The DoubleWalker Project

I have a new project/idea:

...Doppelganger...

After being queried about the actual definition of this word i followed some links in the google-webs and found a really interesting article from 2006 written in 'Nature News' about how scientists had managed to trick the brain into playing weird tricks on itself:

"Doctors treating the patient, a 22-year-old woman with epilepsy, found that when they stimulated a brain region called the left temporoparietal junction, the patient sensed the presence of a sinister figure behind her who copied her actions. They suspect that the effect is due to the mind projecting its own movements onto a phantom figure conjured up by the brain, an effect that is seen in some patients with serious psychiatric conditions."

Not to mention the creepy-ness of inserting electrodes into the brain! I like this idea. There was some more stuff on wikipedia (I know, I know its not a source!) about the idea of Doppelganger (the term itself borrowed from German - Doppel meaning Double and Ganger meaning Walker) as an omen of bad luck or when seen by others even as a harbinger of death!
But the term that really got me interested was this word being used to desribe that moment, that fleeting glimpse of someone/something that looks exactly like you out of the corner of your eye, in a situation where it is not possible for it to be a reflection. A sense of bi-location if you will. I have long been interested in this idea as i seem to have this feeling sometimes and it is always a creepy and sometimes un-nerving experience even if it over in a second. Enough to raise the hairs on your neck...

There is a lot of crap out there about celebrities and their "doppelganagers" and the facebook viral profile picture changing thing a while back. But im not interested in that schmuck that much. Although it is interesting to note it has become a commonly used word due to this need we seem to have to constantly compare ourselves to celebrities...

Thoughts/links/references would be choice...Bladerunner?

Image Search Results got me this far:

Check out the dude in the background and hit the photo for the story...this is the kind of thing i am interested in.

Interesting...photo is link...


Link to the facebook phenomenon. And the best image.

...

Cortney Andrews

I Want To Love You
2010


I Want To Love You (Part 2)
2010

Christine Webster

From the Series Le Dossier - Christine Webster

I saw her retrospective today at the Christchurch City Art Gallery - Incredible. Dark moody, infused with a sense of the macabre and a photographer that was really really interested in pushing the boundaries of decency and moral indignation. Something not often seen in photography and in my neck of the woods...Most noted and infamous for her series Black Carnival some of the other works like the series Le Dossier really got me interested.
Will post more about this...have to take photos...inspired...

oh yea i went and heard Lee Child (the author) speak the other night. He said something reall interesting at the very beginning of his talk which is roughly paraphrased as follows:

He said that the commercial and artistic sides of his job/passion go hand in hand and you cannot get one without the other, it sounded kinda money making and callus until he followed up by saying his work, his writing does not exist and is not really real (durrr) until it is consumed by someone. Unless a book he has written is bought and read by someone else then it really only exists in his head... the consumption is part of the process, it makes his writing and the process real and complete.

So this made me think about art and in particular photography. How does the consumption part of it pan out for us as photographers? I was involved in two group shows and a solo show while in the states and then another solo show posthumously (haha) on top of several other shows over the four years i was at Art School. In all honesty i have sold fuck all of my work. Does this mean that the process has not been complete>? in some ways i feel like it might have. I agree with Lee Child in that fact that the consumption, the viewing or understanding or appreciation of an art work is part of the whole artistic process. How do you know someone is an artist if you have never seen/bought/viewed their work>? but i felt like i was painting myself into a corner a little and saying that because i haven't sold much work therefore stuff doesn't count...hmmm

So the other long winded thing I was also thinking about in terms of consumption was the Internets and how we all have this presence on the web (blogs, linkedIn, facebook blah blah) and how this effects the way we consume and view art. I spend hours trolling the web on blog sites like I heart Photograph and 72dpi yet the last time i was in a gallery...um...a couple of weeks ago maybe? shit when did i last see something in person....our online presence is fascintating. I had an old friend of mine ring me tonight who commented that she found my blog within seconds online because "...there arn't many of you online..." As she said this it felt a 50/50 split, half of me was like 'wow cool she found me online, thats pretty cool' and the other half was thinking...'fuck its so open, so public, so unregulated i have to be more careful about what i do online...' It took me back to the photography elective i undertook in Second year and Dunedin based artist Michael Morley's dire warnings about our online footprints and the possibilities for surveillance/monitoring and tracking. Not to mention copyright infringment and a scary new way of having our work disseminated (outside of our control)

ok enough writing.

The Backyard

I could see it in my head and needed to make it real.

Game.Head.HeadGame.GameHead.

Series. Light. Figures. Rakes. Bizarre///

Seeing is Stealing

Cool blog name. Cool artist. Cool shit in general. Check it out.

