Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

Andrew Conroy will be joining me in Jessop West Foyer today 10.30-12.30 to talk about his photography projects. Walking the Railways and the Coalfields of South Yorkshire and finding a path through the social landscape 

Please come and interrupt our conversation and join in

Andrew Conroy is a curator, writer, lecturer, and photographer. He is interested in the connections and disconnections between space, place, identity, and capital.

@andrewdconroy

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.

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