S.Wickham \ Cofa

COFA1001 process diary

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Link, Now Streaming

Eternity Somewhere Else

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a belated redirection

the blog is dead, long live the blog

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5. A Test of Time

The fifth state of erasure is A Test of Time. The experiment is to ‘cover’ and investigate the interplay of erasure and creation Every little thing you buy, borrow or steal builds up like grime between bathroom tiles. It is all kipple, it breeds, multiplies, conquers room after room. Soon enough you can’t see above it. And then it eats you alive. So, The fifth and final state of erasure will erase you. Turns out all the things you found to create you were just coating you in resin, encasing you in some chrysalis. But you hung around, long enough to see the walls disintegrate. You persisted, and you broke through. Out of the 10331 pieces of music stored within my iTunes, 421 of them begin with the letter A. If you listen to 421 pieces of music at once, at first you hear thunder. Thunder so sick you couldn’t piece the sky. Slowly, as the shorter tracks finish, the storm softens, you begin to make out sounds. Then more, you hear phrases. Songs keep falling away until at last there is one solitary piece of music playing. It has weathered the storm, stood the test of time. The compiling of sonic kipple is like releasing carnivorous hounds into the ring. One cascades into another, into another, into another. The more songs you horde, the less you hear; the more is erased. What is created is a cannibal storm that progresses from flames to embers. Then it repeats, and repeats, and never stops. Visual simplicity was key here. To see the storm in its entirety you must watch on from the satellites, so I offered block colour and timecode to capture the composite body and the shade of the sky rather than focus on foot soldiers and the scatterbrain headache. When I designed the experiment, I hadn’t anticipated our emergence from the angry sea. It soon became obvious that this progression was in fact the most interesting part. In the end, only one piece remains. Only one piece walks away from the fire. Until B comes around, that is.

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4. Martyrs for Immortality

The fourth state of erasure is Martyrs for Immortality. The experiment is to ‘cover’ and investigate the interplay of erasure and creation

Sometimes to be immortal is to die. To meet that which you covet, and for it to destroy you. Through the lens of desire all is infinitesimal, it is desire itself that is subsuming and eternal. In this fourth iteration the ant has found himself either obliterated by his desire or preserved by it; erased or immortalised. Covered in honey, what is captured and preserved is the moment of impact - a split second caught and held indefinitely. In adjacent cells, like static polaroid memories, replicated, duplicated, billboards and mass media. To be eternal is to become object; preserved in desire, hanged by hung time. A martyr for immortality. This iteration made me feel wicked and cruel and merciless… So I must be doing something right. I'd like to know what thought died on their lips (if ants even have lips I’m not entirely sure). Did they die in a moment of ecstasy? And did that moment of pure bliss become their eternity? I’d like to think so, it helps me sleep at night. I’d also like to clear this up, I didn’t pick these poor bastards out and subject them to my unjustifiably consequential cerebral musings - I put out some delicious organic* honey and they came to me! And only then did I murder them / set them free. See? I’m not a monster. *honey may or may not have been organic

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3. Objects Closed and Opening

The third state of erasure is Objects Closed and Opening. The experiment is to ‘cover’ and investigate the interplay of erasure and creation In continuation of the first state of erasure the third examines objects closed to us in some ways, yet open to us in many. Demanding our unwavering attention, the quiet, resolute power of these objects is remarkable, and as we approach the barricade we are in many ways drawn in, not turned away. Unlike the first state of erasure the concrete object has not been sublimated, it has not been cloaked and disappeared through the floor. Here the concrete object stands with iron countenance, uncompromising in its skin, yet universal in its question. What lies beyond has been obscured from our sight, and so we lean in to look for it. And we lean impossibly forward, and we see less and less. The erasure is in process, we are being erased by the object; we are running around it seeing nothing while it stands still, seeing all. The curiosity is magnetic, somehow we feel shut out, or shut in - despite being the ones in motion. Trapped in open space by the gaze of objects watching. This idea was stolen from David Lynch’s mind, from a scene of great drama in his film Mulholland Dr.. The Lynchian eye is an eye for seeing new (see: ways of seeing - course concept/scrapped specsavers byline). Slow manual zooms are tricky; however, I thought the increasing instability of the image could indeed be some kind of quaking as the camera drew closer and closer to this strangely threatening object. I also remembered that failure was a course concept that would be very impressive if addressed. The music undoubtedly plays a central role in this other-worldly presence, and is taken from the classic science-fiction masterpiece The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). In this film an impassive craft from outer space lands on planet Earth - and though the visitors come offering advice, the people are afraid and hostile, and soon descend into hysteria.

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2. A Social Outfit

The second state of erasure is A Social Outfit.

