Personal Practice

Crumb Trail

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Art/M.Ade/venture#n+1

(This is a post about a performance/adventure/artthing I did summer 2019 but never published for some reason, maybe because it is a bit rambling, but I am posting now as it touches on a lot of ideas about the outdoors as / art / as research. Contact me if any links have gone down)

Mad art made adventure n, where n is one of a series n+1.

Reportage of mad art as research based on Barrett and Bolt (1a) Creative Arts practice: an amended writing scheme. This has 5 elements.

1. Introduction – What if? Why? Then…

What if?

What if I were to make, in the offline world, a crumb trail like the one left by Hansel, in the Brothers Grimm story Hansel and Gretel, (2) and reimagine it as a path in the online world, like the crumb trail used on websites to show website structure.

Why?

Because I could create a path in the offline world next to one in the online world. The online world, the internet, exists as both a virtual space of software, and a real place of hardware. In the offline world, I can get wet, or run over, or bitten by a dog, or all three. I want to use art to explore how these two interact.

I can also reconnect with the use of the enactment of myth and story that was part of my Dramatherapy training and use it as art to have an art made adventure in an outdoor setting, and be back in time for tea. Bonus!

Then…

I could wander around the place where I live, with a bag of bread, with slices imprinted with words and symbols, and drop them and photograph them on the ground along a route from my house to the telephone exchange where the internet comes in, like Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs to find his way home when his father took him and his sister out into the woods to murder them. Any questions?

2. Practice and Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
Who? When? Where?

John Mulaney – Salt and Pepper Diner

I listened to this sketch and was inspired, as it unfolded, to realise that it could be seen as art as research. Listen below and I will explain myself afterwards.

John Mulaney – Salt and Pepper Diner

Why this is art as research?

  • It starts with a ‘What if? What if were to play Tom Jones ‘What’s New Pussycat’ 11 times in a row in a diner.
  • It has a Why? The answer is ‘…because it would be fun to find out, and I think I can guess, but I do not know because I have not seen it happen. I need observable data’
  • The account of the experiment is a well observed, accurate and well presented.
  • The experimenter produces quantitative data. In answer to the question, ‘Can you make grown men and women weep tears of joy by playing Tom Jones ‘It’s Not Unusual’? The answer is ‘Yes. If you precede it by seven ‘What’s New Pussycat’s.
  • The experimenter provides some psychological or qualitative insight into the effect of seven ‘What’s New Pussycats’. The author suggests jokingly that seven What’s New Pussycat’s in a row in a diner invokes a temporary state in listeners, similar to serious mental illness.
  • The exegesis, the art as research term for the reflection and account of the research, is delivered as performance. The research findings are theatre. This is art.

This got me wondering how far you could go, away from traditional research methods and get away with it. What if the research was done as a surreal comedy? Could it work?

Hansel and Gretel put their hands up and said. ‘There is only one way to find out!’

Robert Lemons – The Wonder Bread Tests. 2001

In Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things by Peter Buchanan-Smith, the artist Robert Lemons writes “On a dreary day in March 2001, I undertook an experiment to test the utility of pieces of bread as trail markers. In the Brother Grimm fairytale, Hansel laid a trail of crumbs to guide Gretel back home… But would a bread trail work in the modern world?”

He laid out 18 slices of bread in New York city and monitored them over time. He concluded by observing “…the great futility of using breadcrumbs as a navigation system: if a piece of bread is conspicuous enough to be findable by the maker of the trail, the piece is too visible to predators such as shopkeepers and pigeons.”

The Loaf
Slices 1, 2, 3, 4.

Francis Alys – Architect of the Absurd

Francis Alys trained as an architect and engineer. I like that his roots are outside art, and that his art is at once absurd and profound. There is something in walking and doing art and as research.

All these artists approach art as a journey of exploration, adventure and research. My Crumb Trail is influenced by these artists and their works.

3. Material Methods

Conceptual Frameworks – Why?

Desire Paths – Walking

I lot of my work involves walking. Walking is my material method.

