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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.

doing some drawn experiments. these reflect a gaze in to my own personal liminality and the notion of NOW falling redundant in wake of stress felt, which perpetuates a transience I live through, in my own attention span and focus.

Justene Williams discusses her diverse arts practice and giving new life to found objects. See Pleasure & Reality at NGV Australia. Free.

Justene Williams works with video documentation and performance.

In this interview she speaks on the nature of art being expensive and how this impacts the course of her work and practice. She describes her composition of work to be “hokey” as in, mismatched or lacking linearity due to inconsistencies in material. This becomes evident in merely observing the nature of her installations and their composition; possessing a very sporadic quality.

Williams claims she performs to repurpose or reassign value to the materials she immerses with. Her performance oversees her physically engaging with the work as if it were a landscape to explore.

A fascination with incosistencies may become relevant to an idea of NOW and its place in time being liminal at best. Williams being situated in abstract landscapes that almost hang in an environment void of the organisation of time and space has stoked thought for our own work and how we can express our ideas around liminality, time and NOW.

In this elegant and unusual exhibition, Queensland-based artist Archie Moore has devised a highly original way to explore themes of Aboriginal dispossession ...

Archie Moore [multimedia artist] explores the ideas of land inherent to indigenous culture through installation and photography. His work Les Eaux d’Amoore meditates his relationship between olfactory objects and familial memories. Moore deliberates the sensory perception of the object and its potential to trigger strong and resonate feelings of reflection on oneself and their passage through time and maturation.

His inclusion of memory as a central aspect to what the work explores reflects a state of liminality in that memory becomes a persistence over the transience of our surrounding world.

#inspo

Artist Statement

Are glitches merely digital infrequencies, or can they manifest through our very behaviour and ideas as we move [progressively?] through time. Consider the review of the human body and its cultural attachments; how it has become a paradigm for segregational ideas of gender and sex. Does 2016 view a reordering of those conventions of body; male and female?

There is a growing awareness that fluidity and namelessness to one’s concept of gender can be a reality. The rigid and formerly unwavering barriers that cast distinctions between gender and sexuality are exposed and challenged by the queer body.

Despite this, the traditional categorisation of body by heteronormative values still prevails in large portions of Western culture; it is frequently hallmarked by an aggression towards LGBTQI identifying people[1].

For this submission I spent time reading articles that outlined encounters with the body as a “shared cultural concept[2].” These readings fascinated my curiosity towards the ways in which we relegate each other to confines of gender. For a queer person, the body can be a densely complex and ambiguous place. It became clear through the writers’ experiences interviewing and observing young and older minds, that not all of us feel that way. The issue for the queer individual can surface through those among us dictating what our bodies mean; how we should feel in terms of what they deem recognisable by their standards and what that ‘should’ constitute for us.

Then, how does a use of ‘creative glitch’ interplay with these battles over flesh and a concept of body, through my work.

I propose that the queer individual’s [this term I use with the hope of including those identifying as trans; inter sexual or otherwise fluid] body and their respective ideas may highlight a glitch to the binaries of gender. A refusal to conform; a resistance to conservative structure marks an irregularity in a system by which we have lived for centuries.

Amelia Walker in her publication[3] speaks of a “refusal to sacrifice her masculine qualities”. This expression of self converses with the thought that we may acknowledge ourselves as people informed by social influence, without meeting the demand to categorise ourselves by binaries and feel a need to sit, unmoving, within those confines.

“To dissolve the identity categories is to undermine social and political heteronormativity”[4]. I chose to draw the forms of two individuals who identify as queer people for my work. Using oil pastels on paper, I attempted to imbue an ambiguity to the drawn forms. This involved an exclusion of genitals, perpetuating androgyny for the subjects; as well as a decision to exclude faces as a part of the bodies.

Keeping in mind the guidelines provided by my chosen question, I integrated further use of creative glitches to the drawings by experimenting with collage. Fragmented text flecks the paper as if it were a screen on a computer, ridden with intrusive junk email or ad pop ups. However, the dialogue has been taken [quoted] directly from the articles I had been reading that informed much of my concept regarding the queer identity. The dialogue reads menacingly in bold text, juxtaposed with the soft areas inhabited by pastel, which I hoped to use as a point to discuss the aggression queer individuals deal with as passers-by, peers, friends, family, former partners or profiles online communicate disagreeing or hateful views directed at their bodies.

