My interest remains in film based work that deals with jolting the viewer from their cinematic expectation, however, I am further developing this idea to focus on the viewer experience of film/the screen and ways to manipulate the viewers’ physical, physiological and psychological response. This has led to an exploration of the physiology and psychology of memory and an investigation into the evolution of the memento.
I am very interested in the subversion that can be created by technology playing the person -
a great analogy for digital culture today. In the work of Korac and Lopes, the machine plays the human arm - a subversion of autonomy and a great starting point to begin unpacking where these ideas can lead.
I am still interested in the idea of the camera mimicking the human experience, and ways that I can lead the viewer into recreating these actions. I am developing ways to interact and play the viewer, more ways of involving the viewer in the cinematic experience. Lindsay Seers places the viewer inside the ‘head’, mimicking the camera/human experience. Hoang Tran Nguyen explores human participation, reaction and potential with their karaoke machine based on our learned behaviour of karaoke.
The theorists I have been reading deal with cinematic language and the crossover between film and experience. Mindscreen, by Kawin deals with the subjective camera, the physical eye and the mind’s eye these modes of representation in cinema have inspired me to think more deeply about the possible affects of the camera, as an extension of the body/mind, or as in mindscreen suggests - a possible representation of the camera’s own mind - the amorphous nature of the camera being very prevalent in my previous work and something that I would like to pursue further. What happens to the viewer when placed in this scenario? There is a tension between the auteurs/artist’s vision, the protagonist’s vision and the audience's vision when using first person camera/POV shots. I would like to explore this further and experiment with this idea especially in a framework of reflexive mimesis and physiology.
My practice has expanded in the last couple of months based on a collection of souvenirs, maps and memorabilia that I inherited from my old neighbour. The collection of tangible objects compared to my paper trail is one aspect that I am exploring.
The idea of the collection, memorabilia and the value of objects versus the modern day quandary of valuing the abstract. The idea of all of our information/memories being lost at some point into a digital void is scary to me. and it has happened to me, the broken iPhone that I displayed having a wealth of pictures from my European travels but unable to get at it easily without doing some sort of computer shop thing. the tactility of these objects really made me think about the evolution of memory and human interaction - the sensory experience the idea of cataloguing and valuing the object have been areas of research. Patrick Pound, Mark Dion, Christian Boltanski practice investigates the memento, tangible recollection and the archive.
I have been interested in sensory memory and the stimulus that we can get from a digital device. The haptic echoic - tactility being lost in this evolution of information. what is lost though? as we realise more often that emotions, good and bad, are stored more in the body, what does this mean in the long term for sensory memory and the human experience in general? The psychological benefits from things like social media, text versus real human interaction are proven to be null and void… where is society heading?
Nam June Paik's says it eloquently - ‘technology is becoming the new interface’. This questions the technology/screen as a human experience, as a new interface and the tactility of the digital. Tacita Dean is an example of morphing these ideas together. Her obsession with film as a medium and relic and her collections of nostalgic/obsolete technologies interweaves these two trajectories.
These two ideas that I am exploring parallel the same main objective; the dichotomy between the real and virtual, and the evolution of this.