wish lists/kaboodle

The creation of the wish lists, for the 'what do I want today', seems almost like the trouseau or bottom drawer, or the collection of goods for an indian brides dowry......
Accumulation, virtual accumulation
instant gratification
greed
the need to demonstrate who you are by what you want.

new work blurb

Recent work has developed my explorations of the dialectic between the digital and the hand made. Digital drawings and found graphics merge with painstakingly obsessive hand rendered tracing of motifs and messages from my travels around the internet; more specifically how I live my personal life by communicating via technology. Snippets of text from emails and text messages from lovers/potential lovers are abstracted and re-presented in animated montages. I have been interested in examining notions of materiality/immateriality through the cyclical process of making these drawings and animations. The starting point may be a photograph that I have taken of a text message, or a screen grab of an email, which is then fed into the computer and projected onto the wall or printed out for me to trace. I then photograph or scan the image, and it is subjected to a ‘re-drawing’ with the digital tools – simulacra of real tools – and then projected as a slide show of confused and sometimes ambiguous imagery. This process weaves in and out of the material and immaterial, the original and the copy (which is which?). These communications (and the nature of human relationships) are so fleeting and temporal; I pin them down by hand rendering them, I assimilate them into my own visual language. I then destroy this by taking away the materiality of the hand rendered drawing through presenting them projected on the wall….they are inaccessible, and non existent.

MA Degree Show Evaluation

The installation 'the ecstacy of communication' that I have presented for assessment resolves some of my intentions for the work;display and presentation in a space, the use of simultaneous projections, and the use of entirely digital content - without the presence of the 'actual' drawings.


Problematic aspects include;
Logistics of placement of projectors - angle of projection, positioning, the lack of a third projector to fill the space with content as I had envisaged
Pace of films - I had intended to further edit the films to play with pace, flickering and looping of material to create more dynamic animations, and refer to entertainment media.
Content of films/narrative
Aspect ratio technical issues - some images are presented as widescreen, some are not - this leads to a certain amount of 'stretch and squash'

However, the work has developed aspects of the content that I wanted to resolve. By using personal information such as snippets of my text and email conversations I feel that this reconciles the technology to human experience. In past work the process was more important than the content and I didn't find a focal point for my ideas in order to explore that process.

Other Artists

Qubo Gas
Jenny Holzer
Tomoko Takahashi

Kevin Bewersdorf and Paul Slocum

Print Media

It seems wrong somehow to print out the work that I have been making. I have resisted this all year. I am much more interested in the dynamic of on screen work - it is locked away from us behind pixels and light. It sets up a dialectic about materiality/immateriality.

Display and Dissemination

I would love to display my work;
On a mobile device (using flash lite for animations. A guy at the adobe conference said that in about a year, most internet users will be accessing the web from mobile devices. Design is changing to incorporate this shift, and 'design for mobile devices' is the biggest growth area)
Via Bluetooth
On the internet as a pop up ad, or embedded in another site (pop ups becoming less popular)
As a facebook page
Within Second Life

Disappointment and Expectation

The internet cannot provide what isn't there.
If you are bored, there is only so much entertainment that it can provide if you don't know what you want.
There is nothing as soul destroying as having no new emails - no bold text at the top of the list to make your heart lurch. Or seeing the message:
'your profile has been viewed 0 times today'
To see that your facebook page remains static -no pokes, no wall posts. Just your face staring back at you, and the detritus of old news.
And then to reach into your pocket and look at your phone screen, your wallpaper blankly heralding a lack of communication from anyone.

What I have been reading

Sadie Plant - Zeros and Ones
Walter Benjamin - the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Marshall Mcluhan - Understanding Media; Extensions of Man
Friedrich Kittler - Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Jean Baudrillard - The Ecstacy of Communication, Simulacra and Simulation

Touch Screen Technology/Physicality

The focus of technological developments seems to be about encorporating touch and physicality into our electronic devices.

In entertainment - the Nintendo DS, operated by a stylus on a touch screen and the Nintendo Wii which uses a motion sensitive control system. The Wii allows for a level of immersion and 'reality' to game play. The Nintendo DS features an application called pictochat which allows users to create a wireless chat room with other Nintendo DS users, whereby they can swap drawings created on a simulacra of a sketchpad - complete with lined paper, a scribbling sound, different thicknesses of pencil and an eraser. I would be interested to see if these technologies could be 'hacked' in some way so that computer games systems could be used to make artworks.

WACOM pen - allowing us to draw digitally in a more naturalistic way - from the japanese WA meaning harmony and COM meaning computer. A tool to allow us to be in harmony with technology? On talking with the WACOM representative at the Adobe Live conference in May, I discovered that it is now possible to draw directly onto a computer screen with a WACOM pen instead of onto a separate tablet. I was told that there are future plans to develop fabric screens so that the process of drawing seems more natural. WACOM bamboo site

The apple iphone will be the first mobile device to be operated entirely by touch screen and will feature a phone, music and video player and internet access - iphone
Minority Report computer screen
Jeff Han - touch screen technology being developed at MIT YouTube Video
Virtual Reality
Marshall Mcluhan - The Extensions of Man - 'Automation'

Profiles as drawing

I see the profiles we can create on the internet as a form of creating drawings. It's like making your mark on the internet; I was here. I AM here. The way you build up a picture of who you are, or at least, how you would like to be seen by others. In some ways, using a programme like Second Life, creating a Weemee, you literally are building a digital drawing of your avatar (NB - I am interested in the origin of the term Avatar - ) to be displayed in the game or environment. Computer games have done this for years - you can create your identity within the game as a way of feeling immersed in it or connected to it. I feel that it is a way of connecting ourselves to the technology.

Facebook my facebook page
Facebook pages are a drawing of yourself, and feature many ways to represent your tastes and spin an intricate web of your contacts. Relationships are created, developed and displayed. Networks are drawings.
Grafitti Wall
Using a basic drawing programme where only line thickness, opacity and colour are editable, drawing can be used to leave messages for friends - some can be very intricate.

Self Censorship

It seems strange to be making work that is so very personal - dealing with the intimate details of my life - but actually censoring large areas of information as too personal to share just yet. Is this dishonest? I'm in a dilemma when I think of an artist like Tracey Emin - dealing with the personal in such a blatant way - so that the content is so very obviously about the car crash of events that can be life. I'm just sharing snippets of communication in an abstracted way - little hints at what i'm up to in the digital world. However, people have already commented that it seems so personal to be looking at things like my emails, text messages and facebook/myspace profiles. I like the idea of viewing this stuff feeling slightly uncomfortable/a bit naughty.
Thinking about: Tarcey Emin, Sophie Calle and Tomoko Takahashi

Strands in the work

Communicating via electronic means;
- Person to person mediated by technology - email, text messaging, profiles - content - music, photographs, lists of friends
- Person to machine - sharing thoughts, storing important information, co-dependence
- Machine to machine - Loop of communications - phone to phone, bluetooth to computer, computer to printer, computer to memory stick, camera to computer, external hard drives

The processes of drawing digitally/hand rendered;
- Hand rendered drawing, basic mark-making, human touch, instantaneous, direct, autograph, authorship, genius, the original (see Walter Benjamin; the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

Where is the original in the digital?
Materiality - I draw the immaterial to make material. Pinning something down, assimilating it, making it mine.

The internet, the digital is a very temporal medium. Things change every second - a new email in my inbox moves and shifts, my facebook profile changes all the time - human relationships change all the time. Capturing a moment. Digital life has become so significant, I live my life through the digital