On the 14th November, a small group of us went to Liverpool on a Gallery trip. While we were there, we visited a number of galleries. The FACT gallery had a number of pieces up on display on the ground floor that were relevant to my work this term. These were by artists Aram Bartholl, Michel De Broin, Tobias Ebsen Darsha Hewitt, Sam Meech, Sebasien Pierre and Bengt Sjölén. The exhibition was centred on exchange, with all artists looking at the communication between cities with electronics and technology.

Every year, my family and I take a trip overseas for a week (or two). This year, we have travelled to the East Coast of North America. Starting in Boston, MA, we will make our way south, ending in New York in just over a week. I intend to record the entire trip and put together short videos along the way. On the morning of the 19th July (our second day), we visited the Boston Aquarium.

Check out the video on vimeo: ​https://vimeo.com/133906615

Following my feedback from Term 2, I found that I needed to move towards mechanising and/or digitising the patterns and images I had created. Before the end of the previous term, I established that I wanted to increase the size and scale of my pieces whilst allowing for some sort of audience participation. As a result, my aim turned from simply creating an environment, to creating a machine that worked and that animated the painting in front of the viewer, but that could be programmed by the viewer. I considered a variety of different robots and machines that I could use, from Lego's 'Mindstorm' to Xbox's 'Kinect'. One problem I encountered with these machines was that they were either too expensive (£150-£300) or required some knowledge of computer programming. One such example was the Arduino board. The Arduino board enables users to create moving, animated machines. It is best suited for those with basic programming skills. With only 5 weeks in the term, I found that I would not have enough time to learn and apply these techniques, so decided to move away from this. Instead, I turned towards the 'Valiant Roamer', a machine built in the late 1980s to teach computer programming and angles to children. The machine has the ability to be programmed with ease, whilst having a powerful enough memory to remember a whole list of instructions.

Roy Ascott, in his essay 'Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision (1966-1967)', establishes that, previously in the past the "artist played to win, and so set the conditions that he always dominated the play." He asserts, however, that nowadays "we are moving towards a situation in which the game is never won but remains perpetually in a state of play. While the general context of the art-experience is set by the artist, its evaluating in any specific sense is unpredictable and dependent on the total involvement of the spectator." This idea of total involvement of the spectator drove the notions central to this term's work. I had discovered that contemporary art was not focussed so much with the artist creating the painting as it was with the spectator creating and being a part of the production of the painting, as is seen in the work of Burnie Loubelle, in which audience members operate giant machines created by the artist to create drawings on paper. This, likewise, can be seen in the work of Camille Utterback, specifically in her piece 'Text Rain' in which letters fall down and sit on audience members. The ways in which these artists directed the viewer and enabled their participation became central to my study this term. I wanted to create a space as opposed to an art piece. It followed that this shift from object to events included a change from providing a specific message to providing a specific space for interaction. This space became the installation room in the studio, in which I laid two 1.5mx2m pieces of paper side by side and invited all first year artists to participate.

Although my attempt to get audiences to participate with my work as though it were in a gallery space had been successful, I found that the instructions I had given may not have been clear enough as some participants send the Roamer marching of the paper. I did discover, however, that the shapes that each participant planned to create varied from the shapes of the previous participant, or indeed the shapes I would have considered. Many people were interested not so much in creating lines as they were with creating shapes. Many attempted to draw their own and, amongst the skew of lines that can be found in the final versions, one finds a multitude of different recognisable and unrecognisable shapes.

This whole notion of participation can be seen to be my own personal response to the participatory, DIY culture that we live in today. The emergence of websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter etc have led to a surge in the creation of user-based content. This surge, regarded as 'Web 2.0', has shown that the mindsets and skill-sets of participatory practices have been increasingly taken up. People are increasingly likely to exploit new tools and technology in 2.0 ways, This can be seen in my work. Whilst the Valiant Roamer is not necessarily a new tool, it is one that I have utilised in a way that differs from what it was designed for. I have used it to create an art that involves a dialogue, a dialogue between the audience and the robot, as well as a dialogue between audience members. This grammar of interaction, which can be seen in the work of Sauter & Lüsebrink, Snibbe and Lozano-Hemmer, establishes a feedback loop so that the evolution of the artwork/experience is governed by the intimate involvement of the spectator. As the process is open-ended, the spectator now engages in decision-making play. I have attempted  to entice the viewer out of their passive roles and bridge the comfortable aesthetic distance that allows uninvolved viewers to judge an artwork impartially from a secure, external perspective. In doing so, the viewer is involved in the artistic practice from the outset, each piece of criticism he utters is self-criticism.

