MARCH 22, 2007

This Saturday I plan to execute my second prototype. Today, I'm looking at flickr photos that are geotagged with coordinates in Red Hook. I'm writing brief descriptions of these photographs and then trying to forget about them. On Saturday I'll go out with a tagged map and the descriptions and I'll attempt to retake the photos — or, rather, not so much retake them as take new photographs that match my descriptions of the old photographs. Ideally, I would do this all over the city, with descriptions received from other people instead of my own, but it doesn't seem worth going to all that effort for such a risky experiment. We'll see what happens...

MARCH 6, 2007

NOTES FROM MIDTERM PRESENTATION

Yesterday I gave my midterm presentation. We had five(!) guest critics: Rachel Abrams, Liz Dazico, Prem Krishnamurthy, Eric Liftin and Scott Paterson. Overall, the response seemed to be good. I mean, they were harsh about a lot of things, but they seemed to be into the overall idea, and everyone seemed to pull away different things from it that they thought were valuable (which seems to happen a lot with the stuff I do; my art seems to function as a cipher for people's creative impulses a lot of the time). The overall consensus seemed to be that I'm engaged in an interesting project/exploration, and that I'm asking the right questions, but I haven't quite gotten to the answers yet. Here were some of the more useful bits of criticism I received:

- Don't show the images/instructions as a slideshow. Think about seriality, or presentation as a grid. (I mentioned that all of my other work is grid-based, and was enthusiastically told that I should DEFINITELY talk about that during my presentation.)
- Explain why the project matters -- to me, at least, if not to everyone else. (If I can explain why it matters to me, it probably will matter to everyone else.)
- When talking about influences/context, get away from the obvious people (John Cage, Yoko Ono). This was Scott's point, and others either seemed not to care, or to expressly disagree. One way to get around this would be to talk about people who were influenced by the obvious people, and mention the obvious one's in the context of the non-obvious ones.
- My rhetoric is too late-90s post-structuralist. Again, Scott's point. Probably true, as the late '90s was the last time I really thought about art theory!
- Emphasize the instructions, which are the force of cohesion in the work. The images themselves are not necessarily interesting (not on their own, anyway), and they're not particularly connected to each other, visually at least. Therefore, the cohesiveness of the project comes from the instructions, and the fact of instruction itself.
- Jake is really fixated on the idea of visual rather than conceptual cohesion. He thinks the photos should be an example of what Edward Tufte calls "small multiples": a series of slight variations on a single unifying theme.
- What's interesting about the project is that it's systematic, so keep that at the forefront.
- The project involves a certain amount of submission/submissiveness. That said, it shouldn't become entirely about self-abnegation — specifically, it shouldn't be about forcing myself to do uncomfortable or embarrassing things.
- Rachel seemed to think that the underlying concept has an element of wit and/or cheekiness (sp?), and that this element could provide the backbone of the project. It's an interesting point, which I hadn't considered and need to think about more.
- Prem made a really interesting point: Katy Grannan and Sophie Calle are essentially opposites. Calle's photos aren't terribly visually interesting, nor are they meant to be; the value lies entirely in the concept. Grannan, on the other hand, uses the concept as a means of generating beautiful photographs. I need to figure out which category I fall into, because it's probably not possible to sit in the middle.
- Consider dropping the word unintentional (or non-intentional); it's misleading. (I'm not sure this is true, but I think if I am going to use it, I need to spend more time explaining how/why it is applicable.)
- Look at other artists working in this field. (It might be worth looking at AIGA.)

At drinks after class, the critics mentioned a bunch of useful references:

- Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy", an examination of consumer culture. The author simply watched people's buying habits and looked for patterns that emerged once the data set became large enough.
- The Show with Ze Frank.
- Lucy Lippard's Six Years, an anecdotal narrative of the birth of conceptual art in the late '60s and early '70s.
- Learning to Love you More, the Miranda July/Harrell Fletcher project which is essentially the opposite of what I'm doing: they give instructions to the public and catalogue the artwork it produces.
- Martha Rosler's The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, in which she presents unpeopled photos of the lower east side alongside words or sets of words that could be used to describe the neighborhood.
- Sophie Calle's 91 Days to Unhappiness. This is particularly interesting because the system is not really the focus of the work; instead, it's the frame for a compelling narrative. (I should really look at all of Exquisite Pain more closely.) - Stephen Shore's recent series of iPhoto books. - Jack Pierson. (I'm not sure how he's relevant, but I should look more closely.)

