Journal

François Newfoundland – S(c)een 1

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I will be posting a series of images and ruminations following a recent field trip to François Newfoundland. This work is part of a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that I am collaborating on with my colleagues Marlene MacCallum and David Morrish; we are looking into ideas around collaboration-dissemination-creation as a cyclical, even indefinite, process. We are also working with Clifton Meador and Steve Woodall who are faculty at Columbia College in Chicago, C.M. was part of this filed work.

research—research—research

Experiences, locations, dislocations yes, especially dislocations are pretty well what research in media is all about. I really do not know what to call it all anymore; words like “media” seem to point to an idea that the tools being used are the context for the discussion; as a species, artists are really having a hard time moving away from this object oriented way of thinking. One could argue, and this is the position of the Commission, that an artistic practice is primarily an intellectual activity. An intellectual activity must include all aspects of sensation, art allows us to make an attempt at giving all this information (data) a presence within and without the imagination. This includes all the methodologies/technologies of “making” appropriate to how the intellectual filtering of  said experience finds an audience/user.

East Point (right)

West Point (left)

Chaleur Bay (east)

François Bay (west)

Standing still, vertiginous.

line

Between François and Chaleur

Between François and Chaleur

Sitting and thinking that I would rather be out there recording data

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Connot seem to call it taking photographs any more. There is most certainly a shift in the conceptual approach to taking pictures… pitchers… snaps. I keep coming back to articulating this shift by thinking about the decision making process.

There has to be a difference in how we perceive, consume and create images when decisions about technique, composition, framing can be delayed until the image has been seen, and selected or not in comparison to instantly fixing and editing.

With film, one has to make decisions long before ever being able to see the result; good or bad. And once the film has been processed, it becomes a question of various compromises between technique, vision and desired result. They all influence each other and they all affect/effect the work. I am really curious about what happens to the image when this level of distance is no longer there. I can see it in my own work over the past few years; it seems I am less and less concerned about the object in its physical [im]perfection or at least it’s preciousness because I continue to get great satisfaction from making stuff and adding to the great stuff pile in the Great Concavity.

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