Sequential Photography

New Work for the Final Project

New street photography work more to come with comments.....

New Synths

 Here are some new experimental Photosynths using 250 photographs of Lincoln Cathedral.

The first looks like a great medieval city, a utopian dream.

This one looks like a Medieval replay of a cubist composition.

New Synths

When the Photosynth is exported as a jpeg it renders a three dimensional space as a flat image. Here the image recalls collage or montage, cubist art or expressionism where distortion is expected.

New Work: Photosynth Mutations

Cityscape 2

Cityscape

New Synth

Presentation and write up.

Digital Imaging and Photography Project 1: The Irritated Gaze.

Key aims and objectives

• To create visual metaphors that explore migraine auras and migraine experiences.


• The migraine auras are studied via personal experience and research.


• To produce work that explores the condition of seeing within the migraine experience.


• To explore the hallucinatory nature of the migraine aura.


• The imagery inspired by the migraine experiences are not attempts to produce medical illustrations of the auras.
  

To explore a range of technologies and media:

• Drawing


• Paint


• Collage


• Photographic


• Digital imaging


• Digital montage

The process was an attempt to compress technological and media history into a series of images: from drawing, painting, collage to photography, montage, the digital image and digital montage. Elements of the work look like photograms, solarization, abstract expressionist paintings and Daguerreotypes: see Current Developments 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9. See this discussion of Robert Rauschenberg's Retroactive I (1964). I do not believe that the digital montage fully achieves this kind of compression of technological history as seen within Retroactive I, but seems to represent it in more ambiguos ways.

Migraine aura visual distortions.

Migraine auras often include visual distortions, while other symptoms include “faintness, decreased levels of consciousness..., sleepiness….Twinkling and scintillating effects…” accompanying “visual auras” (Grossinger, pp.6-7). Accounts describe “small angled” spheres or disturbance suddenly appearing within the field of vision. This is described as a scotoma (plural: scotomata), while “the term scintillating scotoma is used to designate its peculiar luminous pulsation” (Grossinger, p.10). Where there is a blind spot within the field of vision this is called a negative scotoma (Grossinger, p. 11).

The psychological experience of migraine aura

"The variety of psychological experiences associated with the migraine aura include: negative (a guided tour of aura's hell) and positive emotional and cognitive reactions (a glimpse of aura's heaven)mystical, spiritual and magical interpretations as well as appreciation in terms of psychic experiences, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic interpretations, likening migraine auras to animals, humans or human-like formsthe experience of an increased creativity during varying stages of the migraine attack" (Podoll, Klaus 2007).

Digital Collage: Zoomorphic and Anthropomorphic Forms

Hudson, J Untitled 2010.

Modernist Experience and the Migraine Aura

• Not everything which looks like a migraine aura - e.g. Pablo Picasso's Cubist paintings - actually must have been inspired by a migraine aura.
  
• Likely sufferers: Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, who founded the metaphysical school and the surrealist Dali.


• Doubtful sufferer: Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh.


• Migraine auras do not fully account for or explain Modern Art
  
  
  

  Sofia Greene, Migraine aura, 2005. © 2005 Sofia Greene
  

  
  

  Anonymous, from Podoll, K and Robinson, D (2008) Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience from within, Berkley: North Atlantic Books Ch: 1 p. 1.
  

  
  
  Grossinger: “spontaneous visual distortions have been described throughout history”, but observes, interestingly, that “the association of a class of them with migraines was not recognized until the late nineteenth century” (2006 p. 5). What do we see in the 19th Century, but the birth of modernism and psychiatry?
  
  
  
  Is there are parallel between the migraine aura symptoms and modernist experience as described by Baudelaire and others?
  
  
• Modernism led to a new emphasis on the "fragmentary and fluid nature of experience" (Ward, 2003 p. 123).


• Baudelaire: “modernist consciousness is dominated by a sense of the "transitory, the furtive, the contingent", an image of the city and identity as being fragmented (Baudillaire, C 1863 p.23 and Ward, 2003 p. 123).


• Georg Simmel too commented on the "fragmentation of modernist consciousness" (Ward, 2003 p. 123).


• "Seurat had grasped that there is something atomized, divided and analyzed about modernist experience" (Hughes, R 1991 p.118)


• Gilbert-Rolfe in his essay "Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic" paraphrases T. J. Clark's description of the décor in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Clark suggests that the décor in the Folies' as garish, "but the painting's prettiness is the prettiness of black and white punctured with intensities which signify softness or impalpability" (1995 p.3). It struck me that the migraine aura has similar intensities and this description of Manet's picture seems to resonate with my own imagery. See also here.
  

Clement Greenberg: In Picasso’s Collages the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers "begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it" (Greenberg, 1958, p. 106).

