SEAM 2009 – Spatial Phrases
the symposium was varied with keynotes, presentations of papers, performances, screenings and exhibitions.
It triggered personal thoughts about the making process going through seamed or seamless interaction between space, architecture, body and cinema (frame/screen): from articulating personal and collaborative practice to eventually presenting works in various forms including – but not only – academic papers. It left me with questions about the need of description, the practice itself of writing, and creating our own vocabulary/language, generating a code/diagrams.
Listening to some talks, I felt there were like stacks of tags which could be a shortcut to present/remember my notes. In ‘tag’ fashion, my favourite form is the cloud. Below I organise them by :
– family: module, modulation, co-modulate
– un-definition and un-determination: perceptual shift, liminality, intermediality, fluidity, blur, fracture, in the glitch, slippage
– funny how re-, de-, un- and other suffixes are used: re-explore, dis-ruption, un-predictable, re-signal, re-inject, de-stabilise, de-fragment, un-define, un-do, etc. Is it a way to re-novate the wheel in the digital era (example: organic round photographic grains becoming digital square pixels!) ?
– physical experience : exercising, exorcising, transformative/ transformational
– internet vocabulary: platform, surfing (together as a way of being in the same movement of energy), activation, mapping
– design vocabulary: responsive with speed and scale, participatory models
– poetic license: traversing, spatial autobiographical narrative
Funny to observe, throughout the symposium, recurring quotations from Deleuze and images like Piranese Prisons!
Other questions I am pondering:
– when speaking about dramaturgy: what is the difference and complementarity of dynamic and syntax? Can it be compared with musical composition?
– is it because of a lack of depth that people question the surface? Or maybe it is a fear of the unknown of the depth? Is the surface the skin? what is under the skin? Is the weight/counter-weight of content the interface/form/look?
– Does abstraction lead towards a mysticism? If there is no narrative, is it abstract? What about the impact of analogies?
– Why am I attracted to illusion? to kinaesthetic feel and particularly via the medium of projections? Is tri-dimensionality tricking perception and consequently, something out of control? Why am I interested in using various sources of content simultaneously? Is it because of the slippage? that it will go out of synch, out of phase with time? and how thrilling to see/feel when it is happening? Food for thought…..
Just some reflexions in relation with the “other questions”:
– about mysticism and abstract: I don’t think they are related. But mysticism, sometimes, can free the artist of any effort of meaning; because in a mystic view of universe, meaning is always there. So the artist doesn’t nedd to affect himself a meaning to his creation and that can sometimes help him to free himself of the prison of rational requirement. In this way, mysticism can help to advance in the poetic lands of artistics adventures.And poetry is alos the third way, no narative no abstraction. Wich is may be what you indicate about analogy?
– about the suffixes of re-, de- un-, they are quite representative of the intellectual and artistic mood of today, and echoes what you say about surface: art, and intellect, have became their own object, especially, but not exclusively in virtuals crations. Why? Difficult to say, but I think you make a point about fear of the depth. Except that depth is in fact the reality outside, and the deepest relations with it through emotions. So, in fact it is the consequence of this fear, and sometimes a attempt to fight it.
That conducts to the Piranese prisons: the actual mood of creations and, once again, particularly when it involves to use always the screen can also give an feeling of imprisonement. But the attraction of the Piranese prisons is also that those prisons, with their infinite complexity evocates some kind of organic combinations, and combinations are the basis of any creative games, so of any creation.
(I hope my english is understandable!)
thanks Pierre! your English is really good.
am thinking about the how “to advance in the poetic lands of artistic adventures”, trying to find a torch!talking about organic combinations: am editing a video with caterpillars…frames within the frame…weaving the frame!