proof of concept

i've decided that the mixer is not the best way to amplify the signal from the pipes, instead i'm going to build mini-amps for each pipe. that way each of the 4 speakers i'm planning to use will each be individually the sound of one of the pipes. one pipe, one speaker. 4 individual pipes, 4 individual speakers.

 i found this sound mixer, with 5 inputs, in the rubbish!

 this is a rig up for testing 

- speaker at left, mini-amp in the middle (circuit board),

power off to transformer at top, contact mic at right.

 close up mini-amp, built from an electronics kit

this contact mic was made by artist Riki-Metisse Marlow

drawing out some ideas, considered mounting amp on pipe

getting a feel for how the 4 pipes would look with the 4 amps and 4 speakers,
and trying to figure out how to get the power to each amp

decided here to run the power cables up the pipes and into the roof,
creating much cleaner lines in the 'system'

sequence of developed ideas through drawings (left to right)

i'll have to make 2 more mini-amps, as i have 2 left over from an artwork i exhibited last year. and i'll need to get 4 desk lamps. that should be all i need to purchase to complete the work.

bus projects at west wing

information about the next show for bus projects is here.

the return of painting?

just noticed how the black spray paint on this plywood looks quite interesting. i was using this wood as a backdrop for some spray-painting i was doing. the marks left behind make me think of really abstracted, blasted and blurry flowers.

possible future painting series?

re-charged

i wasn't completely happy with the presentation of charging at its recent outing. i think the plinth was just too much. i don't really enjoy plinths much at all anymore but was thinking it might be ok for a commercial gallery setting - some sort fo fetishising of the object.

once i got the work back to the studio i took some photos of it sans-plinth. 

so now that work can be put to bed, probably the last sculpture with living plants in it for a while i think. in some ways this work feels like a transitional one, as if it is a step into some new work. more system influence, as with the elements combining to build something functional; less plant oriented from now on.


there are some plant drawings yet to come, but sculpturally for now, plants are a concluded material.

studio play vs park play

found some carpet lying around that i can use as a ground for preparing this next sculpture.

this is close to the flooring of the site at west wing, so will help to get a better feel for how the work will look. 

also, i've been completely reinvigorated to go on long walks around my area again, what with my car being written off and all. plus the general joy of longer days and sunshine... occasional as it is in melbourne at the moment. i've been keeping a diary of some photos and making some videos which i'll need to edit down soon. the diary is on tumblr here.

 

new symbols of nature

it had to happen at some point, and i think the time was right. 

plants have been dropped from the installation.

plants have been a very regular material in my work for some time now. perhaps to the point of becoming some sort of signature, where occasionally i am being referred to as the 'plant guy'. now there's a whole variety of good reasons to use plants in art, and it is something that will always be part of my repertoire. but as i have come to realise that my work is about systems, and the plants i use signify just one symbolic evocation of natural systems, i feel more free to let them go and pursue some different natural elements that also evoke symbolic meaning for natural systems.

i had started with logs, way back in 2008, as the starting point of natural materials in my work. natural materials that connote 'nature' and the archive of information contained therein. then i transitioned from those dead and discarded living materials, to plants that were actually alive. this introduced issues like the biophilia hypothesis into my work and was a more direct way of engaging with the 'natural', living world around us, or amongst us.

this next transition goes back in the other direction, in a way, by pursuing natural elements that are even less 'alive' (or perhaps even, less 'conscious') than either logs, wood or living plants. for this next show, with its connections to the architecture of the site, i am going to use rock as a material to represent the natural.

rocks are as equally of the natural world as a tiger, an orchid or a cloud. some theories have it that the world is in fact one functioning system, where all these natural elements - from rocks and sand and dirt, to oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, to termites and kangaroos and humans - are all functioning together to make life possible on earth. they each facilitate the functioning of each other's collective environmental needs.

artist giuseppe penone describes rocks as liquid materials that appear to us as solid only because of our limited time frame of conscious awareness. in the grand scheme of universal time, a rock transitions through many stages in creation and destruction, only existing as a hard rock for the blink of an eye in the broad spectrum of time of the earth's lifespan.

also, i like the correlation between the rock as a natural element, and how we have unitised it into a cobblestone and used thousands to articulate our architectural environment - natural system coopted as cultural system. 

for this site, in the melbourne cbd, the obvious rock choice is bluestone.  this highly recognisable part of melbourne's architecture, especially from the gold rush era, is actually cooled lava from a volcano flow.

