This is the second week of my Argentinian ‘ace project course. The idea is that artists in any of a myriad disciplines get together to collaborate on projects. There was no reference to this aspect of the project at our first of 4 meetings last week, I hope something will come of it today.
We were given the task of preparing a pecha kucha presentation on Frontier for tonight. It turns out we were not asked to do a pecha kucha – we were free to do what we liked:
My presentation is, I hope, the start of my proposed project on seaweeds and seagrasses. I have focused on ‘Thought Frontiers’ because I feel that they are what keep us back from experiencing a wider world. My contention is that our thoughts are ‘frontiered’ by our prejudices, fears and ignorance, all of which are determined by our experiences in life. Is this limiting complicated further the longer we live or does it diminish?
This slide presentation is simply a thumbnail sketch of what I am presenting tonight which forms the ideas behind my project, and I hope there is some cohesion through the images, text and sound.
The ideas expressed in the following poem by Thomas Tranströmer underpin and frame/limit my exploration. I first read the poem in Alex and Rebecca Webb’s book ‘Street Photography and the Poetic Image.’:
The title of one of the works we saw last week ‘Corporal intervention of an intimate geography’ by Elias Adasme, inspired me to ‘intervene’ with the image he made. I am really interested in geographies of all kinds. My intervention reflects my interpretation of the work which still maintains its portrait function:
Similarly, the 1985 painting by Lorenza Böttner we saw last week moved me. I have reacted photographically, to reflect how I interpreted the painter’s intentions.
The following is an edited version of a video I made last week in the storms we had:
This is a poem inspired by the video clip in Slide ⌗5.
I go to the same beach every day, and every day I see something different. Here the sands of time make their own poetic images of what might be going on under the sea – but I’m not certain, I need to explore an environment that is there all around me but which I have taken for granted and which fear of the unknown keeps me from getting to know.
On my way down to the beach I pass various shop fronts, most are closed for good, some just for the season. In one particular shop doorway someone has become a hermit crab and inhabits the space. We would probably call him homeless because our terms and understanding are limited, he is homeless in a conventional way only. Often, when I go past, he has added something different. Last week I saw that he had a little blackboard on which he had written ‘Up Town’, presumably so that those who want to talk with him know where they can find him.
Seaweed covers the beaches, particularly now after the tremendous storms we have had. We see algae and we think wrongly that they are all the same. I never knew that tiny sea creatures live on and in the algae, creating their own diverse community that I know nothing about but which, here on the coast, is asking me to take note.
The best way to experience this is to shut your eyes. I had originally created it as an MP4 file only but could not upload it in the slide.
Reflexion:
I hope that the meaning this set of slides has for me is somewhere near what the others will get from it tonight. In my mind, there is cohesion and coherence in what I have presented and it is accessible.
I would have liked to have presented the sound recording in the last slide purely as that, without any image but I had to make an iMovie of it if I wanted to include it in the presentation. This slide underlines the intention in my project to listen and learn from what I hear under the waves when I look at the seagrasses and algae in the seagrass conservation areas in our bay.
Feedback from the presentation:
There was, as usual, pandemonium when I was asked to present because the zoom screen disappeared for me and, the more they asked me to unmute, the more difficult it got for me because I did not have the screen to allow me to unmute & I started to panic. Then someone suggested that Andy should unmute me, which he did, and I could explain that I could not see them. Suddenly I could see Andy’s thumbnail in a corner of the computer screen, I clicked on it & I could then start presenting.
I had noted, in Andy’s presentation, that he quoted Wittgenstein who wrote ” the limits of my language are the limits of my work”. I found this a blessing because, in literal terms, it is one of the points I make in my presentation of Slide ⌗ 8 in which I say that we call the hermit crab ‘homeless’ because we don’t have the vocabulary to say that this is his home. Our understanding of home is limited to our traditional, stereotypical understanding of home. Do we need another term to describe where we choose to live?
Dani was quite pleased when I referenced her presentation last week of the work of Lorenza Böttner which had moved me. I also referenced the link she had sent us to the talk on her by a leading academic in Paris.
I think it went well, although nobody posted either a question or a comment except for co-presenter Dani:
Having re-read that comment today, I love how perceptive it is in relation to movement and curiosity being linked to overcoming prejudice – it’s a really neat point.
In her summing up of the presentations in our group, Heidi said that she enjoyed the dynamic qualities of my work and presentation. I think the dynamic came from my panic because I was so aware that I had wasted everyone’s precious time at the non-start of the presentation.
Today, Friday 19th February, we received a summary in diagram and text form of the links between ideas on Frontiers expressed in some of the presentations.
Dani also gave a text summary of the various presentations & mine was summarised like this:
This is how I presented the presentation on the Edmodo site. Pleased to get 4 likes!
For next week, we have been given 3 slides with our suggested project:
We were randomly allocated to a group of 3& I am in a group with Annie who is from Bristol, & Heidi from Vancouver Island. Annie was on the website very quickly to try to establish some contact & to arrange how we are to meet to discuss our work, I responded but we have not yet heard from Heidi. My paranoia tells me she does not want to work with me.
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AnnaSYP: Photography 3: Sustaining Your Practice 
Looking forward to experiencing it tonight Anna.
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Hmmm …?!
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Experience ….. reaction ……… feedback loop.
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Good idea!
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