All posts by Natasha Kidd

The Noticer Object Autobiographies

The Noticer Object Autobiographies from Simon Pope on Vimeo.

Talking from the point-of-view of the materials, describing the ways in which each interacts with each other in the construction of participants’ noticer objects.

I really resisted having my backing torn away, but in place of that I was rolled and adhered to another. It made it look better.

Rolled, cut, greased, covered, taped, sliced, pressed, worn.

Starting out big and now rather small I was stabbed and cut and pushed against something sticky. My edges, once smooth, are now jagged and rough. Poor craftsmanship has left me with a hole in my frames. Stabbed, cut, pushed, jagged, I now lie on the cold floor surrounded by round things. Stabbed, cut, pushed, jagged.

Rolled and unravelled, shaped, cut and torn. Fitted and measured, stretched and sliced. Folded and refolded, until the wool is formed, stuck in place, trapped, noticed.

Rectangle within rectangles was sliced out, then hung precariously together with sticky tape. I was influenced by the wall of black paper and so began rebuilding myself as a triangle. I kept my windows, celebrating them and allowing myself to be more accessible.

I am flexible, accommodating and pliable but to an extent there are some ways that i don’t like to be manipulated. I was cut down to a more manageable size using a box cutter; I put up some resistance, but the whole process was relatively quick. Then I was folded in four ways; again I put up some resistance to this folding—it didn’t seem natural to me. They used the box cutter to score the area to be folded. I was forced into an unnatural rectangular shape and quick;y secured with two bits of tape and then with a long strip of tape went along my edges to completely seal me in this new form; scissor blades were jabbed into me to make a hole. Then I was awkwardly impaled onto a stick and fixed permanently with some plasticene.

I am a clamp. I follow the rules and I force them on others. I force two together, normally because they fight to be apart. I am the enforcer of a forced marriage. I hold the scrum of players—locking together—locking my arms around until I unstructed to release them. So to end, I can be hot or cold, loose or tight. I might make a great ally in a fight.

I was in a box with all of my brothers and sisters and some rather asty looking fellas. And then I got plucked out and was forced into this marriage. And I not good at adapting or hiding my feelings on my face. Wood is meant to be hard and tough and strong. And I have to say I feel really let down. Every time we were put together—I didn’t want to be with him anyway—but he would get all pathetic and fall apart. And I was forced to hold everything together. Typical. I wanted to be something, part of something great.

I was quite rigid in my views, but happy. I was shocked when it happened so quickly. I was sawn roughly in half, splintered. Then she wrapped her arms around me and we danced. A new life.

I was free. I had a beginning and I had an end, with no rules between. And then I met you and we had… to get it together and we had ups and downs. And now I have rules, and community together.

I am clinging to you, but also clinging to myself. I am like smoke in a room that attaches itself to the objects that fill the space. You open a window to get rid of me but I reluctant to cooperate. I subdue you.

The light’s going, but I’m used to that; It comes back. But this is a mist descending, scraping, pressing, pressing into me. It’s rolling down me. I’m not sure. They seem to have stopped. No. It’s descending further. I must learn to breath through my back.

I feel like a parasite by nature. I have been unrolled, now I am attached to you. I have been packaged; now I am stretched, They are pressing me up. And now I am thinking, “what is the next step?”

De-Clutter

A structure is beginning to emerge….

Magnetism
Mess
Modify?

So far we have talked about magnetism and mess but we havent covered edit yet.  What does it mean to edit or not to edit information/to modify or not to modify?

We found this “how to” de clutter film.  The rules:

Have you used it in the last year?
Is there a way you can use it in the next week?
Does it have sentimental value?
Do you have more than one?
If you can contain it keep it.

Are generators relevant here?

Generators convert energy into electricity.

Electricity generator
Electricity generator

 

One thing goes in and another comes out. What comes out can be made in one place and used somewhere else, once it is produced you can store it and use it days, weeks, months, or even years later.

How do we unpick this metaphor? The generator only makes one type of thing, it is sequential again but the thing it generates gives power to numerous other more chaotic things.

The generator is also used when something else is broken.

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/generators.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYePMNOQXw

An idea for a blackboard

6’52” – 8’21” (Ingold Thinking Through Making)

In “thinking through making” we can no longer regard making as a projection, as the projection of a ready made thought or concept on to raw material, or a projection of thought on matter as the traditional hylomorphic[1] model of making proposes.   Rather, making is an ongoing binding together of material flows and sensory awareness. This is to think of making as a kind of weaving and to think of every artifact as a knot, something bound together out of lots of materials that all get scrunched up together or come together and all get tied up. That incidentally, is why I don’t use power point. There is a rational for this: I don’t believe in PowerPoint. When we use PowerPoint we project images on the screen; PowerPoint is the epitome of the logic of projection which I am arguing against. The reason why I like black boards is that the black board is the epitome of the process of creativity that I am arguing for. You stand at the black board and you scrape a line. Then your movement, your awareness, the trace of the materials are all bound up in that one performance and what you see is the outcome of that performance. That’s why I like blackboards” (Ingold, T)

In thinking through making Ingold suggests that the artifact cannot be understood as an idea simply projected on to a material.
Does this support our thinking that the learning resource cannot be a tool for projecting knowledge onto an artwork?

[1] Hylomorphism from the greek hyle (matter) and morphe (form).  Whenever we read that in the making of artifacts, practitioners impose forms internal to the mind upon a material world ‘out there’ hylomorphism is at work.

 

e

We are sitting at the table right now. We are exciting by how the blog is working but struggling with its lack of simultaneity/equivalence. The problem is its linear reading, its sequence. We want to see the thoughts, ideas and references piled up, laid out, swapped round. There is equivalence here to e (the resource produced for the Boetti retrospective) but did e do something that this blog can’t do? Can Noticer do it?

Boetti doc copy

What is the relevance of thinking about this as a machine?

We have at times referred to the Noticer as a machine. Why have we considered it in these terms?
Jo’s reservations about the machine as ordered (sequenced), not allowing for chaos seem relevant. The Noticer has to allow for chaos.

According to Raunig in A thousand Machines the machine used to be conceptualized as a “complex composition and an assemblage that specifically could not be grasped or defined through its utilization” p19  The machine as a technical, ordered object only emerged later.

Noticer – a machine for noticing
Curiositer – a machine for being curious

The machine is produced, it produces and it draws labor to it in its construction and its upkeep.

Marx in the ‘Machine Fragment’ doesn’t see the machine as purely technical or as purely a non-living thing but as consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs  (A Thousand Machines p22). The machine is not simply a way to ease humans working conditions. Marx suggests humans become a “means” to the machine. Humans preserve the machine from disruption, they use their intellectual and cognitive labor to make it and they operate it.

Does the noticer keep noticing whilst we are not there?

The machine moves from being a tool (an aid) to the machine as a composite apparatus that dominates the labor force. The machine becomes an object that objectifies all knowledge.

The Noticer as a machine – pulling knowledge towards it, producing it and questioning it.

But if there is too much knowledge then curiosity is lost – according to Huberman. So does the Noticer simply generates another question?

Generative – generator – seem important here.

The Noticer is not mechanical, but the machine cannot be seen as simply mechanical either, for Marx it is not limited to its technical apparatus but instead it is a mechanical, intellectual and social assemblage. Knowledge and skills and people are accumulated to it.

A Thousand Machines

Two Magnets

I was just clearing out a draw in the kitchen.  It was a draw full of stuff (everyhouse has one).  In the draw I found these 2 magnets, they had pulled all these objects to them.

Magnets
Two magnets and the things they have pulled to them.