Bruno Munari - Who is There? Open the Door!

  

Books to be read in a way that’s not rigidly predetermined but as if the book was one continuous sheet as wide as a page but as long as all the pages set one below the other. 

      

Bruno Munari - The Circus In The Mist

With Bruno Munari's circus in the mist you can read back and fourth within the book. You are situated in the mist and the forms become visible through tracing paper and circles through the pages. There’s a lot of room for the reader to build their own narrative especially in the way I first encountered the book in it's original Italian ( I cannot read Italian). Although even with the English translation once you have read through and understood the text there is a great deal of room for interpretation and play.



The book was designed for children and the possibility’s of the book as a play thing work well, encouraging an exploration of the functionally though touch and experience of the structure and the texture and weight of the pages. 

The rational design thing that Bruno Munari brings to these books works so well because its counterbalanced with the absurd. This aids the books functionally to serve a purpose and gives these books objects he creates a life and illusion.

Listening to Images

Yesterday we had a listening to images workshop. In the workshop we created a series of three drawings that we then cut into smaller panels. Eventually we worked text into the image narratives created by the sequencing of these panels.

We where given the task of writing three narratives from three different perspectives. The result I used on the finshed sequence was a combination of all three but all in capitals.

I NEED TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE TO HANDWRITING IN CAPITALS WHEN ATTEMPTING TO ATTACH IMPORTANCE TO TEXT. If you do this in type it just looks like you want to emulate the act of shouting.

These are the narratives I worked out for the workshop;

Dialogue only 

Hey don't ignore us!
Whaa?
We have seen things!
You will Connect, we will explain!
The sea and the sky has become alive In terrible rapture!
Woosh!
Arrr!
Where are you from?
FROM THE FUTURE!
The sky is in wonderful passive control the sea does not merge with it!
Civilisation is confirmed
Will I be ok?
Yes she is there to protect and guide you
Unfortunately they are there also.
No matter come now!

Third person narrative 

They came from the never never
To look for the chosen one
To tell him of the future world
He did not want to listen
But he had to listen
The terrible event was beginning
The beast
Water began to rise fast!
The chosen one was in danger
to the other world they must take him
It stands!
"Come now " they said
She was waiting for him
But unfortunately so were they...

One word per image. 


Broke the rules a bit 

The spectors appear
To the one
The future world
Not want to know
Had to know
Flood
Fear
Flood
Afraid
They knew
The future
All that is
He must come
She is there
And Them

First person monologue 


From the perspective of the spectors as a group conscience 

All in a days work you see
To find him
Tell him about all that
Make him understand
About the event
The sea and the sky becoming one big conscious thingy
It's name was andrew, we thought oh yes
Quite an event!
We from the future
The world of the sentient
Where all is calm
Went back and saved him
So he could meet her
And inevitably, them also

The finished result of the workshop...

A Manifesto for Performative Research

Today we where reminded to look at this; 

A Manifesto for Performative Research by Brad Haseman

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/3999/1/3999_1.pdf

The essay sets out some of the key concepts behind the Wednesday lectures and the emergence of what it calls the 'Performative researcher' I like this essay because it is a clear and concise text which allows you to access its central concepts and idea in an unambiguous straight forward way. It has allot of combative language about 'New strategies' and 'Methods that have to be invented' in the face of "The traditional paradigms of research" in which "Established qualitative researchers are anxious about the performance turn, keen to establish orthodoxies" It sounds like a bloody war, and if so I think I'm unwittingly on the good progressive side, although the word progressive is never used. Because everyone uses it now. For everything. 

 "Most commonly, performative researchers progress their studies by employing variations of: reflective practice,participant, observation, performance ethnography, ethnodrama, biographical/autobiographical/narrative inquiry"

This would be the most natural way to work. I am aiming to work like this IN FACT this here is me trying to work like this / that.

This NEXT is a section of the essay in which I'm working out how it works for me. This is a diagrammatic depiction of one of the ways I deal with a text like this. It is also just something I have done because I want to see what the words look like highlighted. Is this nonnumeric diagrammatic data, qualitative research? Or a visual exploration of digital symbolic data, performative research?  Or neither, just daft.

