26/01/2018

Poems from the wreckage

new software. (which I haven't used for years) A learning curve. A new approach. Hoorah, let's be open to new experiences, new tools and how they can shape the work. Let's play, creatively.

Let's forget how flaky this software always was and how it sometimes crashes with no warning as if it were still the 90s and personal computers were and exciting novelty which, like a dog dancing, we did not expect to do anything well, but were only surprised at them doing it at all.

Not only crashed but corrupted beyond any hope of re-opening. 3 weeks' work. If your immediate response to this included the word "back-up", kindly leave this blog immediately. After searching various online forums and help sites, dowloading all the software they said might help rescue the work, installing, running, de-installing...finding that inexplicably people advertised software as opening file formats it did not open, but opened entirely different formats with similar letters in them, in a different order (is dyslexia rife amongst the nerd community? or vice versa?)...I still had zip, nada, a Foucauldian Lacuna... and irritating people saying I should have backed it up.

Gentlemen, advice about doing something yesterday, unless you are giving it to Dr Who, is not advice but merely smugness.

After tears, shouting, reassuring the cat I was not shouting at her, shouting at the cat, and quite a lot of caffeine, I have of course rebuilt the movie. It is better. It is a second draft. It has benefitted from being rethought from the beginning and by my having actually considered "is this worth doing?" and "what, in the end, is this all about?"
Yesterday, another artist/friend was lamenting that she often didn't finish works because she wasn't sure what it was for, what the point of it was. Never being able to say "this is it" because we don't know what the hell "it" is. Perhaps this comes perilously close to asking what the point of life is, but I suspect the answer may be the same. To do what you love. To do it better. To learn, grow, develop, explore...(failing, questioning, trying again)...does art have a better answer than "because it was there"?...or a less sanctimonious one than "to become a better person"?

The original movie was in danger of being just that, an endless experiment with no idea what it was hoping to discover or prove. A thing I started mainly because of the terror of not having a project...of being naked and lost in front of a computer.
I think I can describe the new movie as being a visual poem. That is risky enough for someone whose normal works might be best described as (visual) short stories.

12/01/2018

Between

Somewhere in the borderlands between farting about, playing, creative play and robust experimentation...somewhere in that liminal space which exists between worlds, and beyond the relentless call of emails, messages, and ooh I wonder if anyone has fitbits on special offer right now...
Somewhere in the space we desperately hope is neither this nor that, and so uniquely able to observe and learn from both the thisses and the thats...
Somewhere between serious artistic endeavour I hope will result in a useful product, and the joys and frustrations of the process for its own sake... between the joy of freeedom and the self-censorship that tuts "you are just wasting time"...seems to be where I live right now. Computing colleagues used to speak of "creeping featurism" - of the phenomenon of digital things never being finished because they were to easy to endlessly reproduce, tweak, to create different versions ... Self-imposed deadlines help, because shortness of time lessens the fart-about factor - correspondingly then, there is a danger that more time to invest in the art process simply results in more Faffing.
Currently, I am running 3 projects with a curious hierarchy. Animation with a capital A is an experiment in an animation driven not by narrative but by purely visual developments, events following other events on the basis of morphing shapes and what they suggest. Im counting the ways that could go wrong. Narrative is so fundamental, not just to my work but to human interpretation. Plus, new software which works differently, has to be re-learnt and is much less forgiving...Thanks for reminding me why my daily artwork environment is full of obsolescent and unsupported antiquities, at least a decade out of date but still my go-to tools like an ancient and almost hairless paintbrush that is perfect for scrubbing in texture...
Making animations with a lower-case a is a series of weekly animations for posting on social media. It's not self-consciously art, it's entertainment... into which I suppose friends and friends-of can read meaningfulness - or not.
The third which is perhaps art, or perhaps craft, but chiefly Fun with a capital F is not animation at all but making jolly things which will have some kind of a life, actually be seen and bring (in some tiny way) happiness to those who engage with them. A pair of wings for a costume hat, some glass bunting for the front window which the neighbours have remarked on, photoshopping...for so many occasions.

moving between liminalities via a Foucauldian lacuna
Sometimes the three can overlap...sometimes the fun leaks out and into other things... and the ideas can jump from one to another, if we do not allow ourselves to put fences round them, but let the borderlands overlap and cross-pollinate.

 I'm thinking I will make a map of these borderlands, of the areas where quicksands and bogs threaten the unwary, of the mountains that offer the best view on a clear day, and the citycentres full of excitement, diversion; and the chance to compare notes with other travellers over a pint or two of creative metaphor. Of paths less travelled by, of where be dragons, and where best to start your recherche for temps perdu. Although perhaps the point is that liminal spaces cannot be mapped - but that's no reason not to try.