Metamodern again...

I finally watched the (private) recording of Gia Milinovich's session for our group on the Metamodern. I learnt a bunch of things, the first of which is that it's not 'metamodernism' as it's a epistime, not a philosophy (i.e. it's a 'trend' observed in culture, not a school of thought). The second thing I learnt was a much better (but perhaps still shaky) understand of what the meta-modern is... To build on my previous post, broadly:

• Modernism: What is truth? How can we create utopia? What is the ultimate right answer? Let's make the world a better and better place.... Let's dream of a great future
• WORLD WAR
• Post-Modernism: There is no truth, there is no utopia, you all suck balls, there is no future so let's just be funny and snarky
• 9-11
• Metamodern: There is no truth, you all suck balls, but that's ok, and actually there is the chance of a future so let's still try to make the world a better place, even if we aren't sure what we mean by 'better place'

Maybe  put more reverently, things that are 'metamodern' tend to constantly swing between (I can't spell the word that starts with 'o' and means that) the idealism of modernism, and the snarky of post-modernism - when things get too serious, metamodern gets sarcastic, but just as things seem to be flippant and cynical, it catches us out and makes us cry. Moreover, it sometimes attempts to use both to enhance the other - a really flippant delivery to make a really earnest point, or a really earnest delivery of something very flippant. I think the movie 'Barbie' (which I loved) is a good example - it makes serious points in a light way - you can watch it as a rather silly comedy, or you can be really moved by it... Or both. Like most metamodern works, it doesn't want to be pinned down.

Which made me think that a lot of the stuff I made last year was metamodern in it's sensibility...  Flippant but with dark undertones, ironic irreverent language to describe earnestly felt emotions...

The "metamodern methods" were interesting:

They are more observations than approaches - i.e. again, they are applied retrospectively, but a few of them could describe my work, especially "ironesty".  

Am I excited to have finally found my true home? Nah. I think it's interesting that I stumbled into making work that fits metamodern, probably because I was aping contemporary work that I admired, but I don't think it's something to 'aim for'. I think my work is already moving away from some of these characterisations, and that's ok.

Another interesting titbit was the idea of 'operational aesthetics' - the attraction to, and fascination with, understanding how artistic things (with their own aesthetic) work - admiring a book for it's plot devices, watching the 'make of' of a movie, watching how a magic trick is done. I'm not sure how it relates to my work, but it feels quite 'me', given my rather analytic mindset, plus it's interesting to learn there is a term for it.

Should I move to Substack?

 I feel an attachment to Blogger, and it's been a really great option for running this blog with none of the grief experienced by my classmates that chose Wordpress... But... People not being able to subscribe without an feed reader feels a bit 1990s... And actually the cool kids are on Substack now. I'm thinking more and more about moving to longer form content, like the stuff I used to publish on my LinkedIn. If I get one of the things I've applied for, writing might be even more front-and-centre.... Should I jump to Substack... Or something else? Or just stay here...

Moving on from Open Casket... Decompression Sickness

 I think Open Casket and the animation are as 'done' as I can get them now. I think I'll called the sculpture "Gone" and the animation "All these moments" - a reference to the line from Bladerunner "All these moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain". Tomorrow I bring the animation to CSM. On Thursday my sculpture is delivered. I'm really looking forward to helping with the show install.

As is often the way after finishing a "big piece", I feel weirdly lost. I guess it's like that when you finishing any sort of big project - you are used to all that focus and pressure, and suddenly it's removed. I used to call the weird listless lost feeling, "decompression sickness".

I have a few ideas for things I want to do physically, but they will have to wait for my sculpture to be removed, as it currently takes up all the space in the dining room that I use for making. Once that's gone, I have a bunch of projects I started and did't finish that I want to return to, and once the sculpture returns, I have the fun of deciding what I am going to do with it - currently either turning it into some sort of wall mounted cast, or perhaps using it as a mould to cast a concrete 'positive' of my body that I could install in the garden somewhere. My poor house...

I am more stuck on the digital side - I've always kept the two things quite separate. I'm still setting up my new laptop as I had quite a lot of 'fiddly' software that takes a while to re-install e.g. OpenVDB is not just a case of 'clicking install' - you have to download a bunch of dependancies, and the compile it from source - which is gloriously fast on my new laptop compared to my old one! Once I've done that, I might make a Volume based rendering of my Open Casket water. There's a bunch of other things I want to do with Volumes as I find the look of how they are rendered quite interesting... 