Liars' - Scissors///

Pretty nuts video for a band called "Liars' " the songs called 'Scissors'. Stumbled across it on http://www.booooooom.com/ Very very cool and well shot. Not so keen on cheesy graphics at the end but still. Cool.

In A Single Word. EPIC.

I have no words for this right now. Its pretty incredible. The vibrancy and the color and the power of the images is pretty sweet.

He also seems to be part of a trend of 20-something artists im finding at the moment that are all incredible. Jealous much. Head in the game.

Thoughts.

Travel.

Ok so i have been reading other peoples blogs for a while, in particular Mr. S. Lewis and Lydia Boehr. I have been thinking about lots of stuff but firstly here is a quote from an article with photographer/filmmaker Zoe Leonard that i am STEALING straight of Steve's blog. Thanks mate but it was so so brilliant in terms of summing up what i was thinking about last semester:

"Photographs play with the idea of absolute truth. When people look at a photograph, they believe it. We believe that it exposes reality. That a portrait can show someone's true character. If you see a picture of something, you believe it really happened that way. Pictures are proof. My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view. I want to draw the viewer into the process of looking so we can look at these things together. I want to show you what I see." ---> Zoe Leonard

Truth! Photography! Accepting images as reality! all such key ideas in one beautifully succinct paragraph.

So. Thinking things. Right now i am struggling a bit because i no longer have a project, something to aim for, work towards... an ultimate goal. It was to finish my degree, to graduate etc etc. This all sounds very melodramatic ahaha and its not meant to be. But yea i need a PROJECT> or something. Now i seem to have been sucked into the rat race already and have no time/energy for stuff that is outside of work! Lame! But i have to up my game.

Its like when i first started art school and i was in printmaking and they were like "ok so this is how you do an acid etching... now go do 3 plates and 12 prints by tmomorrow" and we all stood around like "ahhh so what the hell? is that all there gunna tell us?" because we had all come from high school were art was so prescribed and what we could do was handed to us on a platter.

Mission: Come up with a Project or a Goal. eg A series of prints or a series of work or similar.

First of two big big prints... i told you, never leave me alone with large format printers and a massive gallery space to use...

Some notes and stuff

Reading stuff/notes/stuffstuff:

-"My work is over when i have managed to get beyond the mirror" - Jorge Molder in Face: The new Photographic portrait. Ed:William A. Ewing

-"To say that 'the camera cannot lie' is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name." Marshall McLuhan 1964. page 86 of the above.

-"Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near as to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognise that, at the same time, it is not." Thomas Ruff 1993. Page 104

-"If you stand in front of a customs officer, you try and make a face like the one in your passport. So why should my portraits be communicative at a time when you could be prosecuted for your sympathies?" Thomas Ruff 1993. page 119. I found this one really interesting especially as it came from 1993! I feel that it is even more true now...

-Jason Salavon -"The class of 1967" 1998. All the male and females fomr this year overlayed on top of one another kind of in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher..

-Axel Antas -"White Portrait" 2002
White out, a void where the face should be...

-"I am visable, I am Image." Jean Baudrillard, 1993.

-Eva Lauterlein series called "chimeres" - Spooky and haunting images of people who look totally disengaged, robotic almost...

-Douglas Gordon "Monster" 1997

-"The visable world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream." W. B. Yeats

-Helen Sear from the series "twice...once" 1998-2000
Epic series in whice two portrait images were superimposed creating bizzare and starngly penetrating portraits that look like victims of some sort of strange surveillance experiment. "What is secret and hidden is also ghastly". Look up Freud's notion of the "Unheimlich"

Artists Statement - SITE 2009

“They Say the Camera never lies. It lies everyday.”
-Caesar Romano

The photographic image has long been treated as a direct and literal representation of reality. [SLICE] explores the nature of truth within the photographic image. It questions and distorts our reliance and assumption on the truthful and unbending nature of the mechanically produced photograph.
In our everyday life we interact with the photographic image, we use it to tell us about the world, to report on events, times, space and locations inaccessible to us. We hungrily consume the photograph in order to learn, to discover, to seek out, the “truth” of a situation.
But how do we feel when this truth is distorted, warped, bent or even horrifically misused. How does this change the nature of other photographs that we view? Do we question what it is we are seeing in a photograph anymore? Are we happy with the notion that what we see may not be what actually took place? With so much visual stimulus persistently bombarding us in contemporary society it seemed critical for [SLICE] to explore the constantly shifting nature of truth within the image.
As Andre Bazin notes in The Ontology of the Photographic Image(i) , the photograph provides us with a “…hallucination at the same time as it delivers fact.”(ii) The photographic image offers the viewer a slice, a frozen moment of the real, delivered to us as a tangible object, something that can be held in our hand, pinned to a wall or stuck in a book. However, the event depicted by the image is something that does not exist in that same time or space as the photographic print itself.
In [SLICE] the figure within the images is caught in the middle of a sudden movement, frozen forever in that split second of time that it takes for the camera’s shutter to fire. This figure acts as a metaphor for the isolation and removal from time and space that is inherent in every photograph, this hallucination that Bazin speaks of and what Barthes calls “madness”(iii). Through the use of this figure and the ambiguity of its presence in the images [SLICE] makes the viewer question exactly what it is that they are seeing and their assumptions of the photographic image. It creates a paradox, questioning and commenting on the power of truth at the same time.
[SLICE] does not attempt to make a judgment or final decision on the outcome of the nature of truth within the photograph, for that would be impossible and recklessly self-limiting. Instead, it is intended to make the viewer explore, discover and question their ideas about reality within the frame and the long held perceptions of the photograph as an indexical signifier of truth.

