nonsite

May 19, 2009 4:35 pm

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.

house

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 12:45 pm

Grunge aesthetics have been around since the early 1990s and shows no signs of letting up. Within the digital arts however, higher resolution and fatter files seem to trump low res. I look for content first and value the contrarians for their innovations.

May 18, 2009 8:50 am

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, 2009 3:52 pm

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, 2009 8:29 pm

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 15, 2009 10:37 am

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.

May 15, 2009 9:01 am

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 1:22 pm

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, 2009 10:39 am

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 11:25 am

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.

crab

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, 2009 10:36 am

May 5, 1976: Robert Berlind

small head portraits, people lying on the floor- Anna Leonowens Gallery.

April 30, 2009 4:55 pm

April 30, 2009: communities built on adversity

I’ve been thinking about how communities are formed and how they assume an identity and in particular how communities are built on adversity. I’ve been thinking about the Photography Department at Emily Carr University and I’ve realized that they have built a strong sense of community around how they perceive themselves being treated by the administration at Emily Carr. It is an interesting, and unconscious strategy for community building. That is further complicated by the fact that photography is an industry that is in the middle of radical change. The old analogue processes, darkrooms, chemicals and other ‘heritage processes’ are commercially gone haveing been completely replaced by digital technologies.

‘We have to save the photo department.’ What does that mean? In part, it is a lament for the way photographs used to be made- with wet darkrooms and historic processes- which is how it has been taught for years at Emily Carr.

April 26, 2009 3:03 pm

April 26, 2008: GPS

This week flew by. The weather here has finally warmed up and I’ve been riding my bike to school- I don’t like to imagine that I’m a fair weather cyclist, but in reality I am. I don’t like riding in the rain.

I got a Garmin GPSmap 60Cx two weeks ago- it’s a very impressive. I have been tracking my routes to and from school following different routes. Reading up on the features and the various ways data is saved and viewed is pretty amazing. It has a lot of potential.

I’m still trying to get an idea of how small a GPS device can be. I was looking at the Forerunner 201 today which has a bicycle mount so perhaps that makes sense for the first prototype.

I’m still not clear if I should follow up on my earlier plan to plot and track a series of devices and plot their relationship to each other- relating more to my earlier ideas of how we define a community.

I have been trying to take more time to reflect on these ideas for my project over the past few weeks. To just let them sit. The beauty of having some time to reflect is that some ideas which seemed hot at the time fall away and other ideas percolate to the top.

April 26, 2009 9:55 am

April 26, 2009: community and belonging

I had a realization today. Having a sense of community is about belonging. It sounds simple- you feel that you are a part of something. One of the strengths of NSCAD in the 1970s was that I felt that I was a part of a community of artists- not just there, in Halifax, but part of a larger community of contemporary artists.

It wasn’t a big art school, but I felt like I belonged. I had a sense of place, I knew pretty much everybody in one way or another and I belonged to that community. We had a common purpose, we were making contemporary art and we felt like what were doing made sense in a larger context.

A good example would be The Fox. When Joseph Kosuth and Sarah Charlesworth were starting a new art magazine out of New York with Art and Language, and they needed a Canadian distributor it became me. I was working for the NSCAD Press, as office manager, and it was that easy. For Joseph Kosuth’s distribution network, the NSCAD Press was a place to send 20 copies to sell, but that is an example of how NSCAD functioned back then, it represented the centre of contemporary art in Canada internationally back in the mid 1970s. It was cool to have my name on the back cover as I felt like I was part of a larger community.

If I now try to reflect on my similar sense of community at Camberwell as an online MA student- I’m lost. I have no sense of a community beyond the six others in my course. I’ve done my best to make sense of the place as an international student, but I really don’t have much sense of the place. I’ve seen a few photographs f the physical space. I’m looking forward to actually seeing it in reality in July.

I think this is further complicated by the various kinds of students there are in this MA in Digital Arts. I am an online (part-time) student which is considered part-time, in that I complete my course requirements over two years. There are also some face to face part-time students now in year two. I really only am aware of one- Tim Pickup, but there are at least six others in his course. We haven’t really had any opportunity to interact.

There are some one year, full time MA students. I felt closer to last year’s full time students who graduated last summer. We haven’t had any real opportunity to interact with this group until the start of the panning of the summer MA exhibition. There course work is really out of sync with ours- the three units are compressed into one year. I’m sure it must be really confusing for the tutors and Andy our course leader to keep track of who’s doing what when. I haven’t taken the time to make sense of their work and values, but I’m stumped by what I’ve seen so far.

April 26, 2009 8:56 am

I think we long for a community of like minded friends and colleagues- that’s what is most amazing abou the artworld as I’m come to know it. The people that are a part of it, believe in it and are convinced of its importance- that’s a wonderful thing.

April 24, 2009 4:11 pm

April 24, 1975: Mira Schor, dress paintings

Mira Schor came to Halifax in the fall of 1974 to teach painting. As a New York feminist woman painter, no one knows quite what to make of her- she is tough, hip and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. She has been making these paintings on paper that are shaped like skirts. They were wrinkled with torn edges- mostly warm greys. Very beautiful.

April 22, 2009 3:51 pm

April 22, 1975: Gerry Morehead

On the back walls of the Anna Leonowens Gallery hand-written text one side and masking tape on the other.

April 20, 2009 10:49 pm

April 20, 2008: organizing subcultures

Over the weekend I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He has a very good understanding of how to use the internet to promote social networks, groups and people who want to organize themselves around common interests or events. He points out how the cost of doing so has evaporated and how the historical geographical boundaries no longer matter. He also helps take a step back and look at why some organizations have failed to understand the huge social changes that are taking place, in the distribution of music, for example. Organizing subcultures has never been easier. You just need a blog or a wiki.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what is central to my project. What I’m really finding interesting about this MA_DA course is that I have colleagues in Greece, Italy, Germany and England. I’d be curious to visit each of them on their home turf. You get to know someone a little through the course and their weblogs, and how we build relationships from a distance, and I’m curious how different that might be if we were to meet. I’d be most interested in meeting everyone in the city where they live.

April 20, 2009 3:48 pm

No matter how much we think we’re embracing change, we get used to what we know and change is difficult. As I get older I realize that I’m increasingly comfortable with what is familiar to me.

April 20, 2009 1:45 pm

April 20, 2009: invitations and audiences

It is interesting to consider making work for a large group exhibition that will be over filled with conceptually disparate works. Complicated by the further fact that there is no real community or comradarie biding the works- we have seen a huge gap in values as played out in the power struggle around the choosing of the invitation….so with nothing holding the work together other than the theme of digital arts. So then how do I acknowledge this dilemma while at the same time making a work with its own formal integrity?

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