Angel of the Morning

This morning, on the ferry ride over to Victoria to visit my mother, I was listening to my iTunes library in shuffle mode and Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders singing Angel of the Morning came on.

I was flooded by memories of the original 1968 version of the  song. Fortunately, I have that version as well, and I could then sort and listen to the classic Merrilee Rush singing her hit version.

It’s always great to hear an artist take a song and make it her own. Chrissie Hynde’s version slows the tempo down and her amazing voice aches with years of experience. When she sings “I see no reason to take me home, I’m old enough to face the dawn” it’s with the maturity of a woman who has faced the reality of the morning after a night of infatuated love. When she sings “If morning’s echoes says we’ve sinned, well it was what I wanted now” you can only wish that you’d been there…

There’s a beautiful string coda at the end. OK I’ve listened to it three times- enough. Now with shuffle off I’m listening to The Decemberists singing Angel ,Won’t You Call Me.

Shuffle back on.

u3w49 tacit knowledge

How do I make the aesthetic decisions about my artworks?

I think I make my decisions based on my learned values- I feel this colour is better than that one. These decisions are in part informed by my intuitive ‘knowing’ that this is ‘right’ and a better choice or solution than something else. I choose a specific colour or refine the curve of a form or choose one image over another based on a lifetime of knowledge.

Michael Polanyi helped clarify tacit knowing as an area of knowledge. He thought that creative acts are charged with strong personal feelings, intuitions or ‘tacit’ forms of knowing.

He argues that that “the informed guesses, hunches and imaginings that are part of exploratory acts are motivated by what he describes as ‘passions’. They might well be aimed at discovering ‘truth’, but they are not necessarily in a form that can be stated in propositional or formal terms. As he wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that ‘we can know more than we can tell’. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’.  Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something. Many bits of tacit knowledge can be brought together to help form a new model or theory. This inevitably led him to explore connoisseurship and the process of discovery.”

These ideas makes sense to me when I reflect on how I make decisions on the drawings and paintings that I make and how I decide to keep one over another. I make a certain decisions that feel ‘right’.

Mementos as mnemonic aids

As artists we are encouraged to be self archivists and keep everything we do. I’ve kept all the drawings I’ve made since I was an art student in the 1970s. There’s a lot of them. Many have been made into paintings, and even more have not. I was implicitly taught to believe that even my doodles might have value some day. I have also thrown away a lot of stuff I now regret. I had a journal that I kept for a year or two back in the early 70s before I went to NSCAD. I wish I could read it now, but it is unfortunately long gone.

So why do we choose to keep what we keep? What gives these objects value?

I have a lot of small mementos that have great value to me- some I keep in my office and some I keep at home. I keep them because they are beautiful things, and also I think in part I keep them as mnemonic aids. They serve as souvenirs from the past that not only trigger memories and allow me to recall and call up that past, but they also are familiar. I think we need to surround ourselves with a certain amount of the familiar in order to feel comfortable with where we are.

Why do we choose to keep some things and not others? I have a pair of shoes, penny loafers that I bought in the late 1960s and I had completely resoled by this Italian cobbler in the late 80s. They’re beautiful shoes, a little tight and I haven’t worn them in years. I’m not sure that they even fit, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away. Why are they so valuable to me?

I have drawings my son made when he was a child and stacks of photographs I’ve taken over the years. What gives them value? Why do I keep them?I haven’t do it, but I wonder if I could decide what the most valuable thing that I have is? I’m sure it wouldn’t have much value to others, but I’m guessing that it would be an object that has a huge sentimental value attached to it.

When I was going to Banff last year in May for six weeks, I took a few things with me- a couple of photograps, a map of London, a coffee mug. But mostly it was my laptop that had huge value. That was the thing that connected me to my life in Vancouver as well as the rest of the world via the internet. It also carried years of work, ideas, writing, images, sketches- digitally. When I moved into my office studio I upacked a few thinkgs, plugged in my laptop and was set up.

Hello: remix

I was away for Monday’s chat. We were on the Queen of Nanaimo, the BC Ferry back from Galiano Island, and in reading the archive yesterday, I noted that there was a discussion about animoto, so I thought I’d take a look.

I down loaded the 2:30 HELLO video that I’d just posted yesterday (below), and I uploaded it. I got 30 seconds for free, but I have just paid an additional $3 USD so I can now upload the whole project.

I’ll upload the link as soon as the payment goes through.

Hello

Keep Calm and Carry On

Days of speed and slow time Mondays

u3w48: reconnecting

On Thursday, I sent an email out to my online course colleagues in an attempt to reconnect. As an online community of students and colleagues we have pretty much fallen apart.

When I finally had a few days  to think and catch up over Easter, I realized how much their research, blogs and writing had dropped off my radar. I got wrapped up in myself and what I was doing. I’ve been now trying to catch up with each of their blog posts. Since November, Unit 3 has been increasingly about ourselves and our own research projects. There has been very little interaction between us as a group of colleagues, working towards a common end.

We seem to have less curiosity about what each of us are working on and thinking about. As a result we have drifted apart as a group.  As we are also separated geographically- we don’t have a way to actually get together to talk about our ideas and we don’t seem to have enough of a common basis to do so anyway.

We seem to take up most of the chat time- checking in and making sure that we each understand the next ‘deliverables’. The chat format is also so shallow and abstract, compared to actually talking with someone, it is hard to get to anywhere serious or important. It’s hard to learn something new that might matter to us.

For me, I think part of this dilemma is that digital arts is also too big and too vague. Not only is it hard to have something worthwhile to say about what everyone is doing, but it’s had to make sense of the digital arts context that we’re each trying to work within- our projects are all so different.

Anyway, it was my attempt to see if we can reconnect and talk about some ideas before we finish up July.

u3w48: mind map

This past week I have been working on a mind map of my nonsite project to try to locate it within the context of research in the visual arts, and digital arts as a subset of contemporary visual arts.

I was worried that the larger research questions related to my research had become lost or fallen away in relation to my focus on outputs in relation to the Camberwell Summer 2009 exhibition. Mind maps are an interesting to lay out the key ideas related to a project. It allowed me to get a better visual sense of the relationship between aims, objectives a rationale and the larger subject of my research.

This past week I have been reflecting in more depth about the qualities that make a community and in particular the Camberwell MA community in relation to the online MA Digital Arts course I have been a part of over the past two years.

eighty slides

OK. I’ve written the text for my final project for exhibition in the Summer Show 2009 at Camberwell Wilson Road. I have 80 slides that form a short narrative that takes six and a half minutes to view. It explains my ideas about digital arts and directs you to my actual thesis project: nonsite

The project is pretty simple, but I hope it will stand up in the context of a large group exhibition. It is designed for the basement at Wilson Road, but can go pretty much anywhere. This image above is a teaser, which hopefully gets you interested.