SYNOPSIS
In its tracing of the history of sampling, remix and the mashup, to the early 20th century modernist technique of collage. This project proposes a transformation of the visual material present in the dataset provided by the National Museum of Australia. The reshaping of the existing material will produce new images.
The forging of this new images will be guided by a digitally generated visual syntax. That will contemplate elements such as composition, original image size and collection subsets.
A subsequent curation of the resulting images will be carried out so as to selectively conform a series. This series will later be transmitted to printed media.
BACKGROUND & CONTEXT
The background for this project can be traced to certain practices carried out by early 20th century european avant-garde artists. Artists such as Braque, Picasso and specially Hanna Höch and Kurt Schwitters. Who through the re-appropriation and re-contextualisation of existing images (photos, newspaper and magazine cut-outs) invented a new form of image making, thus originating what we now know as the collage technique.
The presence of the “real” rather than just referencing it through drawing or painting is what drove these artists to experiment with this technique. They believed that having the original image or object as part of their compositions was a more efficient mode to convey certain ideas and messages.
Furthermore, in art there is an intrinsic relationship between material, form and subject-matter. These artists explored that relationship in their work, they experimented with how the semiotics of the materials out of which their works were made from permeated the works, to the extend of becoming one with it. In other words, a composition made of glossy magazine cut-outs portrays an entirely different message than one made from newspapers.
This project is informed to a greater extend by this preoccupation with content (the nature of the raw material) rather than the visual outcomes of the artists mentioned above. I will develop more on this idea of content further down in this proposal.
As tools and mediums progressed so did the practice of collage, yet its ethos remained somewhat untouched. Along with this progression new terms were coined for practices (sampling, remixing, mashup) that have different outcomes (music, video, soundart) yet share an essence with the technique of collage. This essence can be best described as -producing something entirely new out of existing materials, by means of making that material utterly malleable to the needs and desires of the practitioner-.
The mastery of these contemporary practices is in producing pieces that are seamlessly bounded whether they be image or sound oriented. What is more, because the material used in these practices is embedded with unique cultural tokens that are read in a very specific manner. The practitioner must not only posses the technical skills to work with this material but he/she is also compelled to be culturally well informed.
The context for this project can be traced within these contemporary practices of re-appropriation, re-contextualisation, mixing and mashingup. On a sound front works by Dj Shadow, dj food and Girl Talk inform this proposal. And in a more aesthetical pursuit the works of Mark Amerika.
The practitioners mentioned above are prolific and not all of their works inform this project. What follows is a brief description of the pieces or practices that do, in order to further establish the contextual setting for this proposal.
In 1996 DJ Shadow released what would be a seminal album, Endtroducing….., structured almost in its entirety by sampled bits of sound from a varied scope of genres. The album’s importance is not only that, but also the fact that it was the first attempt at producing music through sampling only. Endtroducing….. has been compared to an auditory essay that shows DJ Shadow’s vast knowledge of music history.
Along the same vein is dj food’s Raiding the 20th Century, a piece in which the DJ aims at compacting a large amount of sound history into an hour long set. Where DJ Shadow’s album is only concerned with pop culture, dj food goes further by including emblematic sound artists from the Musique Concrète (know for being at the forefront of sampling and sound experimentation). This piece is based on the book Words and Music: the history of pop in the shape of a city by Paul Morley.
In both cases the pieces are their content, they are self-referential and made up of their own history. And this is why these pieces inform this project. By acknowledging that the content (the NMA’s digital archive) is rich in cultural history; this richness will in turn permeate into the new images.
In the case of Girl Talk what is of most interest for this project is his methods of superimposing and overlapping sound material to create an altogether new piece (could this be done with the images provided by the NMA?). Listing the bits that make up the whole of the piece is also an important part of his practice. Often publishing the lists in tandem with the albums.
In his wide ranging practice Mark Amerika is an artist that has researched the possibilities of the remix. What differs Amerika from the above mentioned creatives is that his work is solely dictated by the pursuit of poetics and aesthetics, but also that this happens within the realm of the digital (may be not in the case of Girl Talk who lists a laptop as his instrument). Digital process are inherent to Amerika’s work and research. Hence informing this project in a twofold manner because not only does his practice explores the possibilities behind the remix but it also explores it (the remix) in a digital setting.
ADDRESSING THE BRIEF
When working with large datasets, direct reference-consulting projects are a great opportunity to find patters and themes in the data that otherwise would be virtually impossible because of the sheer volume in the data. Moreover, having an entire institution’s collection in digital form also lets us explore and use this digital material for other purposes than referential. And this is how this project aims to address the brief. By proposing to explore the creative and aesthetical possibilities that emerge from working with the vast cultural dataset that is the National Museum of Australia digital collection.
The path to be followed in this project will be a mixture of the transform and mashup approaches suggested in the brief. It will contemplate the NMA’ s dataset as its raw, malleable material from which a new whole will emerge.
The idea of content being a very valuable and important element in the types of practices mentioned above resurfaces here. This project contemplates that the value of the resulting images is directly related to its content. That is to say that without a meaningful source of content (in this case the diversity of the NMA collection) as an undertone the resulting images in these types of projects run the risk of being somewhat vacuous. Furthermore, effective creative practice in the transform and mashup approach strives on the richness in a cultural sense of the material that it uses. That is to say that the new resulting works are meaningful because the mesh of snippets out of which they are made from have cultural relevance in themselves. And because of that this project views its resulting images as more that just images on a screen or paper, they could be thought of as a visual synthesis of a nation’s cultural history.
DESCRIPTION
This project’s aim is to make new abstract images out of the visual material from the NMA’s dataset. The project will think of the digital collection as a whole, an entirety to be worked with rather than focusing on its composing units. The idea being that the resulting images will be comprehensive in terms of the amount of data shown in them, but also due to this vastness they will be abstract and non-detailed. This would be explored furthermore in the drawings below.
In practice this project will device the appropriate generative syntax for how the resulting images will be put together. It will create the right set of rules that would function in a twofold manner. On the one hand they have to produce visually aesthetic images and in the other be capable of working with a very large number of items.
What follows are three examples of the types of visual syntax that I would like to explore in in this project.
Figure a. The idea in this example is that all the thumbnails from a given collection would be placed in the image whilst generating a grid like composition. Each colour in this case represents a different collection. The 50 x 50 px thumbnails will most likely be used in an example like this, so as to be able to show collections in their entirety.
figure a
Figure b. This example is similar to the previous one. It differs in that it will only use a fraction of the existing image in the overall composition. It also contemplates a grid like composition.
figure b
Figure c. This example only uses a fraction of the image yet the composition is more linear. Each line represents a slit taken from each image from a given collection. The blank spaces could be used to denote different collections.
figure c
This project is contemplated to be build with Processing. The intend is to work with each collection separately. So as to be able to directly correlate images with collections, but also to ensure that there will always be visual material to work with. Given that some items and collections do not have an image.
Finally, the project contemplates a final curatorial exercise in search for the images that work best visually. This exercise will be carried out with the purpose of selecting a representational series fit for printed media.
