verdure engraved 2016 issue 2

contents

six questions # 5: ellen welsh six questions # 6: wilma vissers six questions # 7: cathy van eck

six questions # 8: liz orton acoustic cameras

onchi koshiyo eileen gray

hugo simbergin jessica dismorr

josef breitenbach pollen 1837

ten thai artists japanese book covers marcel-louis baugniet

cover image by pheobe riley law

six questions series

ellen welsh

ellenwelsh.wordpress.com

JrF: how concerned are you with the durability (physical or cultural) of your work?   EW: I think I am not so much concerned with the physical durability of my work because, as a student, I am in a place where I am doing a lot of experimenting and growing. So it is okay for me to make lots of things and then put them aside, because my practice hasn’t found its ‘place’ yet. But I am starting to think that is okay, maybe I will never find one definitive style; maybe this is just my process!   Culturally, I would like to keep my own record of my work, both digitally and through journals and sketchbooks…I don’t know if my work really extends to the wider world yet. But recording the process I have had over a number of years for myself at least; the durability of that concerns me.   JrF: where is the line between success and failure (you can choose to answer this in terms of your artistic career or the work itself)   EW: I think my work is successful when people make a connection with it. If it evokes something common in all people like the feeling of yearning or nostalgia or curiosity then I feel happy with it. I like art

to be something people can identify with because then it becomes fulfilling.   JrF: given that most artwork becomes a collaboration between the work itself and where it is experienced (physical or online) what is your approach to placing your work ?   EW: In terms of online spaces, I have a blog, which functions both as a place for exhibiting and a journal of my thoughts and processes. I think it is important to me that this is an ongoing blog rather than a website because my work itself is very concerned with the process of art making and keeping sketchbooks and diaries. Constant documentation and recording is quite important to me so I like having this continuous space.

In terms of physical placement, I have recently been thinking about how to make spaces less intimidating and formal. I think that while a lot of gallery spaces are trying to remain neutral, the ‘white cube’ default often seems silent, cold, and uninviting. In the last couple of projects I have done, myself and collaborators have aimed to make the curation more relaxed; we put cushions and rugs on the floor so people could sit down, made a playlist of music for the space, and hid text and information in unlikely places. I think that interacting with the whole room in this way makes for a better experience of the art. Sometimes standing and looking is not enough to engage.   JrF: what is the connection, regardless of the role of chance, between your first interest in art and your current explorations ?     EW: My first interest in art was in drawing. I drew all the time throughout my childhood, I drew stuff from my life but also imagined people and places. When I became I teenager I would draw in quite a diaristic way…I guess my current explorations are very much concerned with my own experiences and trying to express them through lots of different means (writing, installation, pictures, and ephemera)…I still draw lots but I am less concerned with fantasy now.   JrF: do you remember your first experience of ‘art’ and how it felt ?   EW: This is a good question! The first time I saw a piece of Art that impacted on me was when I went to the Tate in London when I was quite young. I saw the painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Dorothea Tanning and I was really obsessed by it. Maybe it’s because it seemed to have a narrative, and it reminded me a lot of fantasy books I’d read when I was younger (The Edge Chronicles especially.) And it was

really surreal and I thought surrealism was cool! It just drew me in and I couldn’t make sense of it but I know I intuitively just liked it.

JrF: in a world that both values (culturally) and often undervalues (as a sustainable career) art how would you describe the benefit to your daily life of being an artist ?   I feel privileged because right now I am an undergraduate student, and am able to do art full time without the pressure of it not being financially viable. I think the benefit through cultural valuing of art comes to me in the sense of community on the art scene, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne at least. Everyone supports each other’s endeavours and I feel like I am part of a pro-active movement, which inspires me a lot! I feel like everything is very engaged, and that motivates my daily studio practice and quest to become an artist.

wilma vissers

www.wilmavissers.com

I am inspired by emptiness and space. Spatiality and infinite space must be present even in the smallest work. Through the process of making a daily drawing in a book I am aware that my hand is searching for new forms and lines. This search is not limited to drawing, but is also expressed through experiments with new and unusual materials for painting, such as sandpaper or newspaper and cut out pieces of linen.

