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“ Representations aren’t simply confined to the spheres of language and culture, but have real implications in terms of rights, liberties, and forms of self-determination.
There is much at stake in the architecture and contents of the training sets used in AI. They can promote or discriminate, approve or reject, render visible or invisible, judge or enforce. And so we need to examine them—because they are already used to examine us—and to have a wider public discussion about their consequences, rather than keeping it within academic corridors. As training sets are increasingly part of our urban, legal, logistical, and commercial infrastructures, they have an important but under examined role: the power to shape the world in their own images. ”
In Christian Marclay’s film The Clock, we are brought into contact with time as a construct. The bearing of time, the constant demand of seconds passing by and the anxieties therein all create a tension that can be lifted out from the screen and ‘felt’ as an actual occurrence. What has started off this investigation into time, started after a session in year two, where we were asked to take a picture from our window. This action was as a response to the lockdown and by chance, I saw a carrier bag snagged and billowing in a tree branch. There was something alluring in the movement of the bag tethered to the tree and excited by the blustering wind. This study of movement brought up the notion of time. (see fig. 1)
Fig. 1 Stuart Lee, Under One Bag 2020-2022, A snippet of a film focusing on study of unnatural elements in natural spaces.
So, I started to consider how as an artist, and here I feel i’m following a tradition, one creates artwork that uses time and movement as a medium. Also the action of viewership and inspection, enacted over increments of time has an appeal to me. This element viewership in my practice embodies the process behind two influential artists I have been following and using as a yardstick to compare my current practice to.
The two artists in question are Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl.
Trevor Paglen:
Trevor Paglen, From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels) – Selections from the ImageNet dataset for object recognition, Barbican Centre – The Curve, London (September 2019 – February 2020)
Hito Steyerl:
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). Video (colour, sound), 14 min.
Through researching both artists, and adding to a continuation of my practice which concerns, time, meaning and development, I have been able to constitute a narrative driven body of work that deals with confrontation of that which opposes us. That which stands in front, around or above, requires that we consider and perceive things that appear as a phenomena. For Paglen, his study of how systems use data to teach machines ‘to see’ introduces, for me, a new lensing, in the same way that Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ directed how we see. What’s different to Mulvey’s Gaze is the Technological Gaze, and the politics therein. This framework, further explores my interest in the withdrawn properties of objects. I am not sure how to develop this thinking at the moment but there is something of the political in my ceramic works that embodies these ideas of viewership. This too goes for a developmental body of work I am making in film. Part of my artistic interest is capturing the everyday, the prosaic and trying to extract deeper essentialisms from what is produced in a film capture of everyday life. One definite thread has been filming police helicopters (see fig. 2) This act has a potential to steer my work into the political also. The political is about community and belief. But also the space in which we partake in the everyday. Its the in between of object coming into contact with other objects that I want to strategize as a way of developing my method to making.
Fig. 2 Stuart Lee, Surveil (2021-22) ongoing project.
Duration, 9:17
Filmed on iPhone Over various periods and locations.
This, is achieved by introducing gaps and plateaus. The gap is a place to investigate beyond the literal and the plateau gives rise to support and hierarchy. But, now we have a site to explore the actions and potential of that which we find ourselves coming into contact with. Therefore, how objects appear, require further analysis. Part of my inquiry into appearance has taking in the considerations and philosophical framework of Sara Ahmed. Sara Ahmed is a contemporary thinker, author and phenomenologist. Through her advancements of Husserlian thinking I find myself influenced and inspired to approach my method of making within the framework of investigation. This allows outcomes to be variant and transitional. If I compare my ceramic work of late and contrast the processes between video production and material manipulation, I still arrive at the same destination when I consider outcomes that look to leaving open pockets of questioning as opposed to articulating a definite narrative, neatly wrapped up in a bow and given over as something defined in just materiality.
Please click on the images and then hover the cursor over the image for further evaluation and commentary.
Another thinker and academic who has been instrumental in helping my garner a definition of that which informs my approach to criticality is Giuliana Bruno. In response to a critical review in the ‘Materialities’ edition of October (2016) The effects of materiality are studied and articulated as question which look to highlight that In our time, with its rapidly changing materials and media, what role can materiality have? How does it operate in the arts and in visual technology, as well as in cultural theory and philosophy? It is not a coincidence that these questions arise at a time when many artists are probing the material conditions of their mediums and striving for a reinvention of materiality.” This reinvention, for me articulates my desire to constitute yet again, a new phase of my practice. How my work embraces contemporary thinking and artistic practice, I now believe, can be demonstrated in how I am choosing to search for essential abstractions within new ontological investigations that articulate my theory in research. Therefore what I am discovering is how my work translates as representations.
How my work “re”- presents that which is material in the real world and re-given as images and forms that reveal a deeper context or intrinsic quality to the extracted form. It is really hard to say where my work is heading at the moment and if i’m going to adopt an analytical lens, I feel my work through research is heading into an undeveloped phase that will transition my practice to a very contemporary space, where the everyday and unfolding ‘nowness’ of being an artist in a world that is facing the 4th industrial revolution and a possible 6th mass extinction, may go to informing my work with an urgency that no other influence can provide. thus making the articulation of time even more relevant, whether that is by material capture or moving narration. Both approaches foster a growing potency within my evolving practice in the realm of moving image, projection and installation based narratives.
[1] Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, ‘Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets’, Liverpool Biennial: Stages #9, (March 2021) <https://www.biennial.com/files/pdfs/9259/stages-9-combined-journal.pdf> [accessed 07/01/2022]