in the interest of stripping the work back to its elements a bit more - in contrast to a habit i have of overloading my work - this sketch is exploring the speaker cone as stripped down sound producer. it requires some sort of armature to stand up, so loses some of its potency i think. 

the desk lamps still seem to have more impact for me, so they remain first choice at the moment. i like the way they imply that the internal infrastructure of an office environment appears to be interrogating/investigating/nurturing the architectural building blocks of its own habitat. building blocks which are made of the earth, are natural, and form the foundation of its existence.

process is evolution

ok, so i'm still working through the ideas for this next show. it has recently become more obvious that ideas about systems and the way in which they behave, as if of their own agency, is the foundation of how i approach an artwork in this series. 

i'm thinking that this phd degree is like a project - with a particularly defined territory of operation - that populates and articulates its terrain with multiple series of artworks.

so, anyway, with this next show i'm working through my ideas and trying to massage them into something interesting and a suitable contribution to the body of work produced here in melbourne.

here's some recent sketches of ideas. i'm enjoying how the work is starting to form itself, just through the process of drawing the ideas as if they were real physical things. i'm going to continue this approach until i'm happy with the last drawing i do, or i run out of time!

i was thinking here about where to have the seedlings going from, or in. i was thinking this is a good object to have in one's language. as an object, the container of the seedlings will evoke a certain interpretative meaning depending on what it is. and it's a great opportunity to introduce something unusual into the combination of elements. 

i have been thinking glass containers would be good, mostly based on the aesthetics of glass in combination with cables, speakers and microphones. in the picture above i was thinking about piles of newspapers. like the piles people bind together with string for their recycling.

seedlings growing out of the news, or out of piles of paper, is an interesting combination of materials - they are seldom seen together and therefore elicit something fresh in the viewer's mind. if i was writing a text book, i'd call that something like, the novelty affect. 
and yes, with the 'a' in affect.

also, there's an anthropomorphology being applied with this imbuing of the mechanical elements with some sort of apparent consciousness. the speakers have been merged with desk lamps. not sure about this, as it's a bit strong. but that might be a good thing. i can't tell yet.

i do like how the speakers emit sound from what is normally a source of light. that's nice slippage of meaning. if i was writing a text book, i'd call that something like, the slippage affect.

also, desk lamps are commonplace items in rooms like the one in which the installation takes place. that ties the materials back to the context of the space and makes the work more installation-y or site specific. and one of the important elements in this artwork is the extraction of sound from the pipes in the middle of the room, that connect to various other parts of the shopping centre building and infrastructure.

here's some other thoughts - drawn out.

originally i had intended to build robots made of plants and electronic parts that would be poised on the pipes, listening to the sound of the pipes with sensors in their limbs. i've since turned away from that idea because i was worried it would translate as too theatrical. robots can work, but they have to look legitimate.

i decided it would be cleaner if the contact microphones (which i am going to mostly make myself) were attached without any authority from an obvious source. the sketch above gives me a chance to better visualise what it would look like with clamps holding the contact mics to the pipes. i quite like it, it's dry and clean.

the lower image is getting a better look at desk lamps, the way they look. they are very anthropomorphic and bring pixar to mind. this could either be a distracting new meaning to introduce as a new element in the combination, or maybe it's good to introduce, acting as a catalyst to stimulate a broader set of possible interpretations. perhaps even interesting ideas. oh - and i'm also thinking about the seedlings growing in nests. maybe nests of shredded papers. maybe real nests.

not sure how many rounds this will go through, there's the sound mixer to think about too. how to present that. if that wave of transition from portraying objects with obvious or implied consciousness -  to -  making objects cleaner and drier, continues, then the objects will become less and less dressed up, and more and more become just the pragmatic functions they are.

what is synthesis?

so, it really only just dawned on me - the name of this project includes the word synthesis. obviously i chose it, but i never really thought about it. well, i mean, i did think about it. but i never really analysed it.

the reason i chose it was because it describes, quite simply, 
 "the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole"

really, that simple.

that's what art is, of course. regardless of medium, method or conceptual content, the process of art is exactly just that. 

process insights

so, for the upcoming show at west wing i started off with the idea of plant robots. 

you can see a pot plant robot clinging to the pipes in this sketch

but after some thought i decided to drop the whole anthropomorphic element and just let the system of interconnected parts speak for itself. i'm always keen on evoking a sense of intelligence in systems, and i think producing robots is a little too didactic - in terms of that evocation of articulated thought.

 just mapping out the parts - you might be able to see i thought about building a pipe that i could tap, drawing water out from it for the seedlings, but i think that is a bit too much trickery for my work now.

there's a few elements i need to consider now:

 - what sort of seedlings should i use (i'm contemplating weeds at the moment)

 - how to build the speakers to elicit a sense of nurturing (i'm thinking about building the speaker cones into desk lamp shades)

random sculptural event

pressed flowers 

+ 

a book about indoor plants 

(that i'm using to appropriate some instructional drawings from)

= 

sudden unplanned sculpture.