Is what I am doing still painting? The past years I find myself in between painting and sculpting.

Space plays an important role: not only the space between my artworks, but also how a space is used when I present them as a large installation on the wall.

I want to pay attention to the detail of each individual work of art that was made separately, without losing sight of the larger whole formed by all of them together.

Oil sticks on book cover no title

2015 10x15cm

Oil sticks on wood 2016

no title 15x20 cm

JrF: how concerned are you with the durability (physical or cultural) of your work ?

WV: Not very much. To me it is a moment in time which can mean something very different to someone else or to me in the future.

JrF: where is the line between success and failure ? (you can choose to answer this in terms of your artistic career or the work itself)

WV: in the time that i work as an artist , about 25 years, i find this difficult to answer. It seems to me that it is important that in my working process i find new viewpoints about what to create. And to surpisese myself sometimes off the outcome. Of course i am touched that the endless thinking and working process is liked by other people. it will never stop.

JrF: given that most artwork becomes a collaboration between the work itself and where it is experienced (physical or online) what is your approach to placing your work ?

WV: I try to place something what an important step in an art work is to me. I can show several phases a piece went through before it is finished. To me they are all important.

JrF: what is the connection, regardless of the role of chance, between your first interest in art and your current explorations ?

WV: the chance of meeting other artist or other people that were important for you working process and the way life or art is experienced. It is difficult to know what had happened when the encounter wasn't made or the encounters happened. If we could live in a parallel universe we would know.

JrF: do you remember your first experience of ‘art’ and how it felt ?

WV: I was 7 years old and I saw a painting of the father of a friend of mine. He painted a biblical depiction of adam and eve in paradise., painted in a surrealistic fashion, I was fascinated by the colours and the atmosphere which was strange. I liked the strangeness of it.

JrF: in a world that both values (culturally) and often undervalues (as a sustainable career) art how would you describe the benefit to your daily life of being an artist ?

WV: it is up and down. Some people really value what you do a lot but most of them don’t. I really liked in the projects that I do and exhibitions that i have had, the encounters with other artists, especially abroad. I think about them a lot and the good atmosphere that was created by some artist who organised an exhibition. There was always a sense off let's do this together. Because off this something was created which i couldn't create on my own. I see the art that I create also a way of connecting with other people and surprise them as much as my self.

photo by Dominik Hodel

cathy van eck  (1979 Belgium/Netherlands) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the arts. She focuses on  composing relationships between everyday objects, human performers, and sound. Her art is t ic work includes performances with live-electronics and installations with sound objects which she often designs herself. She is  interested in setting her gestures into unusual and surprising relationships with sounds, mainly by electronic means. The  result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts. Her work transcends genres and is presented at occasions as diverse as experimental or electronic music  concerts, open air rock festivals, sound art gallery venues, digital art events, or performance art festivals. Cathy is working closely with performers to develop her pieces and she often works in interdisciplinary fields, collaborating regularly with theatre directors and choreographers. Her projects are shown at festivals and venues all over the world. Since 2007, Cathy has a teaching position at the Department for Music and Media Arts of the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. She is a regular guest lecturer at other art and music universities. In her PhD-research  Between Air  and Electricity  she investigated the use of microphones and loudspeakers as musical instrument

www.cathyvaneck.net

JrF: how concerned are you with the durability (physical or cultural) of your work ?

CvE: I would say that, at least for the moment, my works have a very temporary character. They are performances and only exist when performed. Besides, I often modify them during the years, so the process of composition continues after the first performance. I like my works to be “fluid” and to be able to change with me during my life.

JrF: where is the line between success and failure (you can choose to answer this in terms of your artistic career or the work itself) ?