Through experimenting with the roamer, I found that when it repeats an instruction, it tends to be slightly off it's original starting point. This lead me to programme the machine to draw and repeat basic shapes (squares, hexagons, nonagons). In doing this, the robot created staggering yet beautiful shapes that appear to have been drawn by a machine similar to that used by Desmond Paul Henry.

Although I felt that my work had strong ideas surrounding it, I feel as though I could have spent more time experimenting with the roamer to create more exciting pieces. Despite this, however, it is important to note that the focus of this term's work has been with the audience's role as the artist, as opposed to my role as the artist. As Jean-Luc Godard remarked "It takes two to make an image." This is essentially the crux of my work. The work can be considered art because it involves the audience's participation - an idea asserted by Nicolas Bourriaud in his book 'Relational Aesthetics'. As Bourriaud himself states, "it's art that makes art, not artists." He understood that the spectator's participation was a constant feature of artistic practice, and used Fluxus as a key example. My work for term 3 centres around the idea of participation and the viewer's involvement and dialogue with the work. It is art because "Art is a state of encounter." (Bourriaud)

"At Stanley Hayter's New York atelier, there was something called a compound pendulum, a paint can suspend from two strings, which when let go made patterns on whatever material was beneath it. Like Hayter, Marcel Duchamp made use of a can of paint on a string, while Max Ernst had punched holes in a bucket of paint and swung it over a canvas laid flat on the floor. (Ernst always claimed that Pollock had stolen the idea from him)." (Evelyn Toynton, Jackson Pollock, 2012).

As the new term began, I was set the task of creating my own topic, one that was broad enough to last 10 weeks, but was also succinct enough to lead me in a certain direction in one or two medias. In the first lecture back, I was introduced to the work of Jackson Pollock, the early twentieth century drip painter. Whilst I was vaguely aware of Pollock's work, I barely knew of its significance. Along with Pollock's work, Alan Kaprow's interpretation of Pollock's work was also briefly introduced. In his 1958 essay 'The Legacy of Jackson Pollock', Kaprow expressed that Pollock's paintings "ceased to become paintings and became environments," that they "continued out into the room" and had "moved so far out that the canvas [was] no longer a reference point." Kaprow felt, however, that Pollock never left the four corners of the canvas, he remained within the rectangular barriers. This whole premise of going past the four corners of the canvas stuck in my head following the lecture, and consequently became the whole premise behind my topic. I wanted my work to penetrate the literal barrier between the canvas and the floor/wall, to visually go beyond this in some way, although I did not want this to express a clichéd 'deeper meaning'. As Greenberg expressed, the drip paintings were not illusionary, they were simply marks on canvas, woven patterns of paint. In that sense they were depthless. Through extensive research and further reading, I discovered a technique of drip painting that seemed too enticing to ignore.

Whilst Pollock's technique involved using found objects to create a (chaotic yet somewhat ordered) mess of lines and splashes, a method involving a pendulum of paint suspended above a piece of paper appeared as though it would transcend the rectangular canvas barrier as I wanted, so I set about creating this machine. Initially, I attempted to use a 5 litre bucket with a hole drilled into the base as my pendulum. I faced problems with this idea however. The bucket had a small bump on the base which meant the paint would not flow through consistently. To try and fix this, I attempted to expand the hole in the base, but accidentally cracked it, rendering it useless. This early failure not only showed me that I  was going to have a problem in trying to get the paint to flow consistently, but also that I was going to need a lot of paint. 

