Work in Progress Seminar on Thursday 6th March
Well, I’m in Australia for my one month residency at the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University. So good to be back! The sunshine is amazing, it feels like heaven on my skin after the Scottish winter.
Eucalyptus Tree, burnt during the Canberra bush fires, in January 2003, at Kambah Pool by the Murrumbidgee River.
It is wonderful to catch up with my friends, whom I’ve been missing so much. I’m also really pleased to see my teachers and supervisors, it’s truly amazing to be able to speak with them face to face. So many questions that I’ve been grappling and struggling with all semester, finally answered, in some cases in the space of two minutes flat.
Also, many obligations discovered, like, my WIPs, which are part of every graduate student’s yearly ritual. I’ll be presenting mine on Thursday 6th of March at 3pm. These are the very first ones in the graduate season this year. I’ll be presenting both my theory and studio work in progress on Thursday. The working title is:
Interpreting the reality of the virtual
from an art practice perspective.
The WIPs will be held in the CSA lecture theater and are open to all ANU School of Art staff and students. Here is a little blurb pertaining to the direction of my new, planned work:
In ceramics, we speak about the internal space of objects in terms of containment - the empty negative space inside the walls of an object, whether it is functional or sculptural. A space that is ready to receive something - be it something physical such as a liquid, or a concept such as feelings or memories - something metaphorical.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Nine Tables), 1998
Concrete and polystyrene.
It is internal space which mostly makes up the volume that pushes out against the external world, for instance your fingers, as you hold something, like a tea bowl.
There are interesting physical characteristics that ceramic objects can take on - such as two objects of the same volume can appear like one holds more volume than another, or one can seem lighter than another, despite being the same weight.
Margaret Realica, The Reconnect, 2005.
Porcelain, plexiglass, tube, electrical parts
When talking about the virtual, we also talk about space - cyberspace, virtual space. Yet what is it? It isn’t space as we understand it, in a physical sense. You can’t fill it up with tea. Yet you can, as a conceptual space, fill it up with a representation of yourself, your knowledge, feelings or memories, your fantasies - or a representation of tea, if you so desire.
“Just because something is not material does not mean it is unreal” writes Margaret Wertheim in “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace”
Virtual space doesn’t take up any actual space in our world. You might say it takes up space in the cables that connect our routers to each other, or on a server, or, more specifically, on a hard disk. Yet when you examine the hard disk, there doesn’t appear to be any space on it to take up.
Marek Cecula, Interface Set III, 2001.
Vitreous China, gold and wood. 23 x 20 x 11cm
All the time, hard disks are getting smaller, yet somehow they have more of this space available. The thin hard disk in my computer doesn’t seem nearly voluminous enough to carry the masses of letters and photographs, music and videos that make up my research and entertainment, the documentation of my life, for the last several years. Yet it is.
The machine itself (a bunch of small, rather uninteresting little black things with legs, a bit like insects, packaged in a white box with a screen and keyboard) somehow works as a translator, an interface that converts my life archives into something that I can understand and process with my senses. Into something that I can interact with.
In my new work, I’m interested in the concept of containment of virtual space. More precisely, I’m interested in the edge of this space, like the lip of the bowl. What happens where the virtual space and the real space interface? Can we touch it? Can it touch us? How is virtual reality REAL?