Jeff Spalding is exhibiting these beautiful, two foot square, black paintings in the Anna Leonowens Gallery. They are ‘process paintings’ made by painting many thin coats of two transparent colours- opposites like orange and green, until optically the painting appears black.
The only indication of his specific colour choices is evident through the drips on the side of the stretchers which also accounts for the subtle differences of the hue of the black.
Krzysztof Wodiczko arrived at school to give a presentation on his work. It wasn’t clear to us how he got here, but he had arrived from Warsaw and seemed to be trying to emigrate to Canada. Though a little worn, he dresses very formally, wearing a dark suit jacket and white shirt.
We had just opened a small gallery called The Shooting Gallery, in a basement space we renovated on Duke Street to the left of the library. He exhibited drawings for a walking machine that he had designed, a treadmill with bicycle wheels. It appeared that as you walked on it, it moved forward.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the importance of making artworks that relate to good citizenship, that are responsible and that embrace values that indicate the promise of a better tomorrow. I’ve also been thinking more about a self-defined communities of like minded individuals with common interests and other values that I feel are important- like collaboration and co-creation and a refined sense of quality and craft. Bicycles, as a subculture with the potential for a high degree of customizability that also relates to my own personal interests.
Last spring I made my first single speed bicycle. It was a hybrid, rebuilt from a Giant 23″ road bike. I didn’t know that much about the maker- Giant, but I bought it used from Our Community Bikes on Main Street, here in Vancouver. They stripped it down, replaced the tires and rims and converted it to a single speed. Every since then I’ve been thinking more and more about bike culture. What’s great about bicycles is that they’re everywhere, and while they’ve been around for years and are generally the same, there are big regional and national differences. The bicycles in Amsterdam, for example are very different from Vancouver.
In any large city there is a huge market for a great variety of used bicycles. Last summer I decided to see if I could find another used road bike to refurbish as a new bicycle. I started by looking on Craigs List and I found a used Nishiki that a student at UBC was selling. I bought it and took it apart. I am now getting it airstripped and powdercoated. I have chosen a beautiful bright green- it’s a little bright, but instantly recognizable. I wanted to choose a colour that was optimistic and distinctive.
I’ve been reflecting on the ideas and discussion that have been posted on the course wiki and am concerned that we are settling for something that is democratic but not very dynamic. I have just posted a turbulent water image, to extend the discussion towards the kind of imagery that I think would work better visually for any publicity that we are planning.
I am looking for an image that makes me curious, and want to find out more. Something perhaps more mysterious and enigmatic.
Perhaps it needs a title- turbulence works for me.
We had a very informative chat Monday. The second half focused on assessment which is always interesting. What became apparent is how closely this MA_Digital Arts course, and I assume by extension, all Camberwell MA pathways, follow the course handbook and the published learning outcomes and assessment evidence.
We started with a great deal of discussion of the MA summer exhibition in July and how the publicity for the exhibition is organized and the relationship between the university marketing and the student initiated publicity. In an attempt to make the means of production more transparent I have been asking for an overview of the overall budget for the exhibition, which I imagine serve two functions- to display the research and outputs of the students graduating, but also to promote Camberwell College of Arts to the broader public and prospective students. It is in that context that there is a symbiotic relationship between the university and its graduates- it is in both of their interests to present a professional exhibition. The real budget for the exhibition is still a mystery, but what is now clear is that the college will be doing their own marketing- which most people seem to think is ‘rubbish’ and each pathway is responsible for their own publicity.
What has been playing out on the MA_DA wiki has been a lot of opinionated discussion around the design of a flyer, a brochure and a poster. The various pathways do not seem to be able to take advantage of the designers who are colleagues and in fact there is no apparent interaction between the various pathways as far as I can tell and so what we have been debating at the discussion level of the wiki is a design by committee which is not the best way to come up with something interesting.
I first proposed naming our MA Digital Arts course Basement 18 as I have discovered that we will be exhibiting our research outputs in the basement. I next tried to suggest we move away from a proposed grid, with a thumbnail image of each student’s work which I though looked pretty lame.
I posted an image of turbulent water which I thought was appropriately beauitful and enigmatic, but that seems to have been overruled as looking like too much like a ’stock photograph’ which I can understand. The debate continues on the MA_DA wiki.
This red wall is a placeholder image for my nonsite project until I figure out what would be the most appropriate way to represent my project- which is basically written text within a website and not that interesting visually.
There seems to be a great urgency to make a number of decisions for this exhibition MA Digital Arts 2009 at Camberwell’s Wilson Road building in July 2009. I can understand some of the urgency, and the sooner the space details are resolved, the more time there is for completing the work itself. For me the challenge is what to present as the output of my research within a large group exhibition, that I feel would carry the appropriate weight in relation to other works being shown.