 

units

transition alignments

in a movie i saw recently, a conversation something like this:

reporter: So, Yoko, what are you working on now?
yoko: I'm thinking about scissors.
reporter: What? Just thinking about them?
yoko: Yes

and so it is with any art that takes conceptualism as a fundamental component of its makeup. thinking is much of the work.

with the new year coming (an arbitrary signal marker of time) and the continuing refinement of the direction of my work, i've been thinking of using this next show at west wing as a transition process. my initial intention was to construct some sort of installation of hybrid organic robots made of plants and electronics. my first sketches were rather literal robots. but with the focus of my work on systems, i feel i can start to be less literal in my material creations.

i feel like i should make the systems (machines/robots/hybrids) more abstract and ambiguous, even less heirarchical (eliminating who is 'boss' in the system) and more mysterious.

how this will manifest itself is not yet certain. but i'm going to embrace this exhibition opportunity as a platform for development. the first step is to move back from a literal hybridisation of plant and electronic, in the form of robots with 'plant brains', and to move into new territories of ambiguous systems. materially, for this installation, that means no plant robots listening to the pipes, or moving about the space like living things. instead, the system of functioning parts will simply be there, and the viewer can decipher their relations if they choose.

day in the sun

sunshine brings synapse realignment and exhilaration.

 
the city is walking distance to the right of this photo, just slightly north-west along the yarra river, which itself is about 300m behind the camera. a microcosm of a forest or bushland setting, cultivated within an inch of its life not withstanding.

as a system of traffic flow, suburban planning, electrical wiring and sporting endeavours encircles and interconnects with this park, so to a system of interrelated activities within the park reach out and interconnect with the cultural systems. collectively, the living entities of the park, including families of birds who feed on the flowers of the gum trees, the beetles that live amongst the micro-tenement towers of the grassy canyons in the lawn, the semi-forested accumulation of the large trees - and indeed the whole functioning eco-system itself, as manicured and orchestrated as much of it is - all contribute to a participation with the broader external systems within which they lie.

system overlap. system relationship.

hybrid robot plants in a shopping mall

a very exciting opportunity has just come along - to be a part of a group show at west space gallery's offshoot, west wing. this came about as a result of the unfortunate closure of the bus projects gallery earlier this year - where i had been booked to exhibit in may. the closure meant the postponement of that exhibition until new premises could be secured or an off-site opportunity presented itself. west space came to the rescue with their gallery space in the melbourne central shopping centre.

the show is in late january - more details soon.

the location offers a great chance to engage directly with the architecture of the site. i chose a small room to put my work into due to its suitability for a very real engagement with the building's functional components. a series of pipes runs vertically right through the room and if you press your ear against them you can hear the distant sounds of the shopping mall.

 the small room through the right door

 the pipes that pierce the room vertically

 an odd interruption into the white cube

the work i had proposed for the bus gallery show was very much designed to fit a very particular space - a long, skinny space. this new space affords me an opportunity to engage with the site in a different way, most especially because of the 'intruding' elements of the foundational architecture that break into the otherwise white cubical office-like space. 

discovering that i could hear water flowing and the echoing sounds of the extended building through the pipes was a key element in generating ideas for making work in the space. here's a small list of ideas that are getting the ball rolling:

 - the secluded, isolated nature of the space (office room, door) lends itself to being a microcosm environment. this makes me think of things like museum dioramas and zoo exhibits for reptiles or nocturnal animals.

 - the sound element is most intriguing, making me consider encouraging the viewer to listen to the pipes. also makes me think that maybe plants could be listening to pipes, as if tapping them.

 - the ceiling is made of corrugated perspex, the kind of roof that is common as backyard terracing for verandas in the suburbs. with my work i automatically then think of hanging plants and outdoor lighting.

 - the rock that also pierces one wall suggests a hidden infrastructure, something more earthy and traditionally constructed than the more obvious shiny facade of white walls and other commercially oriented presentations of the shopping centre.

out of these thoughts i have been getting a strong desire to construct an installation of hybrid plant/robot machines that are clambering about in the space, listening to the pipes and using the sound they gather from that to stimulate the growth of new plants.