Archetypes of Painting
The Messenger, The Totem, The Shaman, and Watcher
Performed on April 3rd
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> script >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What is process?
Is it what I do? What I imagine? My dance with the material world?
The thing that I draw is only a momentary impression to me, a trick of the light and sensation, a perspective shimmering on the surface of the water, the temporal fading of flesh.
A line that is here, and gone.
The Messenger
The artist is the bringer of fire! Prometheus!
The pointer out of cracks in the wheel of life, an experiencer of the unknown, a responder, an activator. A living embodiment of the tacit.
What am I supposed to do here? … thinking about my active relationship with the line.
I’m doing basically a blind contour. Your arm is about here, and the body there, I don’t know how this angle got to be that way… I can go really deeply in the face. The eyes are endless pools. I don’t know how I got that; that was the arm.
I didn’t get this shoulder right – oh, that’s beautiful. It comes out softly.
The pose is a dynamic state, not a stillness. I just try to experience your arm; I don’t care where it is. I use lots of negative space. The forms come out of the negative space. I’m drawing gesturally so I want to capture tones in blocks, quickly. You are moving constantly. The drawing and the drawn are both constantly moving together. Color moves all the time; it’s the light moving. Everything is always moving or we don’t see it. I’m just drawing the movement.
And something appears.
What is process? Is it a journey?
The Totem
The symbolic representative of the spirit, he stands, moving this way, speaking with the two faces of Janus, pointing towards the one that will follow, myth of terrible force, a story that changes but remains the same.
It stands before me
Echoes of meaning.
Early morning, late night.
What is this region?
A void.
Process seeks a micro-narrative relationship with emergent impression in the media.
A life of awareness is a life of intensity.
Perspective during process is an ambivalent horror.
How can I step back from the Oroborus? I am inside the thing already, consumed by it, chasing a line that never ends, from the trace of the charcoal scratch to the body electric.
Sleep and Birth
The Watcher
The watcher prepares for the return of intention.
Watch closely. Feel closely.
The charcoal drifts over the canvas, the brush with water. The light touch is an echo of time.
I wander through the labyrinth searching along the lines of threads that have been dragged through the dust. I could hear a voice coming from the depths, drawing me on. It seemed to whisper that the paths could only be read together like a melody hidden in the chords of a breeze that called,
“Mother.”
Compositional relationships are a play with the voices of the elements. An element can define a region of unresolve that spreads across the whole canvas. I approach completion by observing the balance (or contrast) of relationships. It’s about the sort of relationship that is reached. Problematic relationships ask questions – one can “erase” the element, but not solve the riddle.
The Shaman
The pure becoming.
The innocent.
Representations can never catch up with reality.
Originality has currency, both spatial and dynamic, in it. The rest is representation.
Knowledge forever emergent.
The lines of her face, countless impressions.
A return
What is born will be reborn.
The process-response of conscious thought through my medium, already detached from the tacit unknown, becomes frozen in a slow time world of plastic, oil, charcoal, graphite, and canvas.
The artist may intend to leave the artifact behind for a little while longer, or not.
The artifact is refuse.
Kronos eats all.
A new beginning
Tacit experience makes every drawing a self-portrait.
The face you see most often.
The body most lived.
We share what we cannot tell by pointing, saying this, and showing.
Discoveries
The serpent in the cave problem.
Disorienting space destroys flow. I have realized that third person observation in studio practice is problematic by nature.
On the other hand, writing notes about drawing while drawing was not an immersive experience either. Perhaps recording while working, a stream of consciousness interaction with the artifact. Having conversations with the painting. Reminiscing with the canvas. Paint from the mouth and words from the brush. Transcendental semiotic conflation.
Detachment
I equate embodied experience with self observation. Self observation requires a particular imagination, the ability to see oneself from a perspective outside experience, or at least to engage intently on the thought experiment of doing so. This is how I approach art as explorative experience; not “making art” but “doing art”. In this way, drawing takes on more of its sense of pulling-out, a bringing forth of what is already there, but hidden: A kinetic and somatic access to knowledge.
My research into process has taken me on a journey, one whose source I find somewhere in the footsteps of a small girl after she became aware of another through the gateway of loss, a journey whose path must extend beyond the confines of containment in a life, but one whose goal focuses on the perfection of the next moment.
vr / room study
CAVE study
Partially encircled space
Room study (for a specific installation)
corner monster online,
@ VASA Project – Online Workshops, Talks, and Exhibitions in Photography, New Media, Sound Art and Visual Studies
Interview
How do the interactive elements echo the main idea behind the work?
In this work we were interested in the process of creative dialog between interlinked organic and technological forms, and the ways those hybrid entities are able to reflect upon themselves. This emergent social agency suggests a new discourse, one that is engaged in a ubiquitous computational poetic that attempts to construct (beneficial) extensions to our increasingly embodied personalities. Interactivity in this sense is trans-liminal experience.
Could you please elaborate on the technology used in this specific project?
We usually conceive of technology as an artificial system external to our body. Technology is an attempt to extend our perceptive being. It represents an externalization that is both disconnected and embodying. It is from this suggestion of trans-liminal passage that this research builds a methodology of investigation into the phenomenology of time, space, and language. Narrative is proposed as a series of metaphorical re-mappings of perceptual elements that are then re-presented and re-formed by audio spatialization and visual deconstruction: If our existence is a navigation from fear to desire (and various other related polarities) then we can map conceptual and emotional structures to artificial constructs of space-time using these technologies. The basic narrative structure used, an abstract(ed) script titled “The Corner Monster”, is distributed in (real) time and (real) space by the bio-mediated interplay of two participants who affectively respond to the placement of their unconscious dramaturgy.