My interest in walking is informed by the idea of ‘Desire Paths’. Partly this comes from thousands of miles walking on footpaths or paddling rivers, where planned routes and desired routes either coalless or collide. Here and Here

The Crumb Trail is one of the dozens of walks I have done locally, going out of my front door, or nearby in pockets of wilderness in the Pennines. Some of this walking is designed by ideas from psychogeography. I use algorithms to give me a direction that is simultaneously predictable but open to the unexpected. Much work has been done but little has gone into the public domain as art. Most of it has been done along the lines of ‘What if I were to go….’ and setting off to see where I go.

Code/Space – Online and Offline Spaces

My own ideas, the work explored by James Bridle and ideas in Code/Space by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge. I want to explore where what we see online can be found offline, eg network towers, data centres, fibre cable routes. And how we can be offline, but connected online, eg Google Maps, location setting on devices. Or where you can go and be totally offline, for example at the level of microhabitats where web-ready devices are too big to operate, until, I presume, nanotechnology fills all spaces with locatable microbots.

Performance – Art as Being

Whilst other art forms make something, an art object. performance becomes art through being in a state of performing.

Performance is what happens between things, the interaction between me and the place I am walking in. This could include ideas like those of Richard Long’s ‘A Line Made by Walking’, Here the ‘object’ is a sign of performance. Or it could be performance as understood by ‘Performance Studies’, or see my page on performance studies. In both senses, performance makes something happen, often to influence a witness to the act of performing.

Material Methods – How?

Find Out Where the Internet is

I used Mast Data to find out the locations of the telecom hardware locally. You put in your postcode and get a map. It shows all the telecom hardware nearby and shows who uses each mast etc. Click on a device and it shows you where it transmits etc. I found my BT exchange. I walked about and looked for the fibre optic cabinets to see where the cabling might go. I could not be certain but would assume the cables follow major roads

Make the Crumb Trail in Offline Space

I walked all the roads on my estate using algorithm walks (L,R,LR,LLR etc) and tracked the routes on GPS then put them onto a series of maps using ArcGIS. Then made a movie using After Effects, to show all the routes.

Previously I had done work to make signifiers using Illustrator which could be cut out and used individually as direction signs on the estate to signify routes taken by each algorithm walk.

The idea was to use design or UX principles to make an object that could give a direction, no matter at what angle you viewed it at. Bottom is L or R, above it L or R in a loop, then ignore L or R next turn.

I used these designs to make the equivalent in toast. The problem was that whilst the images were printed so the sign had only one meaning, whereas toast had two sides.

Lucky for me, I found a toast stamp and realised that lettering could only be read one way, so stamping the toast would make the direction signifier only work the way I intended.

Stamp
Handle

I tried making the sign in toast with a Super Toasty Loaf. This did not really work.

Toasty crumb.

So I tried just using slices of bread which worked better.

Left and Right Signifiers.

I walked the route from my home to the BT exchange with signifiers at strategic junctions.

The bread on the crumb trail glowed like ghostly floating objects when I photographed them. I liked the otherworldly feel.

Finally, I stopped at the telephone exchange in a substation and used a one-off signifier to show the end of the journey. We had found the source of the Internet.

The signifier for the source of the Internet.
The Internet
The Internet can be Dangerous

I dropped the slices as I walked away from my house, like Hansel would have done when his father led him and his sister into the woods to kill them. I walked back to see which ones had gone. they were all there except the first one had been nibbled by birds.

Bird Damage

Make the Crumb Trail in Online Space

Conc

Estelle Barrett talks about art as research being the domain of doing and the senses, and like David Byrne says, it works when you stop making sense.

The point of departure for art as research is the question ‘What if?’. What if could be, ‘What if I tried to show this mountain landscape by pressing paint onto a canvas?’ What if I wanted to use an orchestra to make music that makes people think of the sea?’ or ‘What if, in 1949, I were to use words, as a novel, to explore ideas about a future state controlling personal actions? How would the world look in that future, in say 1984?’ In each case, you learn about paint, or music or words and about mountains, and the sea and the future, but you are never sure what you will learn.

The cgreat futility of breadcrumbs. you cannot he visible to thousnds of people i=on the internet and invisble to trolls and ther NSA

offline spaces are less visble,

offline spaces are levelers, the consultant as King Lear only a king in his court and thus maybe not accesible to orthodoxy and power. Empire ?

