ProJeCt RuLEs
- don't judge your work during the process
- commit to the process fully
- something insignificant can become important when repeated/displayed as a collection
- embrace discomfort
- creating rules/restricting allows focus
- connect mind and body
- test to determine optimum duration/scale
- make it personal
iNiTiAL idEaS - project 1
Option 1: process based
Option 2: concept based
Option 3: rule based
Option 4: experience based
After doing the beginning experiments in class that helped us understand how we can approach the notion of time, I feel most drawn towards responding in a process/rule based way, particularly in the style of the continuous line drawings we did. Alternatively, I am interested in the experimental aspects of long exposure photography, and this is something I could investigate through concept and experience. After having a short tutorial with my tutor (Tuesday) before deciding how to individually develop the project, I was advised to think more upon my subject. It is all good having ideas about how I can produce the work in regards to encompassing time and duration as a main theme, but if the pieces have no subject, other than the method of making, itself, then it is lacking in interest massively.
I was given 30 minutes extra to come back to the tutorial with a subject matter and new, refined concept. This intense period of time, interestingly, forced me to produce more ideas and potential approaches because I was under pressure. I get the exact same feeling when I am rushing for a train, bus, or appointment. This got me thinking about maps, and how whenever I use google maps, the estimated time it takes to get there is never the same as what it actually does, whether slower or faster. Furthermore, I really enjoy walking and running, and when I do, I lose track of time because I am enjoying myself. I thought about this as a way of measuring time and distance, juxtaposing how when you experience boredom, time goes so much slower, thus the distance I am (theoretically) walking/running/travelling feels much further.
I also reflected back to the artist/designer image presentation when being introduced to the 40 Hours project in class, as the designer, Stefanie Posavec, created data maps in a visually appealing and graphically considered way. These beautiful lines, graphs, and collections of data became representative of time, took time to complete, but also were presented in such an appealing way. For me, it was the building of data and the amount she collected over a year that made the simple lines and illustrations most impressive.
Therefore, my proposal for part one of this 40 Hour project is to revert back to the original reference to the 40 hour working week, and take the typical 9-5 working day as my time span to walk/run through London continuously. In doing this, I will create a continuous line on an A2 folded piece of paper (as a basic booklet). This line will reflect the duration of each hour I spend walking, each hour having its own booklet to then curate a volume of pieces to represent the whole "working" day of walking. I have chosen a grey coloured pen - black looking too blunt, and colours becoming gimmicky - to bring a clean finish to the work. Reflecting on the experiments I did in class, the continuous line pieces I did became quite messy and confusing quite quickly, and so by choosing a large piece of paper, breaking each hour into a different booklet, and using minimal tones, I hope to reduce this, resulting in a beautiful outcome of simple lines. Building on the concept, the lines will not have metric measurements or accuracy of distance, but rather reflect the experience of me walking as an enjoyable past time, longer lines being when time feels longer, and shorter lines and corners showing fast paced turns and interesting movements. Moreover, I could hold the pen on the paper when I am not moving, for example, standing at traffic lights or pausing for a rest. When I leave the pen on the paper, the ink spreads into interesting splodge shapes, and I like how the different lengths of holding the pen still leads to different sized circles, further providing a visual reference to the duration of stillness.
iNiTiAL idEaS - project 2
The process of experiencing time for the creation of my first part of this project was definitely more physical, and I really felt the effects of walking around for the length of a working day on my body afterwards. For part 2 of the 40 Hours project, I would prefer to be less active, and experience the length of time in a different way. Again, I referred back to the introductory presentation of artists and designers that works fall in line with this task, and I felt greatly inspired by those who played with the concept on time within photography and film. Douglas Gordon experimented with time through slowing down Alfred Hitchcock's film, 'Psycho', to last 24 hours. I found this approach of manipulating the real time of film into something impossibly long, unbearable and unrealistic. Moreover, Hiroshi Sugimoto created photographic work of films in his project titled 'Theaters', when he took film photographs of entire films in one frame by leaving the shutter open the entire duration of the movies. I love the idea of the symbolism within the image, the bright white of the screen area on the image representing the length of the film, usually 2 hours long. Yet, the content of the film is indistinguishable. Darren Almond's "Full Moon series" is carried out with a similar technical method to Sugimoto. He takes extremely long shutter speed images on the nights of full moons, the light reflecting so strongly on the earth below that the images reveal what appears to be a beautifully mystical, foggy and surreal day time environment. The powerful combination of light and time working in hand to create a deception of evidence of time within photographs is what interests me most, and inspires my idea for project 2 for 40 Hours.
