Wednesday, July 18, 2012










This being my first official "residency", I'm trying to understand what the time-spent fiddling to actual production ratio is. The first thing I'm learning, I guess, is to accept that the process is the work; I'm not going to just shit out perfection.

It's just that... I always thought that if I had 6+ hours a day, minimal distractions and adequate space to work on art, after just a few days I would have a pile of stuff. But it spreads itself thin like peanut butter. Wide, but thin. Not a lot of sandwiches to report just yet I'm afraid.

But I thought perhaps posting about what I’m at—regardless of how much I’ve finished— would establish some sort of trajectory for where I am and where I'm going, now that I'm about 10 days in.

To give a context, here’s what I proposed to the MoKS people when Max wasn’t going to be able to come for most of the residency and I had to say what I would do myself….

I would focus on the travel narrative/non-narrative side of the SOFAR Channel. As I think we talked about in the proposal, we conduct photographic and sonic-recording expeditions and later look for clues in the aleatory results of double- and triple-exposure photographic techniques and random audio recordings. We are looking for the non-narrative story below the surface.
As a writer, painter, radio-dj and dynamic reader, I'm interested in this place that exists between the narrative and the non-narrative. I am often searching for it in my sound work and hand-made books. How can you stretch and manipulate time and frustrate chronology in time-based media like sound, or in linearly-conceived techniques such as prose? What I would like to do is excavate and investigate some of my recent travels and work on a sonic-graphic book. The idea is to locate this place – or perhaps the better word is landscape -- that exists between the places I have seen, the unpredictable memories of them -- and the places that I read about/experience virtually. I would do so using sound and images acquired in my actual travels, and those virtual and imaginary ones that haunt me.Though I can't predict the exact product just yet – that will depend on my meditations while there -- I can say that I would like to produce an actual book (short, given the amount of time) that is complemented by sound. Both will be "-scapes" that are however not static, they will move without being linear or chronological.

So above some action shots from the 'book' I sortof said I'd work on. The shapes here are extracted from photos from Baku, which you can see in the brown-paper research slips in the last photo. Trying to somehow assemble like with like. Lots of mounds, arches, curves and bumps.

Aforementioned nouns that become images...

Meanwhile I've been doing the sort of surfing on the web that I suppose can be classified as artistic research. Spelunking the depths.... But hang on, maybe I'll do that in another post. For now, behold, studio in-progress-shots -- and voila, document it and I'm no longer doing nothing, nuh?

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