Friday 2 January 2009

new year update......and live stream video and gillian wearing confessions

phew am back- long time no blog! a period of digestion and reflection post MA and what last year has given me, early seeds of revised and new projects (posts to follow shortly,) writing proposals, and thinking about both the independent and interrelated possibilities for artist-educator me. speaking to many people lecturing/teaching/ working in education who also find it is often incredibly inspiring and rewarding personally and professionally: for me currently, giving lots of ways of bringing my MA and post MA practice to young people, redefining the curricula to more visibly include socially engaged participatory practice, interdisciplinary art, live art. new projects to be piloted, strategies, initiatives both within the visual arts department and whole school, i'm lucky to be in a school which embraces change and taking risks.mid January, am meeting with the local council setting up site-specific installation and live art projects in derelict buildings for my students. it would be great if to the future this avenue could also allow artist-educator projects too. i work with recent graduates and practitioners who also wish to continue to practice but finding the time and head space is difficult, but so necessary for personal satisfaction, and growth and also to be delivering a contemporary curriculum. i'm lucky at least that i work part-time and this last few months have been re-adjusting to this and this year i feel to become more work-art life balanced: when am i an artist and when am i an artist-educator? stricter timetabling myself this year. i really enjoy being both but in my constantly thirsty and enquiring mind i need to find a way to balance and switch between it better:)

so...my work......The Darkroom @ duckie started something intriguing for me about using my mobile phone camera (N73) purposefully as part of the whole act of photography and the club nature of taking photos in this way, deleting the image later to maintain the temporality ethos to my work. this work was only experienced by the performer (myself or laura bean) and the participant. is there an opportunity, or indeed is it appropriate for a wider audience?



lots to be playing around with my new N96 phone have found it has lots of possibilities- see above this bambuser and also movino app is intriguing me(this boiled egg action is not a piece of work just a test!!) in terms of temporality of my work however, yes live streaming from the phone via bluetooth to web is exciting but how about the fact that it stores for playback the footage,is it just like when i deleted the camera photo in The darkroom? i go online and delete it? how could this or would it work? the mediated performance, where and why is the audience both physically local and online global? how does this challenge the intimate encounter- what is broadcast, audio and visual, anonymity? thinking gillian wearing, confess all on video although this work was made for the gallery, video projection as installation and not online. or would this be a live feed from one arena to another locally and NOT online? two "sheds," two confessional boxes like the walkie talkies in shed ?? what is gained and lost from being physically in one another's company as opposed to mediated- honesty? need to look back at paul sermon in telematic dreaming


my one-to-one work has increasingly become at times, about confessions to a stranger, things you may not say to someone you know. in duckie i spoke to a couple of participants, through the trigger of a train ticket, about my blood father's memorial in october, some things which i haven't told even my closest friends. i have been wondering why i did this. one thing i think was in immersing myself in my MA i detached myself from those closest to me, did not take on board his death at all during my MA (and am working though only now) and my work became a way of still maintaining intimacy in my life. for me this was the truth. for others and what they told me? truth, embellished, utter fiction? back to lyn gardner's post, in the theatrical confession box i looked at last year on my MA blog;

"Lyn Gardner in, In the theatrical confession box, Guardian arts blog (June 08) writing about recent trends in intimate performance, “….what a great number of these performances are exploring is not intimacy, but the illusion of intimacy and the loneliness of a world where communication is easy but real intimacy very hard. But I wonder about the ethical issues around such performances, particularly when they are set up in such a way that the power lies entirely with the performers and the risk seems to lie entirely with the audience."

did i have power and were the participants at risk? does this lie in more of the fact that this work was non-matrixed and therefore not a "performance" oh god, in knots now......;) need to process this.

in conclusion for today........in all of this current thinking, questioning the private/public fact/fictional nature of my work, how does diversifying the areas of photography and video further facilitate this?

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