As an example, “writhing like a decapitated worm,” from Walker’s article, again, colourfully summarises a feeling of angst relative to the queer dilemma, in that any voice instructing you to see your body in a rigidly gendered way, can greatly afflict a sense of self and security.

As I speak my own truth through this work, I implore the understanding that a glitch to the binaries of gender can be observed in the ambiguity of one’s idea of body and gender. In 2016, the passages for hateful dialogue are limitless due to the internet, and more often than not tend oscillate a violent agenda working towards communicating conventions by which we should live to see our physical selves. My work is completed with the consideration of this.

Bibliography/Footnotes/Referencing/Research

[1] Bauhardt, C. (2013) Rethinking gender and nature from a material(ist) perspective: Feminist economics, queer ecologies and resource politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies.

[2] Zimman, L., Davis, J., & Raclaw, J. (2014) Queer excursions: retheorising binaries in gender, language and sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.

[3] Walker, A. 2016 All the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

[4] Hegna, K., and Larson, C.J. (2007) Straightening out the Queer? Same-Sex Experience and Attraction among Young People in Norway (Culture, Sex and Health). Taylor and Francis, Ltd.

Ingrey, J.C., (2013) Troubling gender binaries in schools: from sumptuary law to sartorial agency. Taylor and Francis Group, Routledge.

Woody, L., Elizabeth (2003) Homophobia and Heterosexism in Public School

Reform: Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in California's Single Gender Academies, Equity & Excellence in Education. Taylor and Francis Group, Routledge.

Verdegem, P., Hauttekeete, L., De Marez, L., and Evens, T. (2016) Analogue Switch-Off Vs Digital Switch-On: Rethinking Policy Strategies in the Digital Television Era [online]. Communication, Politics & Culture.

ADAD1002: Glitch, Assessment 2. Final work [drawing 3] details

ADAD1002: Glitch, Assessment 2. Final work [drawing 2] details

ADAD1002: Glitch, Assessment 2. Final work [drawing 1] details

1: Bathers, 1939 ink, wash & white watercolor on blue paper 14 1/2 x 22 inches

Manikins, 1951Egg tempera on paper13 x 16 inches

Paul Cadmus was an American painter who depicted the male form in a style sometimes referred to as magic realism. His male figures could be seen woven in to scenes mythological by nature, which reference literature generated by ancient Greek text and artworks speaking of magic’s existence in the rational world. His particular interest appeared to eroticise the male in scenes that would engage the viewer to decipher a plot, at times taking place around the relationships between different males situated in the scenes painted. While generally implicit, it becomes obvious within such works as Manikins (1951, egg tempera on paper) that traces of homoeroticism may be indicated through the ambiguity of the forms.

It has been said Cadmus was inspired by Italian Renaissance art which trains a huge attention to muscularity and the ‘sculpted’ male form [instead, Cadmus has situated these in vernacular settings of America in the early 20th century.] The painted form appears to celebrate powered allegories of sexuality and liberty - fluidly entwining gendered bodies in playfully flirtatious scenes which in some cases [works] does cement speculation of references to queer culture and relations.

I am inspired by Cadmus’s attitude being channelled through his art which embodies a greatly sexual but celebratory and diverse landscape of conceptual thought. Thought on gender, the form, classicism and the mundane.

#inspiration

Self portraits Representing queer bodies is something that art can do to make visible a community that is too often void of social consideration and respect. In my experience, in conversation, it's become clear to me that ambiguity to one's sex/gender/interests does not qualify as a valid means to identify with in the minds of many who live and conform to heteronormative values. Often, you will be mistook for bisexual or just gay. Unfortunately, some will try to dictate to you that queer is 'not a real thing' and you're either or. The disappearance of genitalia in these drawings represents a process of questioning this kind of dialogue can evoke personally, and how this may trigger fore thoughts to your body you may have been having which were initially uneasy and difficult to configure. How do we treat ourselves as queer people in the face of such adversity. Becoming 'faceless' or feeling robbed of a sense of self can definitely feel an imminent outcome (although not one that anyone should have to feel is necessary). Erasures of physical indicators of one’s identity provide a seeming glitch to traditional binaries which wrote the terms by which we understood concepts of gender and sexuality. The glitch may become a representative for communities of people who do not label themselves as CIS men/women/other, and thus break conservative thought which feeds in to the divisions created amongst ourselves based on physicality and concepts attached to body.

