Reflection: Working With Digital Media
How do we think of the screen, and as a site of what?
Studio annex tests for my film Either the Love or The Peace 2021, a completely experimental work in progress.
Screen made by Stu Lee. Start of a project exploring access to image by the constriction of a surface. This was going to be for my Public display submission.
Fig. 1 Test of projector on the screen
Over the course of block 3 I have been working in various disciplines. Film has presented new ways to engage with my practice in ways that ceramics or sculpture cannot access. Due to the latter art forms having a fixed and static nature, film has allowed me to pursue a documentary approach to my exploration of what I term ‘Gap’. This intervention of image into a narrative of moving semiotic resonance upon an object, brings the dimension of time, our 4th dimension, into and upon the 3 dimensions of space as we understand it.
Musing on Marshall Mcluhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’ we can look upon the content as irrelevant. What contact takes place that gives us an unfolding of something being over a set of constructs that morph and twist, scroll and play in between and over the objects solidity. A static object doesn’t possess a givenness in the way film does, what ever time exists in a static sculpture exists only as long as our gaze engages and moves. The surface becomes the content and we are forced to find the movement in that that is still. So, each crease, edge, bump, derivation, incline, ripple or stippled surface in what ever that form takes, becomes the motion, the actors, the scenery, the car chase, the panning and dollying.. our gaze is reduced to the role of director. The 4th dimension of time is added by film (within the context of installation art) in as much, as it fixes the points of departure and arrival. The beginning and the end. Regardless and in spite of what exists in between. It is in this space I want to explore the agency of meaning outside of content. I don’t think artistic intent should programme, rather explore or ask probing questions of meaning. Harman (2016) gives us the premise of a viewer ‘standing in for’ what the artistic endeavor alludes too, suggests or withdraws (if we use Heideggerdarian terminology). In Fig. 1 I can demonstrate how I respond to making film in situ, not necessarily needing to have a fixed outcome. One can notice noticing in the process of seeing as well as achieving and objective that seeks to input something deeper into the objects at hand.
Again, this is experimentation at its peak really.
You may see something completely different…. at least I hope so!
Either The Love or the Peace (2021)
Duration 04:13s
Format 16 : 9
Below is the film ‘A Journey Home’ Although this film has not been made for any specific demographic, one could immediately consider chance, and the accidental properties of engament and interaction.
The initial process of discovery is dependent on the placement of the screen against the window, in a way that there is a deliberate and purposeful performativity that suggests there may be something other than the normal happening here.
Why is this screen at this height? Who has placed it here, what am I looking at? Am I being asked to resolve the ambiguity of an image with no tangible story or narrative?
Over the fifteen minutes there is a lot to consider as one stands there and takes in what reveals itself in such an obvious and pedestrian way. Viewing an image that scrolls, reveals bumps, jolting and arbitrary movements that imbue an element of the amateur, as the film scrolls from right to left.
In the moments where a bus is reflected in the windows of buildings, we are exposed to the source of vehicle that lends to the location of the filming position. Although each reveal of the bus doesn’t reveal the artist in the process of filming, if one engages in the right way, the possibility presents itself, producing and notion of cat and mouse. Will the buildings opposite lend to the beckoning of the viewer and reveal enough visual catalog to allow a composite mirror of the act of recording.
Stuart Lee
A journey at 04:33
Format 4:3
Duration 15:35s
Showing of the film ‘A Journey at 04:33’ during our public engagement task.