CvE: For me there is no clear line. Often in my works I am exploring what could be called lo-fi technology or the borders of sound production possibilities. So the work itself is about failure, or at least playing with the fragility, imperfectness and imbalance of creating sounds.

JrF: given that most artwork becomes a collaboration between the work itself and where it is experienced (physical or online) what is your approach to placing your work ?

CvE: Some works are clearly made for a specific environment. "Hearing Sirens" is an outdoor piece, "in bilk” is a piece for a gallery-like space whereas “Song No 3” is clearly an “on stage” piece. The piece “Phone Call to Hades” I am currently developing will take place next to the river Isar in München and will be composed for the spot.

JrF: what is the connection, regardless of the role of chance, between your first interest in art and your current explorations ?

CvE: I composed instrumental music as a child and studied classical composition, which meant mainly writing scores for musical instrument. Nowadays my works could be possibly categorised best as “performative sound art”: they clearly have a dramaturgical line, and both visual and auditive aspects are important. Most of the time I work with objects, live electronics, and (human) gestures. What is still an important aspect of my work and which could be seen as a connection between my first interest and the works I make nowadays is the compositional aspects. I still think very much about events connected to each other in time and due to their relations forming a composition.

JrF: do you remember your first experience of ‘art’ and how it felt ?

CvE: No, unfortunately I have no memory of this at all. 

JrF: in a world that both values (culturally) and often undervalues (as a sustainable career) art how would you describe the benefit to your daily life of being an artist ?

CvE:  That’s a difficult question! Of course I don’t know if and how my daily life would look different if I would not be an artist. I enjoy the very rich experiments of collaborating with other artists, which always bring me new perspectives not only on artistic work but on daily life as well. 

liz orton

I am an artist working with photography, books and film. I am increasingly interested in appropriation, how an artist can

occupy or use an existing image.

JrF: how concerned are you with the durability (physical or cultural) of your work ?

LO: I am not overly concerned with durability though it depends on the concept of the work. I am currently working with some images of extinct plants and am experimenting with how to build failure/loss into the work itself (through paper, printing, light). The work will inevitably be temporary…

JrF: where is the line between success and failure (you can choose to answer this in terms of your artistic career or the work itself) ?

LO: It changes all the time, and mostly I try to avoid those kind of labels. I think I am more motivated by fear of failure than by the prospect of success.

JrF: given that most artwork becomes a collaboration between the work itself and where it is experienced (physical or online) what is your approach to placing your work?

LO: I probably fall into the category of visual artists who quite conventionally make work for a gallery context and then put a copy of everything online as well. I am interested in making work specifically to be experienced online but each time I start a new body of work the physical aspect ends up predominating. I am currently screen-printing some photographs onto natural history books that were originally published in the 1940s. They very much need to be experienced as books so I am hoping to find a library where I can display  them.   I am currently committed to writing two artist blogs as part of arts grants I have recently been awarded. I thought this would be fun as it gives me a chance to talk about the research aspects of my work but actually it’s just really hard work.

JrF: what is the connection, regardless of the role of chance, between your first interest in art and your current explorations?

LO: The threads that traverse my work across time are: failure, classification, the horizon and ecology.

JrF: do you remember your first experience of ‘art’ and how it felt?

LO: I remember seeing Picasso’s Guernica and feeling a jolt when I understood the kind of risk involved in making such a painting. Although I work in photography, I am consistently under-whelmed by lots of contemporary photography. 

JrF: in a world that both values (culturally) and often undervalues (as a sustainable career) art how would you describe the benefit to your daily life of being an artist ?

