Tim's FAD

 Back to City Lit on Wednesday for more 'tasting' of options and Visual Communications was to the next sample. There was discussion of kick starting creativity with different devices - some felt this artificial but to my mind the point is always to start and some random spontaneous elements always arrive however we choose to venture. I created a sort of 'I Ching' with the idea of a coin leading to text and image extracted from a newspaper.  (I see that none other than John Cage was an I Ching fan) Rod spoke about the branding crossover with art and the virtue of removing/restricting colour palette  - we were invited to select 3 colours to work with using published 'glossy' magazines as source  - I chose a simple Black, Red and Yellow.    After making a sort of sample sheet of styles we arrived at a form of brand - mine was in group review likened to a flag. We then worked with text to produce something |(I suppose|) provocative. We were given the example ...

Last Tuesday (2nd November) I decided to take myself to the RA, quite a while since I'd visited and I'm not sure that I've made a visit I didn't enjoy - what I'd decided to visit (without much prior knowledge) was by Photographer Helene Binet exhibition  called Light Lines . The Photographer a Swiss/French practitioner in question is still working and I found the exhibition to be really well curated, plenty of space between the works and all works nicely framed and lit. The other thing about Helene's pictures is that she was working with great material from  (for example) Corbusier  to Hadid. but the pictures that I enjoyed most were those of 'Classical Gardens of Suzhou' For me the composition and light are captured to provide a serenity beyond time and the orient is there to be tasted and felt.

 On Thursday I met with a friend to look around a retrospective exhibition of work from Japanese/US Sculptor Isamu Noguchi . The Exhibition was an interesting one showing a diverse body of work ranging from such things as early baby alarms to lampshades alongside the main works of his career (sculpture). The exhibition included some history of his upbringing and US internment (during WW2) . The exhibition was not chronologically organised and the programme needed  to be consulted as itmes were not labelled.  An example of work that shows Noguchi's design skill.  Noguchi worked across many disciplines and gained a lot from a connection to Buckminster Fuller and Branusci was another major influence. Here's a sculpture that Noguchi made of Fuller, it looks quite contemporary . . I like these two, one showing the shadow of rope and another about lightning.  

An image from Dresden Dynamo   Last week in the Moving image session we were shown a piece of work that was created in the days of 16mm (this film format is still around but less common these days)the work we saw was 'Dresden Dynamo ' by the experimental film maker Lis Rhodes and was made 1971-72. (More about Liz Rhodes here )  Liz explains the way the Sound track was created  and the reason for it's unpredictability and other-worldliness here. The image is read by an optical sound head and this is not the usual way (normally a distinct  separate sound track of audio/music would be recorded ) conversely the pattern and shapes in Liz's film correspond with the soundtrack so we see the sound and here the pictures. We also got a chance to see Berlin Horse by Malcolm Le Grice (with soundtrack by Brian Eno) - we were told that the film was colourised black and white (printed to add colour), the film includes found footage, superimposition and various distortions (in...

Books are a great gift  It was nice to be able to fit in a Tutorial with Heidi as a face-to-face and I had the benefit of  hearing suggestions and Heidi's  thoughts around ways forward for me . Although I'm comfortable with what's involved in the Foundation Course   it was very useful to be reminded of what's coming up and also have a suggestion on reading books about photography by   Geoff Dyer . [Nice talk by Geoff on Photographers' Gallery here  ] Plenty of work around Utopia/Dystopia dichotomy as well as mission statement and Critical assignment on a contemporary work of Art/Artist 

 Heidi as with other course teachers has clear goals from sessions and it's great to create something and also understand something of the exercise. Resources for Monday 18th that we brought along were Coloured Tape along with String/Tread/wool. Working area After Heidi talking about some ways that Artist used space ( Bruce Nauman's Walking in an  Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square 1968 ) this was a filmed performance and for me what I saw was not a great realisation of a challenging idea). (This was a long way away from other work I have seen by Nauman ). We also looked at some other examples of Tape and thread being used - Jim Lambie is  a figure working in this area of art - his work  looks (to me) as 'decorative'.   I preferred the example of the Korean artist Sun K Kwak - the work suggests motion and direction. Duchamp's a mile of string was considered too as was the Drawing in the air  and Uncertain Journey of Japanese Artist...

  Another Camera-Person at work  On Friday it was day 2 of the  'Moving Image' and although we focused on shooting and editing we were also able to find out a little  about a renowned practitioner  Sam Taylor Wood who has a history of creating waves with her works which include those of 'Lookalikes' . The piece that Dr Pete alerted us to (and showed us some of) was The Last Century (2005) and he also provided a resource for us to use ( UbuWeb ) . The Last Century which we watched some of was a thought provoking staged  recreation where the central conceit we were invited to be a part of was that we were looking at a 'Freeze Frame' which was actually made up of people being as still as they could (rather than made via the use of technical wizardry). It confronts the staging used in moving image and reminds us of the Director's influence and the artificial nature of film which calls for us to suspend belief.    Like Steve ...