#experimentation

research

http://delivery.acm.org.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/10.1145/2520000/2513525/p175-gross.pdf?ip=149.171.67.164&id=2513525&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&key=65D80644F295BC0D%2EB811333C2AA88C82%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35&CFID=835537391&CFTOKEN=28914586&__acm__=1473329229_79ad933407299764add775a11c465ec6

couldn’t work out how to share the actual pdf here.

interesting discussion on the contention between analog and digital television; how this came to be in an age when digital media was still relatively new and not as mass produced as it is now.

‘The digital switchover is seen as the natural outcome of technological evolution in the television landscape and should generate advantages for both citizens as well as broadcast companies in terms of (a) more choice, better signal stability and higher picture and sound quality for viewers; (b) lower distribution costs and the possibility of transmitting more channels and services at the same cost’

The switchover is something I remember occurring when I was a child. My family already had a digital television at that point but it was interesting to me that this idea of a “switch over” somewhat threatened those of us who hadn’t already. A “stand with us or stay out of the way” type of notion fluttered to my hyperactive and juvenile mind. And perhaps that is a little extreme, in some ways it rings true. We are so influenced to be current in our use of technology and lifestyle. Updates happen faster than we can keep track of; suddenly trends and innovative ideas shift, and we are silently expected to keep up.

What happens to those of us who are more senior, or just not equipped with a digital mind; are they left by the way side in some way? More importantly does this switch over become a sort of paradigm for a social glitch in the way we interact with one another? Arguably yes, because there is always an ongoing war between generations over young adults and teens being inseparable from their devices. Do we need a screen to be a constant interface for conversation; are we forgetting face-to-face? It’s interesting to consider the possibility of behavioural or social glitches that may or may not have been reactant to the development of digital technology.

#experimentation

Week 5 experimentation 'Desire' (Repulsion)

Assessment One/Statement

For this first assessment we were asked to create a poster with response to a chosen question or statement. Mine will respond to the enquiries around how we can utilise glitch as a creative media in an art making practice; in what ways we can integrate glitch in to a conceptualisation of a work, and most importantly, how it can be manifested as a poster.

Glitch is a term that refers to a disruption or interference of some sort; an irregularity; a miscarriage of conventional sequence or cohesion. Particularly, we understand glitches in a digital context. Glitches invade our computer screen’s colour gradient, the loading of material and usually oversee a buffering of content. In simple terms, glitches delay or halt the streaming process of data. I hoped to expand on this, to treat glitch as a flexible term that could cover more than just a frustration in web content error. We experience multiple digital realities being a generation online. Social media is just one amongst many of these facets to the internet that we inhabit. The concept of social media is to connect and in doing so, create conversation between those of us who project ourselves through an online profile. Interaction, discussion and exchange of thoughts are all inherent to social media. In a manner most curious, I believe that the forethought of social media is deteriorating the more that these internet platforms give way to consumerism and business partnerships. Facebook has become host to a plethora of opportunities for businesses to advertise their services or product through news feeds or in designated ad sections that Facebook integrates to its application. Before I continue, I do not “disagree” or object to this manoeuvre; this is just part of embracing a digital age, and business owners who show initiative to do this are only trying to keep up. But in many ways, we could assert that the concept of social media is glitched by consumerism — we came here to socialise, but instead we are tempted to immediately spend or browse intangible things to purchase at a later date. My poster skews the sensational marketing strategy by ‘glitching’ an already existing ‘glitch’. The pixelated images originally depicted different images used to advertise products, television series and holiday destinations I saw on my personal newsfeed. By pixelating the content, I have attempted to erase information and intention from these social media advertising schemes [glitches].

My poster appears more a document through which I loosely explain the intention of the work, rather than elaborate through some tactically plotted visualisation of a thought or campaign, which we understand a poster to be typically. Moving ‘glitch’ from a strictly digital framework of ideas, I have glitched two respective ideas within this assessment together, in order to present one huge creative glitch. The poster I have created represents an anti-poster, appearing almost as a webpage or online image someone attempted to load unsuccessfully; met with meaningless coded text that becomes almost indecipherable if read through and through.

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