Unsustainable initial ideas

Initial Ideas:




What is sustainable? We have to think of this in the terms of the exhaustion of our own cultural forms, thats what we are living through, a global dying created by our dying cultural forms and the vitality of the cultural forms that we see in the primitive people or pre-literate… they have nothing, but they seem to have something we can’t seem to get a grip on… a dynamic equilibrium with their environment and piece of mind in the experience of the moment. These are the two things we don't have, as a society we can’t seem to make peace with nature let alone peace with ourselves. We are all in a search for a little piece of mind at least. The shamans are the centre of this environment in the amazon, we see them as ancient ancestors of the primitive world. It’s obvious we are destroying the planet at a dangerously fast rate, amazon forests being turned into cattle ranches and the trees used for furniture and materials for consumption with big corporations attempting to slow down these processes and regulating the land, on the other side of the coin we also see US government, DEA etc, are planning to carry out the de-foliation on the amazonian basin, there is a schizophrenia that is not academic, are we trying the get the patient well or pulling the plugs one by one? We seem to be acting in both dimensions simultaneously. I think this is because our culture has not yet awakened to the depth of the crisis that surrounds us. This is a perfect image of us being at war not only with ourselves but nature itself. Our culture is in trouble, a terminal crisis, it can go one of two ways, horror beyond your wildest imagination or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community and caring beyond your wildest imagination.


Now where to look for models, where do you go?


The new moral is for the shamans to take the idea/metaphor of the jungle, which is of tremendous wealth, variety, outpouring of form and energy, potential forfilment of various patterns of flow, to take that and to enrich our own lives with it. This is done by empowering the presence of experience, and the individual, the main thing you get with primitive people, they are in the moment, and they know how to have fun, how to work and how to live, the reason they understand this is because they are focused within the confines of the felt presence of the experience, they do not live in abstraction but completely understand it. I feel the real artist is an embodiment of a pattern of flow, they balance of the line between present experience and abstraction… chaos and order, and translate the world into these abstract ideas and memes. The product of creating work with the understanding of the individual experience is the connection between physical and metaphysical, I feel this is important because the subjective human experience is the most complex thing on the planet in line with nature as it is nature, and we need a self understanding as well as a social understanding of these complex facts of existence. We have got it wrong so may times and are still getting it wrong,  but we as artists have an insight directly with addressing these problems so we can hopefully do things positively and have a life that feeds the natural world and enhances experience.




So where is all of my work leading? In my essays on art and photography I discussed that artists are the ones in the social climate that sustain, alter, expand and criticise the current or historical ideology that we use to communicate/ interact with one another, politically, socially, artistically and as a whole race. "Trusting your intuition, experience and theory helps you find your way. Artists find their way through making works of art. Painting Sculpting, etc. is their way of thinking on life and reality. The experience of art will enhance your intuition and acknowledgement of life and reality as it is”. Fre Ilgen,
Im going to trust my intuition and read good books, (geneology of morals) (Tao) etc etc... Painting has inspired me recently and I have made a break through in my visual thinking by reading into the works of Kandinksy, picabia, pollock etc etc. To me it seems that these great artists painted to articulate, figure out and to make physical their ideas, greats because of great ideas. Painting is a way of visualising your thoughts, allowing them flow and to order them in such a way makes sense to you. if you can make your thoughts physical then you can basically solve what you need to work out. This way of working and thought process is quite simple in and of itself, but on a whole this ideology is a very sustainable way of staying on top of your life and thoughts, in theory you can work out almost anything that challenges you as long as you have the knowledge into those areas of interest.


How can you take unsustainable processes and make then sustainable?
My community is full of unsustainable processes.
Talk about the exhaustion and the addiction to wanting the new thing, make things bigger, expand everything, (take make and break society). In the fields below analyse the physical and metaphysical impacts on humans.
. Industry- exhaustion of the lands materials and spaces. - positives and negatives. - statistics. - photographers.
. internet/social media/electricity. - positives and negatives. - statistics. - photographers.
. night life/addictions/habbits. - positives and negatives. - statistics. - photographers.
. photography/proccesses. - positives and negative. - work.