My project proposal for part two of the 40 Hours project to to spend another "working day" in the environmental constraints of the analogue photographic darkroom that I am a member of. These conditions will be challenging on me physically (but in a less active way than for my part 1 project) - my eyes adjusting to darkness and red light for a long period of time, standing on my feet all day, wetting and drying my hands continuously - somewhat like the rules we set ourselves in the initial experiments and introductory tasks. I have a roll of film that I recently took that shows, simply, my daily life, routine, and everyday experiences in a basic documentary style. Fittingly, the roll (when developed) will lend to the 40 Hours project through the basic connection to time, and photography being a medium that captures stills of time, specifically here, how I spent my time during that day. In the darkroom, I plan to undertake a range of different experiments, drawing on the exploration of the effects of time in the darkroom environment, a space that depends on the relation between light and length of exposure:
- layered exposures - negative 1, negative 1 and 2, negative 1 and 2 and 3, negative 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, etc... till the entire roll is layered (?)
- contact sheets of mini daily pics, playing with scale and intricacies of time v size
- moving the paper during exposure - movement versus stationary - links to the part 1 project for 40 Hours in which I explored a more graphic representation of movement through lines and stationary through spreading circles of ink
- Journeys - large scale test strips as images - reinforcing the effects of different timings on photographic paper, evidence of the periods of time spend in exposure, pale to dark...
I plan to keep all test strips to show how long time effects the photos. IMPACTS OF TIME... EXPERIENCE OF TIME...
Stefanie Posavec - Dear Data
"Every week for a year we collected and measured a particular type of data about our lives [Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi] (examples include how often we laughed, the negative feelings we felt, times we were alone, our wardrobes, books, music, and so on). At the end of the week we used this data to make a drawing on a postcard and then dropped the postcard in [the post]... Eventually, the postcard arrived at the other person’s address with all the scuff marks of its journey over the ocean: a type of 'slow data' transmission, culminating after a year in a collection of 104 unique esoteric datasets and visualisation methods."
- Stefanie Posavec
http://www.stefanieposavec.com/dear-data-about/
I really enjoy the colourful and busy visual language used in the "Dear Data" project. In a deeper sense, I am also interested by the investment of time in creating handmade postcards, and sending them overseas, which is very time consuming, but ultimately lends to the whole connection to the 40 Hours project.
Ed Ruscha– Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966
Having studied the content of Ed Ruscha's 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip' for a previous project, I am looking back at the work in regards to the layout and design on the accordion-styled booklet. I want to create an unfolding "map", that slowly exposes my route around London, just as the buildings are slowly shown page at a time when unravelling the work of this book here.
miD-ProJeCt tUtoriAL NOTES
Consentina fold of paper booklets - spring out naturally. If they were to be in a box (container) it would be compressing the natural flow and bounce of the time that they represent.
Symbolism of a box - compresses the time symbolised through the objects inside of it. --- Contains time
With darkroom prints, could experiment with different processes that encapsulate time
Double exposure, building with all the negatives until one picture have every frame layered - the whole day in one picture. Would be messy but metaphorical of the layers of time that make up life…
Think of other experimental processes to do in the darkroom before embarking on the improvisation element of the project.
FINAL LAYOUT OF BOTH PROJECTS
Box?? Links the two projects, as well as the way in which they both take the average day and turn it into something visually other.
Box contains the time shown through the visuals of the work.
???