(1) Practice as Research – Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. Edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. I.B.Taurus Press

(a) pg 198

(2) The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Translated by Jack Zipes.

Personal Practice

Making the Golden Ratio

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The Idea

Researching recursion brought up a lot of references from a range of sources. I worked my way through them. Intuitively there seemed to be connections centring on the idea of self-similarity, a function that expressed itself by referring to itself, like a thing that made itself, like way experiential learning and art make themselves. There was a lot of maths, code, logic, and some geometry. I wanted to start to explore recursion by making something, so geometry seemed a good place to start. I decided to start by making a thing called the Golden Ratio as a thing that makes itself. As the quote below from Wiki indicates, the study of the Golden Ratio has spanned millenia.

‘Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. … Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.’

Mario Livio — The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number.

I cannot do this material service so the Wiki entry is here

But first a bit of maths. A ratio is a thing that exists only as one value as expressed in relation to another value. It is one thing divided by another. 1 divided by 2 is a ratio. It is 1/2, a half. The golden ratio is a mathematical and geometric expression of a particular ratio. As a ratio, it is described as (a+b)/a=a/b where a and b are numbers.

As a geometric form it is expressed thus…

As a decimal number is it 1.618033988749…. so it is an irrational number, it goes on to infinity. The ratio is the same for 1 and 0.618… as it is for 1.618… and 1.

But as many sources show, the golden ratio is also a thing that exists in nature.

It is also a thing expressed as a mathematical symbol, Phi, a letter from the Greek alphabet.

It is also the basis for a mathematical phenomenon called the Golden Spiral which expresses a thing called the Fibonacci Sequence found in art and nature and mathematics. It can be expressed in many ways.

The Golden ratio is recursive and as such seems to reiterate the feeling of researching recursion. A feeling of finding some deeper connection between things, between experiential learning, art-making, crow intelligence, coding, philosophy, on and on. It feels like all the different references may emerge from a single or underpinning referent. This interests me. But this was all a bit abstract. It also evoked a feeling of caution, like I was maybe seeing things that were not there, things not connected. I wanted a more concrete experience. Something embodied not just imagined.

The Intention and the Action – Making the Golden Ratio

You can make a Golden Ratio with nothing more than a pencil, compass and ruler. I decided to make a golden ratio for myself. My intention was to have a concrete experience of making it rather than just having the abstract experience of thinking about it. I was already exploring the recursive behaviour of crows through poetry, and this changed and deepened my connection to them. So I set out to draw the Golden Ratio with a pencil a ruler and a compass. As shown above, there are a great number of discussions of, investigations of, theories of, and expressions of, the golden ratio by very learned people spanning millennia. This does not really interest me. Google Golden Ratio and you will get many varied references thus…

My idea was that the golden ratio has something to do with recursion, which has something to do with making art and experiential learning and this interests me. All the serious ideas generated by other people can help me pursue this interest in ways my brain could never imagine, like Fine Art made by proper artists can help my art-making. But most helpful is the art I make. My intention was to simply make it and pay attention to what I make and what happens when I make it. As always. Don’t Google it do it yourself, the punk ethic. My preparation was to get hold of a big compass and a joiners pencil. I use wallpaper lining paper. It is a heavy gauge 300gm/metre weight paper like fine art paper, but a nice off-white and is as cheap as chips. It remains curved off the roll so needs to be fixed to a board with masking tape. This also fits with a punk ethic. So I made it myself. I went into action.

What Happened?

I found some instructions in a book I got from a charity shop about making the golden ratio1. I bought the big plastic compass from Amazon here. But this proved a bit bendy. My arcs drawn were a bit wobbly and uneven. So I did some practice on another bit of paper and found a way to make a nice steady arc. I got my ruler and joiners pencil. I photographed my making of it…

Or click here

It proved bizarrely nerve wracking. Hippasus of Metapontum was reputedly drowned at sea by the Pythagorians for discovering irrational numbers here, and according to wiki ‘Irrationality, by infinite reciprocal subtraction, can be easily seen in the golden ratio…’ I hoped Pythagoras and the gods were not watching.

