Introduction to Residence.
The Waverley Council together with its Local Creatives Collaboration Program gave me an amazing opportunity to be a resident artist (scientist?) in the Yalagang Room at the iconic Bondi Pavillion, a real hub of creative energy. I thank them for that. It was a marvelous coincidence that i had two works showing next door in the Bondi Pavillion Gallery as part of the Waverley Art Prize.
The residence became about teasing out new ways of thinking. Below – in the following section – are thoughts that I tried to capture during the residence as they emerged. They are not meant as linear explanations of phenomena. For the residence I also intentionally denied, or at least severely limited my drawing and did not set up The Evolver machine. This would have sent me down a more familiar path which I wanted to avoid.
The umbrella bones (wire from an umbrella skeleton) form part of the drawing arms of the Evolver machine. I was interested in harvesting dilapidated umbrellas from the Bondi area to use as measuring devices as part of the evolver (i.e. what would substituting the regular umbrella drawing arms with ones that had been modified by Bondi.. and then use these as part of the way we measure Bondi with the Evolver machine. This question leans into science, but is really probably quite an absurd question, but having said that I am interested in sometimes introducing an absurd approach which is a variant of DIS-understanding of what it means to measure and may lead to novel insights and questions.
What emerged early on in the residence was a different question. This was an interest in my evolver machine which is made of umbrella bones; bicycle wheels; record players and wires which are inspired by the irregular shape of proteins which ideally give unique motion as part of the Evolver. I wanted to – in a sense – deconstruct the evolver and query the objects that make up the evolver and bring them to the fore of the enquiry.
The reason I wanted to do that is gradually the things that make up the system have started to gather interest with me. I have always felt The Evolver was a model of me.. a me trying to describe itself. There is what the thing does which gives you a sense of its behaviour.. but can you predict or understand what it is by what it does? The components of The Evolver are structures that once-upon-a-time did something else. Bicycle wheels were on a someone’s bicycle; the umbrella belonged to someone and is now doing something other than what it was meant to do. The record players are no longer playing music. Do they miss doing that? There is a small detail. A trilobite fossil that used to be a trilobite, living on the sea floor. It died and became a fossil that was harvested and bought as a curio in a curio shop. It now functions to stop the record player arm from sliding back and turning the record player off – a function its live counterpart would never have dreamed of doing!
This introduction therefore gives the rationale underpinning the residence and what follows is the daily blog I kept.
This therefore formed the basis of my enquiry. To make enquiries into the objects that make up the system – see what story they could tell me.
I will then show some images and maybe video that attempt to capture the newly emerged concepts as they unfolded, with an explanation of the thinking.
DAILY BLOG
Yalagang room day 1
Slow and deliberate
Labcoat on; scientist on
Every motion is performed
Measured?
For who?
The world measuring me?
When you are slow and deliberate
Performing
You are asking something very specific from the G0ds
And then I had to eat a banana
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I cannot stand cold belt buckles so while reaching for a strut.. my shirt lifts out of my pants and the cold Jetstream of metal hits my midsection and I momentarily break character.. then quickly realise.. no… that is my character.. and rushed over here to write it down.
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The thing you quickly realise with Deliberate Action (DA) – like the way the wind moves.. and moves things around… there are no wrong moves or repositioning’s.. things just are.. lets not give primacy over ordered motions..
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TRUST
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Went live to build.
Performing as if you know what you are doing.. maybe then you will know what you are doing and if you don’t it might not matter.. except for the matter..
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Turntable driving a wild umbrella..
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An expensive corporate toy maybe?
`Day 2
On my walk from a free parking space
Picked up a toaster
A hopeful monster
Connected in series to a second toaster
More power
And used to re-animate a mandarin
Futureproofing the mandarin
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Random walking
Abraham wandering into the desert
As a non-teleological machine
Deliciously odd beautiful and futile
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How do you force a system out of equilibrium?
