Static Mutascope
In my head I knew
In my head I knew that it was unlikely to work but my heart believed in it so much I forgave it all the suffering it put me through. It’s so romantic to clamber through a room of waste furniture to find a suitable piece of wood, to wait for a day to locate the person who knows where the keys are for the workshop to get a measuring tape and a saw without a handle, to spend hours holding the blade with a piece of rag to cut a line and then repeat this until I had made the piece of wood into six strips, to then wait for the right person to be present to ask to borrow their staple gun, to go to the mall and find the right staples, to cycle to the curtain shop and negotiate a length of netting without sharing a language, to finally assemble a set of frames to make a sheet of paper. |
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What I had created functioned in their role as tools to form sheets of paper. This paper, although I knew would be poor quality being made from such poor and inconsistent materials, would be imbued with the essence of all that it had been part of. Its spirit would live.
For years I collected significant pieces of paper; letters, flyers, catalogues magazines, newspapers, receipts, ticket stubs, birthday cards and saved it in ever enlarging boxes in my room in Leeds. When I moved I hired a van to take my belongings and took my collection with me with the view to producing. A year passed and I had not opened the box; fearful of the weight of responsibility for its precious contents.
In September 2011, pressed to perform, I had used my baggage allowance to fly 20kg of it to Tallinn, where I wheeled it into a room full of people removed the lock and invited them to assist me in tearing it up. They slowly warmed to the idea and then began to enjoy it; throwing torn paper in the air as if it were bundles of cash I had brought to them or piling it up like snowballs and hurling it at their friends.
The activity was documented on a digital camera by an audience member. Thinking about the next stage in the life of this material I decided that I would use the torn paper from the performance to make an object that was a document of the event. Having destroyed the history of this paper, which up until now had been a document of three years of my life this significant experience was now part of its continuing narrative and it should own and reflect this new character. Its new identity would be to be the evidence of this transformation.
For days I sifted through the digital moving image and eventually I collated 288 images that illustrated the transformation. The aim was to print these images onto paper made from the torn paper in the performance and to create a machine based on a Mutascope that would be story of the new identity of this material. I inverted each image and adjusted the contrast so that they would become photographic negatives.
I had seen a Mutascope at the National media Museum in Bradford. I imagined the still images collated cylindrically falling rapidly to reveal to the viewer the event which changed this paper from being a stagnant document of my life to a shared creative activity. I began to formulate a process in my head based on my experiences of paper making, photography and kinetic making. These activities and could happen simultaneously because I wanted the object to be complete before I had to leave. I expect that this is the point where my heart took over and my mind was closed away into a cupboard to be retrieved at a later date.
I got a letter in the post today from The Southbank Centre in London thanking me for gift aiding my ticket for the recent show Tracey Emin ‘Love is what you want’ 2011.
I fantasized about a machine with a handle in a room full of people but only one person could see at a time. I imagined whispers and rumours of what you will see spreading around the room. I imagined gossiping, flirting, awkwardness, tipsiness as people drank wine and waited for their turn. I imaged those so keen they being an informal queue, and some who are excluded by the experience and resign themselves to the social activity dismissing the work as being pretentious and unnecessary. I imagined then an audience member making a film of the film of the film and it being shared online, the sound of the machine as it turned, the noise of the crowd chatting, laughing, plotting and planning where they will go next, how they will suck out the minutes and seconds of this evening.
I fell in love with this fantasy and so I spent every day from the moment I woke up until there would be not enough hours to sleep working on making this machine which would be the catalyst for this event.
The more I made the more I evidence I produced of the fallibility of this object. The self imposed deadline crept closer and I drained the hours out of each day trying to resolve the problems of my circumstances. I chose to make Cyanotypes and then there was no sun. I spent hours adding numbers to each of the digital stills so that they would be in order but when I took them to the printers the numbers did not appear, the paper frames I had made were slightly to small for the images, when I reverted to silver gelatine prints I ran out of chemicals, when exposing I over and under exposed so that the pile of precious paper decreased without a single recognisable image and when I attempted to bind the spine of the stack of mostly non-images the thread I bought was cheap and it broke.
My heart is breaking.
Last night I read that Sophie Calle ‘Take Care of Yourself’ 2007 will be showing at Tallinn in November.
For years I collected significant pieces of paper; letters, flyers, catalogues magazines, newspapers, receipts, ticket stubs, birthday cards and saved it in ever enlarging boxes in my room in Leeds. When I moved I hired a van to take my belongings and took my collection with me with the view to producing. A year passed and I had not opened the box; fearful of the weight of responsibility for its precious contents.
In September 2011, pressed to perform, I had used my baggage allowance to fly 20kg of it to Tallinn, where I wheeled it into a room full of people removed the lock and invited them to assist me in tearing it up. They slowly warmed to the idea and then began to enjoy it; throwing torn paper in the air as if it were bundles of cash I had brought to them or piling it up like snowballs and hurling it at their friends.
The activity was documented on a digital camera by an audience member. Thinking about the next stage in the life of this material I decided that I would use the torn paper from the performance to make an object that was a document of the event. Having destroyed the history of this paper, which up until now had been a document of three years of my life this significant experience was now part of its continuing narrative and it should own and reflect this new character. Its new identity would be to be the evidence of this transformation.
For days I sifted through the digital moving image and eventually I collated 288 images that illustrated the transformation. The aim was to print these images onto paper made from the torn paper in the performance and to create a machine based on a Mutascope that would be story of the new identity of this material. I inverted each image and adjusted the contrast so that they would become photographic negatives.
I had seen a Mutascope at the National media Museum in Bradford. I imagined the still images collated cylindrically falling rapidly to reveal to the viewer the event which changed this paper from being a stagnant document of my life to a shared creative activity. I began to formulate a process in my head based on my experiences of paper making, photography and kinetic making. These activities and could happen simultaneously because I wanted the object to be complete before I had to leave. I expect that this is the point where my heart took over and my mind was closed away into a cupboard to be retrieved at a later date.
I got a letter in the post today from The Southbank Centre in London thanking me for gift aiding my ticket for the recent show Tracey Emin ‘Love is what you want’ 2011.
I fantasized about a machine with a handle in a room full of people but only one person could see at a time. I imagined whispers and rumours of what you will see spreading around the room. I imagined gossiping, flirting, awkwardness, tipsiness as people drank wine and waited for their turn. I imaged those so keen they being an informal queue, and some who are excluded by the experience and resign themselves to the social activity dismissing the work as being pretentious and unnecessary. I imagined then an audience member making a film of the film of the film and it being shared online, the sound of the machine as it turned, the noise of the crowd chatting, laughing, plotting and planning where they will go next, how they will suck out the minutes and seconds of this evening.
I fell in love with this fantasy and so I spent every day from the moment I woke up until there would be not enough hours to sleep working on making this machine which would be the catalyst for this event.
The more I made the more I evidence I produced of the fallibility of this object. The self imposed deadline crept closer and I drained the hours out of each day trying to resolve the problems of my circumstances. I chose to make Cyanotypes and then there was no sun. I spent hours adding numbers to each of the digital stills so that they would be in order but when I took them to the printers the numbers did not appear, the paper frames I had made were slightly to small for the images, when I reverted to silver gelatine prints I ran out of chemicals, when exposing I over and under exposed so that the pile of precious paper decreased without a single recognisable image and when I attempted to bind the spine of the stack of mostly non-images the thread I bought was cheap and it broke.
My heart is breaking.
Last night I read that Sophie Calle ‘Take Care of Yourself’ 2007 will be showing at Tallinn in November.