Bart Robbett is only here for a semester. He has set up a beautiful interior camera obscura with two lights. Entering the dark room, it takes your eyes a while get accustomed to how dark it is and slowly the image of the other ‘light’ room appears reflected on the wall.
How do Camberwell students get to Wilson Road? I have no real idea.
Last week I saw a reference to the #12 bus being late. Do they drive? Where would they park? Ride bikes? Is it near a tube station? How far away is it from Peckham Road? Is there circulation between the two campuses? Wilson Road seems to be a building without an address, no street number. I know it is made of brick. I know it has at least two floors, maybe three, a courtyard and a basement.
Where are the students studios? I know Digital Arts has a room of computers in the basement. I think they are Macs. Maybe there’s also storage down there.
Busy week. I’ve started reading Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995). It took me a while to find it, but my library finally found a used copy from a bookseller in Montreal. It is a compelling thesis. She uses a close read of family photographs to reflect on her memories of growing up in 1950s London.
Her introduction is a thoughtful read on the theories of memory work and the difference between “those who comment on the production of culture and those who do the producing”.
She writes: “Memory work makes it possible to explore connections between’public’ historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and personal memory” and even more importantly for me, she writes about the abstract qualities of how we remember: “memory it turns out, has its own modes of expression: those are characterized by the fragmentary, non-linear quality of moments recalled out of time”.
I’m trying to make sense of the urgency around planning for this Camberwell Summer 2009 exhibition. Planning seems to be moving full steam ahead with little room for any discussion reflecting on the purpose. I tried asking some questions last week, but have had little response. I’ll try to follow up more this week.
Patterson Ewen is such a lovely guy and so painfully shy. He came to give a presentation on his paintings it feels like it is his first talk about his work. He’s getting a bit older. He’s been painting since the 1950s when he lived in Montreal, but now he’s making these amazing plywood paintings which he uses a router to draw with and then paints with a 6″ roller like the ones that printmakers use to ink plates.
A big difference between universities in England and in North America is the concept of ‘quality assurance’. In North America it is all internal. Each University prides itself on the quality of their graduates. In England there is an elaborate process of quality assurance through external evaluators. What’s weird is that the students don’t benefit from the external evaluator’s assessment of their work. We don’t get any feedback. Instead what I now understand is that it is the programme that is being evaluated.
At Emily Carr University we bring in external evaluators to give students feedback on their graduate research and to comment on their thesis.
The artist dress code hasn’t changed much since I was a student in the 70s. Functional distress: jeans, and t-shirt, black jacket. No overt preoccupation with fashion- it is understated and understood. No brands. We are democratic levellers, anyone can assume the outfit and look like an artist, but that doesn’t make you an artist. So what makes you an artist?
I’m starting to feel like I’m onto something as I continue to research my project. It’s amazing how one link leads to many more. Andy put me onto a couple of projects- like the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference on the geospatial web in May and things have developed from there. What’s interesting about this conference is the focus on the geo-spatial web and which considers open source projects like Tim Schaub and Chris Holmes’ Open Planning Project with the Open Geo-stack workshop and the open source Geo-server. I’m supposed to be writing my project outline for Friday, but I keep finding more and more interesting events that are happening around the world.
Regine Debatty is giving a workshop on RFID: Radio Frequency Identification next week, March 24- 27 at iMAL Centre for Digital Cultures and Technologies in Brussells. The workshop will “explore the social implications and artistic possibilities of RFID technologies to track people or objects.” I wish I could attend- both the organization and the topic look great.
Even more intersting is a Geotracing: locative media and mobile networking workshop iMAL have scheduled for September 9- 14, 2008, with Simon Pope and Just van den Broecke.
There are a lot of great references to basements in rock music.
I can still remember buying a bootleg version of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes on vinyl many years ago. It was a double album in a white cover- with no label- the Great White Wonder, sold in a now defunct record store on Granville Street in Vancouver in 1969- what ever happened to that album? Columbia released it a few years later as the Basement Tapes.
Then there’s the Ramones I Don’t Want To Go Down Into the Basement and of course Basement Jaxx.
Don’t get me started.
An External Examiner Alan Peacock, Course Leader in Interactive Media and Screen Culture at the University of Hertfordshire, in Hatfield north of London was present for 30 minutes of an online tutorial in March. He teaches in a similar course in digital arts. His role as far as I can understand is to assess the Camberwell MA Digital Arts to see if it meets the MA standards. It is a peer review. He wrote that: “perhaps it is useful that digital arts is less than clearly defined… do you know the phrase ‘incanabula’? It means ‘in swaddling clothes’ it was used for about the first 50 years after Gutenberg of printed books - metaphorically ‘emerging into its own form’ - like digital arts… and the plurality of the digital - its very width means it is difficult to identify the ‘masterpieces’ or even to know them?”