First of all we must define me interacting with my materials – the system… for this to makes sense.. there must be me changing the behaviour of my materials and my materials changing my behaviour. The basis of feedback. The basis of a system… a thing with different feedback loops with components of that system. To change my system. Take it out of equilibrium. Take it away from its familiar feedback loops.. I must be confronted by different matter.. this matter must be confronted by me.. and we change each other or that system collapses… or falls back to the old equilibrium rather than finding a new one… new material; new behaviour new loops – evolution.
Grant’s extraction, “or we change each other or that system collapses.”
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I don’t mind unresolved ideas / forms.. in fact that might even be my subject matter.. I don’t like or even trust ideas that are too resolved because we want to protect those or the ideas want to protecedactyl themselves you could say.. they get walled off.. the peripheral machine.. and that is probably not good.
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Part of the idea of the aspirational object. Took an umbrella skeleton that was refusing to be a dynamic sculpture. Picked it apart. And threaded together with wire and joined it together.. loop to loop. An interesting hypothesis emerged. Umbrellas are perfect objects. Made to be optimal over the years,. There is profound teleology in their design. I take that and make it something else. Unlike an object or a drawing made from random lines arising in my imagination.. I follow some logical progression with the umbrella carcass. The hypothesis is since the original object is teleology personified and is well made. High level ordered. The derived object I make from it has echos of that order which may be present in the extant form.
Day 3
Panel-related
Day 4
No death by a thousand cuts
Look out for the tyranny of incrementalism
Harvested a Bondi road umbrella with some injuries.. good for measurement a special sacred object`
Look out for snagging. The underlying architecture of desire for materials to be together
Properties of a system emerging.. where once the umbrellas were underlings.. at the service of the evolvers limited teleology.. they are tired of being in the service and want to be served. They want to be the centre of the story.. they have compelled me to take them seriously to say they are really what I was interested in all along.
Day 4
Thought from home.. while half asleep this morning
MINIMISE
minimise
but more if you could see the nerves
falling
states of transition
catching the nerves of things in transition.. the
transitional forms
hopeful monsters
left behind
the logic of the material
the umbrella before it bursts
nerve puddle on the floor
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For the open session tomorrow.. I want it to be not very clear which are the artworks and which are the works.. the works are transitional states.. subject matter of large piece and umbrella.. and the state that I am always in.. is that not a transitional state.. between one state and another.. so the objects around the place might reflect that.. I could [play with that idea. As I develop this story.. it recalls the first day.. where my box of tools looked like a sculpture… so.. its extending playing with that theme in amongst many themes.. there they are again.. the themes.. like systems.. cultures.. competing with each other.
Thinking too that if you are not sure what is the art object and what is not (although it might be kind of obvious?) it is saying something about the saturation of curated.. performative experiences.. where we can’t really know anymore and are maybe more dependent than ever before in someone telling us.. maybe that someone is something.. the objects around us
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Transitional state (between day 4 and 5) things momentarily relinquish the bonds holding them in the prevailing state. Hopefully there is another state waiting for them on the other side of this.. an object waiting to be.. aspiring object in the underlying architecture
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Day 6
Which do you prefer?
Do we assume or I think that in science we assume that all electrons.. whether we got it from an apple.. or just one buzzin around in the air.. if we pull it out and test it.. their behaviour might be indistinguishable.. we don’t make the same assumptions about people.. thinking here about my particle/people trajectory experiment/ I have written rules. But I expect they won’t be perfectly followed.. as I suspect people – where we collect them from – will display different behaviors when tested,. At what scale do the behaviour merge and become indistinguishable? In a crowd? I have two cups.. at what scale do things individuate.. seems maybe not at the scale of the electron? Although maybe one surrounded by apple is a bit different> ? I have two cups in the room to ask the question? They seem the same.. but the electrons in them are different to the other cup.. one might be from Jupiter and one might be from mars. But they seem the same.. they seem to do the same thing.. but I ask which do you prefer as they stand there next to each other.