Hiroshi Sugimoto - Theaters
"I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: "Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? " The answer: "You get a shining screen. " Immediately I began experimenting in order to realize this vision. One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening I developed the film, and my vision exploded behind my eyes." - Hiroshi Sugimoto
Darren Almond - Full Moon series
"In Fullmoon, the conceptual meets the poetic: in more than 260 photographs, British artist Darren Almond catches landscapes around the globe, under the particular light of a full moon.
With the shutter kept open for over a quarter of an hour, rivers, meadows, mountains, and seashores are illuminated almost like daybreak, but the atmosphere is different: a mild glow emanates even from the shadows, star-lines cross the sky, and water blankets the earth like a misty froth. The enhanced moonlight infuses the landscapes with a sense of the surreal or the sublime, and with haunting ideas of time, nature and beauty."
[https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/03123/facts.darren_almond_fullmoon.htm]
PrOjeCt oNe ReFleCtiOn
Today I spent 8 hours, 9-5, walking around the streets of London, beginning as I got off the train at Waterloo, and ending up in the area around Bond Street by the end of the average working day. First thing I noticed when walking and drawing the lines simultaneously was that they are much more jagged and rough in appearance, something I actually did not consider when doing my tests. Furthermore, one difficulty I experienced was the fact that, in order to save myself from drawing messy, overlapping lines due to my lines not being to scale or geographically accurate with my walk, I found myself forced to take alternative routes to avoid crossing drawn paths, despite not having walked there already. I also had to make sure where I was walking fit within the A2 paper, and so when I felt the road was taking ages to walk, and the line was much longer, I had to create diversions in the journey, actually making it more interesting ! Something I think that worked really well is the different styles of line and what they portray: long lines not necessarily for long roads, overlapping lines for going up levels of a building, as in book 2 when I ventured into the Tate Modern and continued to document the smaller movements round the several floors of the building. Also, book 5, the hour during which I had lunch, shows just a single spread ink circle in one section of the page. Not only does this symbolise the long period of time that I was stationary for, but I feel it is rather impactful as well. It makes a statement and is clear what it is showing for that amount of time. I have always enjoyed this style of line drawing, with continuousness, and so I am happy with the visual results of this entire days' work.
To develop my work following todays production, I plan to make a kind of case for the 8 booklets, to hold them as a collection/volume, in their order.
PrOjeCt tWo ReFleCtiOn
Completing part 2 of my 40 Hours project today, I feel I have managed as much as I could within the time spent in the darkroom. I am relatively happy with the series of progressive photographs following the layering negative process. One day to distinguish which negative I added to the pile exposed onto each photo is with a small cutout from the contact sheet on the back of each physical print. This creates a flashcard-like feel to the work. Although I enjoy the tactile element like this, as well as the different in scale, with the small image on the back like an insight to the bigger picture, this does create a challenge in terms of how I chose to finally present the outcomes. I had been playing around with the idea of mounting the images in a timeline styled long frame, however that will take away the opportunity to view the backs of the prints. Perhaps I could emphasise the flashcard nature of them, creating a box to place them in, further lending to the concept of the box symbolising the containment of time, as in part 1 of the 40 hours project. Alternatively, I could bind all the prints to form a concertina folding book, unfolding and expanding to emphasise the length of time.
Some challenges I faced in the darkroom include the constraints of the photographic paper, in terms of layering the negatives, and how much light could get through. I found the alignment of negatives difficult, and actually the time aspect of the project became very tiring, waiting for the images to expose, with some prints needing 10-15 minutes of light exposure to show anything because of the sheer number of layered negatives. I wish I had spent more time exploring the possibilities of the other processes I listed to explore, however I felt that the layering technique had the deepest connection to the concept of time and how we experience it visually through photography.
The whole darkroom process began as a real trail and error experiment. Because of this, I forgot to really include the time equated doing test strips as a contribution to the whole experience of time. I did, however, keep the majority of test strips, and have stuck a selection in my sketchbook to reflect the process. Ultimately, I believe the visual depiction of increased time, layered time, and the daily routing is strong in this second part of the 40 Hours project. Although the links to part 1 could be stronger, I know I can connect them through the format of final layout.