How do you see your work fitting with others in “The Biological Canvas” exhibit?
Any definition of the body, which is narrative, re-fashions the flesh. That emergent homunculus is not only a physical, psychological entity, but also an electronic body, a mediated body, a biological canvas suggesting an evolving notational skin-mediated parchment that is no longer one sided but simultaneously bipolar. All these artists are observing, commenting on, cautioning or experimenting with the movement of the body beyond its confines, or at least its previously understood/accepted/taught container. Movements that start within become manifested without. The external becomes embodied. The canvas now has two sides, whereas it was once bounded. But that new boundlessness is caught up in the helix of time and space, in context, genetic and conceptual. Whatever the I that exists is, it now exists simultaneously in its viscera and the negative space containing it.
What results were collected from this psychological study?
Psychology is the study of the contextual mind. Although quantitative data was not collected on this iteration of the research I do not exclude that possibility. The essential question for me is how data is represented; that representation leads to alternate experience. Conventionally this is done with charts plotting statistical probability, which forms one way of looking at a collection of points. But video and audio manipulation is another; which is more abstract? Greater abstraction approaches meta-language with monstrous intimacy.
An interesting qualitative response to the work has been that it is ‘too beautiful’ meaning that the form distracts people from the interactive experience, I suppose, or that ‘truth’ can only be approached if we fix all irrelevant variables, whatever those are. But this is exactly what is going on in the sea of media we are immersed in. People lose their way, and make decisions, life and world altering decisions, in a state of hypnotic distraction. I try to duplicate that liminal experience in the lab. What is a lab? This is practice-led research: I’m interested in re-mappings of the rich contextualenvironments we find ourselves in. In future iterations I plan to collect emergent narratives that respond to the work and feedback those narratives into the environment so that over time the work reforms itself through a kind of linguistic restructuralism. That restructuring will be monitored for the formation of psycholinguistic patterning – in what way are those patterns, if they exist, reflective of the input data? This is what interests me in the initial stages of this research. As yet, I consider the work the tentative formation of a system of investigation, with many details yet to be resolved.
What bio feedback data did you use to power this work? And what were the differences in the way that the imagery resulted from that data?
Bio feedback data forms a representation of the internal body. In this research we have chosen to represent the human organism with abstract variables, a bridging of internal and external forces which respond to and define aspects of the state of the participant’s transitory mind-body relationship with the environment they find themselves situated in.
The work uses a combination of biofeedback technologies – galvanic skin response, and a representative placeholder for proprioceptive monitoring in the form of pressure sensitive sitting mats. GSR is a method of measuring the electrical conductivity of the skin, the largest sensory organ, generally assumed to represent psychological or physiological arousal, and of interest to me as it is suggestive of a ‘body-electric’ though there are of course many other electrical impulses in the human organism, all of which could have bearing on future iterations of the work. Proprioceptive sensorial space is an explicit mapping of our physical form to an internalized relative coordinate system, and implicitly, a continuous seeking to define oneself in terms of an absolute coordinate, the relationship to the Other.
The galvanic data from one participant was used to set the compass direction of the sound element, whereas the other participant influenced its spatial depth. Proprioceptive bias was equated with small shifts in body weight as the participants responded to environmental changes, and was used to mix the color and alpha channels of the video imagery (consisting of occasionally lip-synced silent mouths reading the script), projected so that each participant saw only the others video mix. The resultant composite was a space of ever shifting discernability interactively influencing affective response. We were interested in these initial experiments to note whether the data would tend to synchronize, or accelerate in a frantic dissolution of formal structure. As yet, results are indeterminate. Biofeedback is a space-time of simultaneous input and output where the variables are continuous and of uncertain equivalence.
Interview by: Jace Lumley
Corner Monster | video documentation
The Corner Monster is a collaborative project supporting the independent research of Suk Kyoung Choi and Mark Nazemi, current graduate students at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Statement
The Corner Monster is process-led research through art as implicit interpretation of liminal states of embodiment using narrative data to explore the idea that affective states are deeply encoded within language and its remediation.
For the purposes of this research we define liminal embodiment to be a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the threshold, a concept drawn from Jung. In terms of embodiment in an electronically mediated society, this could be understood as a dissociative condition of being in two places at the same time.
This research investigates narrative as way of understanding this condition. Narrative is taken as the descriptive codification that mediates between our inner visceral sensation of existence and the exterior condition of the world in which we are embodied. In this space of cybernetic interaction that permeates the flesh, skin is the fine ‘outline’ of inner meeting outer, and the skin of embodiment has become a liminal barrier that suggests tentative associations with the infrathin, a concept suggested by Duchamp.
It is from this suggestion of passage that the research builds to form a conceptual transliminal poetic that reveals in the patterns of interference between the body and its understanding, possible relationships between the forms of language and its affective embodiment in a mediated world.
The installation is comprised of 2 projection screens, 10.1 interactive surround-sound audio controlled by galvanic skin response sensors, and interactive visuals controlled by force sensors. The research explores the intersections of biofeedback technology, the surrounding electronic media environment, and the traditions of narrative in order to examine assumptions about an affective embodiment that is mediated and transported by technology. The technical considerations involved in bio-metric technologies are almost by nature, deceptive. The driving phenomena are organic impulses that come and go in an electronic space with frequencies and modulations deeply colored by psychological and bio-physical response to context. On the one hand, the resonance of bio-feedback may expose, if only in a remediated and ‘distorted’ form, emergent patterning in the interplay of one data form against another; on the other hand, the interplay is so complex that meaning is elusive and ever changing.
leave a comment