The Project:
A disc with 100 images, some interesting, many banal, that are to be structured or organized in some way, almost any way, or any form, and presented. Leave none out, or at least account for all of them, and add no others. The project requires an ongoing discussion about the selection and organizing process, idea development, a summary paper and an artists’ statement.
The Goal:
To explore how archives and databases can be used to re-frame the same 100 images into new meanings, forms and contexts. That’s the official version. The personal version is to make a work that creatively inspires me, and that still connects to the course topics in a meaningful way.
OK. I’ve been stalling on this, trying to think of how I can turn this into something that I can get excited about. Something that feels like art. My art.
It’s not going to be easy!
Ideas:
My first idea was to choose one single image to print, quite large, perhaps very large, and then use the remaining images as a tiny border or frame. These could be grouped in a variety of ways such as:
- sorting them by colour – transitions, similarities or juxtapositions
- creating a narrative reading or context for the large image
- completely randomized order
- repeating them as grouped patterns, using purely aesthetic and decontextualizing purposes
Why this approach? Why subvert the archive approach?
For the sake of finding one image that speaks to me. One echo of connection. One piece of something that feels like my art, not someone else’s.
Also, this points to the selection process, and the very personal criteria that might be applied to it. Likewise, it refers back to the discussions about “who writes history”, and what becomes the official version of the past. One very large photo with 99 teensy ones is very much like history – what gets remembered is only one possible truth, or one version of it. Most of what happened in the past is not archived, does not become “History”. Once that one very large image is reproduced elsewhere, such as in a magazine, the tiny photos in the border would all but disappear, or at least become illegible. A perfect metaphor!
I also thought of putting the 99 other images randomly on the back of the main image, thereby using all the images but somehow subverting the obvious categories, the banal pairings, the sense of meaningful multiples, by selecting one image, and more or less hiding the rest, making them secondary and hard to see.
hmmm . . .
Next I thought about how I could crop each of the 100 original images to make new, less literal images. I like this idea. I will experiment with this and see what new ideas come to mind from here.
If I crop each of the images to create new, abstracted ones, can I make more than one version of each image? Or am I limited to 100 in total? If only 100, can they repeat when re-organized by differing criteria?
And what is the connection between these abstracted remnants of the original photos and the idea of archives and databases? Do they still serve or address the intent of the project? I think so, because it will all depend on how I sequence, sort or present them.
Why crop the images?
To divorce their naming and sorting conventions from their visual content, as databases do.
To create something mysterious from something previously easily understood.
To make them somehow my own.
Image Transitions (as Video, Flash or a gif animation):
I am thinking that making a video, or a Flash/gif animation, using very gradual transitions between images, would be interesting. Animating the images like this would create “new” images as they transition into the next one. Adding music, narration, or poetry as audio tracks would further change how the images are viewed, pointing again to the subjectivity of the selection, framing, media and presentation processes and how these change the readings and understandings of images. In the same way, archives and databases are used to deliver, group and re-frame often diverse materials. There is no inherent meaning to an archive or database – it is shaped and created by the user.
I could sort and sequence the cropped stills in the film by using the alpha-numeric sequence of the original file names. Or I could group the originals by the most obvious categories, such as faces, landscapes, people, skaters, aerials, colours, museums, etc. Since many of the images will fall into multiple categories, they could repeat, or I could create multiple cropped versions of the same original image. In this way I’m not technically adding any new images, but re-purposing the originals. Isn’t that the very nature of archives and databases? To find what you are looking for within them by a subjective kind of sorting and organizing? It would be like cutting your grandmother’s portrait out of a class photograph, because that is the only information of interest to you in it.
In this way, the previously literal, fixed and visually linked images would result in a kaleidoscopic effect based on using the naming or grouping conventions as a sequencing device, and at the same time also create new tertiary images in the transitions created by these various groupings.
A Magazine:
Please visit my home page for this quirky re-developement of my first idea.
