Eyes, windows to the soul

Reflections and self-portraits in mirrors

2011-11-03T06:15:00.001-07:00

This post comes from another one of my blogs Rebecca's Fashion Magazines - April 2011

Since the last show where I exhibited a series of my "self-portraits in mirrors" and since the interview with Claire, I have been thinking about one important aspect in them : the fact that the main subject is not ME, but the mirror/reflecting surface. When taking the picture, in the reality, the camera takes the picture of the mirror itself.

I think that, for me, one of the most important idea in the questions Claire asked me is this one :
CT – so it’s the actual process of looking that you are trying to emphasise thorough the use of the mirror?

CSD – yes. I’m trying to understand something that cannot be understood.

And this is bringing me back to the residency "Eyes, windows to the soul" I did in 2010, which was following a period of research. Studying the process of vision, on different levels and trying to draw parallels between the physical and the psychological (or rather spiritual) aspects of vision ...
The physical particularities of the shop where I was working both helped me to emphasize some sides of this but also made it even more complex at the same time.

Projection installation where a photograph of outside of the shop

is projected inside it.

Photograph through a window showing the indoor market

while a reflection is showing the window

and sky from inside the shop to the outside
To me, there is a direct link, from these images/installations to some of my most recent self-portraits.

A couple of nights ago, I also dreamed that I was by a wide container with water and that I understood that the next step was supposed to start taking pictures from under the water ... This lead me to take new types of images :

the process of seeing ....

2011-04-30T14:30:00.001-07:00

I am interested in machines that tell you what it is to look, that make you aware of the process of seeing, make you aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking at it; but more as looking and seeing being a metaphor of how you understand the world.

William Kentridge in "Anything is possible" - documentary.

Final show

2011-04-05T12:33:00.001-07:00

Some more images to come, showing :
- projection installation
- strings sculpture
- paper sculpture
- mirrors installation

Artist forced to remove head camera implant - Wafaa Bilal

2011-02-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

An artist who had a camera implanted into the back of his head has been forced to remove it after his body rejected part of the device.
(click on link to read article)
BBC 11 February 2011

Final show - drawings on paper

2011-02-03T15:08:00.000-08:00

Series of drawings on 2 sheets of tracing paper mixing biological drawings to the map of Longton and the shop where my residency was taking place.

(click here for more explanation)

Real "map" of the indoor market

"The Strand" is the main street on which the shop has a window and a door.

It also has a window and door at the back, opening on the inddor market.

Statement for the final show opening

2011-02-03T14:33:00.000-08:00

During the one month residency, I developed poetical images, comparing a shop and its window, to an eye. The installation shows my interests in the psychological, phenomenological and scientific aspects of vision. The physical particularities of the shop (one window and door on the street, the other ones on the covered market) came as a great inspiration and are completely part of the work.

“There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place – when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible (…)”

MERLEAU-PONTY Maurice, "Eye and Mind" in The Primary of Perception, Northwestern University Press, 1964

"One common fallacy is to assume there is an image inside your eyeball, the optical image, exciting photoreceptors on your retina and then that image is transmitted faithfully along a cable called the optic nerve and displayed on a screen called the visual cortex. Now this is obviously a logical fallacy because if you have a screen and an image displayed on a screen in the brain, then you need another little chap in there watching that image, and there is no little chap in your head. And if you think about it, that wouldn't solve the problem either because then you'd need another little guy in his head looking at the image in his brain and so on and so forth, and you get an endless regress of eyes and images and little people without really solving the problem of perception. So the first thing you have to do to understand perception is to get rid of the idea of images in the brain and think instead of transforms or symbolic representations of objects and events in the external world.”

Synapses and the Self - Lecture by V.S. Ramachandran - BBC 4 - 2003

Video presented as part of the final work

2010-10-27T12:59:00.003-07:00

Eyes, windows to the soul - June 2010 from Celine Siani Djiakoua on Vimeo.

The Sentinel - article

2010-06-25T01:03:00.000-07:00

End of Residency Show Opening

2010-06-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

Anna adjusting her eyes and pencil

to draw the outlines of the windows of the opposite building

"Audience", interactive art work, by rAndom International

2010-06-06T16:20:00.001-07:00

Royal Opera House: Audience. from rAndom International on Vimeo.

Drawings

2010-06-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

Overhead projector

2010-05-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

View from the room where the overhead projector is.

This window pattern is everywhere in the architecture.

The projected image from the overhead projector is a cut out of this pattern

Eyewriter - how to draw with your eye

2010-05-19T13:42:00.003-07:00

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Days 3&4 ... and THE key to the shop : so a free access

2010-05-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

This upstairs front window has become my obsession

as its curved shape ressembles an eye so much.

Its pattern can be found everywhere in the architecture.

