Alight Here
Raw & Co Gallery, Cleveland Ohio, U.S.
The following text and images are a transcription of the presentation, made by Jennifer Wright to the conference Touch, Textiles and Technology, held at Goldsmiths College in London during September 2007:
To conclude this presentation I would briefly like to focus on the development of one specific body of work generated within my own practice, as a way of reflecting upon some of the speculative possibilities and implications of interacting with information through the technologies of the virtual . This is a work, that does not literally incorporate new technologies into its material manifestation, but can be interpreted to engage its audience through utilising qualities that work both by analogy, through reference to the ‘everyday’ experience of these interactions, particularly those experienced within the domestic interior and by ‘affect’, achieved through deliberate, autonomous transformations of materials through process, which emphasise the phenomenal qualities of colour, light and haptic perception of some very different materials.
The work itself formed an installation called Alight Here, and was exhibited in the Raw & Co Gallery, Cleveland Ohio last year.
In the broadest terms, my fine art practice is developing around
research concerned with the relationships between new technology,
aesthetics and the domestic space. Of particular interest has been the
question of whether the structure of the domestic day and the
activities associated with it have impacted upon the works which women
artists have made and continue to make within the formalist tradition.
My methodology has been to focus on the interpretation of aesthetic objects and the meanings they generate within a Fine art context through, research and making processes which utilise both traditional and contemporary techniques and materials associated with textiles, including digital print on cotton, various vinyl supports, animal skins and canvas as well as embroidery and beading.
Over the last few years, I have been increasingly focussed on discourses surrounding relationships between women and technology, particularly those engaged with the virtual. I have been interested in the dialectical relationship between an aesthetic engagement with the new technologies, particularly the screen, and the effect of these technologies on visual and cognitive perception, including the possibility of neuroplasticity, the condition of physical changes in the neural connections within the brain being encouraged through repetitious patterns of action and movement . This has led me to engage with the computer screen or ‘vitrine’ as a specific site.
My question is, is it possible that the velocities and formal structures of any information entering the domestic space, often experienced through the mediating formats of search engines, web sites and archives as well as interactive gaming consoles, affect the temporal and haptic perception of other aspects of that space. The historically more hermetic and perhaps controllable environment of the home is increasingly more permeable through often multiple, virtual ‘portals’.
At this point I would like to talk a little about the process of making
this work which was completely site specific. The viewer was invited
into an interior within which information from the outside, urban world
had been filtered and transformed through the code of the embroidery
chart. Having first selected and approached the gallery on the basis
that its interior dimensions and architectural structure were very
similar to those of my own living and working space, a single
photograph was taken of the world outside the gallery, through the
multi paned window. This was sent to me via the internet and then
developed entirely within my own domestic space, forming the basis for
a process of encryption and retranslation, initially experienced as a
colourful, coded matrix from both inside and out through the
application of translucent digitally printed window graphics.
Its phenomenal affect on the interior surfaces, resonant of that associated with traditional stained glass, was immediately challenged by it’s obviously, membrane like application and topical plasticity. This information was in turn visibly and conceptually ‘woven’ together, as it alighted on the internal, reflective floor and wall surfaces of the space and was remade, its materiality becoming its own support in ROCOCCO, a carpet made out of thousands of plastic HAMA beads and DMCASTRALRAW, a multi-panelled work, made in a combination of digital photographic print and DMC thread, cotton embroidery.
The compositional structures of these panels consciously referenced the
formal visual elements of the soft ware programmes that were used to
manipulate and create them, entwined with elements of the ‘camera
obscura’ like illusion of the out side reality perceived, magically as
a virtual image on the interior surface.
The experience of the viewer was that of being enclosed within a hermetic, domestic sized box .The gallery as the metaphor for the ‘vitrine’ became a contemplative space, where imagery was encountered in the process of transformation and becoming. It was idealised in the colours of a heightened, Disney like ‘fall’ but manifest as a determinedly and perpetually, corrupted, luminous code.
Each one of these elements performs through technological translations of information, by creating a series of process based, interrelated moments, each privileging a different mode of registering materiality, haptic perception and temporality for the viewer. Moments of mimesis and interruption, shifting between matrix like code, pixel, stitch and bead.
