throughout the course of experimentation and conceptualisation of work we meditated the constraints of NOW.
We became interested in how as a generation, particularly in the Western world, we move as a culture obsessed with the present and what that manifests. The notions driving trends perpetuated by social media and technology train a focus on ideologies that are inevitably transient. Almost seasonally we transition to another paradigm through which we live vicariously, most notably in 2016 as everything is documented and accessible due to the internet.
Thus, Emily and I began to deliberate the validity of NOW. “Nowness” as a concept falls redundant in the wake of the fore-spoken reality. We exist through transience and realities bound to expire due to our attention span and need to be ahead of our own time. Still we cling to memories of generations and eras past; immortalised by the internet which harbours these relics of our former selves - videos and photographs of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s being considered a ‘trend’ function as a common example. We yearn to revive the past as we move through our present, viciously unaware of ourselves.
Caught in a liminal state between progress and regression, the NOW becomes all too ungraspable. How do we generate dialogue around nowness when our version of the present is due to change in a matter of days or weeks. The answer Emily and I believe to have reached is that we do not. We have created a work that obtains vagueness as its central feature to discuss ‘the now’. Physical markings made with charcoal represent a memory of a physical agent to a place we created. These recollections which we have embedded in the PDF. Their purpose is to reflect the landscape of our world and its changing, erratic nature. The gestural marks are indiscernible but reminiscent of a human’s movement, which becomes a greater symbol for the motion of our contemporary age and an inability to pause and decipher it.
We turned to Eric Demitrou for inspiration. His work at the UNSW Galleries appeared to deliberate the nature of recollection and memory: through marks of lacerations he made against the gallery’s wall and an audio track which documented the sound of his doing so, played in an overhead speaker to inspire visualisation in the audience member. We related this to our own thought process around liminality. Demitrou appears to conceptualise the human experience through sensory perception and a lack of persistence in that. The video which we have woven through the PDF as a hyperlink retraces this notion of inconsistency relative to the concept of ‘now’. My own self being the central body we see interacting with a relatively blank space, marks and embeds a wall with bodily gestures and charcoal. Our choices to shoot/edit the video with blur and low lighting hope to imbue what is seen with a temporality to an indistinct and unreachable space; almost as if one were witnessing a mirage or hallucination. A brief moment in time that cannot be revisited with entirety.
The pdf document appropriates the publication of the course outline for ADAD1002. It was considered between Emily and myself that this course generates a concern with contemporary practice and an analysis of the climate of art in 2016; what are driving and influencing the world and its agencies. Encouraged experimentation [which can be revisited on any student’s updated tumblr] sees a meditation of various mediums and ways of thinking about art making relative to a transdisciplinary studio practice. The second semester reviewed as a timeline through our tumblrs reflects an ephemerality to our practice as students in this course, oscillating spaces between our own thought processes and those external to us which we introduce through experimentation. We became excited by the idea of using the publication as the base of an appropriated piece to model our thoughts on the results of our works produced throughout this semester. ‘The now’ existing within this course hangs on liminality through encouraged experimentation; it becomes our responsibility to attempt an approach beyond our own comfortability of experience, and will thus oversee a persistence in inconsistency. The course learning outcomes [which will be uploaded in a screenshot as a separate post to follow this] underscore the reality of this being the case with ADAD1002.