elsie is visiting so I've ordered her a Swapfiets bike so we can ride around Rotterdam and not spend billion of euros on public transport. Only dutch national students get free or discounted public transport, if you're doing Erasmus exchange then you get no discount. My home in Schiedam is 6.6 kilometres away and I bike to uni and back every day so its a pretty good workout, it’s really beautiful on the route through the streets of Schiedam and I pass a few canals. It can also be hard work though,especially at the end of a long day. If its raining its really not that fun and it rains quite a lot here, but when its a cool bright day its a really nice ride. 

Exhibition - This week we’ve been assigned a task. We have one week to prepare an exhibition in the studio spaces which will open on Friday for one hour to second year students and MA students working at the Piet Zwart institute (which is where our studios are based, not in the main building) although we do have full access to all of the facilities and workshops in the Blaak and Wijnhaven buildings. The main purpose of this exhibition is to mingle with the dutch students and figure out who we would want to work with in future. I’ve definitely figured out who I would and wouldn't want to work with but its pretty fun. We’ve separated the into three groups and all of the work must surround the theme of language (obviously because we all speak different languages). One group is doing a piece on body languages, one on language barriers and our group is doing a piece on laughter as a universal language. We’ve recorded a video of us all talking in front of a green screen and we’re cutting up the video into just the snippets of laughter and then we’re going to arrange three televisions in a circle and edit each of the clips so that each tv shows a different person as though the tv’s are having a conversation. I hope it turns out okay.

The point of this exhibition is not to produce amazing work though its just to have fun with it and interact with the other students. I’ve learned in the past few weeks not to take everything so seriously because it actually can be counterproductive. Still going into uni early and leaving late and still working hard but just not being in that mindset of every responsibility feeling like it is another bit of weight on your shoulders. An artist who has reminded me of this is Simon Marsiglia who I will do a post about soon.

14/02/2018

Ben Edmunds. 

This painter has been exciting me recently, a way I haven't felt about any paintings in a while. I adore how he drags together the paintings with the cord as if they are trying to separate. Also the way he paints, i’m not sure how he does it, but it resembles using a hard brush tool in photoshop or Microsoft paint which I love! For a while I have been interested in the shift of a process that has its home in the digital world into the analogue world. By imitating the circular strokes of using the photoshop ‘brush’ tool he Is doing this in an analogue way which I think is super cool. Actually I don't know for sure if this is a painting or a digital print, but if it was a painting! Shit thats so cool.

note on my contextual page - I decided to take my screen grabs 700 x 700 pixels because that seemed like a good size to capture everything I need and I have been wanting to keep everything square for a long time. So rather than screen grabbing the paintings as they are, now we have the images cut-off or surrounded by other information that puts them in a different context. My interest with square frames comes partly from instagram and partly from large format photography. Instagram, for some reason chose to have the format of photographs square which forced the users to frame their photographs in a different way. Films are shot widescreen because it suits the configuration of our eyes they see a similar shape we do not have a square field of view so when we take photographs in this way it feels slightly unnatural. However this method of framing makes for some interesting compositions. 

Screenshots - I am also exploring the use of a screenshot as an artistic tool. Taking a screenshot is a process born in the digital world. A modern method of copying something and without anyones permission. You can screen-grab any image at any time or at any size in fairly good quality and save it to your computer. The artist Richard Prince utilised this technique for his instagram pieces where he appropriated famous peoples instagrams for his own work. I personally really like this. 

http://benedmunds.net/paintings. 

https://www.instagram.com/bentedmunds/