Material Dialogues (Maurice - Phantom Demographic)
I intend to use this discussion page to host the development of one work from the 'Phantom Demographic Series'. Feel free to drop in suggestions, questions, anything that comes to mind!
Ps. I'm setting this page as 'public' for now to see how it goes.
To briefly explain further: At the moment I’m focusing on producing small-scale print works in sets of 11 pieces per work (1 each in sizes A0 to A10). Unlike previous works which consisted of 100+ pieces, I’m working with reduced numbers in order to explore working with smaller groups of people to develop a range of structures for shared ownership. The working title is ‘Phantom Demographic Series’ – which is an idea around imagining the audience/public/community that you’re making something for (which brings with it lots of questions/challenges).
To make these works, I’m using analogue print techniques to compress layer upon layer of ‘contentless’ information in the form of ink layers onto the pieces of paper which have been arranged into overlapping, taped together compositions. Each ink layer is documented as a unique record using ‘Filemaker Pro’ business database software. I’m going to try out using Loomio to post every record of an print work as it’s made.
Amy McDonnell Mon 15 Dec 2014 11:57AM
Amy McDonnell Mon 15 Dec 2014 11:57AM
Amy McDonnell Mon 15 Dec 2014 12:23PM
Hi Maurice - Unfortunately I can only see the last two of these images....
Maurice Carlin Thu 18 Dec 2014 1:28PM
Hi Amy, I think I've figured out that if you upload more than 3 images at any one time to Loomio, it seems to select one of the 3 and copy it 3 times, or it does the above thing where they just appear as a question mark box and you can't click on them. Its really not very good with the visual is it! So anyway, I will post no more than 2 at a time and see if thats any better.
Maurice Carlin Thu 18 Dec 2014 1:59PM
Hi Amy
To answer your questions above, filemaker itself doesn't produce the descriptions, they are a mixture of my own production notes and remarks, colour names identified in the image by an app which can analyse an image for colour and then give you a history of that colour and finally google's 'search by image' function which analyses images for composition, colour and meta info like tags and image titles. So the descriptions are a mixture of machine automation and my own subjective interpretation. Even though the colour app and google's 'search by image' are pretty unsophisticated technologies (as of yet), I find that they often produce quite strange, poetic and sometimes revealing outcomes. For me these descriptions are about adding layers of other potential meanings into these records, and also charting how the print (plus the interpretation of the print) changes as each layer of ink is applied.
Thanks for the Martha Rosler reference, this work was made in the 70's (?) and its interesting how we would read the text parts now as 'tags' or 'keywords', we would think of them as search tools, and I suppose in a way that is what she was asking of the viewer; to go back and forth between the image and the keywords and search for other meanings that aren't right there on the surface?
Maurice Carlin Thu 18 Dec 2014 2:20PM
Maurice Carlin Thu 18 Dec 2014 2:24PM
grrrr! loomio is messing up the images again! seems to replace every image you put up with the following one so that you end up with 3 of the same image, is anyone else having this problem??? I'm going to try just posting one image and leaving it for a while before putting up another, will also ask their tech support.
Maurice Carlin · Mon 15 Dec 2014 8:00AM