thesis update
I’ve been spending sometime reading, sketching, and trying to explore and see what kind of pieces I’d like to remake for my thesis. After experimenting with the Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, I needed a different piece, a different medium to work with.
As luck would have it, that day a link that was sent to the list pointed me in the direction of early computer art experiments, going all the way back to the fifties, with their room-sized computers, punchcards, and all of that. These were perfect candidates for short remaking experiments, as they’re relatively simple to execute. In addition, and contrary to most computer art today, there is no source code available, and even if it were available, the hardware is obsolete. All that’s left of these pieces are the visual documentation of them, and that would be my reference.
For now, I started with two that I liked:
Noll’s Vertical-Horizontal No. 3
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Nees’s Wurfel-Unordnung (Cubic Disarray)
Here are my remakes:
Vertical-Horizontal No.3 (After Noll)
Cubic Disarray (After Nees)
And one attempt at mashing them up:
Vertical-Horizontal Disarray
Thesis idea reading & reference
The artistic question is no longer: “what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life? — Nicolas Bourriaud
Reading:
“Postproduction”, Bourriaud
“Statements on Appropriation”, Michalis Pichler
“Original Copies,” The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, Martha Buskirk
“Sentences on Conceptual Art”, Sol Lewitt
References:
Cory Arcangle
Sherrie Levine
Gelitin
Kutiman
Girl Talk
Joseph Kosuth
Marina Abramovich (Seven easy pieces)
Walter Benjamin
Marshall McLuhan
Words:
Appropriation
Original
Copy
Steal
Homage
Mashup
Replicate
Repeat
Remix
Rearrange
Evolution
Transformation
Recycling
Reference
Apprenticeship
all ideas are second hand
All ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources – Mark Twain
I have commitment issues. While they’re not exclusive to school projects, as we get closer and closer to Thesis they’ve become a major source of agony for me. Following Marina’s and other people’s advice, I went back and tried to draw connections between the projects I had done so far. Great experience, but it got me last thing I needed – even more ideas – and no solution to my problem.
Three (four?) weeks into the course, we had to present our ideas in class. I had spent countless hours thinking about thesis, but when I had to choose one idea I was hopelessly paralyzed. Why couldn’t I just choose an idea? The simple answer is that I was waiting for the perfect idea to come – as if it even means anything. I’m pretty sure this is a common problem, and sadly, have yet to figure out a good way to deal with this (deadlines don’t help, and neither does telling myself to “just do it”).
When this became clear to me, I knew what I had to do: steal other people’s projects. And if they suck, hey, it’s their fault!
I’ve had this idea for a while now – I remember how, sitting in classes last semester as people were presenting their projects, I noticed how different everyone’s approaches were to the exact same assignment. And how we all had different ideas on how to take each other’s projects forward. I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be great if, for next week, we would all just pick someone else’s project and had our take of it?”
As is the case with most of the ideas I get, it got tucked away in the back of my mind, where it lurked patiently until sometime this semester, when we started discussing originals and copies in Recurring Concepts in Art. It so happened that the midterm project for this class was to remake a project you had done, without using technology. During the process of working on that assignment, I really got a taste of how much could be gained by rethinking an existing piece, and how much I personally enjoy doing that.
There’s a lot of interesting theory behind this, all the way from apprentices learning by copying their masters, through appropriation art, to digital art, where the distinction between original and copy loses meaning, even more so with the rise of the open-source mentality. So, I’m still trying to figure out from which angle I want to approach this. Even within this relatively narrow concept space there’s no shortage of choices to make: Do I limit the kind of pieces I remake? How do I choose them? How many do I make? Is there a time limit? Do I request permission? Do I take requests? Is it a plain copy? a mutation? a mashup? a change of medium? A distillation to a concept and recreation? Do I do each piece just once or repeat? and so on, and so forth…
I’m still thinking through this… any suggestions/comments are welcome.