Stop moving. Stop moving so completely and utterly fast. Why is quicker better. Why is the next thing better than the last. The duality of past and present. The sense that we are stuck in limbo. Limbo. Like a movement with no direction, ongoing. Interactive, social. Old not new.

soundboard from kasumi on Vimeo.

SOUNDBOARD investigates the potential for meaning that adheres in increments of physical movement: the marks it leaves through the materials of motion and sound. Using only the sound created from the dancers’ bodies as they come in contact with the floor and each other, it is a study of the human body as it marks its position in space and time, and the very intimate, organizing rhythms that musical force brings to the equation of world and self. Muscles and tendons, joints and skin respond to the recursive structure of repetitive musical forms, conjured into movement, into dance and music. SOUNDBOARD seems to have evolved from a similar aesthetic of the intensely controlled spontaneity of my large scale ink drawings (shodo) dating from the late 1980’s while still in Japan.

Capoeira is a fantastic dance which plays with the moves of martial arts, dance and sport, it is a highly physical and 100% active piece of dance which invariably captures and exemplifies not only the repetition of movement but the repetition of high intensity exercise. The dance incorporates balance, speed, agility whilst confronting a dancing partner whom they interact with. There are so many qualities of the dance which can be drawn out into a video piece, the basic move from step to step (as seen above) could be repeated.

Speaking to the dancers, there is a potential to develop a narrative, perhaps to involve a piece of drama. It would be interesting to place these dancers under a spotlight on a stage setting. To film them with a piece of video projected on top of them completely still. All of this set up will be recorded and then placed back into the gallery. This will involve, the layering of complete opposites - stillness and movement. Through video I will then take it back to the gallery where I will project it and thus continue and ongoing framing of a video framed and layered.

Next week involves this filming. Watch this space.

Inspirations I watched this video initially for the dancers, however, the Seaweed video presented at the beginning is a piece of work developed by two artists practicing in London, still trying to get hold of them, it's proving pretty impossible. The dancers are incredible and a massive influence (here).

11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University

This video celebrates the 'slowness' of movement, the dynamics of each move is emphasised because each gesture is slowed down to such a degree we are sensitive to every movement. Movement is a way of designing space, like Creed once referred to appropriation as the manipulate of the air we breathe and the space we move in.

What about the movements we do but placed in a different context. Carsten Holler's exhibition in the US focusses upon 'experience', obviously within the exhibition environment and the gallery context. The fairground ride is the epitome of repetition, it places a number of people within the same mechanical transporation...

Research in Ballroom Dancing.....in context.....

A video which aims to hijack our concept or perception of where we are and what we're looking at, how quickly is time passing by, and the assurance and consistency in repeating ourselves. There's no anxiety when we know what to expect.

Solakov's exhibition at the Ikon demonstrated a snippet of some of his works (collectively picked by the Ikon gallery as part of four exhibitions...) the progression of his work revealed the acknowledgement of boundaries and borders and then the escape from these borders. Solakov integrates the context within the work and plays around with this.


Still reading about schizophrenia:

Time, Space, and Schizophrenia
Crucial to Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern and his project of a cultural politics is the transition from a temporal logic to a spatial logic in postmodernism. The global capitalist or late capitalist culture is, as we have seen, what Jameson calls postmodernism. The spatialization of time is a result of the destruction of the temporality of the subject, of societies move towards schizophrenia. Time is an organizing system, a continuity within which the subject may situate him/herself as a unitary individual. Within multinational capitalism we find ourselves able only to map the globe.
However it is critical for the subject to be able to mentally or cognitively map him/herself within not only a geographically global system but also within a social one. Humans used to map themselves temporally within the scheme of history. However, as the subject becomes more fragmentary, as the subject approaches a society within which one finds the end of historicity, the ‘real’ diminishes while schizophrenia flourishes. Postmodernism was originally characterized by its refutation of the objective and totalizing truths of modernity; truths are deflated as one is left with nothing ‘real,’ just the empty shell of the contemplated referent and the subject and his/her contemplation. This “breakdown of the relationship between signifiers”, between the subject and how he/she contemplates the object, results in a schizophrenic reality.

A video which highlights and captures the nature of repetition in sync with a rhythm, the progression of the video accompanied the unfolding of the audio sound. Enjoy.

The short documentary film 'Life in a Day' (2011) captures a day in the life of over 400 people as they wake up to and exist in July 24th 2010. The film pays homage to the moments, the rituals and the routines of humanity throughout the globe and identifies the differences and similarities in varying lives of people.