The process of digital montage is also an attempt to achieve this. See this early version of Deepest Autumn (2010).

Pablo Picasso Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass 1912

Modern Art: Surrealism and Film

Still from Bunuel and Dali’s Une Chien Andalou 1928

Stills from Hitchcock’s Spellbound 1945, featuring a dream sequence by Dali.

Stills from the Irritated Gaze Part III, The Irritated Gaze 2010, montage: photography and wallpaper.

The connections between the above imagery is fascinating. Bunuel's imagery is sadistic, Dali seems to reference Bunuel and both seem to problematise sight and punish the act of seeing. Bunuel's action is extremely visceral and sadistic, while Dali plays out symbolically a sadistic act: the eyes transform into patterns onto curtains which are then cut out. Visual examples are also to be found here.

The connections to migraine's auras are not concrete or fully explored here, but much of the symbolism and re-presentation of hallucinations and dreams seem to suggest the experiences of the migraine and it's aura.


Works Cited:

Baudillaire, C (1863) "The Painter of Modern Life" in Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1987)Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.23-27.

Entwistle, E.A. (1954) The Book of Wallpaper London: Arthur Baker

Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row.

Futurism and Dada Reviewed, LMT Publishing 1988/2000.

Gilbert-Rolfe, J. (1995) Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greenberg, C (1958) “On Collage” in Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.105-108.

Grossinger, R (2006) Migraine Auras: When the Visual World Fails, Berkley: North Atlantic Books.

Hamilton, J (1983) Wallpaper London: Victoria and Albert Museum/HMSO.

Hudson, J (2009- incomplete) Digital Imaging and Photography MA Blog: http://www.digitalimagingandphotography.blogspot.com [Last Accessed 7 May, 2010].

Hughes, R (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.

Podoll, K and Robinson, D (2008) Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience from within, Berkley: North Atlantic Books.

Podoll, K Migraine Aura Foundation (2007) http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e27891/e27265/index_en.html [Last Accessed 7 May, 2010].

Ward, G. (2003) Postmodernism, London: Teach Yourself, Hodder Education.

On the new pics: previous post.

Thanks Mike for your comments on the previous post. You saucy thing! How Withnail and I! I will never see these innocent, yes they were innocent, flowers in the same way again!

I should have added more comments with the pictures. To be honest I was too tired, it was getting late and I clicked "PUBLISH POST" instead of "SAVE NOW".

I had forgotten about Mapplethorpe, thank you for reminding me.. As for the method: these are scanned flowers. I love their smudginess. The smears on the scanner are shocking, but they make a wonderful texture. I must photograph the flowers too.

Ernst, Snow Flowers 1929

Georgia O'Keffe: title and date unknown

Mapplethorpe Orchids, 1989

Flower Pictures

These are new pictures. They seem to recall Max Ernst's Shell Flower work and the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe.

Diebenkorn and Cezanne

"Cezanne is famous for saying that any idiot can make a deep space, that it is already deep, and that the task of the artist is to carve out that space- an oxymoron that exactly describes Cezanne's general practice" (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995 p. 91)

Current Developments: 6

More work with slight modulations in brightness and contrast.




Woodgrain and reflections:

Current Developments 5

New work: new developments.

The orbs of light seem to reveal spaces, like those within dark rooms.

The painted surafaces fuse with photographic imagary from screens depicting trees and natural forms.

The leaf motif recalls the photogram and the early experiments of Fox-Talbot.There is also the beginnings within this picturing of a fusing of other media: televisual/stills from the 1940s film Great Expectations. It also includes photographs of real objects, spaces and places.

The imagery draws upon a wealth of technologies and there histories. There is solarization, photogram and negative imagery. Slight modulation in opacity of one layer of imagery can have a profound effect on the image as a whole.

Solarization, light bursts and a silvery colour add to a kind of nostalgia or longing that is provoked by the medium of photography.

Chrystel Lebas

Between Dog and Wolf (2006)
This is a amazing monograph by Chystel Lebas. Here are some extracts:

'We do not have to have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of "going deeper and deeper" into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not know where we are going we no longer know where we are.'
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of space. translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Boston Beacon Press p.185.

'Forests, especially, with the mystery of their space prolonged indefinitely beyond the veil of tree-trunks and leaves, space is veiled for our eyes, but transparent to action, are inevitable psychological transcendents'
Marcault & Therese Brose. Le Education de demain Paris Alcan 20th edition, 1939. p.255

'The forest is a fascinating place; one can feel attracted to its grandeur, or scared by its depth and darkness. This space of immensity echoes our childhood memories, through fairytale or play. Walking through the forest of my childhood in France, after many years, I remembered when we used to build a hut, and slowly the light would disappear, and darkness would surround us.' Chrystel Lebas (2006 p. 93)