I measured the two sections of the golden ratio I made and did the maths to see how accurate I was. I was not drowned at sea. Nothing happened. I drew a line with two segments of differing lengths. It seemed mundane. What was I expecting? I let it go and let it incubate, or percolate, whichever you prefer. I went to work. I made other art. The board with the line on sat on my desk for ages. I lost my measurements done at the time of making. So I returned to the drawing and the following measurements were taken.

On measuring this, the two segments were 22.3cm and 13.7cm giving 1.62773723. The longer segment divided by the shorter segment should be 1.61803398. So this can be applied to the sides of the triangle I drew, so (22.3 x 13.7) / 22.3 = 1.61434977, this applies to the bottom and side segments of the triangle. This gives an error of about 0.009, mostly due to my hamfistedness and a wobbly compass. I was pleased with this outcome. It is interesting that the Fibonacci sequence moves towards 1.618… with each iteration of the recursive sequence. My second iteration was closer. Maybe it was just noise error. It seemed mundane and magic all at once, which is what magic and reality really are. Perpetually dichotomous. Certainty is certain in its uncertainty.

I did lots more reading about recursion. Eventually, I reflected on the experience for this page. This is my reflection.

Reflection

My immediate reflection after standing away from the image for a while, was that the further you stand from the mirror, the smaller becomes your image, but the setting gets bigger. Whilst there are no unequivocal written accounts, it is suggested that Plato knew about a mathematical phenomenon that went on to be named ‘The Golden Section’ by Martin Ohm in 1826. But the (a+b)/a=a/b formula was written in Euclid’s The Elements 2300 years ago. Maths has moved on a long way since then. My understanding is that maths was then, more of a geometric thing. It was understood as objects, albeit in many senses imaginary objects, it was also in a real sense about things you can make and draw.

Making this object put me in some ways back in that time. The line drawn and segmented could be any length, and the segments, with simple tools, could make an object that made itself. All the actions root back to and emerge out of that line. Then that line produces a form which relates only to itself. I could see how Plato could be Platonic, how he could contemplate pure form which could transcend or sub-ordinate matter. To make the golden ratio, on reflection, was at once transcendent and mundane. The act was mundane, but the emergence of a thing that made itself, utterly without any other referent in this world now seems quite remarkable. It reinforces my belief in nominalism. That all that is written about the golden section are just signs pointing to some thing that exists outside of our experience, and this thing is mundane and transcendent. I can see why Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans felt like they were in touch with some deeper reality. And all it is is a pencil line on a piece of paper.

This reflection also puts me back again in a place I have been before. I have an image of a path, in partial darkness, by some garages near my home. I was doing a series of algorithm walks, llr, rlr, rrrl, etc to make my daily wellness walk more interesting. At some point, I realised that each walk was an act of creation, unique and unlike any other walk I had done. Because the path was varied, but because the time varied, I did just this walk, just today, it could never have been done tomorrow or yesterday. I was strongly struck by the realisation that creativity is mundane. We make a sandwich, we drive to work, we make stuff happen. But through connecting to the innate creativity in the seemingly mundane act of making a sandwich, watching endless TV cookery programmes by celebrity chefs showing me how to make a sandwich become mundane.

The act of making the mundane into art, finding some deeper structure in drawing a line and forming a ratio, has risks. If it can render everyday life mundane, it risks becoming escapism, the evasion of everyday life. For some reason, Irving Welsh sprang to mind writing about the risk and trap of escape. The film version of Welshe’s Trainspotting starts with a great, but disturbing diatribe on the seemingly simple escape from the complexity of life…

‘Make a choice…” I think. I did not, like Renton and Iggy, choose some external internal stimulant, although in the past it was a choice I made, it made me unwell, so I made art, eventually after periods of unwellness that showed TV shows and stimulants to be singularly unstimulating.

