portfolio sheets - becoming project

BECOMING CHRISTIAN MARCLAYby POVILAS UOGINTAS

GROUP RESEARCH

Christian Marclay

Within the group we researched the diff erent aspect of Christian Marclay artworks. And we were trying to get as much knowledge about him as possible.

We begun our research with one of his artworks ‘The Clock’ which is quite similar to his earlier work Telephone in which he mixed, combined various video excerpts to create a diff erent composition of visuals. In this case it was a 24 hour clock combined of the excerpts from diff erent movies.

The audience can come to see it whenever they like as it is created in such a way that it is showing the current time.

Then of course we looked at his unique type of music in which he uses turntables as an instrument to create unique sound. Additionally he creates music using broken vinyls to produce interesting / uncommon sounds.

This unique way of producing sounds out of broken vinyls have become the trademark of Christian Marclay and thus a lot of his work is related with Vinyls and breaking sounds. In one of his live performances he, with participants, were breaking vinyls and thus making some kind of harmony from those sounds.

During our research we developed a short description of what his work is based about. The following text is the excerpts from one of our written group posts.

Briefl y Marlcay’s work is about process, how records can be manipulated, how the pace can be changed, what shape they are in. All these and more elements are of signifi cant importance when trying to create the challenging music which he wanted to make. He wanted the medium to be constantly present. ‘ Record without a Cover’

The hurdle he faced was fi nding collaborators in his early stages which proved to be hard. They wanted to make hit records. He just wanted to make challenging music and have fun. He was interested in things that had no commercial value at the time.

He wanted to work with the unexpected usage of these elements. The sounds that were already there not just the sounds in the records more unheard sounds of the object themselves. He wanted to challenge the concept of music through creating sounds that are infact music. This music is not restricted or bound by a genre and principal method of creating a tune. His interests were in audiovisual rhythmic tracks.

* examples of his own made vinyls out of diff erent parts of other albums.

* example of one of his installations* example of Christian Marclay performing live


OUTCOME OF THE GROUP

Who is Christian Marclay? // My part of the presentation“He is an artist. He is a musician. He is a remix’er (multiple times). He likes mash-up (also multiple times). Christian Marclay is a ‘music (multiple times) revolutionary of sorts’. He is known to be the fi rst musician to spin vinyl: to use a record on a turntable as a musical instrument. He embraces all sound to be music and has done to sound what Genetically Modifi ed did to food. ”

During group sessions and tutorials we were always thinking how to present Christian Marclay in a unique way. First suggestion was to make a mash up presentation - that means that we will be presenting Christian Marclay almost at once. That means it might be that several of us would be speaking at once. However this idea was quickly refused due to how complicated it was.

The next ideas was quite similar - each of us needed to create a mash-up video or audio and show it in our presentation.

For that we have written a scrip for it regarding Christian Marclay work and creativity. The script contained most of our ideas and thoughts about Christian Marclay as well as all of your research.

During the process of making this presentation we often met and discussed our process however there were still some group members who were not contributing towards the project. Therefore, when I was selecting the parts of the presentation to the students I made sure that some group members will get less important parts thus even without then our presentation could go well.

But in all the presentation was successful and after it I started to develop the ideas for the fi nal outcome / artefact. At the time I knew that I liked Christian Marclay’s idea of mixing, remixing but I did not liked the fact that all his works are not interactive.

Group Presentation Plan

* screenshots of my part of presentation. it can be accessed through http://vimeo.com/20928134


ARTEFACT // POSTER EXPERIMENTS

After the group presentation and research of Christian Marclay I have started to think what I am going to do next. Whether to continue with the same style of process as we did during the presentation, during my past three semesters or to do something diff erent – get out of my comfort zone, as Tony would say. Thus, I have decided that I will continue to create this artefact in a Graphic Design solution. At that point I did not know what actually I will do but I knew few things already. First, I will use the idea of remix / mash-up from Christian Marclay’s work. And second, that I felt that his work is not interactive enough with the audience, that his work reaches the audience through performance, through his recorded work in video or audio however from there his work stops. By saying stop I mean that the audience have just the only option – to watch / listen to his work and that is it. They cannot alter it or look it diff erently, the only thing that they could do is to imagine / interpret the meaning by themselves. Therefore I thought that I will make my artefact somehow interactive, that the audience should use some diff erent way rather than just watching / listening to get the idea, the message. After rethinking it again I realised that remix the text information might be quite interesting idea. In the following post I will show my development of the poster, research and the fi nal artefact.

Re-Thinking Christian Marclay

Experimenting with PostersThus the poster that Marry and Eva asked us to do, I thought should refl ect my two goals: show remix aspect and make it interactive. After few thoughts I come up / developed the idea of using a crossword (fi nd a word type) for several reasons. Firstly every person through searching for a particular words will end-up creating several words of his own – thus making it interactive as it engages the audience. Secondly in order to fi gure out the bigger picture behind the audience needs to solve the puzzle / fi nd the words. And fi nally it refl ects remix idea as on the whole it is remixed letters put together. Bellow are few examples of fi nd a word crosswords puzzles that you will know what I mean.

After that I started to experiment with possible design for the poster. However the actual making of it – writing the letters – took a huge amount of time thus the visual design process was not well thought at the time

At fi rst I was thinking to use the letters as pixels and make some kind of image out of letters – in this case the name Christian Marclay. However because the letters were too big and too far apart from each other they could not make a nice view thus I discarded this idea as a possibility for the main artefact. After that I just played with colours, shapes, etc… but because I did not had enough time for the poster I did a simpler a more straight forward version of this poster.


