I was thrilled although understandably nervous when selected to join a panel at a conference for university art educators organised by GLAD and the Royal College of Arts along with three other artists:
However, it seemed to go well and I learned a good deal from the other artists, the organisers, in particular Dr Danielle Barrios-O’Neill, Head of Programme, Information Experience Design, and the attendees. What may have been most useful in terms of planning for the Photofusion* workshop I am leading alongside Chris Le Messurier in April was hearing what sort of questions we were asked, thinking about how I should have answered some of those questions, i.e. recalling quotes, information that would have added depth and context, and seeing how people responded to the exercises we were given.
Again, I was struck by the fundamental importance of language, both in terms of how we describe what machine learning is and how we prompt models.
Here are a couple of slides I shared and a few points I raised in my introduction.
- There is no hierarchical authority between materials/processes in my metaphorical ‘pencil case’. That said, when I look at the Explore page of Midjourney, for instance, I am – to be frank – horrified by how kitsch it all is. So lately I have been exploring what that is about, is that familiar aesthetic inevitable? And if not, how can we or should we try to escape what seems like a narrow deterministic plastic ‘style’? But also, what it is about the aesthetic that appeals right now? Which is something the Cute exhibition at Somerset House seems to be investigating (I’m off to see it this afternoon).
As requested, I ended with the following call to action, and may expand on this in further talks:
Art critic, Ben Davis discusses the temptation to stand outside of certain forms of culture, and suggests it might ‘feel very satisfying’ (and I’ll add – a little sanctimonious) to resist the dominant, hyper-commodified cultural language that is almost impossible to escape, but it is the culture that most people live with. “And as a political project, you have to be in dialogue with those forms of energy as well” (School of Visual Arts, 2023).
It was a busy day (in fact, one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in a long while), and I rushed back to the Grosvenor Arms Pub in Wandsworth afterwards where I’d been invited to show some old projects. The exhibition has been curated by Shiza Naveed and runs until the 10th of March. It includes work from a range of Wandsworth-based artists and on Friday the 8th of March, there will be an evening of historic storytelling from local historian Geoff Simmons and a talk by Brendan Conway. Those who know me may recall a project called Portrait of a Pub I developed there a few years ago with Brendan.
As well as that project, I also printed several landscapes taken in Calais and Dunkirk while working with local charity Just Shelter on some relatively low-grade paper which I stuck to the wall as simply as possible. The shadows of the light and the paper echo the shadows and light in many of the photographs, which I hope speak to some of the ideas I have been reading about in Thomas Nail’s (2019) Theory of the Image which is well-worth dipping into if you are working with any form of art, but particularly photography and post-photography. Nail’s theory of movement is also eminently relevant to the Calais project. He has written and spoken about migration at length, an example of which you can see here. Nail’s writing has helped me to consider how the various aspects of my work relate, so I can hopefully speak about that with some level of academic validation at some point in the future.
“…migrants are not marginal or exceptional figures, as they have so often been treated, but rather the essential lever by which all hitherto existing societies have sustained and expanded their social form.”
Borders, Migrants, and Writing
Thomas Nail, 2020
Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie is a long-term project, presented here as a series of landscape images, made in conjunction with local charity Just Shelter which aims to explore the impact of man-made borders on the edges of Northern France and beyond in response to the movement of people and subsequent attempts to control (2014-2019).
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Ben Davis: Art in the After-Culture (2023). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awox1jKxAZc (Accessed: 2 March 2024).
Thomas Nail, ‘Moving Borders’ (2020). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4beAwNhVgXA (Accessed: 2 March 2024).
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.