May 22, 2008: following up on leads
Raining lightly, walking into town, feeling like a tourist, spent the day following up on leads from others.
May 21, 2008: noise is human
Lossy compression artifacts create information that’s not there. Noise is human- messy and imperfect. Introducing compression creates distortion. These errors serve to remind us of the fragility of life- of aging, deterioration and entropy. They approach the conditions of abstraction and are important as they exist stark contrast to the perfect ambitions of digital reproduction, cloning and replication.
There should be room here for a great breadth of research- distortion, compression, the invention of imperfections. I’m reminded of dot matrix printers and old photocopy machines. The challenge is how not to romanticize the retro beauty of these obsolete technologies, but rather to use them as a technique for research.
In the early 1990s I took a series of portraits of friends and family, which I had printed into 4×6″ prints and then scanned on a 8 bit flatbed scanner. At the time I didn’t realize why these files were so small and pixelated- I couldn’t enlarge them at all without them breaking up. I didn’t understand how resolution worked.
May 20, 2008: compression artifacts
Claude Shannon’s important work on information theory in the 1940s gives us the theoretical bounds for rate–distortion theory and how much compression can be achieved through redundancy using lossy compression methods.
I’m doing some experiments to see what king of images I get when I shoot at a low resolution and then compress using jpeg compression and then enlarge. I’m curious how much interpolation the output devices need to make in order to create a large scale version of a low resolution image.
I’m reminded of seeing a Sigmar Polke retrospective I saw many years ago in the early 1990s at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where in the large gallery Polke had made two enormous vinyl banners on each of the two main walls. From a great distance the images held together, but when you approached the work up close you could see the stochastic dot patterns of the inkjet printing.
May 19, 2008: compression artifacts
Over the past few days I have been thinking about the limitations of digital photography and in particular the formal limitations of lossy data compression. I am interested in the formal limitations of data transfer and the compression artifacts that are produced when an image is saved with heavy data compression.
As most of the focus in photography, music and video is in the opposite direction- towards maintaining high fidelity and minimizing the data loss through data compression. I wonder what kinds of images would be interesting to consider in this light- dirty low resolution images and what are the artifacts that the compression creates, could I focus on this phenomenon and what might these images look like.
May 18, 2009: great teachers
There can be many qualities that make teachers great, but I think the most important is an ability to listen. I just had an excellent tutorial with Andy Stiff. He is at Camberwell in London and I’m here in Vancouver. We did this through an online chat- typing fast. Andy has the right set of qualities that distinguish him as a great teacher- he has that ability to listen, he is also curious and he has good instincts and ideas based on his knowledge of contemporary art.
As a student you need to respect your teachers, and you obviously respect some more than others. At NSCAD in the mid 1970s, there were a number of great teachers: Garry Kennedy, Eric Fischl, Mira Shor, Terry Johnson, but Richards Jarden was the teacher whose thoughts and insights I valued the most. It could have been a number of things: his age in relation to mine- he was probably 5 years older; the work he was making- it was smart; but I think it was mostly his intellegence, his curiosity and the way he was willing to listen. I remember he left Halifax in the late 1970s and went on to teach at RISD. I lost track of him in the 80s but what a great teacher he was for many students at NSCAD.
May 17, 2008: three things
1: How we locate ourselves- our sense of self within the world- literally, geographically- physically: “where we are” as well as psychologically and emotionally.
2: How we define ourselves within different communities- in relation to others- our family, our colleagues through relationships- extended relationships, professional communities
3: How we collaborate within a group- networks, social networks, email and then through formal collaborations and how we choose to record those collaborations.
Since I’ve been in Banff, I’ve been trying to focus on what is the essence of my project.
What’s my research question? What’s my fight?
While I’ve been thinking about these questions, I’ve been struck by trying to locate myself: where are you?
come closer … everything I make I make for you … I want to get to know you better …
In particular I’ve been reflecting on both my imagined audience and my community. For many years I’ve always imagined a fairly abstract audience- yes, I knew my friends and colleagues would see my work, but I always imagined and knew I was making art for a larger art world. I was also making art in response to what was being made in that larger art world.
The interesting thing about coming to Banff for this residency is that everyone is coming from away- for six weeks and everyone seems pretty open to talk about where they are and where they’re coming from and what they value- both literally, emotionally, psychologically and metaphysically. This realization has led me to reassess where I am and what my values and priorities are.
What is essential to my research project and what is capricious?
May 16, 2008: does good research make for good art?
Back in October I was in Toronto at York University and I heard Bruce Brown, Pro VP Research at University of Brighton speak about research in the fine arts. I wrote a post outlining his ideas about what is good research?
I am still struck by this dilemma: does good research make for good art?
