Full text which includes what I submitted to my tutor available here: Supporting text What was missing from the submission (for the sake of not overburdening the assessors who are not required to look beyond No 1. is below.)
- Trilogy of short films – available on my Digital Image & Culture blog here
- A single image – a still life photograph of a page from a book about death, in which we also see my hands, arms, patterned shirt. (click on link for example)
Currently probably needs to be reshot with some further thought about lighting and colours, and the possibility of other objects. Many people would see this and think it is a work about death and assisted suicide, which of course it is – but it’s more than that, and explores ‘endings’ again. But look at the words on the page, and the fact that words are in a photograph. This work is looking at the end of text as the dominant structural language – the end of the linear paradigm, and also asks questions about how institutions determine how we live and die. As the photograph emulates still life I wonder if there is space for a symbol of the new paradigm in there somewhere – it might be tricky not to be crass and obvious. But as the words on the page say, technology makes people think death can be overcome. Perhaps there is something to be said for making the work simply about endings. - A series of transitional or glitchy frames (for now screenshots but to be photographed on my computer screen) from a film called A Dialogue with Life made to promote the wonders of modern medical technical advances. We are in a transitional moment, moving from an older paradigm into a new one. The system is transforming and it feels chaotic and dangerous. It no doubt is. But a new paradigm will emerge. Technology has caused glitches and there is lots of degrading through lack of information in the transitional frames and some central frames too. My current edit (see Sketchbook) takes frames from both transitions and central – wherever there is a glitch. It might be better to take them only from transitions. Or perhaps I simply can’t make the project make sense and need to drop it.
For clarity I am also including the following here:
All three projects above stem from the same place; a query around language and how it affects us, emerges from us and feeds back. All explore how language can be seen as a form of technology, an addition to human experience to be used as a tool or adorned. With this thinking, there is little difference between words and the metal objects in one of the films for instance. Each project looks at the way language is changing and therefore how society is too because of its emergent and feedback properties. (added here) Transition, difference, irregularities, displacement and a move away from equilibrium are all fundamental to complex systems and complex life.
Number 3 – Version One, a short temporary edit of the transitional and glitchy frames from A Dialogue with Life (I suspect I have picked one at least which doesn’t belong here because I like it! But it will need to go – there is another which I know will be better).
Number 3 – Version 2
As above but I’ve experimented with layering a coloured frame from one of the other films I worked with. Click on image to see more. I am concerned these looks too much like Guardian illustrations.