Trials to capture the reflection of a series of windows

from the high ceiling of the indoor market

here I just added a piece of black fabric behind the back window

Drawing trials : reproducing the windows patterns

Window pattern reproduced with tissue paper.

Trials for what could be a curved sculpture.

If the window was a cornea, then the eyeball would be somewhere there ...

DAY 1

2010-05-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

Today I went to 3, The Strand, to take the keys ... just to discover that they were only given to me at "market hours". This means that my access to the shop is extremely restricted : about 2 days per week in total and not after 5pm, so no night time projections ...
I am hoping to solve that problem soon ...

The shop is just amazing and could just BE an installation by itself because of its two sides and all the reflexions on the windows. It even has several mirrors and the curve of its front windows ressemble the curved cornea of the eye ... very inspiring ...

WINDOW-CORNEA

(street side views)

REFLEXIONS

On the other side of the window : the indoor market.

On the window, the reflexion of the inside of the shop.

This image is particularly interesting :

On the other side of the window : the indoor market.

On the window, the reflexion of the street, on the other side of the shop.

SELF-PORTRAITS in mirrors and through windows

(street side)

The shop / market / street

2010-05-08T16:46:00.000-07:00

Biology drawings I like

2010-05-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

Idea of movement, something happening :

What can the inner eye see, when the indoor market is asleep ....

2010-05-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

ideas ...

2010-05-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

Number 3, The Strand, Longton

2010-04-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

Longhouse Action Research - end of project

2010-03-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

“There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place – when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible (…)”

MERLEAU-PONTY Maurice, "Eye and Mind" in The Primary of Perception, Northwestern University Press, 1964

In summer 2009, I had started in my practice to challenge the use of the video camera by exploring the physical limits of its frame through performances. With the Action Research Project, I wanted to make interactive installations involving passing pedestrians. They would be shown through the window of an empty shop.

(images above : video installation for Conjunction08, Stoke-on-Trent)

I would explore the use of projectors, CCTV, video cameras, TV monitors and different types of screens. The installations would play with different processes: transposition of images and backgrounds, variations of scales and frames, trompe-l’oeil and mise-en-abyme. By making obvious the omnipresent and hidden CCTV filming, I wanted to offer the viewers a possibility to gain some power back over their image and to reach poetic dimensions in the public space.

Finding an empty shop in Stoke-on-Trent hasn’t actually been easy. With the support of Janette McSkimming from Urban Vision North Staffordshire, I will eventually start a one-month residency in Longton around April 2010. While looking for a shop and meeting with various people, I learned about Regeneration and what making “Art in the Public Realm” meant for me. As the work couldn’t develop in a real space, I started to imaginatively and corporeally invest a virtual shop by comparing it to an eye, drawing a parallel between its mechanism and the filming/projecting installations I was planning to try. I had fallen in love with a space in Longton, which particularity is to have one of its windows on the indoor market when the other side is on the main street. I created some digital images, drawings and diagrams to illustrate these ideas.

The metaphor between the shop and an eye actually allowed me to investigate the mechanism of vision from phenomenological, psychoanalytical, biological and neurological points of view. This was a complex and enriching process, which brought together my knowledge in Psychology and Philosophy and my Art practice.

Can You See With Your Tongue?

2010-03-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Discover, June 2003 issue; published online June 1, 2003

The brain is so adaptable, some researchers now think, that any of the five senses can be rewired.

"I'm sitting at a table draped in black, surrounded by black curtains. Candles, spheres, and unfamiliar symbols have been placed before me. My right hand, arms, and head are strapped with wires, and my mouth is filled with electrodes. I'm blindfolded.
Although this may sound like a scene for a Black Mass, it's even stranger than that: I'm trying to see with my tongue.
The gear I'm wearing was invented by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Bach-y-Rita has devoted much of his career to a single, revolutionary concept: that our senses are interchangeable. The brain, Bach-y-Rita and many other neuroscientists believe, is an organ of astonishing plasticity: If one part of it is damaged, another part can serve the same function. To prove the point, his collaborator Kathi Kamm, a professor of occupational therapy at the university's Milwaukee campus, has strapped a small video camera to my forehead and connected it to a long plastic strip hanging from my mouth. A laptop computer reduces the camera's image to 144 pixels. Those pixels are converted to an electric current that is sent to the business end of the plastic strip—a 12-by-12 grid of electrodes that rests on my tongue.
Kamm sits down in front of me. She says she's holding a ball, but I can't hear a sound as she rolls it back and forth over the cloth-covered table. She says the ball will soon be rolling toward me—to my left, my right, or straight at me—but my eyes and ears have no way to tell where it's going.

That leaves my tongue. It has more tactile nerve endings than any part of the body other than the lips. What the camera sees is zapped onto my tongue's wet, conductive surface. As Kamm rolls the ball, my blindfolded eyes see nothing, but a tingling passes over my tongue. When she sends the ball my way, my hand leaps out to the left.
I've caught it."