Right because we are at such a ripe age with information flying into our senses, university students have a lot to deal with, to articulate, to get right within a certain amount of time otherwise you will fall into the spiral of everyones thoughts caught up in the world of chaos, disorder and unsustained consciousness a place which we can all see and argue we don't want to go. The chaotic mess of social media is a perfect example, from day to day it is used, overused; people dedicate their lives to icons and status in society and with no doubt the creators of these systems knew what they are tapping into? its control if your on the lower end of it. But on the other side of the coin this modern day miracle; the internet, allows any information about anything to be published on a web of information in thin air and it can be accessed by anyone anywhere at anytime. bringing the world closer metaphorically this also creates the contrary, there is so much shit out there that people get hooked into and stuck in a vicious spiral of chaos that is hard to wake people up to. In a society in which we have no fears but whats in our heads. In the East they fear what they see, in the West they fear what they don't see. This is probably because we genuinely don't have anything to be scared of apart for natural death.




fuji work: creative people are always stepping outside of evaluation structures.
this work may not fit perfectly into the conventions of documentary photography but I stepped outside of it to learn something about myself and my perspective, after understanding of my discipline. high risk, high return strategy.
abstraction is very very powerful, for example mathematics is the most pure abstract human language.
we are always studying things in abstraction from the full complexity, thats why we do experiments, to try to get rid of a lot of the complexity of the natural world that somehow you assume that isn't relevant, of course you cant do it 100% of the time because the world is always there. but the point of experiments is to try to get rid of as much as you can. the geneticist is studying fruit flies for example, they are going to want to make those flies as identical as possible, obviously they are not but pretends they are. But what we are doing is studying them in abstraction for their properties, everything we are studying is an abstract object, there is now way to perceive it in any other terms. This is called idealisation, but that is a highly misleading term, it suggests that you are moving away from reality, but what you are really doing is trying to get to reality, trying to cut away the interfering factors that keep you from understanding reality, so you idealise to abstract things. but that is a way of finding out what reality is. This is the core of science since Galallao.




Documentary photography- abstractfying myself and my ideas to come about a more ordered sense of the world I operate in. Painting and photography. They work hand in hand, photography allows me to capture the objective world that I'm interacting in with the use of light and time. Although fine art photography I would say is parallel to abstraction. Painting allows me the complete freedom to experiment/understand more about the subjective world, It allows me the make my thoughts physical, to figure out problems and come about new ideas. To me this is amazing and a real breakthrough in my experience of the world through art.




Its about going into that cave, finding the dragons/ evil in my reality,
turning chaos into order- out there in no mans land, in potential (the world) there is threat, mortal threat, but there is also endless opportunity and riches and wealth, and the possibility of attracting someone, and all of that. You can’t just be afraid of it, you'll just stay in your burrow most of the time like most animals, especially nocturnal animals. But Humans are not like that, we are not only prey animals but also predators, we are also crazy chimpanzees, we are always messing around with things, with our hands and taking the world apart and putting it back together, we are extremely exploratory and trouble making. We don’t just run from dragons, we hunt them down. There is a story here. The oldest story that we know; there is this bounded space, a walled garden, a city; cities had to be walled because the barbarians would swoop in and steal all of your stuff, that would be pointless. So you have inhabited space, inside that is your dominance hierarchy, so all your primates knew exactly who is who, inside that space so you didn't fight each other, you could predict each others behaviours and you saw the world in the same ways, so you are secure. But there is the threat of those walls being breached, there is always something out side of it that is a danger and that is signified by a dragon. This dragon is a symbol, imagistic symbols have an ancient language and is referring to something something that is eternal, so it lives in a cave, in the underworld, its an underground thing. you can imagine what that is like, and sometimes this happens in ignitions rituals among archaic people, when they initiate,usually the young men, because nature initiates woman all by itself. usually the young men will be put in a cave and left there for god knows how long. But you have to think what is in a cave, caves are dark, really dark, not only is there not only is there what is in the cave, what you think is in the cave there is also what you imagine might be in that cave. So when you are in the cave and you are alone, you are confronting the demons and devils and monsters of your own imagination and so you have a chance to deal with that and over come that and is part of growing up, learning to face the things that terrify and upset you, and being able to re-cast them and put yourself back together. that is part of the initiation. If you are not wise, the world will whollop you. It will destroy you.
the unsustainable morality of education at the moment, it doesn't teach the transition into adulthood but academic.














 
faith and high order abstractions
patterns of behaviour
the big five personality traits
psychometrics- self report
construct validation-
a contract is a representation of something psychological that hypothetically exists hypothetically- does fear exist, love, shame, guilt, pain?


abstraction is very useful, it is hard to operate with out it. in fact if you cant take fro granted what something is, but instead have to think of lower level how to make it, then you encounter a challenge.












