Week 1 – Saad Hussain

for the first week of IP i wanted to reflect on last years Walking and Drawing project aswell as the feedback I have gotten from my other Fine Art modulals. Some of the feedback I had gotten was to have some more artists research and show more evidence of planning through thumbnails and experimentation. I also wanted to think about how I felt about my walking and drawing project as there were a lot of things i wished i had done differently if I had more than five weeks. Firstly I think my project was as successfull as it could be given the time restraitns, but I do wish i had used thinner paper as it was too heavy to be mounted on the wall. The only quick solution i had was to cut the pages up and mount them on the wall as well as i could without the seems becomming too distracting.
seccondly i wish i had spent more time planning how i would install the project rather then not having a plan for the installation at all. I could have created a smaller version with maybe one or two pieces of paper to test different ways of attatching them to the wall or talked to Phill about the best ways of hanging the different parts to the wall.
My main take away from the walking and drawing feedback is to doccument my work better and remember to include everything as i ended up rushing the notebook and forgot to include some crusial work.

i started planning this semesters project by looking at what topics i can tackle within the subject of the everyday. I read the book “The Everyday” by Stephen Johnstone and really enjoyed the qoute by Anette Messager stating that an artists job is to show what already exists and reformulate it. This made me think of general everyday activities such as eating or sleeping, but as i was planning out ideas i started thinking about my personal everyday and things spesiffic to my own everyday life. As someone with anxiety disorder, its fairly rare for me to go through a day without feeling anxious. I have seen so many depictions of anxiety through painting, but i have never really seen or in this case heard an artwork depicting the experience of anxiety. Often when i have anxiety its something that goes unnoticed by others, but there is so much that happens in my head audibly. Everything from a fast heartbeat to muffeled sounds of people talking or cars driving by aswell as negative self talk and irregular and heavy breathing. These are the sounds im hoping to capture in order to create an audible experience of anxiety.

during my Tutorial this week i reflected on what my three main goals are for this module. The three goals i landed on were learning how to interpret and think more like a contemporary artist, and learn more about current artist rather then just artistst from the past. I also wanted to experiment more with other ways of creating, using mediums other then paint etc. something im doing this semester by using sound. i wasnt really sure about what i wanted to put as my third goal, but after comming home and having had some more time to think i realised how usefull IP can be for having a consistent work schedual as we need to keep these notebooks updated every week. We also talked about the different ideas i had considdered and how i was going to create the idea i landed on. We also talked about how i can capture the sound of a heartbeat as it can be challenging without the propper tools. Something i really need to remember from this tutorial is that i shouldnt plan too much as this might stop me from experimenting with different sounds and methods. i need to remember to be more playfull and let the prosess of simply creating, guide where this project is heading. Yes, i have a fairly straight forward plan with what sounds i want and how i want the room its installed in to look like, but if i only let my vision of the project guide me, i will never truly be satisfied with the final outcome as the sounds will never sound exactly the way i want them to. Will this project be purely audible or do i include some sort of visual aspect aswell? How many speakers do i end up using? These are some questions that i hope to answere though the prosess of making this project.

for these comming weeks i will be testing out different microphones and reccorders to see what works the best for the soundbites in need aswell as learn how to use editing softwares to mix the audio togeather. I have started looking into how i can capture the heartbeat in an affordable way as electric stethoscopes arent the most budget friendly equipment for a single project. Now that i know the art centre have a reccording room, i will definatley be utilizing that as a way to reccord single sounds like breathing and heartbeat as the is little to no background noise to distort the sounds i want to reccord. I will also work closely with Phill to figure out how this project can be installed in a safe and effective way. I will also be researching different artist who work with or have worked with sound and see how they use/used sound in their artworks.

about the class:

For the first class we started by talking about what inspired us this summer. For me it has been working at the Munch Museum in Oslo as there has been so many exciting exhibitions. One exhibition that particularly sparked my interest was Satyricon + Munch. This was an exhibition that had the Norwegian black metal band Satyricon make music inspired by Munchs paintings. I had never before experienced anything like this in any of the museums i have been to before, something that made me think a lot about how audio can effect art and vice versa. After we had all talked about our summers we jumped straight in to all the general information about the modual. We leared about all the assignments, how they are assessed and what to include in the notebooks aswell as our future group projects. This was super helpful as this is my very first propper IP class.