The Body in the center ... of the city

2010-03-25T07:00:00.001-07:00

Reading the "amazing book" .... I found this paragraph which blew my mind as this is exactly what I discovered through my work a couple of months ago.

“ I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the façade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.”

Pallasmaa J., “The Body in the Centre” in The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, UK

One month Residency at Number 3, The Strand - Hurray !

2010-03-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

After a couple of months of meetings, discussions, mails and phone calls, with the enthusiastic support of Janette McSkimming from Urban Vision Noth Stafforsdhire, I am about to finally access one of those shops in Longton !

I should go for a visit this saturday.

An amazing book's title : The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

2010-03-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

... and the chapters titles could be a poem ...

- Touching the world
- Vision and knowledge
- Retinal architecture and the loss of Plasticity
- An architecture of visual images
- The rejection of Alberti's window
- A new vision ans sensory balance
- The body in the center
- Multisensory experience
- Acoustic intimacy
- Silence, time and solitude
- Spaces of scent
- The Shape of touch
- The taste of stone
- Images of action
- An architecture of the senses

Longton Market, The Strand shop, installation idea

2010-02-25T13:47:00.000-08:00

From a shop to a cell ...

2010-02-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

The story of a man’s struggle to learn to see (video work) - 7'20" - Simon Pummell

2010-02-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

"A blind man receives corneal transplants. He is 50 years old. For the first time since he was ten months old he has complete functional use of his eyes. What does he see? This is the story of a man’s struggle to learn to see. The film is a dramatic monologue with special effects to take us into the world of the newly sighted man."

Click here to watch the video by Simon Pummell

Stills :

Under Scan in Trafalgar Square - 2008 - Rafael Lozano Hemmer

2010-02-17T16:32:00.000-08:00

Arts Council England :

"Under Scan in Trafalgar Square: Arts Council England announce support for a large scale public art installationDate: 10 April 2008 Region: Arts Council England, London Arts Council England, London is proud to be supporting Under Scan; a large scale public art installation that aims to engage local communities, increase participation and celebrate London’s diverse cultural heritage.

The installation by Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer has been awarded £35,000 through Arts Council England’s Grants for the arts programme and will be installed in Trafalgar Square, London from 14 – 23 November 2008.

Under Scan will come as London’s first major artistic output preceding the official launch of the Cultural Olympiad in September 2008.

The installation will feature 400 interactive video portraits of a cross section of Londoners, which will be projected onto the ground. Members of the public will make these portraits ''come alive'' by covering them with their shadows, which are cast using a powerful projector.

Many of Rafael’s previous installations use shadows to highlight the importance of the relationship individuals and communities have with the spaces around them. He states that:

“…the shadow is a very intuitive device - one that is expressive and that has a vast vocabulary of interaction, thanks to both the personal experience that everyone has with their shadow and the sophisticated shadow puppet traditions that are found in most cultures….In our age of surveillance, globalisation, and urban homogenisation, I believe there is the need to re link people to their surroundings.”

This unique installation was originally created for the East Midlands in a venture to help support the creation of vibrant cultural quarters and to link the region’s scientific and technological achievements to its flourishing arts scene. Since its inception in November 2005, the installation toured the region to Lincoln, Liecester, Northampton, Derby and Nottingham until March 2006. The piece soon became reknowned for its capacity to boost cultural tourism and economic development. It later became recognised for its international significance and formed part of the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale from June – November 2007.

With major support from high profile partners such as the Greater London Authority, Tate Modern and the ICA, it is hoped that a broad programme of creative events will enable this innovative event to reach a wide audience from the Capital and beyond.

Rafael Lozano Hemmer is an artist of international standing and his work has been commissioned for significant events across the world.

Further information can be found at www.threecitiescreate.org.uk"

Researching about "Bionic Eye"

2010-01-31T15:07:00.000-08:00

In my exploration of what vision/seeing is, I am now interested in "bionic eyes".
As a starter, here is a diagram that I particularly like for its poetry and esthetism ...
I will post more about this subject later ...

Eye brain shop market

2010-01-14T06:23:00.000-08:00

Work development updates

2010-01-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

Reading the "Synopsis" of my project for the Longhouse Action Research (see column on the right), I realise that it has become the skeleton of the work but that a lot flesh, emotions, feelings and thinking have been added to it since I wrote it in summer !

At the beginning, this project was a matter of offering viewers an interactive piece and I would not be in the work as a performer (as I do, most of the time). I was focusing on the mechanisms of visions, drawing parallels between the functioning of camera and eye and imagining the shop as being an eye. At that point, I was intellectually interested in the work, but not fully engaged. I now know that I cannot exclude myself of the work and that being in the center of it (in one way of the other) is vital to me. The shift allowed me to imaginatively EXPERIENCE the work and this certainly couldn't happen without my interest in phenomenology and the blow-minding writings of Merleau-Ponty.