So like the Glorious IG, I moved on and chose not to “Choose Life; Choose a job; Choose a career; Choose a family…” or at least I chose to be more choosy over what I chose. The lines at the start of the film are highly ambiguous. Iggy Pop sang about a lust for life. Maybe that was what drove Renton to become a junkie as a way out of the mundanity of his diatribe. Renton chose junk, but it kind of becomes a cypher for an escape from choosing ‘…a f***king big television,’ and ’stuffing f***king junk food into your mouth’ as acts of self-destruction which can be ameliorated by recognising the mundanity of self-creation, making art with a pencil or a walk on a morning past a neighbours garage as opposed to shooting up. The line as a walk or as a pencil mark is transformational. Making them is the key. It is not the same as reading about somebody else’s walk or seeing somebody else’s line. But the purveyors of f***king big televisions and f***ing junk food don’t want us to know that. They want us to buy, to buy into a drug of choice, TV, food, holidays, hair products, an online persona, booze, weed, speed, junk, to take Soma, the drug of choice in Huxley’s Brave New World. In an article from Medium by Yash Deshmukh the author explores Soma as a metaphor for current experience, not a future society. The content of Renton’s rant is the drug. Consumerism as Soma. Work to earn money, to buy things to help you escape the mundanity of working to buy things to help you escape… The endless loop. Recursion as a closed loop is a risk. But the recursion of making the golden mean feels different.

I am still working on how recursion as creativity, exposing deeper forms, and recursion as an endless infinite loop reinforcing the same shallow forms of mundane life, differ. I am still working on what it is about making things as art that makes the content of Renton’s rant mundane, but the experience of drawing a pencil line on paper becomes rich and revelatory. Am I mad, or is the world mad? I will make more stuff as art as research. The journey goes on. The path is revealed by the walking of it.

  1. The Secret Code – The mysterious formula that rules art, nature, and science. By Priya Hemenway. 2008  ↩
Source Material

Art as Research

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https://www.tumblr.com/movingspaceart/732463811418800129/tauba-auerbach-in-bodies-of-knowledge-art21

Great video of artist Tauba Auerbach who works right on the edge between arts practice as personal subjective research and objective material research to the point where they become some other thing. That they are they reinforces the post-curricular, nominal nature of their work. That they seek to find the substrate that underpins our surface world fills me with wonder and awe. The header image is a boat she painted.

In this video Tauba says “I want to learn new things constantly. And I am always trying to find the pattern behind things. I have educated myself about a number of mathematical and scientific principles through crafts like paper weaving and paper marbling. To marble paper it is all about relationships and ratios…”

This appeals to me a great deal. I read nothing but books about maths for about 6 months once on the principle that maths may describe the underlying substrate of the material world. In the end I was unconvinced but concluded that maths provided the best map we have available for the underpinning of the objective world, but the maths was the map not the territory.

So like Tauba I explored art making as a way to get there by other means, subjective means that meant something to me personally. I made a things called ‘A Step Back’ here as this path about maths led to me exploring ideas about recursion between the digital and analogue domains and the oddly dissociative effect of things being in both domains. Recursion as a phenomena connects lots of things in maths, science, art, ecology, sociolology, philosophy, on and on. I believe it is a source of creativity and distributed or collected intelligence between intelligences other than just people, see here. Art making helps us encounter distributed intelligence. James Bridle wrote a great book about this idea, see here and the way it is embedded in the world.

Tauba also talks about art making as a way to get out of thinking in words. This is also important. Materials used in art making have their inherent material intelligence made available through the act of art-making. This intrinsically and in an embodied way extents your perceptions to re-view the world through art making. Thus arts practice facilitates the extended mind see here.

Tauba’s website is here and a great pdf called ‘Thy Fearful Dissymmetry’ is here to see more.

And the original link was for Art21, a great arts website here and here.

Personal Practice, Practice Ideas, Source Material

Art as Adventure

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At some level there is a connection between art making and adventure. The place this can happen is in the making of art. Arts practice. Arts practice could be seen as a journey of uncertain outcome. A big part of the adventure journey is the travelling rather than the destination. The journey is made in the walking of it. So it is with art making. I will give you two ways.

Art as Adventure – No 1

The Journey of Uncertain Outcome

I had an art adventure this weekend (Oct 21–22 2023) on Adobe FireFly here. Adobe is doing a big sell on their new service, FireFly. This is an AI image maker. Kinda controversial in some quarters. Some AI image programs scrape art off the interweb and quite rightly some object when art is scraped but not attributed to the maker. Everybody wants the artist to do some art for them for nothing. Hey it’s good publicity right!