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You have to traverse the space to get to the logic of the thing.. sometimes that’s a lot of motion absurd non-linear motion for the motor neurons to fire over the zone of interest..
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Between day 6 and 7
Go around room when you get there.. and like the way science and art aren’t the same.. we can find ways they can talk to each other.. common ground to walk on.. do the same for the works in the room.. allow them to talk to each other.. not shout.. talk
Think about what the building blocks of things are… the keys are the building blocks of a piano.. are umbrellas the building blocks of something?
A dream of consciousness
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A central theme.. is not umbrellas the central them that ties it all together is a nervous system.. that has to / must reorganize itself in all transitions as Galia said to Hilton.. the heart is outside the body when you have children… these phenomena“ or mobile../ motile.. I am trying to capture what the world / a glimpse / of who / what we are when the veil of skin and mind is stripped off.. the nakedness of our nerves. That’s always what the evolver was.. but it hid behind being a measuring device (note added after the fact: all along it / I was being measured).. in its essence it was me saying to the world.. look at me see me.. but that is behind a veil.. the thin veil that holds us all together.. so when ever I am making anything.. it is my nervous system doing it and it is making itself.. a mirror reflection glimpse of it / my! Self
The portrait of Sid’s Nervous System interacting with the Scientists at CSIRO… really got it. The jangly wires that found there way into the Wobably knew what they were..
The umbrella flying…
(transitional state).. which I had to wire with the jangly wire.. the straight wire was ‘wrong’ was suggesting that all the universe.. all the objects in it the living.. non-living.. are held together by these neural systems.. for change to occur.. the re-wiring must support it.. but it is out there exposed externalized.
The umber-all bones teach us.. that the nerves can be soft pliable – spring.. responsive to the world.. or under tension and break / distort the world (it’s about this time that I put a sign at the door: Neuroscience Lab.
It’s the most naked you can be.. when its just the nerves that are ‘out’ there. When the toaster is separated.. it is still entangled by those nerves extending through space.. like Matt once said to an entangled object is an object extending through space.. but not bounded in the way we think things are bounded.
The one object in the room.. which is called ‘way to sure of itself’ is way too sure of itself.. it lacks the instability and uncertainty that the other objects have. There is a line or region between an object and a metaphor and that is what I need to locate.+
We all are these exposed nerves.. that howl in our sleep in our dreams where we are free to.. the thin veil (of culture_Jung) makes sure we hold the line when we are in daylight.
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Making a machine to do something
A teleological machine is curtailing because of the motions my hand will have to make to get it right
Or is that just an excuse?
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They cant be figures
—– the biology of the evolver
The bones became its own thing.. the turntables also separated out to become something else. What they initially identified as has become unsettled
Day 8 Yalagang room
The thing I am realizing and should have known all along is that the intention of the activity I am doing is never the thing I am doing.. that is hidden in the serendipity of what my hands are after.. but I do need to play along.. I do need to observe what is going on.. and go along with it and see what it might be interested in.. like what happened in CSIRO[1].. I am not that clever that I can make a composition of random motion.. my job is to go through the act of doing that.. in the chaos.. or slight disorder of it.. so that the real thought.. non-linear idea can emerge/.
It is interesting how with the spinning umbrellas.. the 3rd turntable seems to be the most important even though technically its not doing anything.. but it seems to be overseeing.. driving.. witnessing the two other umbrellas.. the witness.. what Estelle spoke about the other day
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Changing the memory of the material
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In the Same way the minimalist piece.. : 30cm ruler from a long way away pushed to minimize.. find the essence… the painting.. ‘OK Teapot’ reminded me who I am.
[1] For the CSIRO gig I built / evolved what I called Serendipity machines to demonstrate to the scientists what the scientific process was. It was meant to suggest the process of serendipity. But during the performance the machines behaved badly.. and I though it was going badly.. but then I noticed that the scientists had gathered around and were helping the machines work.. this was captured in the recording – in the form of a drawing – that the machines did.. but the gently jostling of the scientists was expressed in the drawing making it a profound collaboration between the scientists and the machine. This ended up being the real experiment upon reflection and not initially what I thought was the real experiment / question.
