Saturday August 28 surroundings of Reykjavik:
Saturday a little more than a week ago we (the staff at the department of Fine Arts) rented a car and went sight-seeing around Reykjavik experiencing hot springs dead vulcanos The Great Geysir fantastic panoramic landscaps and ended up at a lobster restaurant. On the way back to Reykjavik in the evening me and Karen Kipphoff had a long conversation in the front of the car. She was asking all kinds of difficult questions about past works of mine that forced me to think again about a lot of issues that I’ve once been concerned about and solved to the degree that they are now getting less of my intention than they once did. During the conversation I re-realized how many aspects and layers are present in a work how many different problems and issues the art work is dealing with in various ways. During the presentation the day before I’d been concentrating on certain issues only. That easily can lead to the misunderstanding that those issues were the only ones I was concerned with during the creation of that specific work.
In Trondheim I started wondering if it is possible to structure thoughts on and aspects of an artistic work in a similar way to how data programming is approaching problem-solving: by breaking large problems into smaller ones smaller problems into even smaller and so on until it all becomes a number of fairly simple tasks that can be readily solved. I’m not at all sure that it might be of any use but I’ll keep the thought at the back of my mind for a while.
Here’s a brief attempt at creating such a structure for some parts of the installation in Trondheim
Installation video paintings sound harmonic/rhythmic structures gestures and physical presence painterly gestures. Painting as performance or action in time rhythms and time structures in the video material interaction groups of sound room white room 4 horisontal stripe of sounds vertical stripes of loudspeakers interactive – near the door remote hiss near the opening to the next room dark room group of 7 loudspeakers and a sub the wooden laptop downstairs security issues sound in space awareness of the space immersive loudspeakers as physical/sculptural objects unity and diversity { this one would have to call e.g. sounds.harmonic/rythmic structures() } relationship between sounds video and painting relationships between paintings and video relationships between paintings and sound relationships between video and sounds relationships between all three the breakdown of separate components the merge into a common mixed media collaboration as artistic method dialogue respect curiosity openness
Karen obviously has got to be a very good supervisor. During the tripp she invited me to collaborate on a project to happen next year. It looks interesting and different from the projects I’m already involved in and I’m looking forward to it.