But Adobe base FireFly on their product Adobe Stock of 2 million or somethingorother images here and here. For this you sell them a photo or artwork and they then own it, then designers and advertiser and artists can buy other people images for their art/product/service etc. So Adobe scrape their stock of bought art and images, where the artists are paid. Fair enuf. But this is then used to drive their AI image making machine. They then sell on this service to subscribers. But this all goes (or went) live November the 1st , the paid bit that is. But ’til then it is (or was) up for grabs for payed up subscribers for nowt. I have the ‘Photography Plan’ so I experimented with it. This was my adventure. I put in ‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’ and this is what I got…

‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’

This begs the question ‘Did the monkey agree to this and did she get payed and is she in Equity?’. Art can be so difficult.

My interest (beyond smoking monkeys) really was not in such concrete manifestations but in more abstract ones. Below are some images and the text prompts I gave for more abstract ideas. I wanted to see what I would get.

I prompted with ‘cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate’. I got this…

cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate

Then I changed parameters, making the image ‘oil painting’, or ‘archtectiral drawing’ or ‘bright colours’ or included say, ‘three cycles’ and got these.

cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate
cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate

It was impressive. I suspect this will make millions for Adobe. Designers no longer need to trawl through image libraries, if they want a ‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’ for say, a New Scientist article on hominid evolution in the age of the interweb. They subscribe to FireFly on their device, type in the aforementioned prompt, and then there she is, on their PC in about 5 seconds if you have the latest Intel chip. So as mentioned, from Nov 1st on you will be charged for this as part of your plan.

So my counter cultural alter ego kicked in and I decided to make a little artwork from the initial text prompt ‘huge face with big white blank eyes with no pupils looking up’ and got these.

huge face with big white blank eyes with no pupils looking up
huge face with big white blank eyes with no pupils looking up
huge face with big white blank eyes with no pupils looking up

Part of what I was after with my little artwork was some critique of the Attention Economy (see here), about how young people particularly are being trained by social media and their device centric social life to make money for the shareholders of multinationals see here. Adobe apparently read my mind. Uncanny. Scary. My Lu’d I rest my case. Adobe initially gave me children with big trustful eyes.

But to be truthful in this case I was after a more specific image so I typed in ‘huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes’, then ‘huge ugly grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized eyes looking at viewer’ and got these (amongst many more, unlike a real human artist, AI never gets tired or wants to eat or go to the toilet).

huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes
huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes
huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes
huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes
huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes
huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes

Now FireFly is connected to Adobe Express, a thing to make graphics and images for social media. Express is a quick and easy way to make graphic design. So I made this…

It kinda worked but was not quite what I was after. I moved on and planned to come back to this ismege agian later. But this moving on made me think.

Art as Adventure – No 2

Artworks as way-markers (and as cheating).

This act of art making lead me on to my No 2, Art as Adventure idea, the art object as way-marker or ‘flash’.

On an adventure the ‘flash’ was a thing you left on a tree with your hand-axe. In the wilderness an axe mark can only be the work of a human hand. A bit like a work of art. It was a way to mark your trail, so you can find your way back to whence to came, or have someone else find your remains if you were eaten by a bear say.

People are afraid of bears as people are afraid of art. Like avoiding hungry bears, people avoid making art for fear their art be seen and critiqued. Publicly. In my school if you had your art put up on the wall it was sign of a being a sellout, see here and you were shunned in the dinner queue. Harsh, but just. I got CSE grade 1 in Art and Physics. Social pressure has a lot to answer for. I did a BSc.

So to overcome this fear a suggestion is to see each little artwork you make as a way marker, a flash, a flash in the pan, a thing to be discarded and left behind, a thing to show where you have been not where you are. A thing only you see. A small sign of moving on.

A bigger art work, a project, a show, an article on your local radio station, then a national, then Breakfast TV, Sky Arts, the Venice Biennale here the Turner Prize here, can be seen as an encampment. You set up camp and make a lot more mess. A midden, a dunny, a campfire circle and some discarded lager cans. You know…. ‘Culture’. An encampment will make you officially a ‘Real Artist’. Is it an old tent or Tracy Emin’s artwork? See here. I have seen her tent and I loved it, don’t get me wrong.

So I made the image above and moved on. The lettering did not work. The £ and $ signs ended up upside down so it kinda missed point. The face was great, but I did not make it, AI did.

