This video was made as a response to another on Youtube, and making responses to Youtube videos is something I want to keep doing. The idea of subverting the curate’s egg that Youtube may be is appealing right now.
In the original a boy, Stephen, is videoed—with a hidden camera set up by his brother—’freaking out’, as the typically vulgar Youtube title puts it. The whole channel is videos of the guy being treated disgustingly by his family. Being able to see moments of private frustration like this is fascinating.
While watching some shortish films by Artavazd Pelechian last night I began thinking about the length of films, and its relation to how we process them. In something short we don’t have time to think about it during its course, which is unusual for film, and it’s something I want to explore; perhaps making films even shorter than I have been recently. I’ve also set a goal of making a longer film, perhaps up to an hour, by the end of the year.
I’ve been struggling with this post for a couple of weeks. In another introduction I had written about my last six months’ work feeling like a sidestep; I was frustrated. That’s all cooled now. Perhaps it was finally getting round to looking at the work together, (still poorly) photographing paintings, trying to get the colours matched in Gnu IMP. I guess I felt like the things I wanted to do in the approaching semester were pretty distant from these; closer to what I was making the six or-so months prior, in fact. What I have started working on happens to fit with the things below quite snuggly though, and those other plans are fading. Either way this post is being made to collect my thoughts on these things, and I’m quite pleased to notice I’ve been able to develop a variety of work to satisfying ends. Here’s a selection of the things I’m happy with. Excuse the homebrew grammar.
I posted some of the first batch of these paintings before, but didn’t write about them. I made seventeen in all, all the same height, but with some small variation in width. They started out of a minor frustration: I felt I didn’t have enough people round me that I wanted to paint, nor did I feel comfortable taking people away from their own work. So, I started working from existing images. In the past I’d thought my attempts at portraits from photos to be always lacking, but I hadn’t really spent enough time with the process to make that evaluation. The source images for this series were all degraded in some way. The most useful were from incomplete video files, others were highly compressed Youtube videos, and some came from photos of television screens. I began trying to translate them into oil paint, though the exercise soon became a series of experiments to see how much, and what, information I could remove from the source while retaining the human presence. Three of the images above, and half the final number of works, all came from the same series of source images. I ended up working from sequences of film stills, taking parts from whichever. I’m taking a break from lamp black now.
The above four images, and the sound, come from the project I learned more from than any other. It’s one of the few I specifically made work for, actually, rather than just appropriating whatever else I was working on. Though I am not too thrilled by the work I made for it—working with images that are essentially achromatic was not such a grand idea for this process—the amount of research, and experimentation, that became a part of this project made it particularly satisfying. The task was to transfer works made with the hand, from life, into new, digital, works, considering what this process gave, etc. I hadn’t drawn a portrait for a long time, and the one above is the only one I think is good enough. I’d been meaning to experiment with glitching, datamashing, and/or whatever other slogans the kids are calling the process by, for a while (and I’ve been chipping away at a draft of a post about it for months), so thought that as it’s about the only aspect of digital mediums that interests me I’d try doing it deliberately, rather than waiting to find mistakes. Something I really find exciting about line drawings is that everything is made of the same stuff. Excluding the line itself the face, the clothes, the eyes, the background is all the same matter; the positive/negative space is all defined by the viewer. I don’t think I believe in negative space, but that’s another issue. There’s a, though perhaps vague, correlation to be drawn with digital information. The stuff that makes a JPEG image is the same as what makes a PNG, is the same as a TXT, is the same as a WAV. And this stuff can be transformed by transferring it between different file types. The examples above are me playing with amounts of compression, video effects, opening files in a hex editor and deleting and moving bits round. Not here is one of the images turned into a sound file.
The drawings above were made for a class called Spatial Field Drawing. I enrolled in it because I wanted to continue doing installations, but by the time the end of semester project rolled round I was scratching an itch to make something fun, and quick. So I was using gauche on photos and film stills I’d taken, and photos I’d found, making shapes that would exist in the same hypothetical space.
In May I made another game for a Glorious Trainwrecks Klik of the Month Klub. Rapture Raptor is a dumb rapture (remember the rapture?) related joke, but it’s been fun watching people play it, and reading the responses of the members of Newgrounds, where a Flash version is available to play online. On Newgrounds every submission is voted on before it is given a permanent spot on the site, the game that receives the lowest score (after 200 votes you must have scored at least 1.6 out of 5) wins the ‘turd of the week’ award, and guess who won! It feels like an honour, considering the site’s population.
What’s next? I wanted to start painting portraits again, but I feel like I’ve forgotten a lot about painting. I can’t even remember what to think when I’m doing it, so there’s some catching up to do. I wanted to sculpt some heads, as I always want to do after seeing Rodin’s sculpture; I think it will help my painting, if naught else. I had the thought to depict things by their exclusion, mostly wanting to paint empty chairs again, as a starting point, at least. I have new music I am slowly making something of. But the difference between how it sounds on tape to how it sounded when played is something I can only appreciate with time and memory loss. That step’s over, now I’m waiting for the same process to fix my feelings regarding the differences between how it sounds on tape, and how it sounds badly transferred to my computer. And right now I’m concentrated on the video I posted previously.