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The rest of the residence is sculpting my! Nervous system
Nerves as fault lines (of the folds of the paper)….
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Between day 8 and 9
And then remember that no one idea wins.. they are all in competition.. and sometimes in synergy and sometimes messing with each other. So don’t even try and say.. your work is about this.. because suddenly it wont be it just will be…. The work that comes out in the cracks.
Day 9 Yalagang room
Everything is Nervous [ nervōsus (“nervous; sinewy; energetic, vigorous”)
eMotion / force acted upon it to move)//stir//agitate
Pan-theism // Pan-nervosus
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Curious Objects / / complementary objects / / stated in the object for an uneven world. This object is perfectly complementary… to the world. It fits like a protein or a virus to a receptor.
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Monday 3 Sept. follow up
Thought had while tidying up packing down post residence. I have the Giacometti like sculpture / bust that I carved while talking to David Asher Brook when he came to film. There are a few generalities that I now take as basic assumptions. The world is more interesting than I think and that objects that my hands made or I snagged into are.trying.to.tell.me.something. Just like the minimalist ruler piece was telling me to find the simplicity of expression.. the Giacometti was reminding me of what I think he was doing… painting our nervous system.. most essential exposed selves… this piece held a very extended on an umbrella bone.. this is something that I have thought about around 20 years ago….
The wiriness
The thin-ness
The hard-to-make-out-ness
The tenderness in a world over-filled with brash-ness
The tender neurons being at the fore-
Front-alone-alive
How do you show it>
I don’t know
That is less important and should
Not motivate the saying it (does it needs theatre as Paul Thomas said of Guy Ben Ari’s nerve cells that are hard-to-see
The bent umbrella bones
ganglions / / gangly eons
showing what forms are
not whole
separated by experience
and time
separated by experience
and time
dispersed
alive
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Even the evolver separated out from itself
It does so after every performance
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Post residence notes:
Emergent concepts and methodologies. Things / phenomena I noticed unfurling during the residence that are seeds of new directions of enquiry.
i) Separation
In the story of Genesis. On the fifth day. G0D created creatures of the air and of the water. I simplify as fish and birds. Fish and birds emerged as a theme in my work a long time ago and I have a constant enquiry as to why. I feel it is engaging with the idea of primal separation. This property of one becoming two. Or a fish becoming a bird – if such a context is possibly to create that. Cells divide. Children leave home. Life separates into death. Built into separation is Longing. When the fishness left its birdness on that fifth day it could never return. When a child leaves home they can never return. When Abraham wondered into the wilderness he could never return. You become something else in that moment of separation.
I noticed in the residence that some forms took on the character of separation. The Evolver which was one thing became its component parts. They individuated and diversified. They left home to find themselves.
The Evolver separated out into umbrella bones which found their own wings and ideas and the turntables drove other processes while the gangly nervous wires wanted to be an externalized nervous system.. connecting all things.. feeling their way around.
A part of The Evolver Machine were the umbrella components which in the machine were simply there as components. Here they emerged as entities that compelled me to see them as their-own-thing. Hidden in here is the idea of the Peripheral Machine. An idea or rather phrase that occurred to me while walking around University Campus when I was a lecturer. This would have been back in 2004-ish. The phrase entered my head:
birds maintaining
the fish-eye hollow
the power of
the peripheral machine
This has clawed at me for 20 years.. thereabouts. I have come to realise the peripheral machine is an idea. Ideas when they come into existence don’t like to die. words thoughts and dreams gather round them in layers to protect them. We see this in religion where the core idea.. common probably to most religions.. gets layers of protection in the form of organized religion with its rituals and power structures. the thickening of the seams between the layers leads to an overall cauterization from the internal layer. the heart of the structure .. the idea being protected. It gets lost in this wasteland and the outer layers / parts of the machine there to do the protecting.. become a thing in themselves.. seeking to express themselves in their own right.. new ideas.