How vision works and how we experience it, this would define my work better as it is now, considering it with phenomenologic, neurologic and psychoanalytic approaches. The installations experiments and the end results would still be the same as first described in the Synopsis but the metaphore of the shop as an eye would give them their reason to be. From people's reactions to my blog advertising postcard, I think I should make the metaphore of the eye explicite for the viewers. But I don't know yet how.

Eye-shop-market

2010-01-02T16:56:00.001-08:00

Dreaming of .... a shop !

2010-01-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

Here is a shop, which I could possibly use for a couple of weeks in order to explore and develop my ideas in the physical 3D space rather than just in thinking, virtually or in 2D images. I had a meeting lately with Alan Smith - the Town Centre Regeneration Manager in Longton - and Janette McSkimming from Urban Vision to talk about this possibility of occupying a shop, free of rent in January/February 2010. This shop is one of a couple owned by the Council.

I presented my ideas and showed a couple of images (from the blog) to them.

I explained that I was looking for an empty shop to put my ideas into practice and try things out.

I mentioned the fact that I was not aiming at showing a finished piece but rather experiment in a real space.

Side on the street :

Inside :

Side on the market :

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted ...

2010-01-02T15:21:00.000-08:00

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted. But just think of what's involved. You have two tiny upside down distorted images inside your eyeballs but what you see is a vivid three-dimensional world out there in front of you and this transformation is nothing short of a miracle. How does it come about?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture2.shtml

I knew there was something missing in my diagrams ...

2009-12-28T16:43:00.000-08:00

"One common fallacy is to assume there is an image inside your eyeball, the optical image, exciting photoreceptors on your retina and then that image is transmitted faithfully along a cable called the optic nerve and displayed on a screen called the visual cortex. Now this is obviously a logical fallacy because if you have a screen and an image displayed on a screen in the brain, then you need another little chap in there watching that image, and there is no little chap in your head. And if you think about it, that wouldn't solve the problem either because then you'd need another little guy in his head looking at the image in his brain and so on and so forth, and you get an endless regress of eyes and images and little people without really solving the problem of perception.
So the first thing you have to do to understand perception is to get rid of the idea of images in the brain and think instead of transforms or symbolic representations of objects and events in the external world. Just as little squiggles of ink, print or writing, or dots and dashes in the Morse code can symbolize or represent something even they don't physically resemble what they are representing, similarly the action of nerve cells in your brain, the patterns of firing, represent objects and events in the external world even though they don't in any way resemble what's out there in the world."

Synapses and the Self - Lecture by V.S. Ramachandran - BBC 4 - 2003

Vision is not a simple process

2009-12-28T15:47:00.000-08:00

"(...) vision is not a simple process. When you open your eyes in the morning, it's all out there in front of you. It's easy to assume that it's effortless and instantaneous but in fact you have this distorted upside down image in your retina exciting the photoreceptors and the messages then go through the optic nerve to the brain and then they are analysed in thirty different visual areas, in the back of your brain. And then you finally after analysing all the individual features, you identify what you're looking at. Is it your mother, is it a snake, is it a pig, what is it?
So once the image is recognised, then the message goes to a structure called the amygdala which is sometimes called the gateway to the limbic system which is the emotional core of your brain, which allows you to gauge the emotional significance of what you are looking at. Is this a predator, is it a lion or a tiger? Is it a prey which I can chase? Is it a mate that I can chase? Or is it my departmental chairman I have to worry about, or is it a stranger who is not important to me, or something utterly trivial like a piece of driftwood? What is it?"

Phantoms in the Brain - Lecture by V.S. Ramachandran - BBC 4 - 2003

Illusions, Hallucinations, Palinopsia, Polyopia, Diplopia, Dysmetropsia, Metamorphosia ...

2009-12-28T15:23:00.000-08:00

Illusions (...) illusions can consist in a misinterpretation of a real sensory input, such as a recurrence, persistence, duplication or change in the size of images.
         Palinopsia : A persistence of a visual image of an object in time after the actual object has disappeared
         Polyopia : A rare illusion characterized by monocular diplopia, excluding refractive abnormalities.
                          Diplopia : commonly known as double vision, is the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object. These images may be displaced horizontally, vertically, or diagonally (i.e. both vertically and horizontally) in relation to each other.
        Dysmetropsia (Micro/Macropsia): The illusion that objects are smaller/larger than in reality
        Metamorphopsia : The illusion that objects are distorted.

