Development: Essence
CityScape.
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This new work explores our relationship with the spaces we create, name and anthropomorphise. The skyline in this work is of the City of London. Our encounters with such places take on the role of a relationship. This is reflected in the terms we apply to parts of town that in some way signify or symbolise our perceptions and understanding, typical to this skyline, we refer to it as 'The City'. But what exactly is that? What does that term encompass? And for it to exist as that, what is it then not? What makes the idea or perception of the city 'essential'? CityScape (working title), explores how that essence may emerge in a resonance of physical space. Using a sporadic execution of notes that are picked out on a guitar and fed through a feedback loop. The slow building of each note, which is then delayed, mimicked and subverted, becomes an embodiment that encompasses the historical, emerging, dominance and exactitude of habitat that throughout our own expanding existence has symbolically stood as a sign of the human species success within markets, commerce and finance. These monoliths of architecture, that house the institutions and seats of wealth, power and industry, nestle silently and progressively amongst neighbourhoods and communities that themselves, over time, change with the socio-economic conditions that govern ever evolving landscape that houses not only each and every person, but also ideas, industries, hopes, fears, ambitions, failures and successes. As this conceptual piece grows too, I want the work to explore the idea of evolution, growth rates, impact and consequence. The work is designed to delineate what essentialism that exists within the broader spectrum of a 'handle' or 'title' such as the The City, and bring that to prominence within soundtracks that accompany the visual emergence captured over various visits to "The City".
Taking the explanation text above, I considered approaching other artists/makers to produce a soundtrack as a reaction to the images they perceive in the film. I originally started to think of ideas that came to me through watching an online talk with Computer Scientist Philosopher Jaron Lanier.
Whilst opening his talk with a demonstration of an Laos instrument called the Khaen, Lanier likens to the first ever computer because of its binary functionality - to which he draws a link through the ages between this instrument and alan turing - Originally I approached Jaron Lanier to lend a recording to the edit, alas to no avail. Hearing the instrument gave me a sense of what I was trying to capture in the film, this idea that the city looms there sure, but in so many ways, none of it makes sense, it’s there, sure, but what does it do? What’s the point in it all? To use Lanier’s phrase in reference to the Khaen - to which he calls “the origin of digital information” (5:05secs) What does the city symbolize for humankind, what point of arrival can be drawn from our origins?
So, I then turned to Cellist Clarice Jensen after listening to a track - Metastable (video clip below) - she wrote in response to her mother’s care programme during her time in palliative care. I wanted to explore the seemingly arbitrary way development and progression is percepted when something looms in the distance, whether real or imagined. I found Jensen’s soundtrack perfect to what i myself was trying to convey, although our reasons were different in the process of what we were responding to.
All though planning of cities and landscapes is a very ordered process, involving committees, departments and authorities, the results results form capricious structures jutting out of the horizon line, the sprawl of shapes and features imply inconsistency and the order is of no sense if we were to consider order and form.
This arbitrary amalgamation of development is why I saw the film as a way of harnessing this corrollery between sky and structure. Acting as a tension between fixed lines, geometric shapes and edges set against a natural atmospheric ‘dis’-order. Both positions posing as a metaphor to the constrained pressures of life, usually orchestrated by institutions, conglomerates and commerce who have a power to exert a will on masses who find they may not have a recourse to the laws in place to protect them. Infact, sometimes our governments are complicit in these constructs that form and shape our existence, or at least act as points of navigable obstructions to other wills, aspirations and desires of the individual. So this is why I wanted to use “The City” as a symbol of a faceless, yet, direct influence in the lives of those that it may not physically interact with, but in other ways, effects.
One artist in particular who responded, produced a soundtrack for film I made below.
Karl Bielik lives and works in London.
His paintings have been in numerous shows at home and abroad, including The John Moores Painting Prize, The RA Summer Show, The Marmite Prize and The London Open.
He is a member of Contemporary British Painting and is the Founder and Director of Terrace Gallery in London.
Karl was extremely responsive to the idea. I set no other premiss, or gave any other instructions other that the explanation text attached to the YouTube video page.
The film above (Karl Bielik Collaboration [2021]) contains Karl’s response which is in the form of a soundtrack. There is something mournful and undulating within the waves of overlap that give the image a sense of eeriness. Although our buildings and houses cover and protect us, they in some ways act as an environment ‘that confuse the actual with the virtual, or feelings that are hardly our own yet interpellate us nonetheless’ (Foster, 2011, xii)
So, in essence, these structures act as a symbol of fetishization in that they deliver back our ‘experience in the here and now, and that resist the stunned subjectivity and arrested socially supported by specticle.’ (Foster, 2011, xii)
Stuart Lee
Cityscape Full version
Duration 16:14s
Format 16:9