So this week has been fascinating, all very relevant to my own FMP even if I didnt realise it initially.
Ive already written a short piece about how I approached the ‘hands off’ activity, essentially using a Google news search using the words, Trump, Border, Wall, Brexit to generate web pages and then screen capture them to create stand alone pieces.
The images created are interesting, theyre not entirely machine generated as the web pages are designed and populated by humans but I only know they exist because Google alogrithm decided to show me what it thought I wanted to see and then I used the screen capture facility in Mac OS to create a still image of the portions I wanted to see.
What I didnt expect was how the stories I machine gathered would make me feel and just how monumentally relevant the images and stories are to my FMP. The irony that the machine has delivered pure emotion and also interpreted the search terms into actual hard news and more esoteric stories is very interesting.
The suggestion was made that I incorporate the stories alongside the main images by Effie which is brilliant and Laura suggested I look at layering the frames, very much as one might when having multiple windows open on a desktop.
This is a breakthrough moment for my project. It doesnt alter the core methodology but it gives the project greater depth, it has shifted its target a little though as essentially poking fun and ridiculing those obsessed with the imaginary lines that denote ‘their’ land to a more human level where we see the results of the these borders and walls, what the walls can in time become, how their usefulness becomes diminished and in the case of he Great Wall Of China how the barrier itsef now needs protection from the people it was originally intended to protect, then contain albeit a political wall once known as the Bamboo Curtain.
Moving forwards i’m not 100% how the new image elements will be shown, as a physical item or electronically maybe. In book form I have to consider how I might intersperse these mages amongst the main body of work. They may work well as loose form images slipped into the book in the same way as Lewis Bush has done with his Metropole where he’s appropriate imagery from property development marketing material.
So all in all a great week, heaps of interesting things to explore further, was particularly interested in the work of Jenny Odell and her Travel By Approximation virtual road trip, Crossing borders without even going there. Maybe another route forward or to explore.
References
New York Times, Julia Le Duc/Associated Press
http://www.jennyodell.com/tba.html
Lewis Bush, Metropole 2018 Overlapse