So we’re in a group for Analogue and Digital Debates, looking at technology used in Winchester and we’re supposed to produce a Powerpoint (Keynote anyone?) presentation using images, text, music (?) etc.

We’ve got a Delicious page with a lot of our research material on it and so I’m sifting through it to try and make a coherent structure for the presentation.

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William Marshall

Charles i-Eikon Basilike

Engraving

British Museaum

c1617-1649

Icarus 6C47

Kneller, G.

The triumph of Marlborough

c. 1706

91.2 x 72.5cm

God of Surprises, lent to me by Matt Harrison, this book “is a guide book to the inner journey in which we are all engaged and has much to say to those who have a love/hate relationship with the Church to which they belong or once belonged.” (from the blurb)

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Second unit, Memory:

split into two sections, sculpture and painting, we have been asked to explore the idea of memory.

I started with sticks of which there were a lot in the studio at the time. I’ll be honest - I was just playing. . . . I have been struck by the last project and how the use of arbitrarily chosen materials can help develop work in ways that you would not have conceived had you not been playing and interacting with them. So here I was playing almost for the sake of it.

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Esme:

Sara:

Jonny:

Chris:

Steve:

Quartz composer rocks. SteamSHIFT has been using it for our Gojira gigs and the work he’s been churning out is just awesome - and it keeps getting better! My Mac wont run it because it just isn’t fast enough but I’m dead keen on getting my grubby paws on a machine that will. (Maybe Santa/S.Jobs will give one of those not-yet-quite-released Intel Macs for Christmas. . . . )

Anyhoo, check out some of SteamSHIFT’s work here

Received an email from a PhD student at Liverpool university on the back of the perception work I did last year. It took me an age to get back to him but having written to him I had a look at his website - he’s doing some awesome stuff!

I’d be chuffed to bits to be able to revisit the work I did last year as I don’t feel I ever finished or concluded it. We’ll see. In the mean time Check out his site

Playing with some of the photographs I found that the front of a picture can be stuck with PVA glue to a surface and once the PVA is dry the back of the picture can be scraped away with the aid of a little water to reveal the image again. Layers, alteration and addition/removal seem to be recurrent themes so far in this project.

Here’s a few images: (I’ll perhaps make a bit more sense of this later and add another post then!)

Well, it’s becoming distressingly apparent that any aptitude I may have had for painting has been successfully rooted out of me. . . I’m struggling with this one.
the work I’m doing at the moment is mostly all very small scale and seems to have no focus or point.

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I hereby reserve the right to smack you really hard about the head if I find you doing it.

I like pin-hole cameras. I like this. Check it out

Xian culture:

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Well, I’m scrapping the old format which separated to project work from the art it produced. I’ll now just pile it all into art/project work/… and keep it simple.

The first ‘unit’ of the course has just finished. This is a bit ex-posto-facto but here’s the highlights, starting with the assessment blurb!:

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Well, it’s been a while but here’s my first blog entry in a while.

What’s happened:

Well, marriage is great - I heartily recommend it. I eat well, sleep better (sometimes ) and I feel like the house is finally becoming a home - albeit a rather messy one, I think the styles’s called ‘Maximilist’. I do however have a gadget budget of zero since getting hitched, but it doesn’t stop me eyeing up the new iBook/Powerbook laptops that are reported to be coming out in the new year! Mmmmm!

I worked like a dog over the summer at the SGH where I found I didn’t hate nursing quite as much as I thought! I was told there was a job going in ITU and had to stop myself asking for more details. Shocker.

I’ve now started the second year of my BA and things are going slow. Struggling a bit really. The art world seems to be a shouting match where you try and push peoples boundries in a world where peoples boundries are disappearing anyway, like a donkey after a carrot we make things bigger and more impressive but all the time neglect the content and sometimes the consequences. Feeling pessimistic, it’ll wear off. I did just get 67% for recent work though. Not sure if it means anything but they sure are nice numbers. Wonder what nice numbers I’d get as an IDU nurse!

Also trying to work out if my religion is more than an ideology, and whether it should be or not. . . . . Any thoughts, anyone?

‘Defamiliarisation’ was found by the beautiful Mel recently and has impressed me a great deal - it seems to sum up a great deal of my recent thoughts and developments but from a totally different perspective (oh, the irony). All the work I have done on perspective has lead me to think about challenging perspectives and helping people see things in a fresh new way.

As I ramp up to the end of year show I’ve found myself paring down my ideas a lot, simplifying them to make them clearer - it’s been a difficult task as I dislike the feeling of ‘letting go’ of thoughts and ideas that have been floating about like my own personal ghosts for the last 4 months. But many of my ideas are disperate and unfocused and would cloud a final piece if all thrown in together.

I have also struggled in the last few weeks to fully develop my ideas - money has been an issue and between working to pay the mortgage, planning the wedding, work for PURE and Gojira, I’ve had a lot on my plate and have found myself stretched much further than has been comfortable. It has also shown me how much time is needed to work ideas through properly and develop them fully. I need to ensure I make time to develop work properly. These last few weeks have also revealed a slight tendency toward timidity in completing work, sometimes not starting a piece because I am uncertain how it will turn out. I need to ‘play’ more.

More information:Victor Shklovsky

A few links to more information on Victor Shklovsky

• Bio 1
• Art as Technique
• Bio 2
• formalism

‘There is an element in all this of what the Russian formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky, called ‘defamiliarisation’. ‘As perception becomes blurred by habit’, Shklovsky suggested, ‘it becomes automatic’, and ‘we see the object as though it were hidden in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette.’ Gradually the machinery of habitualsation devours everything: ‘object, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’. We begin to lose our sense of things, and it could be added (although Shklovsky does not say so) our sense of ourselves, our own separate identities too. [. . . . } ‘The purpose of art is to give a sensation of the object as something seen, not something recognised. The technique of art is to make things unfamiliar’.’

American Poetry of the 20th Century by Richard Gray p.22