I’ve been updating Lost Discarded Abandoned again, after realising I hadn’t done so in six months, and I wonder if those images will come back into my work.
I’ve also been daydreaming about the Internet a lot. Mostly about writing things. Whenever I do all the text online in hand written, and it’s a shame when I realise that isn’t how things are.
If been wanting to try something else with my videos for a while now, and this is the first step. It’s a wobbley one, and I will make a revised version this week, and more in the same vein.
Each clip is taken from the Internet, each source a video I felt was exploitative. I want to strip that aspect out, leaving just a person. I find people difficult; their embellishments, haircuts, fashion, conversation… I need to cull all of this, and this is what the art I like does. It reminds me that they are okay.
My drawing and painting are close again. Seeing what I’m showing in this post is the opposite of satisfying. Their similarity to each other, and the noticing that these shapes I drew as asides are not that anymore, worries me. I feel like I’m relying on them; like they, and their silly ‘tense’ compositions are a style.
I started the school-year with the multi-page drawing up top (finished, it had another piece of white paper collaged on to the left of the one depicted). It felt fresh, and like something of a glossary, or chart of possibilities. Above it (out of the photo) are similar shapes in string, reaching round the top of my studio walls.
They’re up here, now. Filed away. Tomorrow there will be no straight lines.
The start of the second video (Batman (Magic)) makes me smile.
I’ve finished photographing a box of lost property I found in a skip. I’m very much looking forward to making a series of posts about the contents on that near-abandoned other blog of mine.
It seems that whenever my drawing and painting are getting closer together they shoot off in other directions again.
Drawings, like these, are all I’ve been doing since Christmas. Constructing them is a fairly logical process. I think of them as three-dimensional objects, and by connecting each point they become credible, even though they may give the illusion of impossibility. I like the play between two, and three, dimensions, and how the freehand drawing adds to that. I had the thought to make them in a 3-D modelling program, but I think they would lose a lot. Animating them (again, freehand) is something I want to try.
I’m curious to hear if anyone else reads them as 3-D, because, so far, no one else does! Perhaps I’ve spent too much time playing old-ish videogames.
These are the last two paintings I’ve made. For lack of things to paint on, my dislike of waste, and experimenting in ways to make work, I’ve been going over old paintings, that are either ‘finished’, or at a point I do not want to resolve. These two also happen to feel particularly exciting, to me, at the moment: technically, aesthetically, and conceptually.
Beginning a painting, or a drawing (or collage, or sculpture, or…)—perhaps particularly, but not necessarily exclusively with abstract work—one first has to make sense of the space in front of them. Typically that’s a blank piece of canvas, or paper. This can be done in the head, by pouring paint, by making preparatory sketches, and so on. Always it is a response. When this response is to, not white page, or to an arbitrary shape, but to an image, and one of my own creation—and a failed one at that—that is, conceptualy, a pretty damn interesting starting point. In effect it could be just the same as pouring paint, and maybe that’s all I’ve done with it. But I’m excited about the potential.
I’ve been wanting to draw again: big charcoal portraits. This is the first one that is okay. I worry so much about not make illustrations when I’m drawing, and this is maybe that. I notice more ‘nice lines, and composition’ rather than ‘a person’.
I’m a bit frustrated with all my work, at the moment. I’m impatient, and it feels like I’m right at the start of everything. The abstract paintings are getting bigger, and are going somewhere, at least. I am looking forward to pushing my drawing. Moving away from line, which I feel very in control of, and trying really dig people out of that page. The carefulness, and tenderness that line can give, I don’t want to lose, but..
I mused today about how controlled my paintings and drawings are. Even in the paintings that start with stains, and thick messes, there are later placed bars and rectangles of single colours. I have a very ordered way of looking at images, that I think comes across most obviously in my videos. I worry about this, too, being too clean, and illustrative (though not in the
Much earlier in the year I took part in a 48 hour game making event over at Glorious Trainwrecks. The aim was to make as many videogames as possible, the result being 529 games created by 102 people. That’s sort of amazing.
Every month Glorious Trainwrecks hosts a ‘Klik of the Month Klub‘, where, in the space of 2 hours, participants try make a game. Generally people use very simple tools—most commonly Klik and Play—and work from simple ideas. It’s very accessible to people, like myself, who have no idea, or want, to learn how to program. The results are often messy, goofy, and not always so good; but it’s a lot of fun!
This was an experiment in making a horizontal shooting game; particularly the part that seemed the most daunting to me: designing the enemy patterns. I think it turned out quite nicely. The player’s avatar is based on a shiv I found in a bin in a hostel. The title is a riff on a Dirty Three song.
