There’s no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There’s no knowing where we’re rowing
Or which way the river’s flowing
Wk 3: Animation & Printing
Some experiments from Friday’s workshop with Lizzy Hobbs: The material properties of animation.
Preparations for this week’s printing experiments. The Amazon river drawn in charcoal, and a set of stencils, ready to screen print the river in many accumulating layers. When animated this will show the river coming to life, reaching out into the country. When reversed it will show the river drying up.
A photo of the Waiapi tribe, which I will animate so that the men appear one by one, continuing my explorations of revelation and image making.
Prep for Written Component 2
Read Thinking Fast and Slow…
Iterate Week 2: Written Component 1
Written Component 1
In short, my iterative process in ‘100 screengrabs’ is a response to impulses within graphic communication design to simplify and reduce complex systems and ideas to snappy and digestible slogans and messaging, and to neo-colonial tendencies towards a supposedly universalising and democratizing minimalism. It is an argument for increased nuance, subtlety and complexity. It is a refusal to try to use GCD to shout louder than everyone else, and it is an acknowledgement that my voice is maybe not the one that needs to be heard. It is a declaration of incomplete and unfinished knowledge. It is a promise to go slowly, listening and learning and healing.
This approach is supported by Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological text, Living a Feminist Life. While much of her approach is about the embodied experience of living as a woman and feminist of colour, and the necessity of self-care and perseverance in an unjust world, I also find this text a useful guide to allyship. She writes,
“[t]here is no guarantee that in struggling for justice we ourselves will be just. We have to hesitate, to temper the strength of our tendencies with doubt; to waver when we are sure, or even because we are sure. A feminist movement that proceeds with too much confidence has cost us too much already.”
Ahmed hints at those who have been excluded from previous iterations of the feminist movement, and argues that slowing down is important for moving forwards towards a stronger and more just movement.
The Framing Climate Justice project, a participatory cross-movement framing project coordinated by PIRC, 350.org and NEON, researched and tested framing narratives for communicating the realities of climate justice to the UK public. They found that the “emergency” narrative, so frequently employed by environmental movements to emphasise the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency “have the effect of narrowing people’s perspectives, making them less open to complex and creative solutions.”
Perhaps then, the hesitation, doubt, and wavering that Ahmed calls for, are useful qualities to inject into the climate conversation. Similarly, I have found in my own activism that being open about what you do not know, and actively listening and asking questions, can create a really healthy and reciprocal working space, and can be wonderful tools to aid other people’s learning, as they are a constant reminder of the extent of the unknown, and often help others to voice their doubts and concerns. What’s more, people hate to be preached at. A practice that is transparent about the limits of its knowledge, that makes the process part of the artwork even, is perhaps more likely to engage in productive and two-way dialogue and communication.
Ahmed’s text seems to speak of life and practice as iteration. She writes, “[i]n retracing some of the steps of a journey, I am not making the same journey. I have found new things along the way because I have stayed closer to the everyday” (11). She advocates for retracing and revisiting, not as a way of remaining static, but as a form of slower learning. The temporality of this retracing seems to be key to living feminism, living a feminist life – there is something inherent in the slowness and the repetition that provides the foundation for Ahmed’s feminist practice.
Uzma Rivzi, when talking about “decolonisation as care”, similarly explores the embodied experience of colonialism and capitalism. Physical exhaustion is a bodily manifestation of late-stage capitalism, caused by the speed at which we work, the lack of breaks we take, and the scale and constancy of our production. Thus, slowing down, for her too, is an inherently radical act, and she advises that we find ways to extricate ourselves from the ever-moving capitalist system.
BRIEF:
The process is the medium. Use screen-printing, or related image-making processes as a tool for communicating complexity and nuance.
Explore the impact that layering and iteration has on image-making and story-telling.
Can this medium be used to critique communication practices within activism, and possibly probe and suggest alternative forms of activism?