But probably the thing I should REALLY do is to get the 3d printer going! I think that's what I'm really excited about - there are a couple of projects I REALLY want to do - one is scanning a river bank and making a model from it, the other is making plaster underground buildings - both will make more sense when I do them!

And I guess I will keep this blog alive, at least for now. I don't know if it helps me with no obvious readership, but it feels sad to just stop....

Open Casket The Movie - testing the ripples as a stand-alone piece

 I've decided to make the ripple animation into a separate piece. I've cleaned up the shape of the body, and added logic to increase the amount of rain slowly, hold it, slowly decrease it, then hold it at zero so the water settles:

I've did a couple of simple test projections, and I really like it:

Next step is to do a few runs and stitch them together so you get a bit of variety in what you see if you stick around for a couple of cycles. I also need to think of 'real' names for this and for the original Open Casket... For the original I was think probably just "Gone", and for this, I'm tempted to reference a beautiful and famous quote from the movie Bladerunner - "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"

Hamad Butt

 "I want to speak of fear. I want to exploit the word apprehensions for its associations with arresting, grasping, understanding and fearing"

I can't remember where I came across Hamad Butt - I want to say Insta, but I have a vague idea someone sent me a link. I really like his work - I love the mixture of science and art, and I love the way he plays with emotions, in a way that I like to - beauty, intrigue, but also apprehension, perhaps even fear. Assuming the vessels really are filled with Chlorine (and I feel sure they are), the risk is quite real.

The glass was apparently blown by technicians from Imperial College. I remember when I first joined Imperial, to study Chemistry, in the late 90s, someone mentioned that the glass technicians had collaborated with an artist. They were rightly proud. The timing fits. Funny how things come in circles.

Ana Mendieta , Jeanne Simmons, and Jennifer Calivas, and some further thoughts on the deeper layers of meaning in Open Casket

Chatting with Chelsea, she mentioned Ana Mendieta as someone I might want to research. I really like her work, but I was especially taken with her Siluetas series. Needless to say, I can't find any good creative-commons-licensed images, but the link above gives a good impression. I really like the aesthetic, and the moulding of the body into nature. It has obvious links to "Open Casket" but other, perhaps less obvious, links to earlier work where I explored the urge I had to merge my body into the landscape. I think Mendieta's motivation is slightly different (she describes them as an attempt to return to a maternal nature). It's interesting to me because I wanted to produce a piece that incorporated nature, but that was sculptural, and I have a love-hate relationship with art that comprises photographs of performed acts. I think a lot of it can be very good, but I need to explore the feeling of confusion it gives me between the art as the act, the art as the visual impression of the act, and the art as the photograph. I think I would want to record the act in a way that isn't a photograph, but that is then difficult and impractical. Of course, Open Casket is one way to record such an act as an indexical mark, but again, is Open Casket the act or the mark? Sometimes I wish I drank.

I also came across (again) the art of Jeanne Simmons, featured in Colossal. She likewise explores the merging of the body with the natural environment and the landscape. She talks about the familiarity of places where one spends a lot of time, and the bond that grows between the body and the landscape. This is very close to the feeling I wanted to explore in my own art, albeit not Open Casket. For me, it's the familiarity, but it's also the timeless/mindlessness/impersonal of the natural environment as an escape from difficult human feelings, as summed up by the phrase I used in my five minute video "... all around me, nature continued with benign indifference".

Lastly, my sister sent me a link to the work of Jennifer Calivas. By taking the photos herself using a trigger release, she plays perhaps with the very ideas I describe above (or maybe she's just really paranoid about IP law?). It's hard to say, as all the material about her seems to be (and sorry if she ever reads this, but I'm confident she won't) breathless marketing slop about toying with the concept of the female body, the earth, and transformation... I don't know, it was a lot of stuff about the earth and feminism, which are both good things, but it wasn't immediately clear how they related to each other, let alone the image. Maybe I just like my stuff a bit less cooked? Maybe I just don't get it. Who knows, really? Anyway...

Anyway, I like the images, whatever they mean. I also find the idea of taking the photo, without being able to see, a really interesting one. Clearly it would be a different image if taken by someone else - by 'breaking the 4th wall', Calivas re-enforces the sense that she is taking these images alone, which makes them feel intimate, lonely, and perhaps a bit dangerous. I guess, in a strange sense, it mirrors my own sometimes pathetic attempts to make Open Casket alone - a close friend pointed out that the act of making something ungainly, that I can't really move alone, is significant. In a way, the mark records my body, but it also records the undignified, unpractical, exhausting effort required to make it without the help and support that I so clearly needed.

