I made Hand Game for an exhibition the other week. The starting point was thoughts about my awareness of my own body, and the correlation between location and body area. Over time it changed from being about bodies to focusing on hands. All the hands in this game were chosen from a bunch of 3-D scans downloaded from that 123D website I use a fair bit. It was set up in a bathroom, one of the locations I felt most in touch with my body, and was played by holding two gobs of Play-doh, which were of course able to be sculpted. I’m not making the game available as I usually would, because of its site and controller specificness, but there is a version up for people who support my game making through Patreon ;) ;) ;)
There was also a publication given away at the show, and I included some hand drawings. In these I attempted to draw my hands as I pictured them without looking at them, mostly dictated by where I felt the most weight, if that makes sense. I’ve always meant to make drawings of how I perceive my body non-visually (for ten years, at least!) so it was about time I got round to it.
I also made this other game a week or so back that I like and other people like: Japan Game.
I’ve been planning on doing this for a while, but some recent copyright/fair use numbskullery has led me to make myself a new Youtube account. There’s quite a bit of hoop jumping involved in setting up one if you want a sensible URL and not to join Google+.
These are videos of drawings made with a piece of artificial charcoal I’ve been holding on to for about a year. Watching them, and the way they are moved by the newly installed ceiling fans, has been a good prompt for the video project I am forming.
I’ve been drawing these quick, line-based drawings off-and-on for a few months now. If I am remembering correctly they began with a Google search for ‘dogs on rugs’, mostly as a fun drawing exercise while working on more serious things. Here’s a selection:
I’d been excited about painting again, but the painting wasn’t working. I’d forgotten how to look at people properly, and was struggling with working from a relatively unfamiliar sitter. That had been okay in the past, but now I feel like I need to know more about the head in front of me than I can get by just looking. I need to know how it feels, and how heavy it is, and how it moves, and how thick the skin is and—
So, I’ve been making these drawings of myself (they’re ordered chronologically):
This is a selection of drawings I made from a work by Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. The photographs are terrific, and I think good enough to stand on their own apart from the text that accompanies them. Photography, in the context of a gallery rarely strikes me: a photograph’s objectness and life are what makes them interesting—a framed photo on a gallery wall is too often just another image.
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.
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.
