Codification

I want to explore ideas of structure and codification in my work, in the way I construct and understand it.

Working with visual material and a set of ideas, sometimes ways of working or reasons present themselves or emerge. Sometimes I start off wanting to make work in a particular way - a set of restrictions, or particular construct. All of these point to the underlying logic or equation of a piece. This is often a multi-layered, asymmetric kind of equation which becomes a way of making the form of the work, solving and resolving the material.

It's often difficult for me to deconstruct those ideas and articulate them, as they are deeply embedded within the making process. Already in making, these ideas and constructs are abstract, and clarifying them in any other way than through making is a distraction. However, I did go some way towards halting the process in stages to record and reflect throughout the MA, especially more recently, and even for me, the counterintuitive steps of planning certain codifications to fulfil in work - eg The Future Past Tense one hour drawings to one hour moving image.

Through this blog page I intend to get further into this. It would help me in the end if I could summarise my own internal mechanism, and turn it from something I find hard to identify and articulate, into something I could explain. I perhaps have to deconstruct my thinking, my practice, the mechanisms of thought, in order to reveal the codification behind work.

In the MA I have found it easier to explain what I am doing and why, and yet vital elements still remain elusive - they are very conscious decisions with clear logic to me, but largely as yet nebulous.

3rd March 2014

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I realise that I enjoyed doing the one hour drawings and making them into the one hour piece. It felt like a literal equation to solve, as the drawings were unequal and the resulting moving image had to be much more fluid than simply feeding stills in to the computer. There were many more internal mechanisms going on.

That is my idea of codification - internal and external mechanisms, some for reasons, and some as aesthetic choices and judgements. Perhaps they can all be unpacked and deconstructed into fine and smaller binary choices.

I have not yet come up with my self imposed parameters for the Final Project work.
I've been thinking about what Jennifer said to me during the Task 3 seminar, that although she detects and impulse towards inventory and archive in my work, it's not about the numbers. Astute. More thinking through as I start to make the layers of work. Still collating.

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/mini-portfolio-task-3-seminar.html

17th April 2014

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Plans and ideas are not always suitable for a particular piece of work. As I am in the middle of making the final project piece Embedded, and revising earlier ideas, I realise that the intention of creating a construct, or equation or underlying matrix to build the work upon turned out to be perhaps for a different work. I had been thinking of working for an hour every day on a specific aspect, or something else to do with numbers or timing. As it turned out, that would have been an irrelevant imposition, as the material I have been working with, and all the ideas and meanings I have been exploring, do not need some equation to weave them together. Not this time. The layers - found paintings, old school photos, movement, and the sound layers of my mum singing, have been more fluid to work with, and grasping them has not required something like the discipline of drawing for an hour a day, as for The Future Past Tense in 2012.

As I allow the idea of codification to recede and adapt to what has actually happened in the making and the cognitive processes of linking work together, I am aware that not all artworks use exactly the same faculties of the artist, and don't contain every single cumulative thought of practice. It's good to know there will be other works, other conundrums, other art equations and codifications to solve.

14th August 2014

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Now that I have completed Embedded and am nearly at the completion of the project and the entire MA, I recognise in the past year the underlying systems and codifications of my working practices. It has definitely been less overtly conscious than in previous MA years, particularly the Reflective Practice unit. As in structured reflection becoming more embedded in my art practice, so the structural codification and processing has receded or been subsumed into making. I think that awareness of reflection and codification is cyclic, and recurs as projects change, practice deepens and circumstances emerge.

11th November 2014