Open Casket and progeny of Open Casket?

I think I am pretty much 'there' for Open Casket. I added a 'head', which was uneventful - it looks like a bit of a weird fold of fabric, but I think it's enough to even up the proportions and generally suggest the right shape. I took some suitably moody photos for Insta, and I think it is ready to ship (literally)

I don't think the projection is going to work with it any more, and I'm not sure it's necessary either - I think it looks old and dry and mummified, adding ripples will probably just make it look damp and soggy and putrid... I think the new fabric texture says enough anyhow, especially with the edges frayed...

I'm quite pleased with the ripples though, and I like how they form the shape of a person when there are lots, and how it disappears when they die away... It's an interesting metaphor for the transience of life in it's own right... So I'm thinking I'll take it along as a separate piece, and it can either get installed, or I can take it home again, it's no big issue to do.

Open Casket - Steady progress, removing the support, saying a prayer to the plaster and PVA gods

Having left the cast for a few days to start to dry out and cure, I decided to be brave and remove the supporting material this afternoon. Plaster will harden quickly, but can take days to cure - the difference being an initial solidification when the excess water is removed vs reaching full strength as the crystal matrix forms eliminating yet more water in the process. I figured that the plaster wasn't going to dry out completely and thus cure with all the packing material around it.

Removing the foam and then the plastic sheeting unleashed an avalanche of polystyrene balls which took quite a while to collect and store back in a plastic bag where they can hopefully dry completely. As I suspected, everything was still quite wet under there. 

Removing the surrounding material gave me a chance to get a much better sense of the actual shape, and the rectilinear shape was definitely part of what made the first iteration a bit dull. I was quite concerned that the upper layer of fabric was beginning to pull away from the plaster layer, so I decided to take a gamble that the upper surface of plaster was quite stable, and I gave everything a thorough coat of PVA. Stepping back once I'd done this, I was pretty happy with the result at last:

This is definitely closer to what I was trying to do. The semantics might not be quite as clear as the first version, but I think this version is better balanced with the aesthetics. I'm quite concerned that the whole thing may still be shifting, and I am prepared for the possibility that I will go down tomorrow morning and find it as flat as a pancake...

I need to leave the whole thing to 'rest' and dry out again for a bit, but the next question is really how I can stabilise this enough to transport - at the moment it is safe to slide around on the tiles, but I think it will collapse if I attempt to lift it, so I need to devise some way to support it from below. The shape is interesting, but I need to fine tune it - it looks a bit 'cape-like' at the moment. I also want to think about ragged edges. Oh, and it needs a head!

One interesting chance event was that I accidentally filled one arm with polystyrene balls:

I've toyed for a while with the idea of some sort of substance in the impression, but I was surprised by how much it made it 'pop'. I think I need to seriously consider what I might do in this direction... Dust seems like an obvious choice, but I think it would be impractical for a bunch of reasons... Maybe I put in the balls and then fix them with something and coat them? Dunno.

I'm going to continue to code the water simulation in parallel and so some experiments with the projector, so I can use the first version if necessary. I'm not sure how this version would look with the projection, but it would be something to experiment with if I can successfully scoop it off my poor kitchen floor...

Open Casket - starting over and loosing control of my balls

As I alluded to in my last post, I made the decision to at least attempt a new cast from scratch. Getting home from my trip today, I couldn't get the idea out of my head, so I decided to just go for it. A bad idea, but one that ended up being ok!

This time I cut a very simple 'grave' shape in the foam, and filled it with polystyrene balls. I soaked a piece of a dust sheet - made I think from unbleached cotton - in 3kg of plaster of paris. I laid it out over the balls directly, and then laid a second piece of the same fabric (wet but without plaster) over the top to stop the plaster sticking to my body. I then climbed onto it, being careful to sit straight down. I lost a few of the balls when I put the fabric on, but I felt a promising moulding as I lay down.

I lay for almost an hour. It was very cold and damp at first, tending to warm and wet as time went on. My daughter came and stared at me like I was an idiot, which was fair, and the cat came and tried to climb on my chest, but my daughter kindly stopped her.

After about an hour I very carefully got up. The fabric felt reassuringly firm and kept it's shape as I flumped out onto the kitchen floor.