The experiment is to ‘cover’ and investigate the interplay of erasure and creation

The second iteration examines abdication of the individual under the cover of A Social Outfit. Here red wine, drained from the teat of the metallic pillow, is the agent of erasure and facilitator of social exchange. This suit will connect you, it offers freedom - if only you put it on over yourself and allow it to redraw your portrait (marks on the dripsheet) in splish and in splash. It will paint you in the colour of those around, and you may move freely with the mass body. A Social Outfit is a uniform, a bridge for divides. This suit: key to your potential, key to your destruction. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// As I’m progressing through these iterations I feel I’m discovering the true nature of my experiment; the basis for all this hoo-haa. Erasure and creation are inexplicably linked, and these works aim to unpack some of that through different mutations of ‘covering.’ Thinking about Balla’s Futurist clothing, I was attracted to the idea of the ‘everyday’ erasure. Something as simple as a glass of red, teased to its furthermost point, but fed by an understanding of its role and its potential to both erase (yes memory too) and to create.

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1. The Seduction of Possibility

The first state of erasure is the seduction of possibility. The experiment is to ‘cover’ and investigate the interplay of erasure and creation.  I have cloaked various things around the house in an attempt to open them up to possibility, rather than contain them to any one fixed state. The erasure in this first iteration is that of the visible identifiable form, the visual language which provides a sense of stability and certainty. If you can see an apple, you know for certain it is in fact an apple and not an orange. But if you can’t see the apple, it could be an orange, it could very well be anything. Now the new form of things lets you create, because the old form of things has been erased. There is potential energy here rather than the properties of speed, direction and mass. Meanwhile it begs the question of existence without perception. These objects are no longer solid and impenetrable, but possible and inviting; make them what you will. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// I’m quite pleased with how this turned out, I think knowing less is much more seductive than knowing more. The process of taking the photographs relied heavily upon light and shadow, which were both kind to me. Beyond this, the covering of furniture (and in one instance the inclusion of family photographs) serendipitously tendered ideas of memory and mortality - which will be dealt with soon. I found as I orbited the subject my imagination snowballed in perpetual topographic rediscovery; that is precisely what I hope I have captured.

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Five States of Erasure

1. The Seduction of Possibility: Filling The Void Erasure of the whole, to allow entry into the subject As a active participant in the construction of meaning Staring at the back of heads on a train Absence and possibility - the magnetic void, the shapable void, the reflective void black on black - containers within containers - the god complex obscuring the image is opening up the image; a closed door is an open door, and an open door is a closed one. 2. Erasure as Freedom: Dissolution of the Self Social lubrication, sacrifice and compromise Abdication of individual body to enter into the collective mass that sticks to no surface, but is an average of all points, round and elastic and sympathetic is individuality containment, a separation? Or an autonomous expression of the absolute, free of association? It cannot be both. Does the chameleon's absence of identity set him free, or ensure he is never free?  Erasure and crowds Drink wine and be merry, wash yourself away, feel better 3. The Permanence of Memory: Can it be Erased? Wilful erasure is impossible The suggestion is insidious, the attempt to remove memory only reaffirms it. The act of repression is both active and wilful, reaction is action nonetheless  Memory is not universal but perspectival, inextricably tied to the self without hope of disentanglement - is the attempt to destroy memory self-denial or self-affirmation? 4. If Else: The Innate Condition  Separate from #2 in that the former deals with the question of choice; a wilful abdication in attempt to free oneself and 'connect' OR a removed autonomous existence.  If Else sees the dynamic of one to many as innate and impregnable, unable to be erased or re-written.  The inescapable truth of physical existence in one mind ensures an us vs. them dynamic. A dialogue written in terms of ownership Mankind is no island ? Sight two ways: Every head sees out, and sees in.  5. Erasure and Death: Response to the Ultimate Erasure  Immortality and the internet - death in the modern world Celebrity and the eternal as a firewall against mortality, or as the perfect messenger of mortality? Erasure and creation: inextricable dichotomy - to do one is to do the other A regenerative cycle both mortal and immortal

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Experimental Origins

The experiment that served as the basis for this assessment can be seen below. In it I covered peoples heads in the courtyard with a postcard calling for emancipation, creating a new body and suggesting new meaning.

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‘Almost all that is good and bad with the world today can be summed up by this one indefensibly stupid lump of plastic and metal.’ - Sam de Brito

  It's dirty, noisy, and indefensibly futile. It speaks to our hopeless obsession with continuous improvement and to the seduction of technology in the modern world, where efficiency is pushed to inefficiency.

  Leaf blowers: swords of containment, arms against the intrusion of nature.

  We must topple this dictator; omnipresent foe!

  We fight for the rights of the humble rake, for (seemingly not-so) 'common' sense, and most importantly for the sanctity of the Saturday/Sunday morning sleep-in.

[Gifs created in After Effects / Illustrator ]

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Two representations of women in art.

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Breakdown of assessment #1 NB:

From plates 6 to 7 a several layered displacement maps and minimax operations, among others, are added. A displacement map displaces the pixels of one layer based on another layer - the latter in this case being my polygon map generated from collated Facebook hashtags. A minimax operation assigns each channel of a pixel the minimum or maximum value for that channel found within a specified radius. I've used the green channel, and limited the radius to the X-axis.

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Subjects of the edit

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#4

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#2

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#3