Through thinking about an unsustainable community project for a few weeks, starting with the unsustainable scientific process that film goes through and is used to create and discard of the mediums involved, silver as such. My ideas evolved and meanwhile I was researching philosophers, artists, photographers and speaking to people that I was working with and my friends. I came to the conclusion that if I was to start a project on unsustainability, I can not start deconstructing parts of the world, until I have looked at myself, and confronted unsustainable ideals and actions in my life which I am already aware of. Smoking, eating rubbish and subjectively emotions, passions, commitment, ideals what is apparent to me is that the most unsustainable thing in our lives is our own minds, As Humans we have been trying to figure out this mystery of consciousness for way over 12,000 years, and have been documenting our own experiences along the whole of this time. Trying to find the deeper truth and meaning in our lives, a wiser insight into life.  re-ordering and constructing ideals of reality, good and evil. lightness and darkness (chiaroscuro) is how artists adapted biblical language in painting, light for salvation and darkness for death, the works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio reflect this in their own art.


“Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential, every horizon upon being breached reveals another beckoning in the distance.”












I wanted to create original work, something what can not be reproduced, as Walter Benjamin explains in ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical photography’, that when art is re-produced mechanically, then the Aura of the work is lost. Paintings are a good example of this, when you go to a gallery you want to see the original piece when you can always view the art work on your phone or in a book as many times as you want, but there is a power, an Aura that is bound to the original. But current cultural values dishonour and devalue art and especially photography with the desire to fill our lives with images and representations of real things.  "In photography, display value starts to drive cultic (tradition) value back along the whole line. However, cultic value does not give ground without resistance. It occupies one last ditch, and that is the human face. It is no accident, not at all, that in the Cult, of recalling absent or dead loved ones, the cultic value finds in its last refuge. In the transient expression of a human countenance in early photogrpahs, we catch one final glimpse of Aura." So being inspired by a local artist and art theory I wanted to create a photographic project using modern day film materials (FujiFilm Instant) and combine painting with the work. Picking up on unsustainable processes that are used by many amateur photographers; Chemically a very toxic process. I produced this work on Fuji Instant which retains more than one root practise of mine, photography and painting. The work questions/ entertains thoughts of feelings, reality, time, space, colour, form and identity. The originals are negative palm sized images to which I will explain the journey.








I created these FujiFilm Instax instants, In early 2018, I was trying to think of a way to combine painting and photography at the time. Thinking of using glass plates and liquid light and various ways to capture portraits, through speaking to tutors and researching into the art works of Peter Beard, Ellen Carey, Mike Ware and many more, I became fascinated of how they used such simple tools to capture these amazing polaroids and cyanotypes etc. I realised a more contemporary way that is quite available and something I have not seen much work on.  I have created a body of work that shows the journey of my ideas, starting with the pure curiosity of wanting to find my own way to figuring out how to get an original piece of work. The process combines the two perfectly, capturing an image on film before its processed uniquely, each one with tools and my decisions. So i'm painting with light and  also painting with developer using tools. Seeing these images come out in the moment clicked with me one day that maybe i'm already doing it. The fact these physical film creations are what they are, showing the journey of getting to the end of an idea and envisioning it all. something that can not be re produced again makes them original to me. Starting with patterns that recur throughout nature everywhere, fractals; the patterns Hiroshi Sugimoto captured using electricity, water and film to make a statement on his discovery on how the first resemblance of life came about on the earth. These first images create a scene; an organic one, something that changes and adapts to the world around it, reaching into the empty space ahead and cutting through space and time. As you see in the first 6 images that they are all objects and shapes and colour and subjective representations, which just happens to question space, time, colour and form. This shows the birth of photography only as I would know it.  As we move through I start taking self portraits; a realisation of these outcomes, I wanted to place myself in the scene, I figured out how to create frames and to put myself in them or in the open space or inside colour or an object, I figured it out after around 10 double packs of them. I made them as simple or as complex as I wanted from one exposure to  six; layering them up and developing each one as I wished, some images I would spend half an hour setting up and envisioning - 10 minutes shooting it and a minute to paint. To me this combination I have found and figured out myself with a bit of time and space to breath shows me how to come about an original idea;  for it it was to go against the rules of the whole process.
The polaroid was seen as an object to be discarded of, a dud image before the 'real photography happens', to me this original image of the moment of figuring out the scene and how to light the subject; that can not be replicated is just as important if not more important to the photographer. The information that was received allowed and gave the photographer trust for the whole shoot. The whole realisation is contained in those moments. 'But i'll know my song well before I start singing"- Bob Dylan. The images are in chronological order of creation in negative first and then positive.