but i want to come back to writing for myself - to get thoughts out, or just to think through things through text
does this need to be done openly? probably not, but what's the harm when this is something that it really just for myself
im teetering on the edge of being able to venture out again
10 days of isolation
coming to an end
too much has probably already been written on this
im more interested in being self-interested
i want to read and write more again
now i have something occupying more of my time during the week i neeed to be considerate to how i move forward with my own practice
i dont want to let it slip behind
but the studio will do a lot to help out with that
as will reading, crossing between some theory, some fiction,
it's funny how when you have all the time when you are out of work, you struggle to find a minute to read, or at least you find it hard to justify that time to yourself to read,
because there is this sense, well at least for me there was, that to give up that time to read, means i could have been looking for a job, or maybe trying to make work
but at its core, i find reading to be fundamental to how i develop my ideas, and to think back over the last year, i think through a lack of reading, and a lack of really feeling like i can have time for myself has stifled my thought process and led to struggling at times to flesh out and develop ideas.
doom takes over more at that point, you feel like you shouldnt be wasting time
but actually when you are struggling you also lack the real brain space to take in reading in the same way
i could read
i literally started writing this too long ago - i've been out of isolation for over a week now - i should post this now
some quotes that have resonated with me while starting to think about what this project could become, and might offer a bit of direction
“One moment does not follow another, as a sequence of spatial givens that unfolds as moments of time. They are moments in which you lose one perspective, but the “loss” itself is not empty or waiting; it is an object, thick with presence. … You experience the moment as loss, as the making present of something that is now absent (the presence of an absence). You blink, but it takes time for the world to acquire a new shape. You might even feel angry from being dislodged from the world you inhabited as a contourless world.” - Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
“Lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition.” - Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
“Since one of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” - Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
“Animated films are for children who believe that “things” (toys, nonhuman animals, rocks, sponges) are as lively as humans and who can glimpse other worlds underlying and overwriting this one.” - Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
“Writing against the competing philosophical paradigms of structuralism and phenomenology (and hermeneutics in its phenomenological influences), Foucault rejects both the idea that subjects are the mere e√ects of external structures of intelligibility located in large-scale social systems and the idea that reality is an internal product of human consciousness. That is, Foucault refuses the humanist assumption that presumes the existence of an autonomous subject that stands before discourse-power-knowledge practices; on the contrary, Foucault is interested in analyzing the historical conditions that call forth certain kinds of subjectivity. At the same time, he also rejects structuralist accounts of the production of the subject via the imposition of an external system of Power, Language, or Culture. In particular, Foucault eschews Marxist treatments of ideology and false consciousness as well as humanist accounts that make reference to the intentionality of a unified subject, giving power an interior location within the consciousness of a subject whose interests are taken to be self-transparent. Indeed, Foucault cuts through the agency-structure dualism held in place by the clash between phenomenology and structuralism. In Foucault’s account, power is not the familiar conception of an external force that acts on a preexisting subject, but rather an immanent set of force relations that constitutes (but does not fully determine) the subject.” - Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
“According to Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking, writing, thinking, calculating, measuring, filtering, and concentrating. Discursive practices produce, rather than merely describe, the subjects and objects of knowledge practices. In Foucault’s account, these conditions are immanent and historical rather than transcendental or phenomenological. That is, they are not conditions in the sense of ahistorical, universal, abstract laws defining the possibilities of experience (Kant), but actual historically and culturally specific social conditions” - Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
“Anyone who has engaged with video games in the last three decades is familiar with the primary institution that games have been successfully deployed in service of: the consumer marketplace. Games were once created and mutated as a form of folk creativity, distributed and taught by word if mouth; (bold my own) the rehabilitation of games’ association with morally degenerate gambling made the family-friendly board game market possible, and the computing revolution enabled an explosion in the number of increasingly disposable product choices available for consumers” - Naomi Clark, 'What Is Queerness in Games, Anyway?', in Queer Game Studies (ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw)
"Bolter and Grusin say, "We call the representation of one medium in another 'remediation,' and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. ... The electronic medium is not set in opposition to painting, photography, or printing; instead, the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to materials from these older media, as if the content of the older media can simply be poured into the new one"." - Edmond Y. Chang, 'Queergaming', in Queer Game Studies (ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw)
"Queergaming is utopia, what José Esteban Muñoz calls "a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present ... that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing" - Edmond Y. Chang, 'Queergaming', in Queer Game Studies (ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw)
and a quick extended reading list, in addition to those quoted above
McKenzie Wark, Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, Katherine McKittrick, Katheryn Yusoff , Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sarah Elwood, Tim Ingold
i've got some example here of some early thoughts and what it is that i'm trying to get at
below are some images - videos - sounds - and quotes
some examples of collecting point cloud data from a simple landscape, the amount of points is changeable via the point density input
a render of changing the point density on a model i made of my kitchen
below are some quick versions of sounds created from datasets - i used https://musicalalgorithms.org to create these with just using a selection of the x co-ordinates from a point cloud, ultimately i want to write a script to feed into a DAW so i have more control over the initial midi instrument sounds
here is a link to some current works in progress, i've been experimenting with blender as a video editing tool, as well as trying to understand more about animating, and utilising blender's new geometry nodes
But I’m trying to comprehend avenues of exploration for research
And I’m thinking looking at ideas of phenomenology in relation to digital life/space is interesting. This can link into to research around repetition. Which I think is inherent in my practice. And often the forms i can be creating/reproducing (maybe regenerating) pieces (I was going to use work, but I don’t know if I want to distance myself somewhat from that word).