     Does not fit right

     Sort of fits

     Fits

"The second characteristic of practice-led researchers lies in their insistence

that research outputs and claims to knowing must be made through the

symbolic language and forms of their practice.>1 They have little interest in

trying to translate the findings and understandings of practice into the

numbers (quantitative) and words (qualitative) preferred by traditional

research paradigms>2.  This means, for example, that the practice-led novelist

asserts the primacy of the novel;>3 for the 3-D interaction designer it is the

computer code and the experience of playing the game; for the composer it is

the music, and for the choreographer it is the dance. This insistence on

reporting research through the outcomes and material forms of practice

challenges traditional ways of representing knowledge claims.>4 It also means

that people who wish to evaluate the research outcomes also need to

experience them in direct (co-presence) or indirect (asynchronous, recorded)

form.">5

1 I would not insist but would be happy if something like this followed from the way I worked

2 I would love to be able to translate my creative practice in this way if needs be. I probably won't.

3 I would assert the primacy of the image, text and it's container?

4 My predisposition for reporting research through outcomes and the material forms of my practice may   challenge orthodoxies in the context of this essay but for me this is not intentional.

5 So this is the recorded form? a sort of narrative inquiry?

 THIS BLOG IS A RECORDED FORM / A SORT OF NARRATIVE INQUIRY 

Creative Writing Workshop

ORIGINAL

Original extract of script that was used as starting point

Theme music playing light changing colour to indicate the passage of time, camel stoically standing guard Mouse from stage left enters skipping skips past camel who is still standing guard ignoring the mouse.

MOUSE Hello?

Camel says nothing stares forward
MOUSE Hello? Hello?
CAMEL Pause Yes.
MOUSE OH A CAMEL!
CAMEL And you a mouse? No more no less.. please do not disturb me.
MOUSE You are not disturbed! You will love me! Everyone loves me!
CAMEL You are incorrect.... I have nothing to say to a mouse, I do not “love” you.

Mouse does weird dance looks at camel camel looks back unmoved. 
MOUSE Oh! Anyway, I haven't seen a Camel round here for years! No not for years! Are you on official business? no doubt?
CAMEL I am on official business from the executive and do not wish to be disturbed, please go away...
MOUSE Yes OK where?
CAMEL Flustered well doesn't matter! do not care!
MOUSE To the mountain?
CAMEL Sarcastic yes to the mountain, the mountains are beautiful, everyone loves the mountains you should go there.
MOUSE Yes! Yes! my camel friend and you shall come with me!

Mouse takes hold of camel’s lead rope and walks off with it, singing same song as before “tra la la lee”, camel goes along, letting the mouse feel heroic.

ANTONYMIC TRANSLATION

Translated text with inverted meanings. Where possible.

Unattributed atonal noise is internalised, darkness is staying the same tone to distract from the stillness of space, Goldfish is nervously floating unprotected. Cat exits into the audience crawling right up to Goldfish who floating unprotected pays all of his attention to the Cat.

CAT Goodbye!

Goldfish thinks about everything darts eyes everywhere

CAT Goodbye! Goodbye!

Goldfish Quickly No.

CAT I am already aware that you are a goldfish.

Goldfish And you not a cat! Lots less and lots more. Do alert me!

CAT You are alerted! You will not hate me. No one hates me.

Goldfish You are correct, I don't have any reason to keep quiet around a Cat, but I do hate you.

Cat does accomplished walk and looks away from goldfish, goldfish also looks away from cat and is very moved by the situation.

CAT I understand! And on a different subject, I have seen another Goldfish directly over-there very recently! I was sure you would be on an unofficial pleasure trip, but I do have my doubts.

Goldfish I am on a Unofficial pleasure trip to the lowest rank and I do fear being alerted! COME HERE!

CAT No, negative, don't you want me over there?

Goldfish Composed certainly it does matter where you go, I am passive.

CAT Away from the sea?

Goldfish Sincerely Not away from the sea, the sea is not ugly, no one hates the sea, you shouldn't go away from somewhere.

CAT NO! NO! You are my goldfish nemesis and you will not go away without me!

Cat lets go of Goldfish's listless string and dances at that spot without need of it.Cat is screaming a different atonal noise than will be heard in future times “SNAAAAAAAA” 

Goldfish stops dead, Unwilling to let the Cat become a villain. 

SUBJECTIVITY 

First person narration, from the perspective of an object or character within the original narration. This is the events from the perspective of the bucket that appears later in the script HERE.

