Interested in the word ‘participation’ I asked Simon to elaborate on ways in which the word can be interpreted and the value of the individual experience of the participator. He drew my attention to Suzanne Lacy’s rings of engagement, which in concentric circles transform the notion of different audiences into a diagram representing different groups’ level of interaction with a work of art. Lacy states that the ‘innermost circle represents those without whom the work could not exist’, the outermost circle being ‘audience of myth and memory’. I suppose, the question this poses (at least to me) is whether one could consider the perspective of ‘the audience of myth and memory’ as either part of the inner circle or a different diagramme completely, as although yes, the work could exist without their perspective, the work from their perspective could not exist without them.

http://gawker.com/heres-a-terrific-video-essay-on-david-o-selznick-neo-953809210

“In this five-minute video essay, filmmaker Ernie Park compares two different versions of a 1953 film: one edited for Hollywood audiences and one for Italian filmgoers. By comparing two different versions of the same footage, the video essay comes across like a think piece on how seemingly cosmetic changes can affect meaning, tone, and content in movies.

Park, who goes by the name Kogonada, created this short video essay for the British Film Institute (here’s Park’s interview with NPR last week about the essay). The short film compares the Hollywood and neorealism by using David O. Selznick and Vittorio De Sica’s unsuccessful collaboration as a case study. In the early 1950s, legendary Hollywood producer Selznick, best known for his work on Gone with the Wind, commissioned Italian neorealist director De Sica to make a film. Because of unresolvable stylistic clashes, two films resulted from the footage:Terminal Station in Italy and Indiscretion of an American Wife in the U.S”.

My colleague Steve Benford from the virtual reality lab at Nottingham, has a new project. It’s to make a guitar that will record and tell its own life story.

You can see the project blog on http://carolanguitar.com and follow its progress.

The art historian James Elkins writes about seeing. He challenges a number of taken-for-granted ideas about sight and vision. Here are three of his big ideas:

(1) Elkins says that a lot of what we call seeing is actually not-seeing – we screen out much that is actually  in our scope of vision, because we are unable to process the sheer amount of available visual  information. So as we see, we always simultaneously not-see. We are both sighted and blind at the same time.

(2) Elkins suggests that seeing is not simply what happens in the brain ‘inside ‘ us – it is what happens in between our eyes and objects. And this is not empty space but is actually light. Light joins our eyes and the object we are ‘seeing’. We are not separated from the objects we are looking at but are joined to them by and through light.

(3) Elkins maintains that objects look at us. A knife says pick me up. A cookie says eat me. An unused box reminds us of things we haven’t done. The object can resist being noticed, or invite us to notice it.

This is a challenging idea and Elkins proposes a reason for this:

” A psychoanalyst might say that we need to believe that vision is a one-way street and that objects are just the evasive recipients of our gaze in order to maintain the conviction that we are in control of our vision and ourselves. If I think of the world in the ordinary way I am  reassured. Everything is mine to command: if I want to see a movie I go and see it. if I want to look at my cat, I look at her. But this implies something darker: that if I resist the idea that objects look back at me and that I am tangled in a web of seeing, then I am also resisting the possibility that I may not be the autonomous, independent, stable self that I claim I am. I may not be coming to terms with the thought that I need these reciprocal gazes in order to go out and be myself.”  (p. 74)

Elkins, James (1996) The object stares back. San Diego: Harvest

‘It is what people ‘know’ they experience when they encounter an artwork, even if they are not always able to say what it is that they know. This knowing ‘non-knowledge’ may open a few of the windows that have been closed by ordinary knowledge. […] This process is not only about what people ‘take away’ from a work of art, but also what they ‘bring forward’ in their experience of it.’

Wonderful Uncertainty, Raqs Media Collective

John Cage composed the piece 4”33 as a composition intended to force an unsuspecting audience to notice; in lieu of actual music each listener would begin to tune in to sounds that surrounded them; consequently each listener’s experience would be completely unique and each individual would, in turn, leave with a different account of the work. Richter composed his Cage series of paintings to similar effect; this is a series of work in which abstraction exists as the catalyst for possibility, the work can be interpreted infinitely. Presenting ‘empty’ work, Cage and by extension Richter as the composers create works in which they themselves do not dictate the listener/viewer’s experience. What the listener/viewer then brings forth or takes becomes wholly engrained in what the work is (at least, in an individual sense). Does one interpret the cracks in the paint or the texture of the canvas? Should one read into the colour or the composition? These questions are left unanswered by both Cage and Richter and thus are only answerable by whoever encounters the work and in what capacity they experience it.

Similarly the scholar’s rock, although it has no known creator, exists and is valued because of the possibilities it poses. The object in it’s abstract nature has the potential to become, or signify, absolutely anything to its viewer. It’s presence, solid and object-like, is in itself far more tangible than the likes of Cage’s 4”33, knowledge particularly regarding the object’s history is not certain at all. The jagged formations and entwining surfaces have been preserved for their thought provoking, mediative qualities and many of them have in fact been titled, on account of their resemblance to other objects. These objects of natural beauty and wonderment have been preserved  specifically because their finder (of thousands of years ago) saw the importance to do so; in the first instance they have no solid idea or concrete concept, and exist almost exclusively for the purpose of interpretation. Craig Burnett, who curated Structure & Absence describes the rocks as objects that ‘sustain the play between observation and imagination’.

These processes are involved emphatically with experience and share the notion of learning through noticing and having one’s eyes opened, as opposed to being taught, lectured, or engaged in a didactic process of viewing.

Every Saturday morning when my brother and I were growing up, we’d go to the newsagents to each buy a shiny pack of stickers for our collections. For me it was Top of the Pops and for him it was the Premiership League. He was more dedicated than me and would always stick them in the album provided, whilst I often found places like my desk, my door, my bunk bed, my books, my clothes and occasionally my body to house them. Their stickiness marked my habitat, leaving grey smudges where they had fallen off, slowly peeled away or been replaced; only a few ever remained clinging to where they had been originally stuck.