As an initial reading list
Fred Moten - ‘The Universal Machine’
Sara Ahmed - ‘Queer Phenomenology’
Giles Deleuze - ‘Difference and Repetition’
Laura U. Marks - ‘Skin of the Film’
Emanuel Levinas - unsure.
Martin Heidegger?
This list will expand. Some of it is coming off of who I know moten and Ahmed look at in their writings (Levinas and Heidegger). Marks’ ideas around hapticality I think will be interesting to look into and think about how touch can inform phenomenological perspectives — often a sensual experience of something can lead to the belief of it being real.
Maybe there’s interesting angles in looking into Cartesian dualism? And the schools of thought that go against certain strains of phenomenology.
This is a side thought — but does digital phenomenology create what can maybe only be described as a digital proximity, or at least a belief in such a proximity, to those that only exist digitally to us? I guess I’m trying to think about this in the way people create certain fan cultures, speak about celebrities as though they are friends, and have the ability to interact online with them, although most of the time only in a one directional way — fan to celebrity, though communication never returned — I dunno this is interesting because it feels like it links in to conversations we’ve been having to do with the ways in which social media, isn’t a space for particular discourses due to its limitations. It doesn’t encourage conversation as much as a cacophony of multitudes, voices from every direction saying the same and different. But without the unison that is apparent in a conversation. And I guess in this way it becomes (I’ve forgotten the word right now, but there’s a great word in 1000 Plateaus, to do with trees and linked to roots growing down from the tree) but it’s that, it’s coming from a particular stem every time. So you get these different roots that always link up to the main stem, but sometimes have their own offshoots as well.
And obviously there is something interesting existing within this practice of communication. In a lot of ways it feels like it emulates the manner in which books/magazines can operate. It’s like the editors letters, but more immediate. That you might ask something, but you probably won’t get a response from someone deemed bigger/reputable. This has kinda spiralled, but there’s maybe something to look at here that links.
addendum
as I'm copying and pasting this, I have this funny moment of pause
I couldn't exactly say what it is that is making me want to publish this out - I mean it really is just some inner thought scrawlings in relation to having been reading some of The Universal Machine
and there are some interesting things here, and I thinks it (alongside exploring different online exhibitions) has made me feel excited to try and put something together, hopefully with a group of people, I guess just depending on what the people I speak to think about it
I'm going to try and post on this more regularly again
I lost a lot of energy over the past few months and was only doing things sporadicly, so maybe trying to keep more of a digital record could be helpful
i dunno, there is something that i really enjoy about the imagery of these point maps i guess it gives this feeling of how a computer could see - this mixture of a heat map/point map
everything is constructed through these points, there's a strange atomisation of everything, the way a road marking is viewed is the same as how a person, or a vehicle is realised
it's a kind of holistic view of the world
and with this video - the manipulation of the view point gives a visualisation to the difference of the method of capture - because i think there's a pull to see this as a type of photography - and in a way you have this development process of the image, but maybe a question arises in thinking about this in Bathes terms of studium and punctum - could a 3D scan like this have a punctum? or maybe that is kinda the challenge of how you make sure this technology doesn't only become situated as just a tool because it maybe feels easier to assign the cultural position of the studium to an image/scan created in this way - and it almost feels double layered in its studium at the moment because of the relative newness of the technology
what's maybe interesting is that everything it is picking up is relative to something existing on different layers (textured)
looking at the comparison between these two images, you can see that the LiDAR has registered the STOP markings on the tarmac, raised painted marking, versus the stop sign that only shows the shape, with any printed marking being lost
to capture something with this - you need an element of depth - without depth you are left with a plain front
for a minute i was thinking that this maybe lends itself more to looking at natural forms, as there is much more likely to be elements of texture, less flat surfaces, but i guess in thinking about it more, i would be really interested to see the level of detail LiDAR could capture - because realistically even something we visually perceive as being smooth, is most likely going to have at least small imperfections
there's something about the contexts that this technology is being presented in by the creators - obviously it is very much linked to notions of automation, self-driving cars/smarter cars, and then in this warehouse setting - and in this warehouse setting, i guess it makes me think of maybe the above point of how does it register smooth surfaces? does there have to be an integration of LiDAR to allow some form of automated device/vehicle to move around the space, then another kind of barcode scanner that registers an item for collection - i think the thing is that the potential of technology like this for examination of spaces, whether that be natural sites (woodlands, rainforest, deserts etc.), and also for examination/recreation of historical sites feels very exciting, but obviously there has to be this push towards business, ways of seemingly making things easier, removing the potentiality of human error - gradually phasing out workers
i am looking at the moment at one particular maker of LiDAR sensors, but interestingly on their website i've just seen this "The OS1 now outputs fixed resolution depth images, signal images, and ambient images in real time, all without a camera...The OS1 captures both the signal and ambient data in the near infrared, so the data closely resembles visible light images of the same scenes"
i mean i'm still trying to fully understand how all of this works.
seeing as most people viewing my work are coming from my own facebook/instagram sharing, and are viewing on mobile i'm trying to have a bit of a rethink of how this all exists
i like it online, i think the desktop version works, but i feel like its not engaging people
there are a couple of changes i have planned
and im going to go back to unity to work out how to develop it as a mobile app - because maybe then people would explore the space? maybe it could be something that gets regularly updated
new spaces could be added?
i dunno it feels like it opens it up more to a way that people are engaging with.
