The Shift

OK, so here's how things stand: the initial impetus behind this blog so far has run it's course, so it's time now for a little change. Seeing as how I am loath to let this site slip into the blog graveyard that seems to make up a huge part of the World Wide Web, I'm introducing a bit of a shift. This blog is to become a sort-of online journal of experiences. Don't worry, I'm not going to start pouring my heart out online or anything. Rather, I'm going to use this space to try and comment critically on the world that I encounter daily. The conceptual drive of the site isn't changing, I'm simply broadening its horizons - shifting those boundaries, you might say. Considering all that I've dealt with so far, it actually makes sense that this site should make a shift into a different direction. After all, that's pretty much what I've been writing about this whole time. Perhaps you could look at this as a way of searching for new inspiration.

The Truth

For the sake of truth, I have decided to post a bird's eye picture of what my room REALLY looks like. Some of the time. For truth and because no-one I know would ever believe that that room in the video is my room. What's a little honesty between two billion strangers?

It's the little things...

I've included this as a bit of an afterthought.

When I started this, it was all about me. Now with the video done, the "me" in it has become just another metaphor in the proverbial greater scheme. This is inevitable, of course. The point of creating a work is to communicate a concept to others and too much arrogance gets in the way of that. What's nice though is when the concept that you're trying so hard to convey appears to you one day in its purest simplicity, as it did to me earlier today. When i was younger, and smoked a lot more, I picked up the habit of selecting a virgin cigarette out of the pack. This cigarette would be removed and then returned to the pack upside down before any other cig was smoked and would remain in there 'till the last. This has followed me throughout the years until, it appears, I am the only one left doing it. I caught sight of this lone cigarette today - stark and white amidst the cork filters of those around it - and I knew that I had been there.

The Work

My idea behind the video is to document the creases created by me nightly in and on the bed where I sleep.

A problem I encountered in the conceptual phase was how to remove myself from the work but not loose that sense of presence usually imbued by a visible subject. My answer came in the form of stop-motion. Stop-motion allowed me to create the feel of a false present subject while not distracting from the true subject – the traces on the bed and blankets; the whole room, really.

Not only do the rippling creases act as a symbolic way of attempting to reconcile the missing subject (who, through a beautiful act of allegory, becomes the viewer) with the lost experience, but they also, through our understanding, point to the events and experiences of the day. The creases of the bed become metaphors for the traces that are left on and by the body, and as they shift and change, constantly reshaping each other through their connection, they can be seen as an allegory for that constantly shifting and fluctuating semiotic framework that make up our selves.

Re-enter that invisible subject in the bed.

I love circles.

No Traces - A Peripheral

A little peripheral while I'm at it. I found this photography site - No Traces - while browsing around for inspiration. The name I find quite ironic because - amidst zillions of adorable photos of his wife, child, dog and clouds - he's happened to catch some very compelling images, many of which seem to speak volumes about traces, experience and memory. I thought it would be worth a look.

The Inspiration

So inevitably, this change that came over me worked its way into my work.

My medium of self expression changed from sculpture to illustration and photography (you can check out some of this on my other blog, Poorboy Illustration, at poorboyillustratin.blogspot.com, or follow my link on the left).

This change was obviously greatly influenced by my change of studies to Arts Direction and Graphic Design, but the core of the shift lies slightly deeper. This graphic medium just seemed more suited to Cape Town; more in tune with the ebb and flow of popular culture that wasn’t nearly as prevalent in Grahamstown.

Also, clay costs too much.

My predominant theme in my earlier works dealt with relationships between people and the unspoken narratives that both connects and isolates us. After my move, this shifted towards a more predominant focus on our relationships with our environments. This is what eventually led me to what you are looking at now.

I tried to think of a way that I could trace my life over the last year and a bit. The simple, most obvious suggestion occurred to me in the form the photograph, but was rejected for the same reason – too simple; too obvious. Also, it suffers from the same, immediate process of dissemination that I was discussing earlier. When you look at a photograph, you aren’t really seeing what happened. You’re seeing a bubble of time, yanked out of context, always just out of your grasp and constantly slipping further and further away. Simply by looking at a photograph, you’re forced to admit that those few moments of exposure are forever lost to you and the closer you examine it, the further away it is ironically pushed.

So any sort of direct representation was out of the question.

Then I got to thinking about all that I’ve written so far and about those creases that I’ve worn into the world around me; those traces that point to my past experiences, even when I’ll never be able to truly experience them myself. Surely they’d make for a far more provoking subject matter. But where to begin? What single scenario could be used to successfully represent the last year (and a bit) of my life?

When it came to me, the answer seemed quite simple: that single act that I had been repeating almost every night since I had arrived in Cape Town – sleeping in my bed.

