Week 3

My preparation for today’s 2 artist choices. (Extracted from PowerPoint)

Ryuichi Sakamato

Hello and welcome to my presentation. These two slides will focus on two artists that inspire me both in their creative process and their work overall. My first artist of choice is Japanese musical composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Born in Tokyo in 1952, he came to start his early work whilst at university in the 1970’s as a producer, session musician and arranger. His first round of successes came with his formation as co-founder of YMO in 1978. Overall, his solo career devilled in experimental music such as the experimental electronic fusion album, Thousand Knives, in 1978.

The public will be aware of Ryuichi, through his Oscar winning soundtrack for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawarence in 1983. This release also won Ryuichi a BAFTA, Grammy and two golden globes. Its main theme was also formed into an adaptation into the hit single, Forbidden Colours. The most successful release of his career though, however, is for his composition for the film ‘The last Emperor’.

When I was growing up on music, I would hear classic FM constantly through my parent’s radio and would hear Ryuichi’s music constantly. To the point of him being one of main inspirations into learning music overall. Not long before his sad passing away, he released his work on The Revenant. If you have seen this film, you would know that the cinematography helms a lot of establishing, wide shots that really take you to where the film is set.

Ryuichi’s soundtrack for The Revenant holds quite a unique score in the sense that it’s basically a soundscape, mixed with classical elements such as violins, basses etc. This is of quite some inspiration towards my current project as I may write my own soundscape and score to accompany my own work.

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Ansel Adams

In the world of photography, the name Ansel Adams is a prominent one. One of the well-known names of Landscape Photography, Ansel Adams was born in the Filmore District of San Francisco, 1902. Adams was an American landscape photography and major environmentalist, also well known for his incredible black and white work of Western America. His help in founding the group, F/64, the association for photographers who’s advocation for photography of a pure nature, is of an important one. With the help of Fred Archer, they developed the system of image making called, the Zone System, this method allows the photographer to achieve a print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the results of artistic choice in exposure, negative development and printing. This is critical in the photography realm.

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Notes from Class:

The art of score 

In performance art a score is given to someone 

Visual thinking.

Site specific sound art.

Enabling and not costly.

Documenting the relationship to site and location.

Locative media.

• Name two artists who use location as a material. 
• How site specific and sound contextualise. 
• Articulate the link. 
  
  Site specific art can’t live without the specific place, it loses meaning otherwise.

In my project, the art, that being a film, would not work without the sounds recorded on site.

Particular time and place is relative to the critical attention that the viewer is tuned to. Or the spacial features the site holds and how it shapes the viewers vision.

Richard Cera

Land art – built into the land. Could be a response within a concept to the world the land art occupies. Found material can be used to create land art.  

Maintenance art – the art of maintaining. 

Touch sanitation. Celebrating the hidden people of maintenance. 

Feminist performance art. Taking the art out of the white cube, into the public realm. This is routed deeply in the feminist art world. Early Avant Garde, relates also the environment not just the image.

Site specified art can use the elements of its location, this leads to its keys materials as a response to the location the art is held. This can also be used to reveal the invisible of the institutionalised nature of the placement. 

Take the artwork out of the location, the art is dead. But this isn’t the case for all artworks. 

Art is specific to the location.

Locative media – specific to working with the location and media, technological. These are usual merged. CHRISTIAN NOLD*

Mobile locative technology – Google maps etc direct location translated through this tech.  Listening to music. Creative projects that are thought as a technology that identifies and responds to specific location.  Definition of location – where something is. A concept that carries general significance. This helps us describes where something is, in relation to something or somewhere else.   Something to say about the place. Communication tech. Camera/sound piece/ smart map etc tech that helps understand of the impact the location has on ourselves .

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I have chosen Ansel because within my own photography work, throughout my 2^nd year of university, I followed suit in this technical range of how to appropriately use the darkroom development process alongside contract and the correct exposure throughout my portrait and landscape work. His work has been of a huge inspiration towards my own due to his, essentially perfect use of contract ratio and tonality in his black and white landscapes.

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Today we digested more artists and the world of site specific sound arts, as well as other definitions. *See notes on left*.

Class Exercise 1/2
At the start of the class we made our A3 mood boards based around our influences and our work, this also involved cutting work from the books around us. This was refreshing as I found a lot of work that interested me in terms of photography and some work that has influenced me before.

Reflecting on this exercise has made me realise how much I’ve grown from my first few semesters at University. Accepting my failed works as important and not just to be chucked aside. And also trying to find my visual style and theme.

The collage effect creates a visual treat for the eyes and seeing everyone’s different output is fascinating as it screams personality.

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Class Exercise 2/2

Further on into the class, we learnt what a ‘Score’ is. A score is a task that someone may layout in the artworld for the viewer to respond too and carry out, in this moment we went outside and focused on a specific area and documented it. I ended choosing the building site for the new room. Texture and sounds were the focus. I cannot share the audio as wordpress is rejecting WMA format.

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