So what? Well some principles from the arts therapies and experiential learning apply. Whatever thought or idea you had becomes concretised, reified, made a subjective object see here. You make it as art and this experience becomes concretised, reified, made a subjective object. You get to view and re-view yourself, your inner world. You go beyond being a consumer of images and become a producer. That nobody sees your way-marker but you removes you from the echo chamber of on-line life. Like a sketchbook or journal, you see your journey unfold and know where you have been that you better see where you could go. I believe this can make health. It can aid recovery of whatever need to be recovered. It is recovering your own ground. It is in the process in which states become traits to quote Dan Siegel see here. It is art in process. It is art making with intention, attention attitude. I intend to make art, I attend to what I make and what happens when I make it within an attitude of openness and the capacity to non-attachment. This is a just way-marker and I let it pass. Nobody sees it but me. It shows where my adventure took me. This is art not ‘Art’. I do not have to account for it. I am a safe in the dinner queue.

So check out Adobe FireFly. Or ignore it out of principle. But remember David Hockney said ‘The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.’ See here and here. My business man was not a beauty, nor was my art, but I was a bit of a cheat so maybe I was being an artist. If you cheat, you too can be an artist. Just avoid the dinner queue.

Source Material

Performing Place

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https://www.tumblr.com/movingspaceart/731586268941697024/native-american-concept-of-land-ownership

Above is a link to a great article about the mutual creation of place. Place as relational. Place as performance.

To me this connects more directly to the idea of artmaking as co-creational with the artist, the materials, the substrate, the artform as partners. Place is performed. All art is performance. It exists in-process in realtionship with the maker, the materials and the viewer. The viewer includes the maker. She sees her own making, and it can tell her or show her new stuff.

Featured image is from Adobe Firefly from Adobe images.

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Real Photography

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“Each camera click is an exploration, a deep dive into another person’s worldview, making the photograph a captivating tapestry of human perception and worldview. This process, this dance between creativity and reality, transforms an ordinary image into a captivating story that is a trustworthy reflection of a real and true story with which the viewer can identify. It is a fusion of different minds and points of view converging to create something unique, trustworthy, thought-provoking, and priceless. The process of searching for meaning and truth in documentary photography is a value in itself that AI is not likely to give.”

Anna Bedynska
https://annabedynska.pl/
Anna Bedynska’s Site
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The Analogue Object

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After reviewing my photography and looking at images I had not looked at for years, my re-viewing also took another retrospective perspective.

Years ago I became fascinated by the whole idea of DTP, Desk Top Publishing. In those days I had access to Adobe Pagemaker here now InDesign. I briefly had a part-time job as a magazine editor but around this time the scope to publish online became more easily available and I had various websites. Whilst I maintained an interest in magazines and paper based analogue communications, the world fell in love with the digital on-line world. Like painting, the death of the paper newspaper, the death of the analogue has been predicted for ages. See here and here. But vinyl is being sold in my local supermarket again. Maybe the analogue is not to dead. All that stuff we did years ago that we no longer do is maybe useful after all.

I love the interweb but at heart I am a group worker, a carer, a therapist. I like the hands on. I have an interest in the digital and invite discourse online, but the idea of ‘friends’ and followers online kinda always bemused me. I am 65, forgive me.

I have lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

Joan Didion

My re-viewing has taken me back to inDesign. I reconnected and actually did some online (YootYoob!) training and now finally understand the power of the frame and its relationship with content for example, something that drove me mad before. As a professional trainer I should know better than to expect intuition to guide me.

My goal is to develop work with art-making locally and I am exploring making a free newspaper to be distributed locally to invite fellow travellers to join in an art-making journey as well as people joining an online conversation. The image I have is a kind of Art Fanzine. See here and here. In the second link I loved the simplicity of the little magazine made out of an A4 sheet. So… the possibilities are endless. I want a kind of slick looking A4 minimal magazine like this here with a clear narrative inviting people to use art making to promote their own health and wellbeing, but also I could make little fanzines to promote my website, designed to be a bit more rough and counter-cultural. I like graffiti art and particularly stickers, here but don’t really want to be breaking the law to promote my work.

So I love my online digital object, but I have reconnected with the analogue object. It feels oddly counter-cultural.

art . outdoors . health