The movement of both the eye and the body within the space are intended to be subtly directed and orientated by the physical constraints of possible viewing positions. These are imposed by both the obvious physical fragility of the bead carpet, which deters the viewer from walking upon it and yet occupies the very position that may be intuited as constituting the normative viewing distance for the wall based work and the scale of the embroidery code on the windows, which whilst one is on the inside of the gallery remains just too close to create a coherent representation of exterior world it literally maps behind it.
Out side the gallery, especially at night, the interior ambiguities of this process are hidden and the window becomes an illuminated, static screen saver of itself.
To conclude, this work is most effective at those moments when the virtual becomes actual, the points at which the viewer drawn in by the image, is suddenly acutely aware and often surprised at the specificity of its materiality. At those points the historical relationships to women’s work often associated with hierarchies of skill and craft in relation to making are thrown into relief against the ‘suped up’ screen like qualities. However, although challenging the latter’s, often mute physicality, they still share their dependency on being counted and the code.
My methodology has been to focus on the interpretation of aesthetic objects and the meanings they generate within a Fine art context through, research and making processes which utilise both traditional and contemporary techniques and materials associated with textiles, including digital print on cotton, various vinyl supports, animal skins and canvas as well as embroidery and beading.
Over the last few years, I have been increasingly focussed on discourses surrounding relationships between women and technology, particularly those engaged with the virtual. I have been interested in the dialectical relationship between an aesthetic engagement with the new technologies, particularly the screen, and the effect of these technologies on visual and cognitive perception, including the possibility of neuroplasticity, the condition of physical changes in the neural connections within the brain being encouraged through repetitious patterns of action and movement . This has led me to engage with the computer screen or ‘vitrine’ as a specific site.
My question is, is it possible that the velocities and formal structures of any information entering the domestic space, often experienced through the mediating formats of search engines, web sites and archives as well as interactive gaming consoles, affect the temporal and haptic perception of other aspects of that space. The historically more hermetic and perhaps controllable environment of the home is increasingly more permeable through often multiple, virtual ‘portals’.
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Its phenomenal affect on the interior surfaces, resonant of that associated with traditional stained glass, was immediately challenged by it’s obviously, membrane like application and topical plasticity. This information was in turn visibly and conceptually ‘woven’ together, as it alighted on the internal, reflective floor and wall surfaces of the space and was remade, its materiality becoming its own support in ROCOCCO, a carpet made out of thousands of plastic HAMA beads and DMCASTRALRAW, a multi-panelled work, made in a combination of digital photographic print and DMC thread, cotton embroidery.
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The experience of the viewer was that of being enclosed within a hermetic, domestic sized box .The gallery as the metaphor for the ‘vitrine’ became a contemplative space, where imagery was encountered in the process of transformation and becoming. It was idealised in the colours of a heightened, Disney like ‘fall’ but manifest as a determinedly and perpetually, corrupted, luminous code.
Each one of these elements performs through technological translations of information, by creating a series of process based, interrelated moments, each privileging a different mode of registering materiality, haptic perception and temporality for the viewer. Moments of mimesis and interruption, shifting between matrix like code, pixel, stitch and bead.
The movement of both the eye and the body within the space are intended to be subtly directed and orientated by the physical constraints of possible viewing positions. These are imposed by both the obvious physical fragility of the bead carpet, which deters the viewer from walking upon it and yet occupies the very position that may be intuited as constituting the normative viewing distance for the wall based work and the scale of the embroidery code on the windows, which whilst one is on the inside of the gallery remains just too close to create a coherent representation of exterior world it literally maps behind it.
Out side the gallery, especially at night, the interior ambiguities of this process are hidden and the window becomes an illuminated, static screen saver of itself.
To conclude, this work is most effective at those moments when the virtual becomes actual, the points at which the viewer drawn in by the image, is suddenly acutely aware and often surprised at the specificity of its materiality. At those points the historical relationships to women’s work often associated with hierarchies of skill and craft in relation to making are thrown into relief against the ‘suped up’ screen like qualities. However, although challenging the latter’s, often mute physicality, they still share their dependency on being counted and the code.
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