"Betsy Sharkey described the progression of the film: "Beginning with videos that start pre-dawn then moving through morning, afternoon and evening, ... the rituals that define a day begin to emerge. Beyond an extraordinary range of cultures, terrain and styles reflected, which are captivating on their own, the film stands as a stirring reminder of how ordinary and yet eclectic humanity can be. If "Life in a Day" is any measure, we are a quirky, likable, unpredictable and yet predictable bunch."

(BBC Life In a Day)

I directed the camera to move backwards, to chase after me and effectively reverse the set up seen in the previous videos. I had less control moving backwards, but there is something exciting in the way the backdrop seems to be moving against the runner. I want to develop running backwards in further videos as a way of recontextualising and DE-constructing the movement.

The cinemagraph encapsulates and highlights a short period of time and repeats it in a compulsive and infinite loop, it focusses upon the moments which are briefly forgotten by emphasising slight movement against a still backdrop. These are examples of my interpretations of cinemagraphs...

The act of 'appropriation' reveals the way in which artists effectively adopt a concept or an act from a previous artist or an object or concept from culture and features within their work to 'enrich or erode conventional definitions of what artwork can be'. Just like Richard Prince 'appropriated' (capitalised..) on previous artist's images such as Patrick Cariou, if Prince's work is a copy, which effectively becomes an 'original' because it is now owned and modified by Prince then what happens to the other original? Martin Creed's view on 'appropriation' is far more liberally interpreted, as he appropriates the 'air we breathe and the world around us with frantic enthusiasm' (reference).

In the article written by Jan Verwoert 'Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels so Different' she brings up Robert Longo, an artist who in the 1970s appropriated actors and put them in freeze frame photos where they expressing great potential of movement. Verwoert also cites Cindy Sherman who appropriated the visual language of Hollywood. Appropriation has two historical moments where its definition did not change but was slightly different, beyond the Cold War and World War 2 there was a break in historical continuity and therefore it was a natural progression to return back to the past. Currently "the reason why appropriation remains relevant as a critical (art) practice – is the undiminished if not increased power of capitalist commodity culture to determine the shape of our daily reality" (reference). It is through appropriation that we are able to cut a slice from the multiple layers that control it - essentially to detach it from any of its power relations associated with society - and to place it in a new setting which it acts or performs as something entirely different.

"How would you clarify the status of ownership of something that inhabits different times, that travels through time and repeats itself in unpredictable intervals, like for instance, a recurring style in fashion, a folkloristic symbol that is revived by a new political movement to articulate its revisionist version of a country’s history or a complex of second rate modernist architecture occupied by residents who know nothing of its original designs but still have to find a way of living with the ghosts that haunt the building" -

When I am running in my videos, am I appropriating from Martin Creed's work - or would there be certain qualities of his work which I would have to replicate, surely the replication of the concept of running alone could be appropriation. Furthermore, is it possible to appropriate something that is timeless?
 'Things that live throughout time, in any unambiguous sense, pass into anyone's posession' - if I was to create a video of someone running, am I not therefore, owning them? Owning their act, their very movement?

oliviaontherun

Oliviaontherun

 If "art is the speech of dead language" then appropriation is the act of producing allegories of the 'present ruinous state of the historic language of modern art' - that an allegory revives the past forms..the death of modernism is revitalised.

I am going to cling onto what Jameson says about schizophrenia as it is undeniably relevant to the points I am questioning about time and the confusion of time. Appropriation is the constant jumping back and fourth, where the present holds up a mirror to the past, which then points to the future as the new original and so on.

"Schizophrenia implies a loss of the mental capacity to perceive time as ongoing in a consistent order, which results in the inability to organise experiences in coherent sequences that would allow them to make sense, which in turn generated a heightened sense of the visceral and material presence of the isolated fragments of perception. He writes that “as temporal continuities break down, the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material’: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy.”
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’, p. 120.

There is a potential to perceive like a schizophrenic, to be unable to make sense and order of sequences and events resulting in this desire to cling onto the present. Continuity is broken and all sense and order is completely detached. It is possible to remove movement from its context, to place in a new setting, and to forget the order that the context attaches to it, what if time becomes an inconsistent and unsure element to the setting, what if it is completely hijacked and forgotten.

Derrida urges us to 'learn to live with ghosts' to approach them in a way in which we can hear the voices from the past, Verwoert uses the word 'guidance' as appropriation today is the acknowledgement that a death has occurred, but the ghosts of modernity are here to stay.