Hallucinations
Hallucination is defined as visual perception without external stimulation. It must be distinguished whether the individual is able to recognize that the perception is not real, also called pseudo-hallucination, or that the individual endorses it as real, also called delusion.
The content of hallucinations is widely variable and can range from simple images including flashing or steady spots, colored lines and shapes (unformed hallucinations) to vivid objects, flowers, animals and persons (formed hallucinations). The differential diagnosis includes entopic phenomena, which are visual images produced within the eye and reflected to the retina.
        Example : Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) is a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations. Sufferers, who are mentally healthy people with often significant visual loss, have vivid, complex recurrent visual hallucinations (fictive visual percepts). One characteristic of these hallucinations is that they usually are "lilliput hallucinations". People suffering from CBS may experience a wide variety of hallucinations. Images of complex coloured patterns and images of people are most common, followed by animals, plants or trees and inanimate objects.

Improvised and unexpected advertisment of my "Longhouse" postcard :)

2009-12-15T04:03:00.000-08:00

Pictures taken by Mr Will

I don't want to compromise

2009-12-14T07:06:00.000-08:00

My artwork is my soul.
You can't ask your soul to compromise.

Here, in the virtual space of these pages and of my head, is a work in progress.
I am not expected to create a finished product.
I am here to try and get lost.
I am here to try and fail.
I am here to try and try.
I am here to wander around.
I am here to dream the work.
I am here to try to make it happen.
I am here to watch it grow.
I am here to get surprised by its shape.

Now that I am learning my life as an artist, only 6 months old, I am already fully aware of the luxury to have been awarded a Longhouse Bursary. £3000 for nearly 9 months : what kind of luxuray is that ? Obviously not a material luxury ... but still, it is luxury : it is paying for a time to allow myself to feel free to "waste" time : free to go at my own pace, free to TAKE THE TIME TO STOP, free to take a break from ALL THE REST ... because, you don't just say "I am an artist"and all of a sudden all your life is filled with art and freedom to create wonderful work .... no, before that, you have all the other worries that everybody has : finding the money, raising the kids, looking after your house, dealing with your more personal problems etc .... THEN, after all that, you can be an artist and deal with your artwork.

So this is why I don't want to compromise with my art.
Being an artist is certainly the most difficult choice I have ever made in my life but this is a choice made with full awareness and this is exactly where my only freedom comes from.

shop eye

2009-12-01T10:31:00.003-08:00

coming soon ... a postcard

2009-12-01T10:27:00.000-08:00

Looking for empty shops ... a visit to Hanley with the Barefoot Doctors for the Standstill project

2009-11-17T04:03:00.001-08:00

When going to Longton last time, I realised that I wasn't so much looking forward to working on my own in an empty shop, especially in winter when it's dark ... even if this is exactly what I need for my installation. I also realised that looking for an empty shop was not such an easy task ... not more than looking for a new house to move in ... actually even more difficult : you have to contact the renting agencies and you have to convince them that it would be such a fantastic idea to have MY work in THEIR shop ... for FREE ... but with all the worries of (for example) : "will the public go in the shop ... in that case, what about the insurance" ...

So, as I am pretty busy with other things and as I didn't want to feel isolated, I tried to contact other artists and / or organisations to see how and what they were doing and there would be any possibilities for support and/or collaboration.

I have joined the Barefoot Doctors from their beginnings in August for 3 days summer school; this is what they do.

Here is also a The Sentinel article about performances we did at the summer school :

this picture was taken when we created a short outdoor performance piece in Newcastle in order to develop ideas for the future Standstill project ... I am now a bit far from what I did at that time but I didn't know Barefoot Doctors and my Longhouse Reasearch would meet at some point ...

With the Barefoot Doctors, last week I went for a visit of Hanley town center in order to locate interesting sites for the Standstill project. I am thinking of fitting one of my installation idea in the Stanstill project, which will be made of 12 interventions on a journey from the town center to the Observatory ("mental health training, resource and arts centre"). Standstill is about standing still in the middle of the Christmas hysteria, hyper comsumerism and forced happiness and love ... we developped lots of ideas around this theme.

I think that the installation projecting the live image of the outside street onto the back wall inside the empty shop would work well here. The emptiness of the shop is kept and shown as it is : a vacancy of shoppers and of goods. I like the idea of the camera and the projection working as a mirror : self reflection image.

Taking the time to look inward and reflect on the meaning of that crazy season. This is happening in a context of crisis and of interrogations about the overproduction of goods in our Western countries ... without forgetting the overuse of petrol and pollution production because of making merchandises in the other side of the world ... and if you add to that the uncertainties wether what you are buying has been produce fairly ... or by underpaid children ...

So will we find an empty shop for this installation ... ?

Here are some shops :

And this one below is my favourite one ... not so much because it would be good for my installation, quite on the opposite : I think it just doesn't need me at all. The emptyness, the mirroring surfaces and the beauty of it just work on their own and I may just go back to take more pictures of it ....