Create a stop motion animation on a single large sheet of paper, printing the frames in different spaces across the sheet so that they start to appear in the corners of the other frames, as the sheet fills up. Alternate between passages of text-based storytelling and passages of imagery. You may want to use short bursts of actual animation, where several frames make up a moving image. You may want to utilise a range of printing and image making techniques so as to create something of a suitable length.
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Practicalities:
- This will obviously be very slow and time-consuming, especially as I will have to photograph it at each stage.
- Do I change sheet when it gets full, or keep going beyond legibility?
- Is there a voice over too? On loop maybe as the different words come back into shot.
- Stop-motion animation is usually 7-12 fps. On the text-based sections this is maybe much slower?
Other concerns:
- What story to tell? What content to use?
- How do I stop this becoming a project with an end goal from the start?
- How do I make the outcome coherent, whilst also embracing the process as medium, inevitably unfinished nature of it?
- Is there an end goal? Can I design it so that it’s an unfinished story? Open source…? Collaborative?
- Could this be part of the art? Working backwards from his death, towards his birth, seeing how far you get, how much progress into his life the capacity of the brief gives me?
- Would be a beautiful metaphor for media and the depth of stories, and the fact that behind the headlines are real lives, stories…
- If I was doing this properly I would work with indigenous activists and allow them to tell their story. However since this is a relatively short brief it may be insensitive to ask for people’s precious time when it’s just an experiment
- Might be worth looking through Instagram to see if there’s content I can use here.
- Maybe there are places I can use the overwriting technique too – having something emerge, grow. Remember this took a whole day. Maybe I can use the bit I’ve already got
- Think about the practicalities of how many screens I’d need, each with max 12 or so different images… taping sections off each time… if I didn’t want to wash it each time, would the ink dry in between each one…?
100 screengrabs: 4 versions
Week 6: Present
Presenting my article-as-zine as a video. A useful form for archiving the zine, or capturing the visuals, though not so much for engaging with it.
Week 1: Investigate
Testing, testing. 1, 2, 3. Deciding on which category to choose (space, publication or interface), exploring different investigation methods for each – how would these investigation methods transfer to the other categories. Which sites could I choose for each?
Settling on Publication: The LRB, and starting to investigate, through written and verbal description and documentation; familiarising myself, getting to know it. Starting the process of criticising those processes – what are its strengths? weaknesses? Implicit biases? Unintended consequences?
Describing to someone else:
A simple photographic series, page by page. Why do we document? To keep records, to remember, to be able to refer back. These are some of the most common reasons. Photography is by far one of the simplest and most effective ways of doing this, especially since many more of us have access to camera phones than scanners. I explore its strengths and weaknesses below.
Photo vs. Scan
I used macro photography (or as macro as my camera would go) to explore textures, lesions, wear and tear, breakages, strains, creases, imperfections. I was interested to discover the places where the print shows through from the other side. I like the places where the staples and folding have created a pattern of mirrored creases, and the mountains and valleys created by the fold. The yellowing of the outer fold could simply be age… or it could say something about the air in our living room/kitchen where our journals are stored… To be honest, I’m surprised it isn’t more gross in there, given how much and often we cook.
Image Tracing: what happens when you try to vectorise the scans? This is a great way of documenting, often, because it stores the information in points and vectors. Infinitely scaleable. Easily reproducible. High contrast. But you’re asking the computer to translate/recognise human language… The results are fascinating. On its auto settings, it captures the essence of the page – the general texture, the mark-making, the layout. But zoom in closer and the words are illegible. Does this matter? What is it I want to document? With some adjustment of settings I can get it to capture the words legibly, if heavy-handedly. When I ask it to create a high-res image, it uses many layers and contours to capture the subtlety of the colour shifts. Translated into outlines and this is fascinating. You discover the contours of the colours in a whole new way, and the way these contours gather around words gives the language a sort of magnetism, and the page a geography, even if it’s not that legible. Finally I asked it to recreate the page as line art – it seems to have picked up only the places where it thinks there are lines, and no fill, as it’s basically ignored the bold title. The documentation of the body text is fascinating – like braille, or Hebrew – mostly vertical and horizontal lines, and dots.
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