Mapping the Territory 2

I’ve strangely found it easy to put off getting down to this project. I’ve been thinking it through alot, and coming up with comprehensive lists of what I didn’t want to do:

Lists of galleries, museums, exhibition spaces, arts organisations.

Where I have come from actually, and aesthetically, as a visual essay.

Any sort of mind mapping at all.

Anything literal about mapping.

Anything literal about territory.

So I have spend considerable time in eliminating various ways of understanding this assignment in ways it may be useful and interesting to me - ways I can uncover some sort of revelation about myself and my practice. I further understand the project through talking it over with tutor Angela during recent tutorial - it makes sense in thinking of it as a way of locating myself and my practice right now, and how this may change in a year or so, and how I would refer to this mapping from the future.

I want to explore the invisible spaces, the areas I do not yet know. As in ancient maps, the areas I wish to explore here are where "There be dragons".

There be Dragons

http://www.tomorrowtoday.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/there-be-dragons-map.jpg (accessed 6th june 2011).

There are areas which do not make sense. There seem to be dragons and territory which is a closed shop of secret knowledge. Although I am a functioning grown up person with a degree and a family and certain knowledges and experiences, I still feel excluded from the language or currency which other people seem to be fluent in. A common malaise perhaps, but there are commonalities of commerce, employability and viability which are best not to consistently attempt to reinvent.

So the art territory I am mapping is the uncharted, the unknown, at least to me. I could do worse than to quote Donald Rumsfeld yet again:

“ [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. ” 

 Former United States Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, 2002.

I am very fond of this seemingly abstruse gem of wisdom, for its hilarious yet ineffable logic. 
The territory to explore is the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.

There is an area of disconnect in logic I am very drawn to. There is a notorious counterintuitive phenomenon which occurs when the looker looks through a certain lens for a certain purpose. The logic is, I believe, further confounded by years of inaccurate representation in film and TV, making it look like the simplest, easiest and most logical thing in the world.

Film cameras, video cameras, photographic cameras, especially medium format, telescopes, periscopes and binoculars. We all have seen how easy it is to track movement in a controlled way through these – we have seen clear evidence in fiction and documentary, time and again, of spies tracking enemies’ progress, or astral bodies orbiting in space, and yet the truth is that the lens does tricks with the eyes, creating completely different views and perspectives. 

Binocular View

http://images.travelpod.co.uk/users/saktophe/1.1235689080.view-from-jackyxs-binoculars.jpg (accessed 6th June 2011).

Telescope View

http://wisp.physics.wisc.edu/astro104/lecture17/F12_02.jpg (accessed 6th June 2011).


One can spend a long time looking through such devices, wondering what it is supposed to show, wondering if it works, if it should be so wavering, and where the most obvious thing to look at has gone. Such clear views through binoculars and telescopes as above are what we expect, but only show the result of patience and control. It's almost an unspoken ignorance or failing, so used are we to seeing better images than those we can see for ourselves.

I have previously taken various moving image footage of these things, setting up by eye something which ends up behaving very differently when seen through the camera. Suddenly more opposites come into play – if the video camera flips its view upside down while filming a ceiling in the round, at which point must the camera be turned upside down to counteract this? You can strangely hide objects behind others through a camera which are perfectly visible live. It truly becomes like a Gordian knot, ever unfolding, ever out of step. An Escher video.

Escher. Stairs 1950's.

http://sparksofgenius.wikispaces.com/file/view/escher-stairs-thumb6306396.jpg/92222708/escher-stairs-thumb6306396.jpg

Making a camera follow a walking person, or panning, becomes an exercise in guesswork and ignoring the senses and signals. Walking around any area while looking through and relying only upon what the camera can see leads to disorientating misjudgments of space and scale. I am interested in these tricks and optical illusions because they are real tricks. They somehow reveal to us by extrapolation that we are tricked all the time anyway through the built-in lenses of our eyes. What a revelation if we realise  that what we see is as a mirrored reflection of our imaginations and assumptions.

Perhaps again I refer to James Elkins, The Object Stares Back, Mariner Books, 1997, where "Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer," and "seeing is irrational, inconsistent and undependable."

Rather than destabilising and making us unreliable witnesses to our own vision, this idea portrays vision and insight as a more multifaceted series of variables.

By looking and mapping territory at the edges I am only partly going Through the Looking Glass. Using mirrors, what mirrors hide and can reveal, I am exploring what I have long suspected, that mirrors, and cameras, know something and decide what they will show. This may sound a little fanciful, but in getting to know a different medium, more and more is revealed, more shown and more is able to be employed in the use of art and revelation.

Flare. still EMF

Through. still EMF

I have previous material, photos and video, which touch on this. I may look them out, but for now, for this project, I am setting up mirrors through which I intend to make territory.

Conversation. EMF

Again I realise that this is new and not new. I have thought about this and made work on it before, and yet not really created it all into a piece of work ready to show. My current big project outside the MA, Vessels, involves mirrors, and aiming to have the reflection without the object.

Dark Mirror. EMF

Now I have collected together various mirrors, and have an idea to set up. Actually a little pressured for time and space at the moment due to visitors, and longing again for a studio, a room of one's own, but what I can carve out will suffice.

6th June 2011