Video camera as a protheisis - the Big Brother's complex

2009-11-05T02:22:00.000-08:00

Josh Harris. Photograph: David Rentas/New York Post

Josh Harris (internet)

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Harris_(internet)

Josh Harris (born c. 1960) is the founder of Pseudo.com, a live audio and video webcasting website founded in 1993, which filed for bankruptcy following the end of the dot-com bubble in 2000. Harris also developed many human experiments, testing the effects of media and technology on the development and understanding of personal identity.

Among Harris' experiments featured in the film is the art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother type concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made

"We Live in Public"

Harris is the focus of director Ondi Timoner's documentary film, We Live In Public, an entry at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

"Here. Now. I am", A3 poster, 2006 - Céline Siani Djiakoua

2009-11-04T16:34:00.000-08:00

Click on the image to read the text.

the window shop as a cornea

2009-11-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

Prosthesis in the realm of vision

2009-11-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

"Telescopes, microscopes, and radiographic machines have all extended the human body's perceptual capabilities and are routinely used in the scientific world. We have the capacity to explore the inner workings of the body, the environment it inhabits, and far beyonds. The camera lucida and the camera obscura, as well as the mechanical/analogue and digital cameras, have all played central roles in fashioning Western visuality. The wide range of optical inventions that emerged in the nineteenth century attests to the creativity of humans in this field. The phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and kaleidoscope are but a few examples. One particular legacy of the nineteenth century is the establishment of the necessary conditions for the invention of the contact lense."

Francine Degenais in "Eye and skin/gaze and touch", Image and imagination by Martha Langford

TELESCOPE

MICROSCOPE

RADIOGRAPHIC MACHINE

CAMERA LUCIDA

CAMERA OBSCURA

PHENAKISTOSCOPE

ZOETROPE

KALEIDOSCOPE

THAUMATROPE

PRAXINOSCOPE

To Turn One's Own Eyes Inside Out - Giuseppe Penone - 1970

2009-11-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

Wearing mirrored contact lenses ...

"His interest in revealing natural processes led to a series of tree sculptures, made from 1969 on, in which he took huge beams of roughly processed timber and chiselled away the wood, following the growth rings to expose the younger tree inside. To Turn One's Eyes Inside Out, 1970, a photograph of Penone wearing mirrored contact lenses, continues this notion of reversal. Instead of receiving images from outside for later transformation into art, the artist's eyes become screens on which to display an immediate picture of the world."
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/artepovera/penone.htm

"Penone’s aesthetic proposition springs from observations on natural phenomena, with a bearing particularly on our interaction with our environment. The nature of sensory perception is crucial for his proposition, especially through touch and sight – not surprisingly, given his choice of media. He has thus been consistently preoccupied with the eyes and skin, locations of interface between the human body and all that surrounds it. In this vein, Penone’s Rovesciare i propri occhi (Reverse Your Eyes, 1970), is a key work. It consists of a sequence of photographic slide projections showing the artist on a tree-lined road, each one zooming in on him until we can clearly see that his eyes are covered with mirrored contact lenses. In the dramatic final image we see Penone sightless and, in reverse, little convex reflections of what would otherwise be visible to him. He makes the point strongly that our knowledge of the world is derived ultimately from physical sensitivity. Many of Penone’s works, from the 1970s, involve impressions of his skin or magnifed images of eyelids."

http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/programme/current/event/299/giuseppe_penone/

Alchemy - soul and body and other reading notes ...

2009-11-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

"To the alchemists, imagination was the bond that tied the soul to the body."

"Imagination depends on our observation of reality and our somatic responses, in addition to relying on our unconscious mind - dreams, desires, and what Freud would have considered symptoms of the repressed."

Francine Degenais in "Eye and skin/gaze and touch", Image and imagination by Martha Langford

CCTV in disguise ...

2009-10-24T11:29:00.001-07:00

Tom Osman: "I thought that this cunningly disguised CCTV camera wouldn't be out of place at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Alas, this is no memoir of an exotic trip, it's in Hoxton"

Photograph: Tom Osman

Self-portraits

2009-10-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

For years now, I have been taking portraits of myself in mirrors or reflecting surfaces.
I am watching myself in the mirror.
I am watching myself in the screen of the photo camera.
Controlling the image of myself I am taking.
Controlling my image.

images reflected in eyes

2009-10-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Found images from Internet

Method and apparatus for maintaining eye contact in teleconferencing using reflected images

2009-10-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

Invention

Vision : eyes, brain.

2009-10-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

"Vision occurs neither in the eyes nor in the brain, but emerges from the collaboration of the eyes and the rest of the brain."

Vision : a collaboration of eyes and brain

"The brain needs to be trained to see.