I'm much happier with the shape this time. It's a bit hard to make out from the photo because the right arm filled with balls as I got out, and because the balls below my hands are pushed out into little mounds, which makes it look like I have saddlebags! However, the same is much easier to 'read' in 3d so I'm not too worried - yet. One slight setback is that the head is missing - it's actually more 'missing' that it appears in the photo as the plaster material layer is significantly lower down my neck than the fabric covering layer was. I need to decide if I roll without a head, or more likely pull some of the loose covering material up to make a bit of a head shape. I might even attempt to 'mould' a head like a hood, but I'm not sure if that would end in tears.

I'm looking forward to getting my kitchen floor back, but I think I'll need to leave it for a few days to dry at least, before I dare to remove the supporting material.

Although this is much closer to what I was originally imagining, I am not writing off my last effort let - but I feel I've 'scratched the itch', and it's good to have options. I feel much more interested in keeping this version in my house after the final show, so perhaps that's telling it itself?

Open Casket - where next... Facing the idea of starting over

 I had a long drive today, and as usual I used it to reflect on my art. I've now attached the cotton cover onto the plaster impression, painting diluted PVA onto just the areas that form the impression. I've left this to dry for a couple of days - I'm currently away from home, so I'll see what this looks like when I get home. I've also discovered that the impression looks better when  loose sheet is thrown over the top.

But....

Driving and reflecting, I reluctantly admitted to myself that I am not happy with what I currently have. It might yet redeem itself, and if it doesn't, it's not awful.

But...

It's not what I wanted to make. I wanted something raw and indexical.

I think I'm going to have to have another go. I think I'll work in a much less planned way. I wont' attempt to make a 3d shape, I'll just cut a rough 'grave' slot in foam and fill it with polystyrene balls. I'll then lay rough cotton soaked in plaster direct on that, and then a layer of damp rough cotton on top of that. The idea is to see if I can make a shape that's more organic, more raw, more... honest and interesting.

And then I'll decide what I want to do next.

Open Casket - animating water ripples

I'm sure I could come up with some really edgy double entendre, but my brain is too frazzled... I've been working on the digital component of "Open Casket" - essentially a very simple 2d water simulation of drops sending ripples, reflecting off the edges of the impression. 

After a bit of Googling around, I found a very simple simulation that basically said that for each step, the height of the water in a 'cell' at a point x,y, is the combination of the heights in the left/right/top/bottom cells. I mentioned this in my last post on Open Casket, and suggested it was too simple to work with non-rectilinear containers. My assumption was that given the way it was presented [basically as if it was a 'hack'], it must be something someone had just come up with messing around. I did implement it, but it gave ugly results, so I went to look for a 'real' implementation.

After more research, I discovered that the type of simulation I'm after is typically referred to as height-field water. Essentially the water is modelled as a height-field, which allows ripples etc, but doesn't allow splash or tearing, since the water can only have one height at a given point. What was more interesting was that I saw the same implementation [more or less], but this time with a full explanation of the logic behind it. It actually transpires to be a real physics based implementation, albeit a very simplified one! 

Essentially it is based on the fact that the force acting on a column element in the grid is proportional to its height relative to its neighbours. The velocity of the water interface can therefore be derived from that, and from there, the height at each point, for any given time. In other words, the taller any point is above its neighbours, the more it accelerates downward, and vice versa.

Buoyed up by this discovery [I love a good pun, you know that], I re-implemented the code. After a bunch of cock-ups because I forgot that I was reading the same array of heights as I was writing too, I got to something fairly well-behaved. Nevertheless, the ripples were still a bit weird and square, but I realised this is because I was perturbing a single element to initiate the ripple, so I wrote code to perturb a circular patch instead - essentially make a small bulge. This gave much nicer ripples.

Finally I have implemented code to add obstacles to the grid - basically to allow me to draw regions that are 'not water'. These are held fixed at zero height, which is probably a nasty hack, but seems to give good ripple reflections anyhow.

There's not a lot to see, but please notice and appreciate the ripples coming off the blue blob, especially how they are distorted by the non-straight edge. Yeah, this is how I get my thrills.

Next step is probably to find a nicer way to render the surface - it's currently based directly on height, but that gives some 'meh' results, especially the white 'blips' which each bulge is initialised. Ideally I'd render it as something closer to reflection and caustics. I need to decide if I want to do that by hand [I have code I created before that could potentially do it] or whether I just export to Blender using Openvdb Volumes and render there with full ray traced sexiness.... 

