“Ultimately information consumers are not interested in whether or not an exhibition occurs; it is only the image the media constructs of the artistic event that matters.” From the chapter A Media Art (Manifesto) in Conceptual Art by Alexander Alberro, available on-line. This quote can explain how an audience can experience a piece of work; the source, visual image, it's material properties determine an audience experience. In terms of my own work, the digital image of my alphabet is physically more aesthetically pleasing, as a flattened, perfected image it is easier and more accessible to consume in a purely visual way. This goes back to something I mentioned in an earlier post about how an individual at an exhibition will immediately refer to the exhibition information for the meaning etc. This perhaps questions whether it is always necessary to have a physical version at all. The physical version of my alphabet will no doubt look a bit rough around the edges when presented large scale on the wall, a lot less than perfect. The physical texture and material will reveal imperfections an audience cannot experience from a digital image. The audience will be able to experience the physical presence, scale, positioning next to other work. The brief will be visible underneath the ink, informing the audience of meaning.

Total Alphabet

Sarah Walker Untitled, ink on 56 project briefs each 21cm x 28cm.

Alphabet on Sheet Music

This is an image I made to show how my alphabet could be translated and deciphered in an entirely different way. I think it looks interesting as an image in itself; the dots which correspond to the positioning of the letters on the brief are scattered in a crazy fashion around the music sheet. I think it would be quite interesting if I were to ask someone to adapt it to music. I had thought about creating somekind of conventions which apply the positioning of the letters to composing music.

Infinity Crossword

This image I have made is a sort of mock-up for an idea I had of creating a mirrored crossword. The idea was to have an image of a crossword surrounded by mirrors, creating the illusionary effect of an endless image. I hadn't thought of including words into the crossword, until it was mentioned at the crit. It wouldn't really work due to the text being reversed, anyhow, I prefer the space to be void of words, the idea is to create an illusion of vast space, the lack of text I think gives it a slightly odd quality which I like, the format feels a bit lost without the words.

nu-language

'By saying nothing at all, repeatedly and forcefully, you can wear your audience down much easier than by outright lying. It is easier to tire a room full of people out with junk syntax than it is to deliberately mislead. The opposition between lies and truth, between meaning and nonsense has been transcended. As Adorno puts it: ‘now nothing seems precisely the opposite of anything else’. Battles, political, artistic or philosophical, are no longer waged within language, which is precisely why we have so few meaningful debates. The hallmark of Nu-language is its inability to be refuted. If someone says something that doesn’t really make sense, it is impossible to oppose it, except to criticise the terms of the language itself. And how often can we turn round and say ‘I do not accept the very terms of your debate. Your language is all wrong!’ Nu-language is ideology without a counterpart, a battle waged at the level of the generic capacity to speak itself, a kind of amniotic fluid in which everyone exists and no one can escape. This kind of language without referent, this endless demand to keep speaking without making sense is characteristic not only of the contemporary artworld, but of businesses, academia and politics, all of whom learn something from each other (if the freelance curator is the artworld’s paradigmatic immaterial labourer, then the management consultant is surely the business equivalent). But it is in the artworld that we perhaps most often see the ill-digested consequence of the non-positions of nu-language. To take just one example: a recent conference on the idea of ‘Art after Aesthetic Distance’ states as its remit the following: Their projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships. Art historian Miwon Kwon stated that such work “no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process”. To ‘mediate’ ‘frameworks’ as ‘relationships’...one could switch the terms around with similar effect: to ‘framework mediations as relationship’, or perhaps to ‘relate mediations as frameworks’. The art historian quoted above is quite right to state that ‘such work’ likes to think of itself as a process rather than an object – if it stood still for more than five minutes someone might just notice that it makes absolutely no sense at all. The peculiar power of Nu-language, as a kind of pure formal currency, has precisely lead to a vapid never-ending abstraction that uses words like ‘consolidate’, ‘reconstellate’, ‘reconfigure’, ‘enhance’, ‘articulate’, as descriptors of some mythical ‘process’, like Hegel’s absolute spirit in a particularly insomniac phase. Nouns, like material products, appear to be out of fashion. This is not simply a claim about the superficial faddishness of individual terms, but a more serious point about the necessity of agrammaticism for forms of immaterial labour, of the constitutive need for language that no longer needs to ‘make sense’, just so long as communication itself keeps taking place. The proximity of the artworld to Blairism (whose use of ‘spin’ has been noted on many occasions) is not coincidental. The very cringe-worthy superficiality of ‘Cool Britannia’ and of Nu-Labour’s constant promotion of Britain’s ‘creative industries’ attest to the clinch between those that manipulate the language and those that orbit the rhetoric. The government’s own definition of such industries is itself a justification for the economical and cultural abuse of creativity, written in the very terms of Nu-language itself: [T]hose industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. Immaterial Labour indeed! This ‘exploitation of intellectual property’ that is at the same time based on ‘individual creativity’ is a frank admission that we do indeed possess all the signs of publicness, but no public to speak of (or out of). Whether we’ll ever find one in the depthless prose of the artworld is an open – but increasingly depressing – question. Of all the many stupid, irritating pieces of nu-language in the academy, the phrase 'speak to' (or, sometimes, 'talk to'), as in, 'I'll speak to this document in a moment' is enjoying a particular prominence at the moment. You can speak to a piece of paper all you like, but it's unlikely to ever give you a useful response.' http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2008/03/artworld-is-not-world.asp