LO: Being an artist is a compulsion. It’s very unstable so you have to be able to deal with the excesses of both adrenalin and rejection.

liz orton a handful of soil

(selected images)

acoustic cameras sound annexation project

www.acousticcameras.org

Pierre Beloüin - United Gartenhotel Theresia - Salzburg - Austria

lat.: 47.799999, long.: 13.0333

http://www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/pierre-belouin/

An article on my own photographic scores recently featured in the latest issue of Source photographic review, documenting one aspect of my fascination with the relationship between sound and lens based images. I’ve also long used camera’s in performances, utilising the sound of their internal mechanisms and electronics to provide textures in both intuitive compositions and improvisation.

Hearing about the Acoustic Camera project I dived in to the website and wanted to know more about the motivations and interests of those involved. The following interview was conducted via email (a trace recording in web form) between myself and Pierre Beloüin of Optical Sound, one of the team curating and editing the project.

jez riley french - movere | soundtrack for an unfocused image # 1

Ráðhús Dalvíkurbyggðar on Goðabraut, Iceland lat. 64.150002 long. -21.950001

http://www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/jez-riley-french/

JrF: Could you describe the project 'acoustic cameras' to readers unfamiliar with it ?

PB: Yes  sure, ACOUSTIC CAMERAS invites composers and sound artists to annex the real-time flow of webcams located in various places around the world. We’ve launched it on the January the 1st of this year.The resulting work is the encounter of a recorded sound piece and the live capture of a fluctuating landscape. Depending on the season, depending on weather, depending on time of day or night, the camera sweeps continuously the filmed location (seaside, city or mountain) and writes in real time the film of the artist's music. Music or sound design, by monopolising the filmed landscape, soon moves to a narrative, dramatic dimension, according to the principles of film music. The slight difference here that the film is written simultaneously.

Blaine L. Reininger - Waterphone Le Sirenuse Hotel - Positano - Italy

lat.: 40.6333, long.: 14.4832

http://www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/blaine-l-reininger/

Étienne Charry - Pool Cam Music Pool Cam - Granada - Spain lat.: 37.1773, long.: -3.5985

http://www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/etienne-charry/

JrF: The use of the net to access systems of transmission provides contemporary artists with some interesting possibilities. How do you see this project in terms of its use of the technologies and the aspect of surveillance ?

PB: Christophe Demarthe (who initially had this idea in 2011 for this project http://echos.editions-cactus.com/sessions/echos3.php?s=3 ), me (Pierre Belouin) and P. Nicolas Ledoux (Optical Sound), as Didier Hochart and Thierry Weyd (La manufacture des Cactée) we all have been used to work in what we called ‘web-art’ since the 90’s. I think that there were several good and bad projects during this period, with of course a low web speed, however we worked with it and made a lot. Quickly I thought artists who were using the web have questioned all issues, and the medium became just a pretext. Anyway, we see this new project on-line as a fast and simple way to divert or annex some official webcams with sound interpretation, all the cams are legal and not necessarily surveillance ones. We have now a modern and efficient digital interface, and highway speed web to make it possible as a fluid and immersive (sometimes ‘voyeur’) journey into realtime video flux with coherent written looped soundtracks. In the 90’s some contemporary artist such as Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil for example worked with aspects of surveillance cameras, and for sure they’re all around us today. So the aspect of surveillance if it exists in the work is so when chosen by the sound artist but sometimes it’s just contemplation.

JrF) listening through the pieces online already one gets the sense that each composer, as expected, provided a soundtrack for a non-narrative visual event. Do you see this as 'cinema' or a subversion of established connections between image and sound ?

PB) The number of participants is regularly expanding and the project is growing fast. Recently, for example, we’ve got one from Charles Pennequin and Black Sifichi which are very narrative ones.

The first one describes actions in an automatic Laundry. Sometimes it matches with the artist reading when there’s people inside, sometimes not. It’s this total chance or luck or random and uncontrolled fact inducted by the continuous webcam flux and the fixed soundtrack which is interesting for us. For sure it’s cinema and subversion also, I personally worked with this notion of free scenario made by the audience induced by what happens in your mind when you listen to music and watch something imperfectly connected. In this installation it was fixed images, but the goal was quite the same, going against the diktat of a frozen scenario as we get in regular movies. (http://documentsdartistes.org/artistes/belouin/repro4.html) So it depends which webcam has been chosen and which soundtrack has been made for it, we try to select eclectic artists to get a lot a different feelings.