After a visit to B&Q, I fashioned a pendulum from a 750ml Evian water bottle. I selected this specific brand, not for any personal reason, but because the lid of the bottle formed together into a small hole. This small hole would allow me to constantly drip paint. Having solved this problem, I then looked to solve the consistency issue. At B&Q, I chose Red and white Matte House paint. Red was a central colour to a number of Pollock's paintings and, for me, it was the strongest colour visually to use. In the majority of my paintings, the red colour makes the image more striking and beautiful at the same time. My decision in choosing Matte paint as opposed to Gloss paint meant the paint was relatively thick. This meant it did not flow and dripped instead. Whilst this may have been desirable in creating a 'drip painting', I wanted a paint that was constantly flowing. To achieve this, I added a small amount of water to the paint and mixed it together. When the paint fell from the paint brush constantly, I tipped it into the water bottle, held it to the right or left, undid the cap and let the painting fall. As the pendulum swung right to left (or vice versa), it would leave lines that, in my opinion, often resembled diagrams showing the orbit of planets. Like Pollock's paintings, the paintings that I created showed a sort of ordered chaos. Similarly like Pollock, I would also make decisions on how I wanted the painting to look based on the last move of the pendulum. I would only interfere with the pendulum when I felt necessary, although it was usually when the bottle was beginning to return to it's neutral state, or if there was an area of the page I felt was too blank. 

Initially, I had problems getting the mixture between paint and water correct, so in some paintings the paint was extremely thick and did not fall our constantly. In others, the paint was runny and left splash marks and/or distorted & crumpled the page when it dried. Eventually, I was able to get the mixture between paint and water correct and created some stunning pieces. These can be seen below:

Whilst my work had centred on this premise of going beyond the four corners of the canvas, it was also focussed on energy. As Pollock himself said "the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the renaissance or of any other past culture." In a culture focussed on the speed and power of technology, but also on the fear of terrorism, it is impossible to represent the modern day in the old forms of the renaissance. For me, this style of painting that I had embarked on represented a kind of energy. The paint flows, as if forever, never ending, always continuing. I wanted to harness this idea and incorporate it into my central premise. I knew that I wanted to move from painting to sculpture/installation, but was not sure how to make this leap. In a way, the pendulum I had crafted was already an installation in itself. Following some talks with tutors, I came across a machine called a 'three pendulum harmonograph'. A harmonograph acts just like a spirograph but, instead, uses three arms to create these impossible shapes. These shapes resembled the paintings that I had created and so I wanted to experiment with this machine. In order to do this, I had to build one. 

Building the harmonograph was not easy. In many instances, I had to cut corners, breaking away from the official instructions and guidelines to suit my budget. In my opinion, it was this decision to cut corners that led to the machine's failure. The harmonograph was made up of a table with three holes cut through. In these holes sits three arms, two lateral and one rotary. The rotary arm span using a gimbal - a metal washer. The others had screws perturbing from them which rested on two metal pieces. To save time, I used wood blocks instead of metal pieces and I feel this was part of my downfall. I also used dowels that were slightly smaller than instructed. This meant they weren't as strong and could not fully support the load of the weights. When the machine was finally build, I found that the table, made using MDF board, was not sturdy enough and wobbled way too much. This ultimately stifled the entire machine, meaning it would not work. What's more, the pen sat too strongly on the paper and, instead of gliding on the surface, dug into it and only moved with jolts. This piece was ultimately a failure, but it taught me to pay close attention to instructions. Below are photos from the build:

Like Pollock, the size and scale of my work began to increase. I found that the pieces that were larger were much more powerful than the smaller paintings. They portrayed the energy and movement that I desired. These larger pieces also left some interesting marks on the plastic sheet I had placed under the paper, which can be seen in the photo below.

Moving from the painting, I began to consider sculpture and installations. I initially looked at the work of Conrad Shawcross, Adrian Pritchard and Sarah Sze. I was fascinated both with the energy of Shawcross's work, but also with the scale of Sze's work. I decided that, like Sze, I would begin to move my paintings out into the room by creating installations. I considered using clay but upon purchasing it, found it difficult to mould into the styles I wanted. I decided, instead, to create chicken wire net that hung from the ceiling. From this, fishing wire would hang down, holding a canvas, surrounded by red string. This installation would represent the paint that fell both on the paper and on the plastic sheet, and was influenced by Sze. In my head, this string would curve round in front of the canvas perfectly, falling to the floor and making a perfect circular shape. In reality, I had a lot of problems with getting the string to stay in the positions in the air that I desired and, consequently, had to abandon the whole idea. I attempted to fix this by placing a wood board on the floor and connecting the string to it. This, however, did not work as well as I had hoped. In response, I decided to create an installation where string was secured tightly to the floor, and then red string wrapped round the pattern to represent the paint. This did work to some extent, although not as well as I had hoped. I learned from both these failures that often the ideas I have can be more difficult to create. I still feel, however, that it would be possible to make both of these machines. Below are pictures of these installations.

