Everything is indexical - musing on piss flowers and dead foxes

 I feel like I'm getting really good at clickbait titles, but unlike most articles with clickbait titles, this one does relate directly to the things in the title. Of course, my brain is now rushing off thinking of clickbait titles "They pissed in the snow, this happened next!".... "They found lemon snow, they never expected this!" anyhooooo....

The DCS were chatting this morning about an upcoming exhibition featuring Helen Chadwick, and discussing her notorious "Piss Flowers". I'd vaguely heard of them, but Catherine shared a link to a Tate article about them. While I still find them a bit gross (as is the intention, I think), I was charmed by the broader meaning of love, sharing (both romantic and bodily), and transience. Indexical marks have been on my mind since the tutorial, and I was struck that the flowers are indexical.

A few months ago, I shared an entry that likened art to the 'fire' not the 'ashes' - wow, ok, over a year ago... And I was reflecting that, in a sense, I'm saying that all art is indexical - or at least, that I think of all my art as being 'indexical' in the broadest sense. The objects I make are not 'the art', they are the indexical marks from 'the art', which is the non-physical phenomena that they represent... 

Maybe... I think there is something interesting and useful in this idea, I can't quite wrap my head around what my head is trying to tell me!

All of which brought me back to my dead foxes. I learnt a lot making a two part mould to cast them, but never really got them to work, and sort of lost the will... But they sort of floated back to the top of the stew, and now I'm thinking about 3d scanning and 3d printing to make recordings of random 1m square chunks of interesting ground... And it struck me that maybe I should revisit my poor little foxes? Roadkill is very indexical - in the literal sense of smooshed blood and skin, tyre marks etc, but also in the more metaphorical sense of a nocturnal adventure undertake but never completed - the indexical 'mark' of what should have been, and wasn't. 

I love the word 'smooshed'.

The idea of 3d scanning the (perhaps-not-so-) recently departed remains of foxes makes me feel a bit yucky, but I think that's maybe even more reason to do it. It would be sharing death literally in face, but also recognising and memorialising what was life.

I don't have time to get to grips with 3d scanning and 3d printing in time, but I honestly think that perhaps the roadkill sculptures are what I 'should' have exhibited in my final show.

Starting on on-line 'Showcase'

 I was a bit underwhelmed by the UAL 'Showcase' platform - it seems a bit clunky, and the fact that it's only live for a year seems, well, a bit 1990s. Nevertheless, I thought I should take every chance to promote my stuff. 

tl;dr; I kinda got into it, and it made me want to dig up my unloved website and get it into a presentable state.

I was a bit unsure what to put as the 'main project', given that Open Casket is unlikely to be photographable until the final show - it will be finished before, but unless I rent a space to photograph it in (which maybe I could! I live next to a community hall that would work at a push), then I'm not going to have decent images till after the deadline. In the end, I plumped for my 'frosted face', which I better give a name to, and come up with some words to describe! 

I added "A Month in my Head" as a second project, and used the same text as I just submitted to an open call. 

I have to admit, even at this early stage, it actually looks a lot slicker than I had expected. I'm actually quite enjoying it.

I've had a half-finished website at https://www.tomgrey.net/ for a while - I should really dust it off and finish it - I think I worried too much about how to sort my stuff, but now I'm not expecting to sell it, I think I can worry a lot less and focus on informing, not selling...

Full-body impression test for Open Casket

 Today I finally got some time to do some more tests on open casket (tentative final name "Gone"). I put a double thickness of sheet over the foam/beads and climbed in. I did a literal 'dry run' first, but the result was unconvincing. Next I tried spraying the sheet with water first, so it was damp. I'm still not happy, but I'm a lot happier:

Smoothing down the areas that are not under me seemed to help a lot as it gives a much better contrast between the body and the surround. I could do this to a limited extent before I got in, but having a second person  to do this while I'm lying there should give even better results - hopefully they could also smooth the slightly weird raised edges around the limbs. Tucking the sheet underneath the board definitely looks neater and makes the thing look more integrated. Adding more beads might give a shallower but more natural looking impression too (some of the edges are still quite square)

In general, I think/hope that the shape will only improve with each attempt because the beads will continue to settle more into the right shape... But maybe I'm just being naive!

Next thing to test is plaster-soaked fabric, for a small area. I'm hoping it will take the shape of the body better, and maybe show the beads less - that was also an issue - the beads are showing through in places as a fine set of bumps.

I'm also interested in whether I could somehow 'flow' the plaster on afterwards? It would be great to be able to repeatedly test/tinker and then 'freeze' the best result... I can't see that working though as I think the plaster will sit on top of the sheet, even if wet, and not bond to it... But it's worth a quick test.

Unit 3 Video

 "Final video"? Five minute video of my work, summarising it (kinda) for unit 3.

Five Minute Video almost done - lessons learnt?

 The five minute video is almost done now. I've been going at it pretty hard for the last few nights... I wanted to extract some lessons learnt, but maybe it's too early? Maybe I need more perspective? Maybe it's because my daughter, anxious about school, is tossing and turning and chattering away nervously to herself? Even from the next room, stuck upstairs because she won't settle if I'm not nearby, I can feel her anxiety prickling my skin like static. However, I think I should try - I don't want to post the lessons at the same time as the video...

Things what I have learnt from making my first 'art' video:

• Shoot more footage than you think you need - you can always trim it down and pick the best bits, but if you don't have enough, you can't make it longer.. Well, you can sometimes get away with doubling stuff up, but it's better to avoid the problem in the first place
• Movement is important - video needs movement, even if it's just a bit of zooming/panning in a static image. Sound can help the illusion of movement when there isn't any.
• Sound effects add immersion - simple sound effects, which might go unnoticed, significantly add to the immersion into the video - silence is unnatural, and ideally there would always be some sort of relevant background noise (which makes the use of silence more deliberate and effective)
• Transitions are important - I'm sure they teach this on video 101, but I've not been to video 101, so I learnt the hard way - my video started as a series of fragments with pauses between, it still is a bit, but working to bridge those gaps will keep the thing moving, save for those moments when you WANT things to stop. You can bridge with footage, transitions, but also with sound e.g. let the sound from one sequence bleed into the next
• AI is amazing - I've done a bunch of cool stuff with AI, including all the narration
• AI is not amazing - but the sequences it generates are short (and financially expensive!) so it can contribute to the feeling of disconnected snippets
• Traditional filters are more powerful than you think - they might end up being labelled 'cheesy' but I was surprised how much interest and atmosphere you can generate with simple filters like 'de-saturate' and 'posterise'
• Band pass filters are great for cleaning-up audio - most of the tracks featured hiss and hum and traffic noise. The 15 band filter was great for massively reducing this without wrecking the audio - my technique is a bit brute force - just keep removing bands till the problem sound goes away, and then start carefully adding them back in until it returns, starting from the furthest from the 'problem' band.
• Start long and overworked and edit down - like my static art, sometimes it's easier to just check a lot of stuff in, see how it looks and then start removing as much as possible until you can't remove any more
• Shotcut is powerful but buggy - I've learnt a tonne about Shotcut, and I'm amazed how well it has stood up to some fairly heavy editing, but there are some odd bugs that surface sometimes - you just need to keep a close eye, save regularly, and be prepared to re-do stuff if you have to
• Keep it simple stupid - sometimes the simplest sequences are the most effective - some of my favourites are just a video of me huffing up a hill with a voice over