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Having practiced making work for 50 years a question arises, which is: "how does a personal history - with its embracing of behaviours in my case as diverse as creating sound art installations, making documentaries for Television, running an academic research centre on the future of the moving image and shooting promos for well known music acts - how has that diversity of production informed my work in the past and much more specifically, right now? During my life each practice has always informed the one that is running parallel (or is to come). You can't edit a documentary without learning about the efficacious organisation of information and discovering how to reveal that information whilst drawing your audience along with you - and then working with installation form and understanding that you're doing pretty much the same thing - albeit on the surface, they may seem entirely different. People need enter an installation space and be interested in what they see and hear, feeling that the mind guiding that entry also will take care of them whilst being in that space, such that they receive a sense that there is something to be gained by being there - as well as trust that more will be revealed in a series of stages. - and when the basic point of the work has been transmitted, then it's time to leave.
This is very similar to documentary which is the curation of the audiences attention - though the state you try to bring the audience to is qualitatively and aesthetically different - the mechanics you use to operate the functionalities of how an installation operates on the audience goes back to Greek theatre, or further if you like, to making the fire for people in a cave to throw their shadows on a wall. For myself, on becoming 70, I look forward to becoming free of self mainly because the best audience responses I've received was when I was 'just' making the work, where I'd learned all the five finger exercises sufficient to relax my 'self' so that 'the work made itself' ... Hokusai, on becoming 70 said: "Nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.” |
2025 and beyond...
'The Past' is spilt into 9 areas:
1: Vida 1976 - 1981 2: Transition 1981 - 1982 3: Triple Vision/Videomakers 1982 - 1985 4: Triple Vision & Channel 4 1985 - 1992 5: A Trip Sideways to the BBC 1988 - 1990 6: Cinematography & Scripts 1992 - 2006 7 Academia 2007 - 2016 8. CineFest 2015 - 2016 9. Sedition Art 2015 - 2023 10. Makersplace & NFT's 2019 - 2022 11. 2025 and Beyond? I like irony - so here is one of my first works reinvented and I hope to release this on Sedition Art in 2025 - that'll be 48 years after the original piece was made in 1977. BELOW Presentiments II
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