Obviously there are some big assumptions here- but what I’m wrestling with is the reality that most of the work that is done by artists that I admire does not come of of a “fine arts research” model. In fact just the opposite- I’ve seen and heard about a great deal of work that has been heavily supported by research funds, ends up producing work that is: a) illustrative of a “research topic” or b) visually uninteresting or c) lame.
What I’m trying to make sense of is how do the ideas that I am researching fit into the methodologies of a research paradigm and the artistic creation model that I understand and have worked with for thirty years. I feel like I am trying to tweak and distort my ideas to fit into this research model and I’m not sure how exactly to critique it from within. I think I’ve been a bit stuck by this dilemma.
Falling out from this, would be the further question: does good reflective writing lead to better work. I would say yes, given the initial idea is interesting in the first place!
May 1976: Donal Judd and Hans Haacke
Donald Judd’s The Complete Writings 1959- 1975 and Hans Haacke’s book Framing and Being Framed that we co-published with NYU Press arrived today.
Both are Kasper Koenig’s projects.
The thing about Hans Haacke that has remained with me over the years is the emotional intellegence he brought to his projects. His research is thorough, his ideas remain relevant and he managed not to get caught up in the artworld marketing of celebrities. He just continues to make interesting artworks.
May 9, 2009: tacit knowledge
How do I make the aesthetic decisions about my artworks?
I think I make my decisions based on my learned values- I feel this colour is better than that one. These decisions are in part informed by my intuitive ‘knowing’ that this is ‘right’ and a better choice or solution than something else. I choose a specific colour, or refine the curve of a form or choose one image over another based on my intuition and a lifetime of knowledge.
Michael Polanyi helped clarify tacit knowing as an area of knowledge. He thought that creative acts are charged with strong personal feelings, intuitions or ‘tacit’ forms of knowing.
He argues that that “the informed guesses, hunches and imaginings that are part of exploratory acts are motivated by what he describes as ‘passions’. They might well be aimed at discovering ‘truth’, but they are not necessarily in a form that can be stated in propositional or formal terms. As he wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that ‘we can know more than we can tell’. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’. Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something. Many bits of tacit knowledge can be brought together to help form a new model or theory. This inevitably led him to explore connoisseurship and the process of discovery.”
These ideas makes sense to me when I reflect on how I make decisions on the drawings and paintings that I make and how I decide to keep one over another. I make a certain decisions that feel ‘right’.
May 8, 1976: Joseph Beuys in Halifax
Joseph Beuys arrived from Dusseldorf to receive his honorary doctorate at today’s convocation. Great excitement as he drew on a green ‘blackboard’ as he spoke about history, democracy and agency. He is older than I imagined, but he sure has great personal charisma- he’s like a magnet.
We stood near the back.
May 6, 2009: Mementos as mnemonic aids
As artists we are encouraged to be self archivists and keep everything we do. I’ve kept all the drawings I’ve made since I was an art student in the 1970s. There’s a lot of them. Many have been made into paintings, and even more have not. I was implicitly taught to believe that even my doodles might have value some day. I have also thrown away a lot of stuff I now regret. I had a journal that I kept for a year or two back in the early 70s before I went to NSCAD. I wish I could read it now, but it is unfortunately long gone.
So why do we choose to keep what we keep? What gives these objects value?
I have a lot of small mementos that have great value to me- some I keep in my office and some I keep at home. I keep them because they are beautiful things, and also I think in part I keep them as mnemonic aids. They serve as souvenirs from the past that not only trigger memories and allow me to recall and call up that past, but they also are familiar. I think we need to surround ourselves with a certain amount of the familiar in order to feel comfortable with where we are.
Why do we choose to keep some things and not others? I have a pair of shoes, penny loafers that I bought in the late 1960s and I had completely resoled by this Italian cobbler in the late 80s. They’re beautiful shoes, a little tight and I haven’t worn them in years. I’m not sure that they even fit, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away. Why are they so valuable to me?
I have drawings my son made when he was a child and stacks of photographs I’ve taken over the years. What gives them value? Why do I keep them? I haven’t done it, but I wonder if I could decide what the most valuable thing that I have is? I’m sure it wouldn’t have much value to others, but I’m guessing that it would be an object that has a huge sentimental value attached to it.
When I was going to Banff last year in May for six weeks, I took a few things with me- a couple of photographs, a map of London, a coffee mug.
But mostly it was my laptop that had huge value. That was the thing that connected me to my life in Vancouver as well as the rest of the world via the internet. It also carried years of work, ideas, writing, images, sketches- digitally. When I moved into my office studio I upacked a few things, plugged in my laptop and was set up.
May 5, 1976: Robert Berlind
small head portraits, people lying on the floor- Anna Leonowens Gallery.