Amalgamative Boundaries - ‘Walkies’ and our practice.
Photogrammetric scanning creates 3D replicas of objects, reproducing them as frayed and distorted segments of the landscape of the real. Orbiting a telephone box with a phone camera the totality of the object is represented by the frozen images by which in the software it will be compiled. In the process of its recreation the object is pulled apart to be stitched back together, reborn in the grey space of the viewport it bleeds and stretches from its vertices and angles, red painted metal twisted and growing outwards, buckling where otherwise it would have been pristine. In this new state, the object is both older and more new, a more organically-appearing copy in relation to its sibling in the real world. Torn away from the associate connections of its original location, it vibrates with the uncertainty of standing alone, waiting to be permeated with new meaning, to deceive and disturb the viewer with its subverted function and manipulated identity.
Pushed together in a digital environment - in combination with pseudo-real-life structures birthed in blender and surfaces textured with images from a personal cloud-based library of photographs - these objects again reach their hands out to each other, every addition tainting the meaning of the totality in its whole, forming a new amalgamative organism altogether.
Often this is the method by which we build our works, hitting ideas and thoughts with tuning forks until one of them reverberates with the right sound, and then hitting it again and chasing it as far as we can before reaching the next deadline’s tether, accumulating as we go. Because of this it is hard to say where one project begins and the other ends, we can only really perceive the blend of influences leaking into each other, developing, almost self-sufficiently, along the way.
Working together with Ellie Towers, a postgraduate from LJMU’s Fine Art course, for nearly two years now, there have been a range of shows in which I have been involved, often during my time studying Creative Writing at LJMU I would find myself skipping classes and seminars to spend time in the studio, or be suddenly rushing back from a day of assisting the Fine Art students installing an exhibition to write an assignment that was due the same day. Predominantly during these times I was there because this new medium of art, which I had never properly experienced before, fascinated me and I wanted to invest myself into seeing the creative potentials it could achieve; but it was over the initial lockdown issued at the outbreak of the Coronavirus that saw me take on a more active role. Faced with the notion of the LJMU Final Degree Show moving online, me and Ellie, over a series of months, redeveloped and adapted a collaborative practice that would be better suited to genuine investment in digital and virtual art, whilst retaining the physical elements which made it unique to us. Experimenting with the location of her parent’s home and the field behind the garden with its view of Burnley, we cobbled together imagery, snippets, phone-recorded conversations, sometimes building new structures from scraps of things like fence wood and candle wax. Sculpturally we realised that through a combination of disturbing the physical state of an object and then transposing it onto the computer, we could create displays that would be impossible to replicate in real life. The result of this new path was ‘Un-Boxing’: an online faux-game experience that exhibits combinative structures of re-imagined exhibition scenes, embedded narratives, 360° spaces, and renderings of 3D monuments inside a treasure-hunt-style format.
Its fragmentative nature shows, I think, the infancy of our escapades, but acts well in itself as a display of our workings out with regard to the new direction we were taking. How each piece was individualised and segmented away from the whole as opposed to coagulating in a singular immersion-style experience, reveals this works purpose as an exhibition of ideas, with each piece we were showing ourselves, ‘this is a way we could do it, or maybe like this, or this’ - and, as opposed to choosing one and closing off the others, we decided instead within the form of the thing itself, to show the various pathways our creative thoughts had taken us. In this section, a snapshot of the Practice Degree Show installation within a car’s interior with an edited backdrop of police cars in pursuit; in this, a room with walls pasted with a wraparound image of the field, and four panels featuring a self-referential narrative I wrote, ‘Fanfiction’, filling its centre, held up by baby-blue balloons.
With regard to our practice, to generalise, but not reduce, and to give a very summative explanation by no means a pindownable definition, we aim to challenge the discrepancies caused by the rampant logic of conventional capitalistic structures and the effects that branch out into and disturb our personal lives, affecting how we see gender, sexuality, relationships, working life, interpersonal connections, infrastructure, communication systems and how this has sculpted what we regard as the current typical and normative lifestyle. We aim to offer, through our art, an alternate perspective, to create images which subvert the iconography of the things of this everyday reality - combining them with symbols and narrative fragments pushed out from our own childhoods, imaginings and memories - and transform them into refreshing, enlightening, sometimes humorous or perverse, totems of our own personal orthodox.
Moving forward from our plunge in the solely digital process of ‘Un-Boxing’ we knew we wanted to take the best parts of our physical and virtual ideas and combine them in a way that, even when interacting through a screen, retained the tangibility of the experience of the installation as much as possible. Accepted for the Space Raiders Residency, we had approximately three weeks to create the work that would achieve this.
In blender I began to piece together the skeletons of two environments. Used to weaving our art around complications and intricacies created by the space, we decided to address the only ones this gallery had to offer as fully as possible: the walls and the floor. I imagined the room ‘Fanfiction’ was contained in as an actual space. Taking planes painted with summer grass I buffered them into three sets of hills, littering the gaps of the leftmost set with signage of every kind which we had encountered and captured a picture of. In the centre, building a gigantic screen to feature an interactive video work. And on the right, erecting a shopping centre complex saturated with neon light, where the sunset of the background image didn’t reach. Taking a massive render of this 'Hills' model, we broke the set down into 1500 sheets of A4 paper. After two days of printing, we spent the next week cutting and pasting each sheet in order onto the walls.
In the meantime and between all of this, working collaboratively me and Ellie conceptualised, sketched and built a series of locations for the 'Map' of our video piece, which was to be projected into the space in the centre of the screen. Again we wanted to generate mutational relics of our memories and past taken from the landmarks of our hometowns, which we would then use to create a simulacral re-worked imitation of our own neighbourhoods. This work was - if anything definable - an exploration of perspective, between memory within the present, the virtual in the physical, the universal in the local, the animal in the human. Alongside the physical locations, with me deciding to take a break from writing in this context, Ellie concocted a narrative which addressed all of these aspects, following a canine’s anecdotal journey through a constructed reflection of its life, and those around it within its family unit, who themselves are exploring the change of personal and relational opinion through the experiences of those who love them.
Often we pride ourselves on the sheer grabbing panic with which we put together our work, giving ourselves no room in this interval of time to perceive anything other than the work itself. 'Walkies' was no exception. In the final throes we completed the installation with only three days left to document everything we needed for the virtual translation (photographs, AR models, 360° scans), take down the murals and move our equipment out, all whilst making sure to allow enough time to properly paint over the inverted negative print of our ‘Hills’ wraparound the ink of which had bled into the walls. And then, after this, we gave ourselves four days to create the website structure and build all the virtual components from scratch.
‘Walkies’ - a combinative online interactive work featuring a mix of physical making and installation with an embedded narrative video set inside a labyrinthian menagerie of manifested locations featured on a website platform - was fully completed on the first of November.
When we had finished we rewarded ourselves with eight hours sleep and a day off. Now in the New Year, we are back in the process of moving towards the next production of our practice. Working from our new studio at The Royal Standard we are looking into ways to better develop some of the features we have only skimmed the surface of, considering a focus on augmented reality models and their possible uses within a filmic context, and exploring as always the most striking, disturbing and memorable methods by which to implode the boundaries of everyday life and its subsequent representation into each other and themselves.