Recent studies on visionics found that seeing-impaired patients had to be taught how to perceive light signals transmitted to the brain electronically by these systems. And in some cases, the patients preferred to return to their original state of blindness because they found the systems too confusing"

Francine Degenais in "Eye and skin/gaze and touch", Image and imagination by Martha Langford

Being part of the work ... dreaming the work ...

2009-10-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

I cannot exclude myself from the work I produce.
I must be part of the work.
I must feel and occupy the space of the work in a physical and sensitive manner.
I must experience the space of the work ...
Here,
My eye is the window of the shop.
My head is a terraced house.
My body is made of streets.
My shoulders, the Public Market.
My legs, avenues.
My fingers, hallways.
My nails, lampposts.

Looking for empty shops ... a visit to Longton

2009-10-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

Looking for empty shops, I went to Longton where three artists have been commisioned to do some works within the I love Longton project, lead by Urban Vision. I thought it would be less intimidating to be working in an area where other artists would have been ...

In the covered Market, I found Rachel Grant who is one of the commissioned artists and who also was part of Longhouse Action Research in 2008.

Rachel's store

more about Rachel in Longton

I found the market lovely and very busy. It's a funny place with little shops within a huge hall heated from the ceiling.

Another shop is used by I love Longton's artists : one side of it is in the market, the other side on the street. Really cute small space, I just loved it ...

side inside the market

on the street

So many shops are empty in Longton town centre, it's really sad ...

I spotted some other places by the Market, in the shopping area ...

This one (above) presents the great advantage to be completely dark so allowing projections maybe visible even by day time ...

On a very personal level, though, I would much more prefer to use a space within the market as it felt so warm and homy. I am also not sure if this area is busy after a certain time in the day ...

"Making art in the public realm", whatever it meant to me, I have to deal with exposing myself as a person and as an artist, in a very public space. The shop window here comes very much as a "show room", a display space, selling area ... What do I want to show ? Have I got anything to sell ?
I am finding myself very selfish of wanting to make a piece of work when and where nobody expects that kind of thing to happen ...

I am coming here to show people their own reflection, their own image ...
Why ? What is that ? What does that mean ?

Luc Courchesne

2009-10-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

Video conference from one bench in Montreal to one bench in Quebec ...

Rendez-vous... (1999) -- Mathieu from Luc Courchesne on Vimeo.

Eye, camera, shop

2009-10-06T06:46:00.001-07:00

EYE, CAMERA, SHOP

SHOP

SLR camera : the most most popular type of general-purpose camera for enthusiasts and professionals

2009-10-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

This type of camera has a moveable mirror behind the lens which reflects an image through a five-sided prism (pentaprism) or pair of mirrors, onto a glass screen (the viewfinder). This means the photographer sees exactly the same image that will be exposed on the recording medium (film or digital CCD).

When you press the shutter button, the main mirror is flipped out of the way so the light passes straight through to the recording medium as pictured below. As you do this, you notice the image briefly disappear from the viewfinder. There is also the familiar sound of the "camera click" as the whole mechanism works

The obvious advantage of this system is accuracy. If the image you see through the viewfinder is not exactly the same as the image on the recording medium (as in viewfinder cameras), the composition of the resulting photograph may be noticeably different to what you expected. The SLR camera makes sure this doesn't happen.

http://www.mediacollege.com/photography/camera/slr/

The eye works on the same principle as that of the camera.

2009-10-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

The eye works on the same principle as that of the camera.

The light rays from the object pass through the conjuctiva, cornea, aqueous humour, lens and vitreous humour in that order. All these structures refract the light such that it falls on the retina. This is called focussing. Maximum focussing is done by the cornea and the lens. The light then falls on the retina.

This light is received by the photoreceptors - rods and cones, on the retina. The absorbed light activates the pigments present in the rods and cones. The pigments are present on the membranes of the vesicles. Thus, the light is then converted into action potentials in the membranes of the vesicles. These travel as nervous impulses through the rod or the cone cell and reach the synaptic knobs. From here the impulses are transmitted to the bipolar nerve cells, then to the ganglions and then to the optic nerves. Thus the nervous impulses generated in the retina are carried to the brain by about a million neurons of the optic nerve. The vision is controlled by the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. The information received is processed and we are able to see the image. The image formed on the retina is inverted. However, the brain makes us see the image erect. So, though the eyes are essential for vision, any damage to the optic nerves also results in impairment of vision.

http://www.tutorvista.com/content/biology/biology-iv/nervous-coordination/vision-mechanism.php

My body is caught in the fabric of the world ...

2009-10-06T05:25:00.000-07:00

"Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body. "
"Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. “Nature is on the inside,” says Cézanne. Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

Things have an internal equivalent in me (…)."

pp 163-4, "Eye and Mind", Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in The Primary of Perception, 1964, Northwestern University Press

TVs and CCTVs - installation idea

2009-10-01T13:49:00.001-07:00

The passers by are being filmed by CCTV cameras, each one being linked to a TV screen and each one framing a different part of the viewer's body. The result on the TV screens is a fragmented body.

