Symbioverse

Date: 25 August 2024
Time: 3pm… onwards
Obsidian Tags: #practicenote
Place: Chapel House + Chapel Lane Studios, Hereford

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Visual: A 16-17 minute wander through the Prelude, x 2 speed. (Original length: 33 minutes)
Audio: Featuring original compositions produced in the Lake District, between 2 July and 1 September 2024.

Studio Notes:

An ongoing studio practice block, 12 – 26 August, situated in Hereford. Musical and visual experiments made in response to notes and observations from Grasmere stay in June and July 2024.

Today, I decided to photograph the Prelude, page by page, to prep a motion experiment. Teasing out the idea (here) of activating a text through process: how to produce, capture, reflect upon, share, experiential ‘data’? Always in my mind, William Kentridge’s example, to ‘thicken time with material’. And the studio as a place of inherent optimism.

I set the text on a table across from a window, for good light. I then use glass to keep the pages flat. An extendable microphone arm holds my camera aloft above me, and allows me the freedom to move beneath and alongside the work without casting a shadow.

I begin with listening back to sounds and musical compositions created over the weeks of the summer. I play these aloud as I sketch a frame for the book, placing it into space. Edges emerge, shapes, memories, characters that feel themselves into the frame.

I work to the light fading in the afternoon
I film myself taking images.
I take images of myself filming
I film the page
I film the charcoal
I film the absence of the charcoal
I film the traces

The action of turning the page, taking an image with my iphone, turns into a dance with the text.
A performance of: draw, turn, move, click. Draw, turn, move, click. Draw, turn, move, click. Stumble. Draw, sniff, move, click. Skip a page. Turn back. Click.

I am dancing with the text

• Finding the ‘edges’ with charcoal
• Documenting through film / stop motion… finding the movement, the traces, ‘thickening time with material’

Pages as Slices of time?
Breath as expression of time?

• Reflecting again on Bernard Carr’s notion of the specious present, and Bergson’s theory la durée (“duration”), that which is “lived time,” “the time of our inner subjective experience.”
• Luce Irigaray’s notion of breath as the pinnacle, the expression of Bergsonian / Ponty’s ideas of flow

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Reflections