I also need to consider if I need to make each drop a double perturbation to simulate tearing at that point - basically ripples from a drop spread in a series of ripples because the initial splash goes up, tears, and comes down as a second drop a few moments later, which in turn may throw up a third drop that comes down to make a third ripple... And so on... Kinda fiddly to code as I'd have to track all the drop positions and add the second/third perturbations a few simulation steps later... Right now that sounds too painful for the benefit [relative to things like nicing up the rendering] but we'll see how I feel later [plus I only have 3 weeks left... Eeeek!]

Do you like it wet or dry? Conceptual art that is...

A residency announcement in Art Forum caught my eye this morning - not for the residency itself - that's a distant dream - but for the fact that it referenced 'wet conceptualism'! I wondered if it was a 'thing' so I Googled it, and indeed it is! I was motivated to read a very interesting article by Gary Ryan in CultBytes called "Interview with Warren Neidich About Wet Conceptualism". 

Warren is the inventor of the term, and is championing the idea that conceptual art comes in two varieties - the conventional 'dry' variety, but also the less recognised 'wet' variety. The 'dry' being like 'dry humour' - abstracted, pared down, uninterested in the aesthetic, understated. The 'wet' being conceptual art that deals with more human and personal experiences, political positions etc. A nice example given being “Semiotics of the Kitchen” by Martha Rosler.

Given that I often refer to my work as 'concept-led', I was wondering how this distinction might apply. I'm not sure... But I find the tension between the more universal experiences and understated dry vs the more human, personal, wet, immediately familiar. I wonder if Tomgos makes 'dry' conceptual art and Tathos makes 'wet'? I my head, Tathos is laughing gleefully at the term 'wet', and is very clearly drawn that way...

I'm also wondering about Postmodernism vs Metamodernism - I managed to miss the talk the first time, and I am about to miss it again, but it feels like 'dry' conceptualism is quite postmodern, whereas 'wet' conceptualism might be more metamodern?

The other aspect of the article that drew my interest was the discussion of the indexical and non-material nature of conceptual art. It's again something I have also reflected on - is the object just the indexical mark of the 'art'? Ironically Warren relates the shift to 'wet' conceptualim as reflecting a shift from ford-ian physical labour with physical products, to post-ford-ian mental labour, with intangible results. I need to reflect more on that [right now my brain is just screaming about the PhD selection day tomorrow] but it feels funny and relevant given my previous work, and my potential future work...

Open Casket - experiment painting the impression with a dark wash

 Dedicated readers will recall that I made a pact never to paint natural materials, and that I regularly break that pact, with varying degrees of regret. I'm concerned that the contrast between the impression and the surrounding material isn't clear enough, and that it's therefore hard to see the shape, leading it to look distorted. I therefore experimented with painting one of my prototypes in a mixture of diluted PVA and black poster paint. The aim was to see how the plaster took the paint, but also to see how it looked when it was then covered by the planned layer of PVA-soaked fabric.

The 'point' of the picture above is that the painted areas do show through the fabric above, but do so in a subtle way. Broadly the fabric looks darker in those areas, but not in a way that screams that it has been painted.

I therefore decided to be 'brave' and paint the whole impression:

I actually think it looks way more interesting now! Clearly it's a bit 'over-cooked' but that's deliberate as it will be much more subtle when it's covered in the final layer. I am half tempted not to apply the final layer, but I think it will make the overall finish better, and it will also cover the annoying strip of exposed foam on the bottom left. That said, I feel like I might push the final layer a lot closer to the plaster layer, so it better mimics the shape, and I might actually paint the final fabric layer, albeit much more subtly... I think I need to do some experiments with a wet sheet before I commit - in particular I wonder if I want to have folds in particular areas, or to avoid folds at all. Folds in different areas might have different connotations - folds in the surround but not the impression might evoke the way luxury items are packaged in a silk lined case, whereas folds on the impression but not the surround might evoke the sense of a body removed abruptly. I suspect I'll end-up going with no folds, or rather, minimal folds.

I also made a start on the digital component. I found a very simple algorithm online to produce ripple patterns. It appears to work by making each pixel equal to the average of it's neighbours from the previous frame. However, it only considers pixels above/below/left/right (I'm sure there's a name for that, but I can't think what it is (apparently there is not, there's a whole reddit of people arguing about it with 'bordering' being a strong contender)), which means that I don't think it will handle reflections correctly from an irregular border since it can't 'see' pixels that are not rectalinear. I'm going to do some experiments and see - it might be that it's not 'correct' but it looks good enough anyhow...