The Experiment

The blog is going somewhere, i promise. This is just an experiment to see if it'll be able to get to where it's headed. I've always been a fan of stop motion. I feel that it, as a video medium, has a powerful sense of tangibility and, because of this, lends itself well to conveying certain ideas or concepts - certainly with far greater effect than CGI could ever hope to achieve. This mini-vid is my first real attempt at stop motion and is a test run for a larger project I am currently working on. It was done on the fly, so i apologize for the shoddieness, but it's a means to an end.

The Move

Just over a year ago, I left the Eastern Cape to live in Cape Town.

Now, I don’t pretend that this is a drastic or unexpected move. People leave the Eastern Cape all the time. It’s one of those things. Some hypothesize that the prospect of leaving the Eastern Cape is the only reason that anyone moves there to begin with, but I digress.

The real crux of the move was that it was the first time in twenty-three years that I had lived anywhere besides the good ol’ E.C. - either growing up with the folks in Port Elizabeth or bumming around in the student/settler town of Grahamstown; a gorgeously buzzing little town of equal parts academic intellectualism and hedonistic nihilism.

The move brought with it the inevitable changes. The small town awe was eventually swallowed up by the everyday humdrum of sitting in traffic (something Western Capers and Josie Goers would tell us stories about like scout masters telling urban legends around a campfire) overpriced drinks and rolling blackouts. The esoteric life of Fine Arts and red wine exhibition openings was replaced by the fast paced world of advertising; all early mornings, late nights and cut-throat deadlines.

And inevitably I changed.

Not in any drastic, personal way, in so far as I can tell, but the basic make up of my day was altered significantly. Something as previously foreign as waking up at seven each morning to beat traffic became routine and in that subtle but significant way I became changed. The way I viewed the day shifted – mornings were now for work and late afternoons were for driving, sweating, swearing, hooting and screaming obscenities at the BMW yuppie and his store-bought license.

For neither better nor worse, Cape Town has marked me. I walk its streets, I drive on its roads, I greet its people and I breathe its air. I wear its traces on my clothes and on my skin and in my head and the crease that I’ve worn into its fabric grows more pronounced each day.

These Creases cont.

Haruo Shirane writes in his book Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural memory and the Poetry of Basho that, in the Edo culture; "the ability to create the new out of the old was generally a more highly regarded form of newness than the ability to be unique or individual". Of course, most of today’s scholars of the postmodern ilk would argue that being unique is impossible from the get go - that any text is only ever conceived, created, interpreted and understood via the previous experiences of both the author and the viewer and that the intentions of the author as to the meaning of the text are tenuous at best (the poor fellow is only just recovering after a vicious thesis bludgeoning by a certain Mr. Roland Barthés).

The point that i’m trying to make is that it is not the new or the unique that matters, but rather what remains. Experiencing the present is impossible for us. We live our lives through our memories and it is with our memories that we construct an identity for ourselves - minute fragments of experience that weave together throughout our lives, constantly building and reshaping that abstract concept we call the self.

Our present is constantly belated - in the minute amount of time that it takes for our eyes to collect the light from the outside world, send it to our brains for interpretation and the eventual image that appears in our mind to form, that instant has already come and passed and we are presented with a glimpse of a world that is already lost to us.

We live in our memories and it is our memories that make us who we are.

How then do we document this lost world? How do we begin to successfully map something that seems as simple to us as our own lives when, under scrutiny, we realise that so much of it is already lost to us; that even our most present experience has already fallen victim to the passage of time? The truth is that we can't. And yet, perhaps there are other ways of considering it.

Just as the experience of the world leaves its traces upon us, so do we leave echoes of our passage on the world around us. Like the crease on the blanket, these traces point to our space in the world. Like the negative space of a letter form, they give us our shape.

Through the experience of memory, these traces represent that part of ourselves that is always present, and though an examination of them we can maybe begin to understand, if not experience, that part of ourselves that is always lost to us.

These Creases

We touch the world and the world touches us. With every instant that goes by, we leave echoes of ourselves on the world around us and the world in turn leaves its marks upon us. Our lives are a myriad of infinite, constantly shifting experiences ranging from the very tangible hello-goodbye handshake to the constant reorganization of the semiotic framework that forms the foundation of who we are, and with every experience, traces of its passing become embedded in the fabric of our world.

The thing about traces is that they are everywhere and everything. The creases in the blanket may point to the person that lay there, but the blanket itself is an index of the cotton plants from which its material was gathered and of the processes by which the cotton was refined, spun and woven, bleached and dyed, packaged and sold so that it may one day end up on the bed to be slept upon. The blanket becomes a text to be read; to be deciphered and interpreted. It has imbedded upon it the traces of all that has come before it, both physically and symbolically, and through our most often unconscious consideration of this blanket we in turn imbue it with new possibilities, just as it does us. Having considered this blanket, even unconsciously, we now carry its trace with us, to shift and subtly alter all our perceptions to come.

As for the person who once slept there; he’ll come soon.

Because nothing exists in isolation.