I have been looking at the use of Surrealist Games as a way of producing arrangements of language to use as material. J and I played 'The Exquisite Corpse' game involving a number of players writing down articles, nouns, verbs and adjectives in a specific order before concealing them and passing the paper on, the picture equivalent is the well known heads, bodies and legs game, although it didn't seem to work very well. I am quite interested in the results of the questions game. Players write down questions before concealing them and passing the paper on. The next player writes a set of answers. Some examples: Do you like music? Absolutely pointless.

What's making you smile like that? The sound of rain.

What is your idea of a good time? Really boring.

What are you reading? Yes. Definitely.

How do you play the game? No way to say goodbye.

Is it raining outside? Very enjoyable.

Where are you from? I know the answer.

Are you awake? Just like honey.

Will you come with me? Very early in the morning.

Can you explain? I don't want to say it out loud.

What the fuck is that about? Being alive.

Do you like trees? It's making me want to die.

Why do you like it? Lots of information.

How are you? Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

What's a computer? Tired.

How do you live? The music of Sonic Youth.

How does it feel? A possibility.

Why am I confused? The way it was meant to be.

What does this mean? A girl sat naked on a chair.

What does it all mean? The dark outside.

What is the answer? My reason for living.

Just what is it that you want to do? In the universe.

Are you asleep?Upstairs.

What do you want from me? No.

There are lots of variations of this game, some seem quite complicated, this is one of the simplier ones, where the outcome would almost always read in the right way and rely purely on chance rather than intellegence.

'The surrealists initiated the most radically liberating critique of reason of the century. Their brilliant investigations were conducted through art and polemic, manifesto and demonstration, love and politics. But most specially and remarkably, it was through games, play, techniques of suprise and methodologies of the fantastic that they subverted academic modes of enquiry, and undermined the complacent certanties of the resonable and respectable. Playful procedures and systematic strategems provided keys to unlock the door to the unconscious and to release the visual and verbal poetry of collective creativity.'

I like the idea of the games being a pretty much pointless but fun exercise. The idea that they are intended to free words from the constraints of rational order. I feel like I want to continue experimenting playing the games, involving lots of people, perhaps I could do this through the blog, apparantly you can conceal the comments, if I figure out how to do this, then if people send me random questions and answers, I could compile the list, just a thought.

I think there are many ways I could realise this idea, visuals, sound. Although at the moment I am thinking about perhaps compiling a massive list of outcomes from the game, and playing around with formats, and different ways of presenting the infomation. This is an image I made from an english language pronounciation guide. I am attracted to the diagram aesthetically, the instructional desciption is interesting as an image. I have briefly looked into pronunciation of language. My aim in doing this is to discover how I can somehow convey a message of something which is invisible, liminal, shown in somekind of physical realm. This is all very vague really... I am very interested in how all this stuff ive been doing can be translated, I like how the diagram 'fine as in fine' articulates and defines the word. The visible word read as 'fine' can be read a million different ways. The diagram is instructional and concentrates upon the action of speech, phonetics. Syllables are counted as units of sound (phones) that they use in their language. The branch of linguistics which studies these units of sound is phonetics. Phones which play the same role are grouped together into classes called phonemes; the study of these is phonemics or phonematics or phonology.