Interesting thought, which I guess is proposed to make us feel like we are at the start of something new. Tutor Jonathan Kearney said something similar last year.
This seems to be part of the myth around digital arts that the tutors believe- we know digital arts is going to be big, but it is just forming and still being defined so don’t expect any clarity about what it is anytime soon. Which I guess is another way around saying that they are not sure how to assess the quality of the research we do.
I have just sent an email to my colleagues in the Camberwell MA Digital Arts with the following questions. I hoping to clarify the context that we will be exhibiting our work at the Wilson Road Post Graduate Research Centre this summer. These questions may be obvious to the full-time students and to those who live in London, but there are a number of assumptions that seen to be understood that are a mystery to me from my vantage point. I am hoping to make sense of this exhibition opportunity from a great distance away and trying to understand the purpose of this exhibition in the hopes that I can make a useful contribution to this exhibition process and this is my attempt to start a discussion.
I can see that Camberwell is trying to clarify its MA courses, or Visual Arts pathways as they are now called, and to better articulate the relationship between the various Colleges that form the University of the Arts London.
Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbleton- CCW have formed a strategic relationship. The Wilson Road Building is now a Post Graduate Research Centre which “brings together all taught pathways in a creative and flexible environment”. The CCW Visual Arts Masters pathways are: Book Arts, Designer-Maker, Digital Arts, Drawing, Fine Art (Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Installation and Environmental Arts), Graphic Design, Illustration, Printmaking, and Transnational Arts. That pretty much describes contemporary visual arts and design.
Here are some questions I find myself asking in relation to this exhibition:
1. What is the purpose of the exhibition?
2. What are the relationships between exhibiting artwork and exhibiting research outputs?
I think there are some major tensions between creating an aesthetic experience for a viewer and the outputs and evidence of practice based research. What does it mean for a Research Centre within an art college to transform itself into an exhibition space or ‘gallery’ for a brief, temporary period of time?
3. Why is the exhibition held at Wilson Road and not in a gallery like the South London Gallery for example?
(I would imaging that the conditions for display are fraught with compromise in a space where exhibition is not the primary function.)
4. How many MA students will be participating in this “Camberwell 2009″ exhibition? Is everyone exhibiting at Wilson Road?
5. What is the budget for this exhibition? How are funds allocated for things like publicity, printing, equipment, private view etc.?
6. What is the relationship between the various students in these various pathways- in the context of this exhibition? Have they met and has this been discussed?
7. Why is Digital Arts designing its own graphics/poster/invitation? Do each of the pathways do this? Why?
8. What is the relationship between the Chelsea and Wimbleton MA students and the Camberwell students- in relation to this exhibition? Are there exhibitions at Chelsea and Wimbleton at the same time?
9. What is the relationship between the CCW (Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbleton) College and the other Colleges- within University of the Arts London, particularly Central Saint Martins in this context? Are there collaborative discussions between students in these colleges?
(It might be interesting for example for Camberwell students to show their artwork and research at Saint Martins or Chelsea and so on.)
10. What is the relationship between Camberwell 2009 and all the other Fine Art Colleges in London, like the Slade and Goldsmiths? Is there any larger joint symposium planned to discuss the ’state of the art’ or post graduate education- for example?
In the research I’ve been doing around mapping, graphing and the visual representation of ideas, I keep bumping up into amazing projects which gather live information from the internet not just for information visualization, but that explore the expressive potential of information. Eric Rodenbeck at Stamen Design and live dynamic displays he did for Digg Labs and his taxi project Cabspotting for San Francisco, where you see the locations of every cab in San Francisco at a particular time are a good examples. He plotted of every cab location over a 31 day period in 2007. The result is a beautiful ghost map of the Bay area.
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s we feel fine project is another amazing project- ideosyncratic but very elegant- tracking and interpreting the feelings of bloggers everywhere. These feelings are then catagorized and listed based on frequency, gender, age, weather, location, and so on.
Moving your mouse over the screen causes the bouncing dots to cluster and clicking then selects that particular feeling- like feeling real, tells you how long ago it was posted and from where. Another click will take you to that blog. Recently posted pictures are also graphed and organized. Technically I have no idea how these projects are done, but I admire the creativity and the results are amazing representations of a very large internet community.
Joel Shapiro makes these beautiful little objects, they are small with a great material presence.
Lawrence Weiner came to screen his film A Second Quarter. It was back and white with sub-titles, which made good sense given his interest in text.
