@ Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, The University of British Columbia

Presentation on May 20th, 2012

I am holding a doll, a doll I’ve had as long as I can remember, a doll with falling out hair, one closed eye and one open eye, a doll that has always been with me. I am holding my doll, and looking at the boy. The doll fits me, holds me and is held and I feel without counting its missing hairs, its familiar one-eyed gaze. There is nothing wrong with my doll. The boy doesn’t fit here. From a distance I am just looking at this little stranger. I hold my doll more closely.

Mom comes in the room looking upset. She says, “Let’s get rid of this old doll. Now you are a big sister, and you have to take care of your brother. You are now an elder sister, you cannot act like a child anymore.” I nod no. I shake my head fast and hold the doll tight. Mom starts pulling my doll away from me. I pull back strongly, but my doll slips out of my hands. I cry and cry. But Mom takes the doll away. I only have a few hairs of the doll in my hand – a few from a few.

I am getting very upset. The doll is mine, but the boy is not my brother. He is a boy not a baby, so he cannot be my brother. The boy is looking at me, the red eyes and a pale face, like a doll.

I met the boy a few days before. Mom and dad introduced him as my brother. He had been there since 3 years ago. He was there. I don’t know what they mean. Grandma brought him here. He was holding my grandma’s hand and wouldn’t let her go. When Mom tried to hold his little hand, he had refused, and held Grandma more tightly with both his arms. He was crying. Dad had looked at me and said, “Now you have a younger brother”. I just looked at my dad. I didn’t understand what he meant. I was holding my doll then.

Since grandma left, the boy has been sitting down, not talking or looking at anyone, but just looking down in the corner of the room. Silence.

I hear mom and dad talking outside the room, whispering.

I think he is like a doll. He does not move nor talk. He has round eyes and does not blink. He just looks down. We are both alone.

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.

at the afternoon light

Windows

I don’t remember how long I’ve been standing here, looking at windows, windows covered in buildings. Maybe a few hours, or a few months… maybe longer.

There are many windows. There are different people in every window. A couple far away standing still, a man smoking at a café, a grandma setting places at a table, a cat looking at a bird, a curtain closing, my reflection.

A window.

A little girl is still crying in her room,

(I assume the room is the little girl’s, but maybe it is not.)

Her little fist is clenched around something I cannot see clearly, some fibres perhaps a few hairs from a doll that is not anymore in her hand. Another little boy is sitting down in the corner of the room, staring at the girl.

A window.

A girl who seems just out of high school is wandering in a room. It is an open, empty space with only one window that is wide and very narrow, a horizontal gash in a wall that lets in a bit of light in a thin flat plane. The space is not designed to be used as a residence but for a business or an office. The girl seems to be looking for a space.

(But for what?)

She seems a little too young to look for a space for business, alone. Too young to be alone.

Sometimes you see empty windows.

A window,

A window,

and another window.

Only a few are there in the dark, here, there, there, there, and there. You can see better in the dark. The days pass and pass and the light comes on at night. Night after night of stories pass across the faces of buildings. The windows are alive at night while the buildings sleep.

There is someone in a window.

It was a little room, and there was a girl and boy, both with red puffy eyes, staring at each other. They are getting harder to see, I’m not sure they live there anymore.

Another window.

It is a larger room. A girl is painting in this room, a large painting that is covering one entire wall. I remember seeing her there for the last couple of days, every night. She is not there during the daytime, but she comes back late and starts painting again every night.

The room light is off – I can’t see the girl!

(Maybe I dozed out briefly…)

I am still standing and looking at windows.

People are coming out from the buildings.

A window.

A girl is sleeping in a dim room. A room that is full of ‘stuff’ – it is not clear what these things are for. The bed is roughly built with cheap veneered panels on top of chairs at the corners – no mattress. Fake plastic vine leaves are winding around the chair legs. There are torn foam cushions and leather pieces in the corner of the room – they must have been a couch for someone at some point. Wood panels everywhere. Piles of books – not quite piled,  almost falling. Books and loose paper everywhere.

(She is waking up!)

The girl is acting very strange. She is looking for something. Something… that is quite fast… she turns on the light.

Fast black specks.

Cockroaches.

(The room is above a cheap pizza place and below a fast noodle place. I’ve been to the noodle place once. It is not bad but not that good either.)

Going back to the girl, a room in between two ‘not_so_good’ food places is not a good idea.

She goes out. She goes out of the building.

(I am looking at the empty room – those cockroaches may be still there though… I am looking at the room more carefully. The room is full of paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects. I see parts of the couch are sewn back into one of the paintings.

She is back!)

The girl is setting up something. And lighting a match… is that…?

(Smoke!)

A small pile of small bodies, the hundreds that are sacrificed so that I may paint here, your ashes protect this space and warn away my demons, the brush dips from water to charcoal – draws out the line that traces around a lost doll, a pony, giant smiling rats that eat people, a girl, a friend, a window, a space, a brother, a road between an old field and concrete walls that lead up and up away from my world, windows, windows looking down on us, eyes I paint but cannot see, he is out there waiting, for the soft touch of my brush.

Partially encircled space

Room study (for a specific installation)

@ 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

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.