Category: Uncategorized
Pin-hole Brighton
The other weekend I took some pinhole camera pictures of Brighton beach using my zeroimage pinhole camera. I have the Zero 6×9 multiformat deluxe edition – it takes medium format film, and has simple wooden shutters allowing you a choice of formats, from portrait, 6×6, 6×9 and panoramic. Its very easy to set up and use, and the film I’m experimenting with (Kodak 400NC and Kodak Portra 400BW) are extremelt tolerant. I’ve been bracketing between 1-4 sec exposures, and the differences are marginal. The pinhole has an fstop of around f215, so you can take a reading for any fstop and exposure time, then use a wheel on the back of the camera to judge the reading for f215.
As there is no viewfinder, i’m still getting used to the range of the pinhole, so that I can imagine the picture i’m taking better. I’m still not really there, hence the large amounts of pebbles in these pictures!
Rose Esme – from now until she is 21 (part 1)
My daughter, Rose Esme, was born today at 11.05am. As a way of celebrating this fact, I thought I’d do a google search for predictions about how life in the UK might change over her first 21 years. Lots of the searches yield mostly generic business plan predictions, so i’ve tried to pepper them with odd little statistics or facts. I’ll post the results up in groups of 7 over the next few days (assuming I get time, that is…)
2005 – Rose is 1
‘Chip and PIN’ cards will be rolled out across the UK
BT will have Broadband across 100% of the UK
Hearing Screening for Newborn Babies will be available across the country
2006 – Rose is 2
Power cuts will be crippling the UK
The Water Vole will be extinct
It will be against the law to discriminate job candidates by their age
2007 – Rose is 3
Wiltshire will be the safest place to live
There will be a new pill to help men with premature ejaculation
God will be working in all twelve areas of the UK
2008 – Rose is 4
Cannabis shops will have opened for business
There will be 2 credit cards for every adult in the UK
The amount of obese children in the UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands will be the same as the US (16%)
2009 – Rose is 5
The £2 coin will commemorate the 350th anniversary of temperature measurements
Linear TV will be dead
The RAF will get new Joint Combat Aircraft
[2009 seems to be a very unpopular year for predictions. Maybe its an odd number to target, or perhaps it’ll be a very dull year.]
2010 – Rose is 6
3% of the UK’s energy will come from renewables
There will be over 4 million people with diabetes
There will be double the number of Brown Hares (Lepus europaeus)
2011 – Rose is 7
The Subway sandwich chain will have more than 2,00 stores
4.6 million people will be over the age of 75
De-beaking of hens will be prohibited
Alpha Male
Thomas Haywood is a London-based photographer, working mainly in colour medium-format. His website has a selection of his work, including the fantastic series Alpha Male – pictures of men lying prone in urban locations, looking like drunks or perhaps sunbathers who have fallen asleep. Also lovely are the photographs in the Twilight and Passing Through series. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine thingsmagazine and cityofsound would love…
Tate New Media Conference – Part 4
Tate New Media Conference – Part 3
Tate New Media Conference – Part 2
Tate New Media Conference – part 1
British New Media Art 1994-2004
A few weeks ago, I attended a conference at Tate Britain to launch the book New Media Art: Practise and Context in the UK 1994-2004. Steve Dietz gave a very good introductory speech, with a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the ‘YNMBAs’, the Young New Media British Artists who had developed under the diverse support from funding and commissioning agencies like Film & Video Umbrella, FACT and Locus +. Using Lev Manovich’s assertion that we live in a keyword-driven database culture, he regrouped the work produced over the last decade in a number of arbitary thematic or formal categories, pointing out in passing how diverse and international a group the putative ‘YNMBAs’ actually were. Having mapped out many possible narratives, Dietz asked why there was so little discourse around New Media Art. There are many mailing lists like Rhizome that keep the global digital media community active and connected, and magazines like MUTE that place digital media within a wider political and cultural milieu, but, for Dietz, there is no debate about the artworks themselves to compare with that of mainstream contemporary art. By casually inventing a handful of taxonomies, Dietz demonstrated how few critical theories there are around the aesthetic qualities of new media art, and how few arguments there are about the ones – like Manovich’s The Language of New Media – that already exist.
Unfortunately, the rest of the conference failed to take this challenge, and felt like a series of unconnected panels alternating between lectures and presentations of artists work. Most disappointing was the session with Charlie Gere and Geoffrey Batchen. I’m a huge admirer of Batchen’s writing on vernacular photography, and had hoped that he would have taken the opportunity to expand this to digital media. Instead, he presented a revisioning of Lev Manovich’s description of the historical relationships between film and computers, extending back from Manovich’s citation of Konrad Zuse’s early use of film as memory storage, to the use of lace – created on the programmable Jaquard loom – as a referent for Fox-Talbot’s early photograms. This was fascinating, and would have been an excellent stand-alone lecture, but was far too historical to meet the challenge that Steve Dietz had set in the morning. Charlie Gere’s response was similar, tracing the history of British computer art to the creation of the technical and trade craft colleges in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Both talks felt tangentially linked to the main themes, as if the speakers had been invited to talk, but not given a strong enough brief, leaving them to present some current research of interest to them rather than really engaging with the conference aims. There was a brief Q&A after the Batchen/Gere session, when Batchen rose to a question about the potential political impact of new media art and called for artists to be far more engaged in contemporary political issues, saying that no other contemporary art form had as much potential for political debate. This was the kind of debate that I expected from the whole day, so it was frustrating to see it only twice – in Dietz’s opening speech, and in a 10 minute Q&A halfway through the day.
So – an opportunity missed, but it inspired me to try and write more about digital art. I owe Marisa Olsen an essay on vernacular culture and digital art, partly based on Batchen’s essays, so I’ll endeavour to finish that now and publish it here (I think i’m about six months past my deadline for Marisa, so she’s no doubt given up on ever seeing the text). I’ve also thought more about turning TEST into a location for commissioned texts on digital art, perhaps inviting Steve and others to write or respond to specific works. When I was an art student, I used to devour copies of October magazine, and the critical writing of Rosalind Krauss, Martin Jay and Douglas Crimp hugely influenced my views on modern art. October used to occassionally hold ’round table’ discussions on particular artists or artworks, and maybe that would be a good approach to kickstart the kind of debates Steve Dietz is calling for. In the meantime, I took a number of medium-format black and white portraits at the event, capturing a good cross-section of the UK ‘new media scene’ of the last 10 years, including Craighed & Thomson, Fiona Raby, Pauline Van Mourik Broekman, Peter Ride, Susan Collins and Beryl Graham. I’ll post them up in groups of threes over the next few days.
The Weather Project
Four pictures from The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson at the Tate Modern
View of the Bridge, facing away from the ‘sun’
View of the ceiling mirrors
Looking directly up at the ‘sun’ from below
Looking from behind the ‘sun’ at the ceiling mirrors
TEST 