Learning Journeys - Urban Vision - Trip to BRISTOL September 2009 - Art and the Public Realm

2009-10-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

"Learning Journeys" by Urban Vision North Staffordshire Urban Vision North Staffordshire : the program consists of a series of 4 trips designed to “inspire, inform and educate the practice of delivering and engaging art in the Regeneration of North Staffordshire through a series of visits, experiences, seminars and interactive workshops.”.
For the 1st trip, we went to Bristol and had a tour around Stoke Croft : guided walking tour with resident Artist Chris Chalkley of Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft (Community Led public art and regeneration programme). We also went for a talk with Neville Gabie at the Architecture Centre where he introduced us to his projects for the Cabot Centre and we then went to the Cabot Circus to look at several Public Art pieces.

It was very interesting to discover these three completely different approaches for Art in the Public Realm.

The future of CCTV is mobile.

2009-09-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

"The future of CCTV is mobile. Rather than erecting concrete masts and building cameras into fixed spots in the city, cameras will be deployed in hot spots with a clear task and then redeployed somewhere else when their task is completed. Critics have long argued that CCTV simply displaces crime. Mobile camera installations will allow the authorities to more actively pursue it."
CCTV and (In)dividuation, Heather Cameron, 2004, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(2)/individuation.pdf

And this is certainly the future too ...

What have Kitty and Fido been up to, anyway?
See the world through the eyes of your 4-legged friends!
Built-in timer automatically takes photos.
You gotta get one of these!

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodinfo.asp?number=UM1538

CCTV systems cannot identify an individual person

2009-09-28T05:39:00.000-07:00

"Video does not faithfully reproduce the world, despite its claims to do so. Video surveillance in CCTV
systems differs from direct visual observation in many important ways including audio cues, three dimensionality, colour, time and frame. Video images do not tell a lasting truth, if they tell a truth at all. They identify a moment, not the depicted subject. CCTV systems cannot identify an individual person."

"It is increasingly the case that identification from CCTV has high levels of error. Researchers in Leicester University recently completed a study confirming results from Bruce et al. (1999) and Kemp, Towell and Pike (1997) that there is a very low rate (15-30%) of successful identification of individuals from CCTV material (Davis and Thasen, 2000). Even close up CCTV images such as those collected from bank machines did not guarantee accurate identification. According to the Davis and Thasen study there was still a 13% error rate when the viewer had continuous access to the recording."

Heather Cameron, 2004, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(2)/individuation.pdf

The perception of being under surveillance ...

2009-09-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

"A growing net of cameras with the potential to surveil an individual day in, day out, may in fact do no more than give that individual the perception of being under surveillance. That is what CCTV systems and even dummy cameras intend to do in order to deter that individual from committing a crime."

from : The Legal Regulation of CCTV in Europe, 2004, Marianne L. Gras

http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(2)/regulation.pdf

June 2009 - Outline of proposed action research idea based around digital media

2009-09-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

In my practice, I have recently started to challenge the use of the video camera by exploring the physical limits of its frame. So far, my video work has been focusing on myself performing in front of the camera. With the Action Research Project, I would like to explore and transpose my video installations ideas into the public space, offering interactive pieces in an everyday life context.

In public and private spaces, CCTV cameras are recording our images without us noticing. How public do we want our image to be and how much control do we have over it ? Through the use of live filming and projection in public spaces, I would like to investigate a new field for me: the limits and tensions between public and private images, confidentiality and disclosure. I would like to technically transpose and develop my previous self-centred trials into the public realm by installing the work in public spaces and putting the viewers (instead of me) in the centre of the visual interactions. I would like to explore the possibilities such interactive installations can open for the viewers to gain some power back over their image and to reach poetic dimensions.

I would explore the use of projectors, CCTV, video cameras, TV monitors and different types of screens; ideally involving pedestrians, but they could also focus on public buildings only. The installations would play with different processes: transposition of images and backgrounds, variations of scales and frames, trompe-l’oeil and mise-en-abyme.

PAST WORKS

CLICK on the pictures to enlarge

"What do you love ?", interactive and itinerant growing installation, 2002 - ongoing

"Rectangular Dance (...)", video installation for Conjunction08, Hanley town center.

Studio trials

Window reflections

2009-09-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

Images taken from the site specific video piece I made for Conjunction08.

passerby s

2009-09-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

Passerby seen from inside

Passerby seen from outside

Images from the site specific video piece I made for Conjunction08.

Conjunction08 INFORMATION

A window as an eye ...

2009-09-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

Windows as eyes ...

Eyes are the window on the soul ...

Eyes are the mirror of the soul ...