Saturday, October 25, 2008
through my talk with hammet last week, i was introduced to a new theoretical term that i have subconsciously & intuitively been working with…for a long, long time. The idea of “framing”.
FRAMING: “It is an inevitable process of selective influence over the individual’s perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases. A frame defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others.”
When one seeks to explain an event, the understanding often depends on the frame it is referred to. Individuals constantly project into the world the interpretive frames that allow them to make sense; we only shift frames, or realize that we have habitually applied a frame, when incongruity calls for a frame-shift. In other words, we only become aware of the frames that we automatically use when something forces us to replace one frame with another.
My choice of frame would be of the necessity to look closely, wonder liberally and to pay attention non-discriminatorily. By placing this frame onto the realms of the expected, I am encouraging an alternate way of looking at the world, or in essence an alternative world that bears reason to be looked at.
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008
lastnight i went to see uta barth give a lecture at risd.
she has been one of my favorite photographers for about a decade & a half now & i’ve realized that she is working with ideas that are quite similar to my thesis work thus far.
in her ground series, she investigates what she calls “non spaces” which in this case is the background that is so often visually disregarded in portraiture. with the camera lens, as with our eyes but it’s often too subtle to note, when we choose to focus on one thing all else slips out of focus. Barth set up her shots with the focus on the person in foreground & then simply removed the person so that all that is left in her images is the blurred background; a non space becoming the subject of the piece.
she is too good.
in much of her work, she cleverly tricks her viewer into looking at things with heightened sensitivity. In another series, she repeats the same image of a tree through a window taken at different times of day or in slightly different conditions over & over & over until the repetition forces the viewer to realize that the work is not about the tree but in fact about the need to be in the moment; to be invested in actually looking at the things that have become so familiar that you almost no longer see them.
i {heart} uta barth.
big time.
& please feel free to travel here for more images of my latest microscopic adventure…
in researching the small things in the world this evening, i stumbled upon both a contemporary micro-sculptor & a powers of ten {digital intergalactic superhighway re-mix}.
i posted, to my flickr page, the images that i took of my miniature friends who started this most recent investigation into the world of miniatures…enjoy:
oh, cold & rainy sunday mornings seem to be the perfect time to sit on the dusty blue couch drinking warm coffee & reading gaston bachelard’s the poetics of space. the chapter of the day? why miniature, of course. much like the through-the-microscope photos that i’ve been taking of miniscule scraps of sea life, each passage of bachelards writing holds infinite morsels of fascinating discovery that one would not expect to exist with such a small string of words. in just two & a half pages i have uncovered these thoughts & images to meditate on:
“to make others believe, we must believe ourselves.”
“…a coach the size of a bean.”
“…from the interior he discovers interior beauty.”
“…an inversion of perspective, which is either fleeting or captivating, according to the talent of the narrator, or the reader’s capacity for dream.”
“representation is dominated by imagination. representation becomes nothing but a body of expressions with which to communicate our own images to others.”
“‘the world is my imagination.’ the cleverer i am at miniaturizing the world, the better i possess it.”
“one must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.”
all of this has also made me think again of my buddy abelardo morell. his work is brimming with the idea of an “inversion of perspective”.
i think i’m going to go & bug him for an interview now & hope he is not too busy to chat….
Saturday, October 4, 2008
i’ve been reading a lot lately about the power & intrigue of the miniature.
i decided to return to the wondrous collection of fantastical relics at the museum of jurassic technology…with particular attention paid to the strand-of-hair carvings by Hagop Sandaldjian.
“Inhabiting the margins between dream and reality, these figures of impossible dimensions appear at once banal and elusive, meticulously crafted and dreamily insubstantial. Each nearly weightless sculpture seems to hover between its slim hold on the material plane and the lucid and immeasurable reality of a mental image. Straddling the line between science, craft, art, and novelty, Sandaldjian’s work befuddles our ability to make such distinctions, and in so doing, opens a space for wonder.”
(above, wild animals ”on a strand of hair, twelve wild animals are seen in the presence of a crowd. the strand of hair is coverd with glue.”)
pretty good, yes?
i highly recommend you look at the rest of the microminiatures of hagop sandaldjian.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
after much confusion & general computer-shaking, i do believe that i have officially created a blog for my thesis process. if you disagree with this here belief of mine, please do let me know as i will remain quite clueless otherwise.
& so in far more simpler terms, this post is a test: testing, 1llama, 2llama, 3llama…