In this way umbrellas – which were once components.. separated out to become there own thing.
Umbrella as a transitional state. Perfect state. Umbrella is a perfect object until it is damaged. This one harvested in Bondi after a rainy windy happening became a centre piece of the residence. I wanted to capture it in the process of falling.. suggesting that a fall is simply a transitional state from one state of perfection to secondary state. It is asking the question of what else something can be if it is already considered perfect.
What is a perfect object. An object with perfect teleology.. designed.. evolved to do one thing. In the case of an umbral that is to keep rain off when it is raining. The Umbrella was arranged into a drawing which was attained by attaching.. through its own available wires and channels and connected by wire to form the following drawing.
I was interested to know if a perfect object can transition to a secondary object with echoes of that perfection to form a new object with a different teleology that still had echoes of what it once was.. echoes of that perfect state that is not there any more.
Tensegrity.
I had an ice-cream with the enigmatic artist of the in betweenness of things, Paul Thomas during the residence. He was talking about the fundamentals of observation.. and then capturing that in drawing. maybe capturing that is the wrong word.. maybe manifesting that in drawing is better. I became interested in that in the context of the wire umbrella drawing – wire is an object that can directly hold tension. I started looking at the tension I could get in the umbrella wires and then asked how that might.. depending on how that was released on its paper support – manipulate, bend and fold the paper.
A few days later Tibor Molnar Philosopher of Science – friend sent me an article on tensegrity.. a coin termed by Buckminster Fuller. Refers to structures that are held together by tension. Like suspension bridges,. It holds interest in the idea that.. every part of the structure.. when interacted with affects.. is absorbed by every other part of the structure. A system in the way that a brick house is my=uch less so.. you can remove a bathroom and the house still stands. Donald Ingber refers to cells as being Tensegrity structures (Ingber 1998. Sci.Am; The Architecture of Life). He talks about when cells are placed on a glass surface they flatten, but on rubber they distort / crimp the surface.. much like what i am doing with the paper and wire.
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I am interested in exploring this phenomenon.. as a way to push the structure of a transitioned umbrella.
A side note. The wonderful ceramicist and painter from Mullimbimby, Hannah Massey sent me the book Cats Paws and Catapults by Stephen Vogel. He explores the mechanics of animal motion. I placed this on the floor of the studio during the residence
I had been playing with idea of tensegrity.. but without knowing it when I was introducing tension into the aluminum wire from an umbrella
The experiments were continued back at home.. and a single umbrella was used to construct a tensegrity-like structure
The deviant heart.
The heart of The Evolver. Which are the record players.. have in them a built in longing to play music. They instead played the heart of the Evolver – driving its erratic behaviour.. only during the residence to have that role removed from them… directed elsewhere. The peripheral machine of music now well covered up but maybe still echoing in there. What is the longing they are expressing now?
Like the separated toaster. They are playing on a twoness/ but with the toaster the two was a discontinuous one now two umbrellas are brought close together. Allowed to interact – reach for each other – occasionally touch and occasionally the one changes the behaviour of the other and thus has its behaviour changed in this simple two – component feedback system to elucidate the mechanics of reaching.
Here is a short video of the umbrella’s dancing.
The last theme which emerged was the idea of complementarity.
This object reflected on my interest in measurement. What does a measuring device look like that exactly measures the world. Measuring devices give a narrow slice of what the world actually is.. and also only an echo of it. We never truly access the world as it really is.. This device felt like it got close to reflecting the shape of the world.. like a puzzle piece exactly fitting its complement. inspired by how proteins evolve exactly to fit the complementary shape of the receptor of the cell they are binding to.
ii) Transitional states
iii) Measurement apparatus (complementary; relational)
iv) Tensegrity structures
v) Deconstruction (wrt evolver components)
