Lines, Linz

Here’s the work installed. The video work is made for projecting at 1:1 scale rather than showing on a monitor. This installation video shows the gap between the projector and the image – the gap that seems to carry the flight of the pens to the page; it also shows the quality of the wall and the distance to the floor, which makes sense of the sound made by the pens as they hit the wall and then, after a pause, hit the floor.

The effect is different again when you’re in the room itself: the eye, the projector, the image and the origin of each biro’s trajectory keep lining up differently as you move around the space.

This is the model I constructed on Sketchup from the video to be included in the exhibition. It arrived in the post from the 3D modellers last week. The form is taken from fourteen lines drawn between the fifteen marks of ink made by the tip of the biro as it hit the page. The original video is here:

www.a-n.co.uk/p/4089796

… here’s the model appearing in Sketchup:

www.a-n.co.uk/p/4109062

These aren’t the works, they’re plinths and things. This is day 2 of the install, which was December 17th.

You can see I’m running behind – it’s the 21st now and it’s been a busy few days in the lead-up to the exhibition, which opened on the 18th. It was a lovely evening: Martina, Petra and I were each there with our varying levels of German proficiency, but our works were all doing the talking on our behalf, and talking sideways amongst themselves too.

Since the exhibition opened I’ve had a couple of days let loose from the studio and exploring Austria, with a day in Salzburg and a day in Vienna. I was surprised to find myself writing lengthy notes about the use of perspective in paintings on the ceiling of the Salzburg cathedral, and how the neck-craning perspective of the viewer had been anticipated and accommodated at times successfully; at times less so. Thinking back to the video projection work I’d just installed in Linz, it struck me I could do with spending some time with paintings like these, learning more about how the spectator’s perspective has been accommodated in the surface of the painting historically. When I get back from Austria I’m going to dig out some writing by Michael Fried and have another look.

I made this video yesterday. The gloves I found in a junk shop on Bischofstraße a week or so ago, very very thin and angular and never worn. I can’t get them on my hands. I think it was the imaginary sign language on the news this week that made me rattle them in front of the camera to see what came out. In the end it looked rather sad. Very slowed down they are like a bird in flight, or some pair of things dancing. The music is Nun ist alles überwunden, an anonymous aria here performed by Cantus Cölln, Concerto Palatino and conducted by Konrad Junghänel.

Meanwhile for the exhibition: my model is in production today and will be delivered early next week. I have to wait for it to arrive before completing the final edit of the video. In the meantime we’re beginning the install tomorrow morning.

Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d go down to the studio and watch the sunrise over the Danube. Instead I ended up downloading Sketchup, sort of learning how to use it, making a 3D model of some lines and sending it off for 3D printing in time for the website’s 11am postage deadline. That was productive.

I’d been wondering about 3D printing for a couple of days, as a means of addressing the flatness of the image I’m projecting on the wall — specifically the video with pens being flung at the wall, which I posted on December 4th or 5th. The model I’ve made is a 3D rendering of the flat linear structure you see in this video, which was itself rendered on the computer by joining the all dots the pen leaves behind on the paper. I want to see what it’s like to see the real, plastic 3D model beside the projected video.

I had to get the model done and sent off today so I can receive it in time to spray it black (various technicalities mean it has to be printed white) and test it before the exhibition opens on the 18th. I’m prepared for it to look fairly tacky when it arrives, and it might finally be unuseable — 3D printing is still a new technology so it’s a bit unpredictable as far as I can see — but it’s a useful experiment either way. And anyway, what a brilliant thing to be able to invent a completely imaginary structure on a computer and then be able to hold it in your hands.

(Here are some snippets of the modelling I did this morning.)