(i) Bazin, Andre. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” (1967) in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 242.
(ii) Kriebel, Sabine T. “Theories of photography – A Short History” in Photography Theory Edited by James Elkins 17-19. New York: Routledge, 2007.
(iii) IBID

Money money money

Ok so i have just realised how woefully under-thought-about i have been in terms of dimensions and frames and all that jazz. I just picked this proportional size for the images and thought "oh yea that'll be sweet"...fail...epic fail.
So i have a frame that is 22x28 inches, its cheap (only cost $22USD) but there are several problems. One, using this frame means i am going to have to crop my images down to fit this size, it is smaller proportions than as it is in camera. I like the format of the standard in camera frame, the images were shot and frame to this so it makes sense to keep the standard (i want to say 35mm) dimensions.

The other option would be to crop the images down to the panoramic, 16:9 kind of style of image (reminiscent or Aaron Hobson etc) I think this is the only way i would like to crop them...but then this means making custom frames OR getting them professionally framed...hence the money money money.


Pano style

Vs.


Totally uncropped - as shot.
Vs.


Cropped to fit 22x28 inch frame

[S]pace dimensions

So i am going to make the images on the larger wall i have in the P/DF gallery slightly bigger than the rest in order to make better use of the space and the whole exhibition more visually appealing.
So these two images (and iv decided that this wall will be the image on the left and one cloud one) would measure 50x33.271 inches and the rest of the prints going on the smaller walls would all measure 40x26.617 inches. So now i need to print the dam things! and then obtain a quote for framing (note: be seated when reading quote)

Julia Fullerton_Batten

Staircase - 2008


Mirror - 2008


Cupboards - 2009


Broken Glass -2009

I have seen her work before but had not seen all of this series. Thanks to Katy for picking it up for me!
This blog has become quite the point of collection for these sorts of bizzare images that deal with he floating figure in contemporary photography. Its fair to say i think that i have become obsessed with this technique/style/idea. But after my discussion with Patrick late last week i need to think more critically about why i have become obsessed with these images, and more importantly how my images relate to this obviously well used technique.
Why is this floating/suspended figure important to me> what is it/he trying to say/do/communicate to the viewer?
Important questions...

Sexy paper mock ups

So these are two bits o paper that i am thinking will be the size of my final prints. I am open to suggestions tho haha.
I think they fit well as a diptych on this wall (which there are two of this size in the gallery) and one image this size will fit nicely with plenty of room on the center-floating walls. My only concern is images this size on the larger wall. Should i print the images for the larger wall bigger? or is that an exhibition no no. Hmmm if i do print them bigger then i have to make a very concrete and irreversible decision on which two will be going on that wall.

Because i never posted this before

American Professional photographer Joey L(awrence). Beautifully shot and incredibly graphic...you know i like that haha

Mock up changes

Another mock up. It takes away the shot were i am falling/suspended/whatever in front of the building. I like this image because it is one of the best and most painful to create (my ribs still hurt) but it does not fit so well with the rest of the series. This is mainly due to the lack of sky in the image (apart from the reflection in the buildings windows..) It just does not have the same feeling of overwhelming sky and openness that most of the other images do...

/////

Haha going back and looking at that image again i really do like the clouds in the window....it adds another depth to the image and still ties thematically to the other images. Wow indecisive again.

Images series being considered for SITE...

Here they are in proper form, not all silly and distorted. Let me know what you think. I also have a massive library of shots like the cloud shots in the mock ups. I am still thinking hard about the inclusion of these and have not really decided ether way yet.
The taking of the photos such as these i so process driven and so physical, i like the clouds for two reasons. One, there the opposite of physical, they are light and spacey and not blunt and physical which the images allude to in their technical seduction. Two, the taking of them is bound up in the process of making these images, and the way in which they react to the images of me is interesting...maybe...