#mtbaugust

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Fernanda Gomes 

I have recently found the work of Brazilian artist Fernanda Gomes. Her works are highly sculptural and extremely minimalist, yet they still manage to convey to me ideas of the image plane, the idea of the pictorial object, materiality, and archivism. These remind me of the works I made for my last project and although it’s not a visual style I’d like to repeat it’s still good to take ideas from this work. 

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Paul Otlet - The Mundaneum

After more indepth research on Paul Otlet and his grand plans for a global archive of knowledge, it has given me some inspiration to create images that are in reference to this project and the implications that it had on the world today, specifically the internet and the idea of global archive and conservation.

I found a short documentary about Otlet which was a great look at his life in general, and referenced a lot of his key texts which I have since found.

One of the key texts that is most relevant to my research is his 1934 book The Treatise of Documentation - The Book About the Book. In it he outlines his plan for his global "internet" of connected archive, with screen and telephone being the main connections. In his design people would phone up with a research question and an operator would consult the vast archive of index cards and quickly find the right text, which would be displayed on the screen for the person to study. This would possibly be aided by microfilm, which Otlet invented to in his quest to archive the world.

The key terms that I have found in Otlet's work which relate to my work are:

Classification

Archive

Collecting

Storage

Encyclopedism

As well as his pre-internet internet idea of the Radiated Library or Televised Book. Where he describes radio, cinema, phonographs, and television as becoming the "new book". All of these ideas that Otlet was exploring have given me some great starting points of how to convey my ideas into photographs, and hopefully this will lead to some new images that reference Otlet and his work.

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Proposal Presentation Feedback

After my draft proposal presentation I received some feedback on artists and writers to look at to further my research. I had already been looking a quite a few of these people but some of the specific projects were new to me, which was very helpful.

Lev Manovich: Recent book released online as he was writing it

James Elkins: more connected to photography

Benjamin Buchloh

Hal Foster: Archival impulse. October Magazine

Andrew Grassie: painter. Studies of gallery spaces

Christian Boltanski

Paul Otlet: The Mundaneum. Online archive

David Leventhal: Toy soldiers

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel

Michael Shiell: Forms of documentation of ephemeral art

Professor Sloggett: head of teaching conservation at Melbourne Uni

Jonathon Shaw

Photomediations and how it is related

September 11 Newspapers. Collected images published on 12/9

Storage/degradation

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VHS loop experiment video

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Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek - Bird, Lake, Objects

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SCIENTISTS FIND HOLES IN LIGHT BY TYING IT IN KNOTS

“We are all familiar with tying knots in tangible substances such as shoelaces or ribbon. A branch of mathematics called ‘knot theory’ can be used to analyze such knots by counting their loops and crossings. With light, however, things get a little more complex. It isn’t just a single thread-like beam being knotted, but the whole of the space or 'field’ in which it moves. From a maths point of view, it isn’t the knot that’s interesting, it’s the space around it. The geometric and spatial properties of the field are known as its topology.”

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William Anastasi - Transfer

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Ailbhe Ní Bhriain - The Passenger

I found this work quite early on in my visual research, it was something I found quite visually striking and somewhat unsettling. Like my own work, Bhriain uses multiple sources while creating these collages, including neo- classical sculpture, west of Ireland landscapes, found images and studio shots. I really like how the artist describes the work, 

There is an attempt to collapse the binaries and conventions suggested by the source imagery, to reveal the representational and cultural constructs at play

using these new collages to explore the ways in which we are conditioned to view images.  They also mention “taking apart the props of narrative”, a phrase I find quite interesting when thinking about image making and especially when working with found images, considering which “props” to borrow from certain images.