Chicaloyoh - Il me parle lorsque sa tête brûle Fishway Marais Pine at Marais Poitevin Natural Park, Marans - France

lat.: 47.200001, long.: -1.3

http://www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/chicaloyoh/  

JrF: Indeed, I also work quite often with still images and sound - for me, when working with extended field recording techniques that uncover sounds from places I find still images often work much better than moving ones, as the audience is not drawn away from a certain focus. One aspect of the ‘acoustic cameras’ project that I liked when I first came across it is the way the use of these lenses that are not focused on a chosen ‘story’ as such are able to play with but not disrupt the attention away from the soundtrack. How do you see this aspect compared to ‘traditional’ ways in which sound and image are used, both in broadcast media and the arts ?

PB: The fact is that the authors have to consider when they choose a webcam that it will be different depending the time (day or night) and also the seasons. BTW some webcams have multiple lenses and angles of view, and sometimes there are surprises as human apparitions…So they have to deal with the hazard, and their soundtrack has to be evocative enough and free to fit with this.

Regarding the traditional ways of broadcasting, we think first that Acoustic Cameras is uncontrollable, as the pirate channels we see in the David Cronemberg ‘Videodrome’ movie, it will be impossible to put live on TV as a program director would want to see first what will be broadcast. So the viewer has also to be free and able to make their own journey, trip or tv program, depending on their own mood and personal story or culture, and finally, interpretation.

I think here of the first idea of Brion Gysin's Dreamachine which was to replace all TV with Dremachines, it was the first invention which could provide your own tv programs. There’s also an intimate and direct relation to the viewer as they are alone in front of their computer and free to switch or stop the flux into the webcams. They could also watch it in bed or in a forest or the Australian desert as I remember the screen addiction scene in ‘until the end of the world’, the movie by Wim Wenders, when the actress can ’t stop watching their own dreams.

JrF: We are overwhelmingly a visual culture, ignoring or overlooking sound is commonplace and yet we resent the use of public webcams but not that of sonic bombardment in our environments. Do you feel this project highlights the equality of sound and image in terms of their ability to affect us in ways other than originally intended ?

PB: Yes absolutely ! There’s a real fascism with the permanent sound bombing in public and private areas, but must people seem to be ok and happy to eat crap full of subliminal commercial ads…

For the Orwell’s we don’t really see webcams or at least we are accustomed to them but they see and record us for sure…

So we’re affected by both, but as artists we try to modify reality.

I’ll be happy if I could for example transform commercial music in a supermarket into experimental, and it could definitely be possible with electronic radio devices which send wave perturbations ! 

JrF: Would you see it as important that such a project is done without the collaboration of the supermarket ? That it is appropriation and an act of cultural activism so to speak ? Also, is this how you see ‘acoustic cameras’ - an attempt to bring the creative to something designed to document either that which the intended users would see as uninteresting or that which they would want to discourage ?

PB: Yes absolutely, that why we've subtitled it ‘sound annexation project’, (n.b : it’s not a hacking of private webcams as they are free and officially listed).

Without soundtracks especially made by the authors for specific webcam views the interest will be reduced to a simple wallpaper movie, or some zen TV channel with birds or waterfalls ;) so that’s certainly this first idea of collage which leads viewers into a really special environment.

My opinion is that an artist have to transform the reality, or their own environment to something better and brighter than they generally hate.

By the way ‘Acoustic Cameras’ is a totally free project. We have nothing to sell, there’s no publicity, paid subscription or e-mail collect.  

onchi koshiyo

eileen gray

hugo simbergin

jessica dismorr

Josef Breitenbach

pollen 1837

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japanese book covers

marcel-louis baugniet

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