Next term, I'm hoping to start making drawing machines using motors ands other forms of technology. Following a talk with one of the tutors, I have had the idea to use a GPS tracker to create paintings on maps similar to that of the drip paintings shown above. At the moment in time, I'm still considering some other ideas, although I am fixed on moving this drip painting to a digital form, whether that be as a machine or as a a computer image.

Having never done sculpture before, I was raring to start this project. Prior to the practical, we were told to go out and find items of any material and bring them to the studio. Whilst in Lancaster city centre, I bought a full desk unit for £1 in a charity shop, as well as a shelf for £3. Later on, I found a large wooden crate and brought that back. This crate, whilst extremely difficult to pull apart, was later crafted into a follow up sculpture.

Our brief for this project outlined that we design and create a 'totem' sculpture which bases its form on the human body. The sculpture was not intended to be a model of the body, but a sculptural form creatively inspired by it. The sculpture had to comprise of three different materials fixed using three different methods. Using the materials I had found, I began to devise a plan. The Z-shaped legs that came with the desk provided a very strong base to the sculpture and I decided to work my way up from there. The legs were positioned in different directions. This was partly inspired by the shape that was created when viewed sideways on - the shape reminded me of Escher's tessellations.

I considered welding these two bits of metal together, but found that the department did not have the equipment needed, so went on to create a backup plan. This plan involved placing two pieces of wood inside the ends of the top bar and fixing it in place using screws. A piece of wood would then sit on top and be screwed in through the metal and into the wood underneath. I added another piece of wood across the two pieces of metal to ensure that the base was strong. This was spray painted silver. The photo below shows how this looked once completed.

I next planned to have the large wood shelf unit as a large spine standing down the middle of the sculpture. I attached this by screwing another block of wood to the front of the top metal bar and using a long screw to hold the long shelf in place. The photo below shows this.

The toughest part of this sculpture was the metal part on the top. I planned to have a pane of glass sit in a metal holder on top of the wood. This piece of glass was extremely heavy, so the spine and the metal casing had to be strong enough to hold its weight. In order to ensure that the glass would not fall off and break, I secured to metal poles onto the front rectangle metal holder using L-shaped brackets and bolts. The brackets were bent to direct the poles. These were then attached using more L-shaped brackets to a block of wood which, in turn, was screwed to a shelf holding. This shelf holding was screwed into a metal piece that was attached to the wood spine. This would provide extra support to the rectangle metal holder. Photos below shows how this was done. The piece of metal that held the rectangle metal holder above the wood shelf could not be attached using screws as the top rectangle metal was hollow. Instead, this was connected using wire and proved extremely difficult to attach.

When everything was attached, I found that the wood had began to bend forward slightly, meaning the glass was at risk of falling out. To counteract this problem, I cut a piece of wood to tilt the whole sculpture back. This essentially counter-balanced the sculptures forward gravitational pull and made it stand upright. This ensured that the glass would remain in place.

The original plan saw a bear placed on top. This was scraped, however, as it made the sculpture look silly. The three materials used for this sculpture were wood, metal and glass. The four methods of connection were (mainly) screws, nails and bolts, but also wire. The piece took inspiration primarily from sculptors David Smith, who made sculptures of subjects that had never been shown in 3 dimensions and Edwardo Paolizzi. I enjoyed creating this sculpture so much that, following the sessions, I created a second sculpture completely out of wood. This sculpture, shown below, takes inspiration from contemporary Antony Gormley's series 'Construct' (Click the word to see this work). The wood for this piece was taken from a moldy crate that had to be taken apart, sanded, cleaned and put together using screws and L-Shaped brackets. If I were to do this piece again, I would use clean wood as it would have saved me the time of having to take the wood apart and clean it, as well as ensuring there would be no splintering or splits.

Below are photos from my sketchbook which show my thought process and ideas.