Tuesday, February 10, 2009

This is an old start to a story I wrote. I'm just consolidating it here.

Chapter 1

Welcome to the not too distant future and Welcome to the book.

As soon as you can, please send an email to hander.filmsales@hotmail.com. This will place you on the CDF mailing list. Emails are a reliable form of information.

We live in an age of macro narratives. The barriers between our avatars and real self are melting. It doesn’t make sense to dance around an ugly subject, so I will get straight to the point.

It’s night. The light of the moon is a crystal white. I imagine a cloaked city of interconnected palaces in the clouds that hover in a misty gray canopy above. I am dressed in a long black jacket with blue jeans. My hair is long and unkempt. I skulk beneath a bus stop. I imagine that the next bus that comes along will have all of my friends on it and they will combine all of their efforts to help me.

I am on the run from an organization I know only as the SFP. It was set up to keep tabs on me. I realize, with no great amusement, that my life has become like that of a comic book hero who faces peril at every turn. A bus full of comic book heroes would do.

A thousand electric showers in the palaces above are turned on at once and I press my body against the bus stop trying to keep my only clothes dry. The rain is so hard that I don’t even notice the bus approaching. I quickly dash out and signal to the driver.

Shaking my hair I climb on board and flash my ticket. The bus isn’t full of super heroes and friends but instead has only two passengers. One is an old man - it doesn’t make sense to dance around ugly subjects; the other is a very attractive girl with brown hair. I sit near the girl and watch her shift her body around slightly so she can keep an eye on me. She seems young but her clothes are bold and colourful. That cheers me up as I settle into my seat.

No longer afraid of the rain, I take out my CDF Unit. Context Dependent Films are just about the only thing I can use to amuse myself these days. Living on the run, I rarely get the chance to stay in one place long enough to watch one of the 3Dimax films at the cinemas. However, my love for films and stories is what keeps me going.
My CDF Unit automatically downloads a film everyday. The films work by dividing a story into three component sections. Video, Audio and Book. When I’m able to sit in quiet spaces I can watch the video component of the story. When I’m on the move I can listen to the audio of the story. And when I’m in loud environments I can read the book and look at the pictures. Where I am and what I’m doing dictates how the story is delivered to me. For a life like mine, it is not only convenient but also oddly empowering.

Today I have been learning French. I am planning on attempting to cross the Channel in the next few months and the idea of being on the run in a country where I don’t speak the language doesn’t appeal. For most of the day I have only been able to listen to the audio and read the book.

I spent the morning hiding in an attic above a shop that sold musical instruments. I was too frightened to make too much noise and my head phones broke two months ago, so I had to content myself with only using the book section of my CDF, reading equivalent French and English words and looking at the illustrative images.

In the afternoon I had crept out of the shop and headed across London to the train station. I was able to select the audio on my CDF as just about everyone else in the city uses headphones. It is quite a surreal experience to walk freely on a crowded street with a female French voice describing, for all the world to hear, what you call certain vital organs in her language. No one looks up to the physical sound that colours the street.

The video I’m presented with on the bus is of a French soap opera. Presumably the words you have learnt in the Audio and Book sections make an appearance and you get to hear them in context. I feel like relaxing and notice an option to link in an old video. I laugh and smile. How did she know?!

CDF’s producers, Film Sales ltd. www.filmsales.cdf.net, are the last company independent of the government data sharing policy. They only keep records of the films you have seen and your comments on those films as this helps them decide which films will best fit your daily life. These records are kept safe from the government because each subscriber is given a handler.
A handler works for the company by facilitating a client’s account. They have personal stations that record the CDF’s you have seen and your comments and they are in charge of uploading requested and recommended CDF’s. By keeping data sharing on a one to one basis the company cunningly side step the Government.

My handlers name is Sarah Mason. I have never met her but I think she knows me better than I know myself. She sometimes downloads additional options to the films. For example, because this is the fifth day in a row that, by request, she has downloaded an educational CDF to me, she has included an option for me to take a break and watch my favourite video instead. She is telling me to take a break.

For me, it is this dialogue with Sarah that is the greatest story of all. A tear creeps down my face. I feel like Sarah and me have just spoken a thousand words. I imagine holding her hand, like all of people in the ticket queue had been doing that morning as they shuffled along oblivious to the French word, ‘beau’, that resonated around them.

The film Sarah has downloaded for me is a story about a commuter who travels to London daily but dreams of staying in the countryside where he lives. I love the story, as I grew up in the countryside. The video component however, is simply films of the sky. Rolling clouds and the ambient sounds of the location. It is my home. www.commutestory.cdf.net.

Monday, February 09, 2009

TED



This is such an amazingly powerful video. I remember the Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan said something like, 'all the drugs you could ever need are in your head'.

