Residency day 4

Images from todays work:

exploring space, line, internal and external liminal boundaries...

Attempting to follow a repetitive process and the difficulties of breaking free from the constraint and control

Following the material which seemed to fight back today

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown

Clee Claire Lee will be joining me today in Jessop West - thinking bout liminal spaces, absence presence drawing and sculpture, connecting ideas between and across our work

come along, interrupt us in the bright sunshine and use wire to help you thinking process

or take a break and sit at the typewriter a while - it remains here after a successful day yesterday

Error and reflection

In the act of typing I am experiencing error with repeated frustration.

This leads me to consider my own relation with the laptop keyboard and the more gentle approach it seems to require by comparison. 

Vilem Flusser explores the act of writing as digging, a penetrating gesture which cuts away rather than constructs, he makes the connection even to the typewriter despite resembling the piano:

The pointed pencil […] reminds us of course much more of the original gesture of scratching than does the typewriter, which reminds us of nothing in our tradition except the piano […] it is evident that to type is still to ‘impress’, namely a gesture that presses into a surface, although in fact it presses ink onto a surface. Its intention is one of digging.

But I am aware of how little the laptop keys impact or press on either the paper or my own body. 

Except perhaps the bodily cramp which comes from being unaware of how long I have been sat writing and staring at the screen for. The gritty dry eye is by far my biggest physical discomfort.

Today people have come back to comment on how their fingers are still vibrating even after finishing a short burst of typing.

The typewriter has been a revealing object which tells something of peoples age in their encounter with it. Many have stories to tell of using them, as well as those who have come curious and excited for their first encounter.

The laptop screen seems a portal which links to a wider space, whereas the typewriter focuses attention towards a single letter and is a much more contained activity.

There have been discussions about process. How the thinking process disappears when writing digitally. Marginalia, notes, scribbles, errors and corrections all vanish, leaving little evidence of the effort or editing that has gone into sculpting the final result.

Auto correct and the difficulty of working without a safety net has been apparent today, yet there have also been discussions around the errors which are corrected by the computer unnecessarily, as well as the restrictions which we will accept and work under in our relation with technology and machines.

A Visual Interruption

A found photograph from a library book: Perform or else by John McKenzie from 'about page 100'  brought as an interruption by Joe Edwardes-Evans

Residency Day 3

More interruptions

The noise of the typewriters is drawing people in....

Come along and try out your skills at writing from before the digital auto correct was invented

copying was an act of reproduction; now it is nominated as an act of creation

Today in Jessop West foyer, artists Rachel Smith and Madeleine Walton are copying, and responding to Bartleby the Scrivener the novella by Herman Melville. 

They are interested in a variety of conceptual writing strategies as well as following the observations of Roland Barthes: 

Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren't interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven't you ever happened to read while looking up from your book? 

While typing the distractions and sounds from the foyer will possibly seep into the typed work

Come along and interrupt 

Become part of the typed distraction in the work, or join in and take your turn with a vintage typewriter 

Residency day 2

Work in progress...

Discussions around faulty translation, film, and fan-subbing with Emma Bolland, Amanda Crawley Jackson, and Helen Frank

work in progress, 

interruptions and sounds from the foyer seeping into the film timeline

Lovely chatting to Helen Blejerman about graphic novels, image and text and other related ideas

Emma Bolland fan-subbing in progress

Rachel Smith fan-subbing in progress

An ERRANT, or Improper Form

This morning I am working in the foyer at Jessop West - please interrupt me.

This afternoon from 1.30pm I am looking forward to welcoming Emma Bolland. She and I are collaborating on a piece of work titled An ERRANT, or Improper Form

We will be producing speculative narratives by writing directly into the timelines of projected films. These are films we have not watched before and without sound. Mimicking modes of ‘fansubbing’ (the phenomenon whereby collaborative groups of amateur translators subtitle and stream material as diverse as Anime, or Game of Thrones, within hours of its first broadcast, often using formal experimentation and interventionist translator notes), we will produce new and experimental text narratives which will interrupt the visual nature of the film clips. 

‘Fansubbing is defined as ‘improper’[…] however, the errancy of fansubbing exceeds this definitional parameter, also manifesting in more explicit, intentional forms of disobedience and irregularity.’

Rachel Smith

Emma Bolland

Residency day 1

A successful day of work, conversation, and plenty of interesting interruptions:

Rachel Smith present in Jessop West foyer

Exploring rhizomatic connections across my practice 

while discussing the idea of artist zines and teach-out activities with Rachel Stenner

 An interruption with Terence Dunne about film, and ongoing discussions with Barry Greenwood and Emma Frances O'Connor about how to conduct a polite interruption

Reading about Deleuze and ideas about becoming revolutionary through a failure of concentration, absent minded distraction (or might that include an interruption?)

Emma Bolland interrupting and working in preparation for next weeks fan-subbing performance where we will be subtitling film clips and narrating our own misunderstandings

'we must begin wherever we are'

Today I will be setting up for my artist residency at the University of Sheffield in the foyer at Jessop West.

Please interrupt me.

Interrupteur

Interrupteur Residency

Interrupteur

interrupteur holds both the mistaken notion of the interruption as well as the actual translated sense of the word – switch: as exchange, shift, or transformation.

Forging conversations and collaborations between artists and academics is at the heart of the project’s endeavour, but initially Rachel Smith as artist in residence will be present in the foyer of the Jessop West building on selected dates (see below), working, making art, and being interrupted by conversation and the unexpected encounter. 

Smith’s work uses drawing, photography, and writing to explore the materiality of the peripheral details in the acts of reading, writing, and listening. The grasping action of finding sense in the face of the excesses of language sometimes pushes the the work towards wordlessness. Equally gaps, voids, misunderstandings, and errors are opened up in the artworks and these contain the potentiality of that which has yet to happen. Producing these generative spaces allows room for other voices. These gaps in the practice may contain no visible language, but they are not empty, they possess a latent energy. These are the spaces inhabited by the other, the as-yet-unwritten, the as-yet-unread, the as-yet-unspoken, or the as-yet-unheard.

Beyond producing her own work Smith will host conversations, events, performances, staged dialogue, and even accidental occurrences. The intention is to explore how artists might open spaces for dialogue and collaboration between and beyond expected outcomes, engaging across disciplines and inhabiting liminal and in-between spaces. In her occupation of the foyer at Jessop West, other artists will move through the space, stopping to collaborate, discuss, perform, and workshop ideas. 

Not-knowing, error and misrepresentation, hybridity, constraint and improvisation, will be some of ideas explored during the conversations and work in progress during the residency.

Quotations selected for each day of work will act as provocation or a filter through which to work and think.

You are welcome to interrupt, join in, exchange ideas, observe, listen in, or merely glance and walk by.