It hasn't rained round here for ages. The air feels heavy with moisture, but it never rains!
Hmm interesting, why is the mouse thing talking to the one who is called camel? Quite Interesting......
Camels can hold much much more water in there humps than I could ever hope to hold! I always find this depressing.....
 ...This camel has no humps. It must be one of those hump-less camels, that is a camel who has no humps and doesn't really look like a camel. For me that's a camel in name only, but what do I know? I'm only a bucket!
 ...Hmm they are still talking. I wonder what they are saying to each other?

(Long pause)

It hasn't rained round here for ages, maybe for days.

Oh their heading this way!

 HAIKU 

Camel stoically. 


Mouse skips damp path towards night. 


Enjoy yourself fool!

HERE

This is Richard McGuire's comic strip Here, published originally in RAW Vol 2 #1.








I became aware of this strip about a year ago after spotting it in a anthology of comics that I was flicking through in a shop. Here is a depiction of happenings in one place back and forth through thousands of years of time. Here was so exciting because it demonstrated to me what can be possible with a pictorial depiction of time in a way that I had half imagined and hoped  might of been done / could be done.
Within a rigid frame system Here opens itself up to mutable readings by installing cut-out frames that offer windows to the same place at different times. I like the way it emphasises the massiveness of the place in Here by throwing the reader through the events and snapshots of events that take place. The sub-plot of the man growing old and dying seems incidental to the physicality of the location fixed in every frame. The whole feel of the strip serves to reinforces that absoluteness of the universe in comparison to our briefness; A 'Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing' sort of thing. This is something that all good culture can and should do, to some extent. Possibly.
Anyway the here in Here is the star of the strip 
Interestingly according to the Wikipedia  Chris Ware wrote an essay about Here for the magazine Comic Arts so I should try and find that and see what he said. Chris Ware's work sometimes makes me think of George Perec's Life a users manual especially here. I got a bit drowned by detail in Life a users manual and unfortunately couldn't made it to the end.
This here is a film adaptation of Here;

For me this film although charming and worth watching doesn't really have the multidimensional and open quality of the original.. This is partly because it acts more as a interpretation of the original and partly because moving image is not an open enough format / doesn't lend itself to alternative ways of viewing time. Maybe that's because moving image is a developed interpretation of time so creatively you are locked into the set parameters of the medium?

The fact that film is limited is great! A Hierarchy of cultural produce is of course wrong and mad but unfortunately I sometimes develop, like a cold, a pyramidal system  in my head that I have to try and ignore. Quite often moving image and film sits on the top. Limitations help put nonsensical ideas like this into perspective and limitation are the framework in which different strands of creative activity weave together to create a richer reflection of the whole. 

Not pointy and solid like the pyramid but soft and lumpy like an old coat.      

HOWEVER..... Just to indulge: if there was this great pyramid then music would be the sea or sky, or both. It would definitely have to be gas or liquid, not solid.

 TIME HAVE TIME NOT? 

  

Kin-Dza-Dza

 'Calender' Saul Steinberg, 1970

TIME TRAVELS

Michael Craig-Martin Lecture

Michael Craig-Martin had a chat with the curator of a Tate St Ives exhibition of abstract painting today for our MA Arts guest lecture. He came across as likeable often ending answers to questions by saying something like 'that's just the way I am'. 

By coincidence I was introduced to his piece An Oak Tree in my first lectures at art college, probably in an attempt to broaden minds or something or something. Anyway, further than my knowledge of that work and his subsequent big object drawing things, I didn't really know what, why or how he did what he did.

One Michael Craig-Martin work  that I would sometimes encounter, depending on my route to work, was his mural for the Woolwich DLR station. The mobile phone in the mural would catch my attention. I  would think about how the model of phone pre-dated the station, opened in 2009, by quite a few years. 

Here is the mural from the station. The phone is tucked away a bit at the back near the pink football.

Here is the phone as you would see it coming up the stairs.

I knew the DLR part of the station had opened in 2009 because I remembered it opening; I remembered my friend travelling on the the extension to see what it was like. Exciting friend. ANYWAY This is a wrong phone! A displacement phone!

It was in fact as revealed in the talk I attended not a result of some sort of conspiratorial element but as the result of Michael Craig-Martin love of templates. He reuses all his templates for objects from the moment they were created onwards, the templates remain the same. He said his templates once created become timeless in there re-usage but to me in light of my relationship with the mural in Woolwich they appear more like time travellers.