I have started to think more about where my work fits in, at present i havn't made anything actually physical, i'm not sure i feel like like i should, writing things down seems to get things more clear in my mind. It was suggested to me that i think about thoughts as my material, handing on to the viewer a new thought. All i know is that i am interested in.. Lists Text Experimental Wordplay Signs Deciphering Information Keywords Search Engines Codes Misinterpreting Information Letter/Word Counts Punctuation Descriptions Formats of Text Having vague thoughts about different ways to reach an audience, through subconcious, instead of concious, indirectly, unintentionally, non-visually maybe. Thoughts as a material, invisible, liminal, figments. Thoughts are separate to the act of talking, spoken words, and separate to written words, breaks in communication. I came across a program called 'Text Arc'. A TextArc is a visual represention of a text, the entire text, on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. http://www.textarc.org/

I briefly looked at 'Death of the Author', by Roland Barthes. In his essay, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author's identity; his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes, to distill meaning from the work. This theory is applied to the interpretation of text, but is relevant when thinking about the way in which we view art. "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables), for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a famous quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority.") The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate." Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot.

In Art this could open up ideas about how work is exhibited, how being as important as what. Fundamentally, each individual will read work according to their own personal choice, cultural background etc. The 'Author' cannot possibly be in control of how their work is widely read. I have been thinking about my personal approach when viewing work. When I make myself aware of it, I think I often tend to look quite passively. Perhaps in a gallery situation people can become desensitised to the work due to being forced to actively look at things, looking being predominant. The physicality could be an obstruction as it requires somekind of immediate response. The natural tendancy to form a definitive evaluation of things, forces you to search for the artists statement about the work. There is confusion between what you initially think, then what you should think now you know the true meaning.

I watched the culture show the another night, there was a feature about the current exhibition at The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester called Subversive Spaces: Surrealism + Contemporary Art. Uneasy and disoriented visitors to Gregor Schneider’s Kinderzimmer will find themselves groping their way into the blacked-out space of the usually sunlit South Gallery of The Whitworth Art Gallery, moving toward an eerily lit nursery. The children’s rooms have been recovered from a village in Schneider’s Rhineland home, erased to make way for opencast mining. I'm not sure if the presenters reaction was genuine or not, but the works purpose seemed to be concerned with giving the audience somekind of disturbing experience. The work could only be seen by going through the dark, confined space one person at a time, so perhaps this could effect the individuals response. This is something i have been thinking about, the gallery space as a social environment contains distractions, it would be interesting to regulate this in someway.

Getting round to writing took some time...a bit unsure as to the approach. A brief comment about the exhibition of last week at the Met Gallery, Perhaps Nothing, Perhaps Something. After a bit of thought on the experience it occured to me my main thoughts were concerned with the non physical conditions of the gallery space. By this I mean the atmosphere of the place, how this is affected by uncontrollable factors. Galleries can be quite confusing places to begin with, personally I tend to feel intimidated at times. Particularly at the Met opening, I observed the type of people who were there, typically looking creatives. It made me think about the codes of conduct people must learn for this situation. I think perhaps each Gallery can carry its own sense of space, which inadvertantly controls the behaviour of the audience, effecting their involvement. The Met Gallery space is relatively small divided by a wall in the centre, work was positioned on either side, some free standing, some mounted on plinths on the walls. People were taking up most of the space, crowded around the work, with little personal space it was difficult to appreciate. Just a thought, perhaps there is an expectation at a viewing more so at at any other time to feel as though you should be engaged in the work. An exhibition opening is an event in itself that makes us aware of being required to have some sort of experience, whether it be with the work itself or the people there. Perhaps there are too many distractions when viewing work; such as its positioning close to other work and so on. I find interesting the invasion of personal space you often feel in an exhibition setting; the sense of tension between members of the audience, you are being indirectly observed whilst you are aware of others, or maybe this is just me? This could be something to think about and a factor that could be controlled, perhaps in allowing a limited number of people in at any one time, I like the idea of work being viewed in a solitary way. Plan to visit some ongoing exhibitions in Leeds & possibly a few in Manchester over the weekend, will be interesting to observe the differences discussed.