A game for two people, based on a game I used to be quite good at: British Bulldog. Players alternate between trying to get from one side to the other, and trying to stop the other doing so. It’s a bit too fast, so relies on chance too much. I hadn’t played it with another person till recently.
It’s an idea I had a long time ago, but never had the drive to put the whole thing together. That’s one of the interesting things about these events; you have so little time you just have to cobble the thing together, somehow.
Inspired by the videogame series Castlevania, somewhat loosely. It’s the game most like a real videogame: players must complete screens of enemies, and boss enemies. The trick to the game is that you can ‘shoot’ a hell of a lot of swords at once. This is an accidental feature, because I couldn’t figure out how to make a character swing a sword, so I made them shoot, then I accidentally made them not disappear. Being an artist is about knowing which mistakes to keep, and which to discard; right?
It’s the most popular game of mine on the website.
This one’s a joke/comment on videogames that are more about collecting baubles than being enjoyable in and of themselves. People don’t seem to like the end, but I do. And I think think the title screen is quite clever!
Colour2 is my favourite. It makes images by generating shapes in a somewhat randomised manner. I wanted to recreate another, similar, thing I made many years ago. It would ‘shoot’ coloured squares in the direction of the mouse cursor. That was made in The Games Factory (a later program by the makers of Klik & Play), which allowed the shot squares to mark the screen with their colour. So the player could draw, in a way. Klick & Play doesn’t allow for this, so the game changed a bit. It also has sometimes-troublesome mouse support, that I wanted to avoid.
You can use the number keys to change levels. Number three’s my favourite.
I finished this installation a few weeks back now. It’s been difficult to document; the video above is my best attempt.
It relates to the collage project I did at the beginning of the year. I had the thought as I was making them that I would like to walk round in these spaces. They worked much better as held objects: I think they are interesting from all angles, and have some nice surprises made-in.
I also connect it to the multimedia course I did when I first left school. I was quickly off-put by the lack of animation involved in computer animation, but fascinated by the building blocks. For those unaware, 3D models are made of polygons, of generally four or three sides. Typically nicely put together to give the illusion of rounded surfaces. More interesting to me were the effects you would get from clipping polygons through each other, the unreal effects from single-sided polygons, all sorts of glitchy, dirty, messy stuff, that reminded me of the beautiful, crude 3D we used to see in videogames.
I’m happy with it. I realised near the end that it was going to be dark (though not quite as dark as in the video) inside, which I hadn’t thought about. I spent most of my time carefully choosing the colour, grain, and texture of the pieces in there, all for little result! But, the effect of the light coming in between the cardboard is a wonderful surprise. I always felt I was working out problems in the same way I would for a drawing, and these lines become something like that. To think I spent so much time trying to fill those gaps! This use of the space between things reminds me of what I was doing with my painting, when the installating wasn’t taking up my painting time.
I’ve been drawing, and am about to start painting, from the structure. (Actually, I’ve been working from the collages too). I want to position people inside, and use the space as an illustration of an internal state. That’s the starting point, anyway.
Last Saturday the Supreme Court of Victoria had its annual open day. I was a shade disappointed to see a line to enter the building, and frustrated to not be able to get through the metal detectors without beeping. The security may have been in dress-up, like the visitor welcoming judge out the front, because I eventually got through with my camera and my knife. Inside was fascinating. It was surprising to find many rooms open, and no one round to keep us behaved. My biggest regret of the day is not opening the bar-fridge you see early in the videos above.
After a while we headed to the library. The books make beautiful patterns, and I thought between that, oil paintings of Santa, and a dungeon tour, I’d have plenty to use up the battery of my camera. I was occupied playing with compositions using all the ladders and books on the mezzanine floor, when Erin found me with news of a staircase she found behind a bookshelf. This staircase led to an office, with piles of books, a book binding machine, and a modest wee door. Behind that door was a narrow, stone, spiral staircase. The video at this point is mostly me being very excited. The further up I went the more excited I got. The staircase provides access to the beautiful dome. Outside, and inside.
(This image was loaned from the Walking Melbourne forum, which is a wonderful place for researching Melbourne’s architecture. This thread has some information on the building.)
The battery gave up as I was trying to open a hatch at the very top—the final inserted photo shows it. I couldn’t get it open, and was too full of excited feelings that I would explode if successful, to try enough. The battery woke back up after we went back down, and you can here me commenting in the video regarding going back up to keep filming. Next year!
There was also a dungeon tour, that we missed. But I think our time was well spent.
Oh, and we also saw the Dachshund UN. It’s better as a comment on the audience, than it is on the UN, and a bit mean, really. But I got some great footage behind the setup. I seem to be anchoring a lot of my compositions to the top of the frame recently.
![Erin Sitting, with Elbow Out [drawing]](https://blog.ryliejamesthomas.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/erin-sitting-with-elbow-out.jpg)