MARCH 4, 2007

NOTES FROM FIRST PROTOTYPING SESSION

Yesterday I executed the first prototype of my thesis. For six hours, I walked the streets of New York with a camera while people called me and gave me instructions about how, when and where to take photographs. The experience was fun and informative, but ultimately sort of a failure. I hope it was the type of failure from which I can learn something, but that remains to be seen.

The whole shoot took a little over six hours. I received a total of 28 requests, of which I was able to fulfill 21, taking a total of 58 pictures. Eventually, I'll put together a page for with all of the images and the instructions that led to them. For now, the best of them are here.

The pictures I produced weren't all great, but they weren't all bad either. The best of them, I think, was "Can you take a blue picture for me please?" But I'm not sure it was a picture I wouldn't have otherwise taken, so then what's the point. But then, I'm no longer sure that the point is to surprise myself, or to access my unconscious. Zach Layton told me about an essay by Jeff Wall, in which Wall suggests that as technology makes "good" photography increasingly available to the amateur photographer, the professional, or "art", photographer finds himself backed into a corner in terms of how to set his work apart from that of the weekender with a fancy AF DSLR and minimal knowledge of Photoshop. (Wall suggests that one option is for the professional to adopt the amateurism that has been lost to the amateur, with all his fancy "corrective" technology. An interesting idea, for sure.) I guess that's what I'm trying to do here: if my photos can't derive their meaning from being technically "good" or beautiful, then they must have some other underlying meaning. And that meaning, I'm hoping, can be derived from the process by which they were created. But that means the process itself has to have meaning; it can't just be a means to an end, because it is the means that ultimately matters more than the end itself. Clearly I have a long way to go...

MARCH 2, 2007

This Saturday, in anticipation of my midterm presentation, I'll be executing my first prototype of my thesis. I've been thinking a lot about writing code to generate instructions for the photographs, but I realized that I've gotten caught up in the code (the technology) without really focusing on what it's like to take pictures based on instructions. So what I've done is asked a bunch of friends (and the ITP community) to call me during a 6-hour window on Saturday and ask me to take a picture of something. Here's the email message I sent everyone:

On Saturday, March 3, from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm Eastern Time, I'll be walking around New York City with my camera. What I need you to do is tell me what to take pictures of. How? Call me at 917.478.8429. Ask me where I am, and anything else you want to know about what's going on around me. Tell me to take a picture of something nearby. You can call me as many times as you like, and your instructions can be in any form, and can be based on what you'd like to see a picture of or what you'd like to force me to do in order to get the picture.

The only restrictions are that you can't ask me to do anything that will:

- get me arrested
- get me assaulted, injured or killed
- cost me a lot of money
- take more than 20 minutes

If you call and I don't pick up, it means I'm either shooting someone else's picture or I don't have reception. If this happens, feel free to leave me a message and I'll call you back to get your instructions.

We'll see how it turns out!

FEBRUARY 8, 2007

This is my first journal entry, so I'll do a little catching up here. I've ditched my original thesis idea -- a drawing machine -- in favor of project that better allows me to explore my interest in non-random non-intentional art practice: algorithmic photography. (That's a temporary title.) Basically, what I'm doing is writing a computer program that will tell the how, when, where and what of a picture that I will take. The instructions will be derived from data that the program gathers from the internet, data about anything and everything. In a sense, this photograph will be representation of the state of the world at the particular moment that the program is run. There will be only one picture, which will be blown up to an enormous size (approximately 4' x 6'.

Last week I did some initial experimentation with a program I threw together that created sets of instructions based on pseudo-random numbers. The experiements were useful, as they began to indicate the types of instructions that might be useful. Ultimately, I realize that I don't want to know exactly what form the instructions will take, so I need to incorporate a certain amount of variation into the output as well. Maybe the program will tell me to go to an exact set of coordinates at an exact time and point my camera in a particular direction, or maybe it will send we to a general location and have me take a picture of a particular subject. Maybe it will give me exposure/focus settings, or maybe it will allow me to adjust them to the requirements of the environment.

I still need to figure out what type of data the program will use, and where this data will come from. Basically, I need to work forward from the data and backward from the instructions, in the hope that these two lines will eventually meet. It's kind of like digging a train tunnel through a mountain, John Henry-style.

Today I began working on the Road Map for the project. I hope to have that completed and posted here by the weekend. I'll also post the current version of my thesis documentation -- abstract, personal statement, research and work description -- shortly.