I guess the challenge is society and dealing with the daily pressures. Allowing the stress to 'melt away'.

Which in turn reminds me of this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/david-mitchell-snow-thatcher

More specifically: "For half the week, strangers were exchanging twinkly-eyed glances as if to say: "Yes, we can all see it. A slight thing has happened.""

It is strange but I can't help but think that more snow would help me connect more with the right hand side of my brain.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

RIP John Martyn

Monday, August 25, 2008

Pictures



Cityscape 2.0

Monday, October 15, 2007

Article on my art work on VIDEOLUDICA

An article about my work has appeared on the video culture website
videoludica. Please check it out.

http://videoludica.com/news.php?news=744

Friday, September 01, 2006

The Gallery and wiki Space

The Gallery Space and wiki Space
Entering my exhibition space a visitor is presented with six images and a computer terminal. Five of the images are hybrids of paintings and digital prints. The sixth is a projection of the contents of the computer screen. The computer sits on a desk and is connected to the internet. Upon inspection of the five images, one of the things a viewer could perceive within the images is a website address. This internet address is of a wiki website. Depending on past interactions with the computer, the internet will (by request rather than physical/digital restrictions) be viewing this wiki site. Therefore the sixth image, the projection, will be of this wiki website.
A printed sheet will be available for people to pick up, which is a print out of the wiki in its initial state at the start of the exhibition. Within this printed sheet will be a written explanation that will describe the nature of a wiki for visitors that do not know. Part of the written explanation will also highlight how one could participate and collaborate on the content of that wiki. The printed sheet/initial wiki, will also contain a description of my own perception of the hybrid paintings and prints.
In this way the show will attempt to engender a sense of participation where people can freely respond to the ‘questions’ within the work and contribute to the wiki.
There is a sense of performance and direct interactivity in the work, as it will entail them sitting down in the exhibition and editing the written content of the wiki as the projected image changes in real time. Of course people may chose not to physically engage in this process, but I hope the understanding that they can, will ‘challenge’ people to consider a number of implications.
One of the implications that interests me, is the effect the changes to the wiki will have over peoples perception of the five images that contain the wiki website address. Something highlighted in the show by the large scale projection of the wiki site. Central to this is the relationship between words and images. A relationship that, in my work, is played out through; the symbols that are embedded in the images, an internet address that is used as an interface over the images, and the words online that these two things point to. (See ‘An Image with a Story’ below)
All of the images in the show will be for sale. The images are printed on canvas and the prints on fine art paper, therefore encouraging the perception that the images are traditional fine art commodities. The gallery hence functions as a market place, a space where artists can make a living selling their work. In this context do the contents of the website become more relevant? From one perspective, this is a question about how integrated an individual’s life is with digital technology; to what extent will the contents of the wiki site effect an individual if they take one of the images out of the show and hang it up in their homes? Will they check the wiki to see how it changes?

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Over the next few days, in the lead up to my Masters show, I will post up sections of the essay I'm writing about my work. If anyone wants to comment on it please feel free. The official site, which contains more information about some of the work that the essay mentions, should be up again soon. I'm adding some '3D paintings' of the database that I created in 'Unreal'. For now here is my essays title, abstract and introduction.

Painting Collaborative Database Narratives

Abstract. This essay explores the key themes in my Masters exhibition; Interactivity, hybrid interfaces, collaborative storytelling and digital integration.

Introduction:- Paintings In A Digital Age

I have always been interested in the link between visuals and words. In my BA in Fine Art I explored paintings that made use of computer game interfaces and cinematic language. In my explanation of the work I tried to encourage my audience to investigate the ways we read visual images. However I was disappointed by the response, as I witnessed very little active investigation of the images in terms of their narrative content. I observed that people were less willing to fully explore the narratives of my static images than they would be to explore the story of a film or computer game for example.
During this Masters I have made use of technology to introduce collaborative elements to my work, believing that people would further explore narrative content if they could add to it. I also investigated how the integration of the internet into the world around us, could be utilised to tell a story. To this end I invented a system of delivering a situation dependent story. In this system the context that a person found themselves in would dictate how a story was delivered to them, be it through audio book, pictures and text, or film.
The work I have made on this course has lead to the creation of my Masters show. My images, like my work on situation dependent stories, explore notions of the integration of the internet as they are linked to a website. If people encounter the work outside the gallery (I am attempting to sell the images and display them in as many places as possible) they will only be able to check the contents of this website if they have a means of accessing the internet. The images also, like my BA work, contain references to a narrative of my own creation. This time however the images are more abstract. The story is hence referenced through the creation of a database of symbols that have been composited to make up the actuised images.