PERSONAL RESEARCH

Eva’s and Marry’s feedback allowed me to step back and look at my ideas from a ‘third person’ view. At the crit I still have not been at the stage that I could clearly state my ideas and present them very logically, thus I presented with a bunch of many ideas. Thus the thing that tutors said was to focus on one or few ideas. The next thing that they talked about was the colour range and the whole confusion with the poster. There are many problems with it but mainly that it does not serve the purpose of the poster, it may work in some diff erent form but as a poster it did not.

After this session I thought a lot about it but still I wanted to keep using the same two goals that I have given to myself. So after thinking and brainstorming I thought that I will make a whole puzzle book for the this project as an artefact. This book will solve the problems that the poster medium was making as the person which will have this book will spend more time on studying it thus solving it rather than looking at the poster.

The following posts will be related to the research of artists / poets that I looked at and the rethinking and making this artefact – book.

Feedback and some thoughts One of the artists that I looked for was Tom Phillips. The reason of why I looked at his work is because of the collages that he did using the medium the book that he found. Bellow is the excerpt from wikipedia, I know that wikipedia is a horrible source to use however it clearly and quickly shows and explains the major idea behind Tom Phillips creativity.

“A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Tom Phillips’s usurpation of an original text, rendered essentially inconsequential if not by history, then by his conversion of it into a palimpsest, is an example of the secondary discourse of de-literature. The book’s pages, each defaced, or re-faced, in a unique way, foster a new reading through a selection of words that does not conform to the text’s conventional order.” (excerpt from http://postmediumcritique.org/blog/2010/07/emergent-form-in-the-post-literary-mechanism-from-exposition-to-refl exivity/)

As you can see Tom Phillips collages are very beautiful piece of art. Through diff erent processes and using the text from books diff erent meaning are being produced. This is in a sense is what I would like to produce as this brief artefact. His way of drawing onto the book itself, using the book as a canvas but also as an medium is really interesting and worth exploring and doing it myself.

Visual Research


OUTCOME // MANIFESTO BOOK

Rethinking the artefactAfter Tom Phillips research and few other artists I was quite motivated to produce a similar result but I started to rethink my idea and the whole purpose of the book. As even the brief title is called “becoming…. Christian Marclay” thus my artefact should refl ect this idea this goal of becoming him. Thus I thought that the purpose of my artefact should be that it will help others to be more like him / use his way of working. However, this artefact should still follow two rules that I have created for myself – it should refl ect remix spirit, it should be interactive.

After much thought I have decided to create a book / manifesto which will guide the audience / the user to become Christian Marclay. Originally I thought that I could use similar style as Tom Phillips did however I soon realised that I am not at that level yet with analog / hand to hand working methods and that I do not have any practice with screen printing or anything like that. Thus I came back to my poster idea to use puzzle style for this artefact.

However, it will contain a lot of diff erent crosswords and each solution of each crossword will be one point of the manifesto, thus the user will be needing to solve it in order to use it – hence it will make the book interactive book. Also because of lack of time for this book I will use computer programs to design it as I feel more comfortable with them.

Manifesto pointsDuring the beginning of the manifesto points development I have decided that I will not use my own words for the points but rather I have selected quotes with various interviews with Christian Marclay and especially when he is asked whether to explain his work or whether state his ideas. I think this way my manifesto points will be stronger and probably will refl ect Christian Marclay a bit better.

• Use objects that you are confronted with on everyday basis.

• Speed it up, slow it down, mix it up, it is easy.• Comment on the commercial aspect of music.• Sound and object is interconnected both visually

and acoustically.• Have do it yourself attitude towards your work.• Each sound is visually equal with other.• Debate the copyright laws in an interesting new way.• Make sculptures that do not produce sound but that

are about sound.• Consider yourself to be in between visual artist and

a musician.

So here is the 9 points of this manifesto book. Thus what was left now to do is to produce that actual book. The idea is to use each spread of the book as a puzzle that should be solved and through the solving it the points will appear.

IN U R T B L E S

M FU L

AU C

sG

t iE P

CR E M

S UI X

NI

IN

E AC U K

C US

QU

TA

I M E A YP O

A HV I m A S

ED

SC

O U T H RE

AR

NG

IF

AS

CO

K

FE

P H O N O G R AD

P H

RE

Sc

N A T U R N T A B L I S M G

CHRISRId

O R EA Mc h

Ar

T H I S I S A P O S T E R

TE AA

U TSI

G TT I N

CI

L AA N

YA

n N S T A LAN

Y

I N Y L D O

J A M

R E M AA M A N I

GO N

RE A

E H I S

DSINAUN

WS

ORDBOS U

E AR

E A

AY

Q HR E

JM

MU

V IT S

DA

B L ER O S S

I N S TJ

S A L

Y L D O

R M AM N I

S

ETHIB

NAU

anife

E C W

AN

K OA K

O R HA MR E

IC

D S HL As D

B

I N GY

T I NL AA N

Y

V I NA

O SN S T t Os

S s O

s w o rA M A N U

TA

T I M

S O U T H RG

O NE T H I

r oT

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GT U

CA OA G

INTASIAS

P H

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JM

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TAS O

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MT U R T A B L E S

A PU L

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A OA G

Y AE P

CR E M

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Q T T I M E A Y A H

I S AA MR E

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A N I F E S T O I N A S H

TE AA

U TSI

G TT I

C L A

T I N S T A LL AA N

Y

V I N Y L D O

J A M

R E M AA M A N I

O N

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1

2

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4

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7

8

9

This book consist of 24 pages. The fi rst spread is fi nd a word puzzle which is full of words that are related in some way to Christian Marclay and his work, thus by solving this spread the user will get the overall feeling / theme of the his work and this book. Then the rest of the spreads contains all the points in a shape of the puzzle (however, the questions are not yet written). The circles represent each word that you either need to fi nd it or you need to answer the question. And the last spread is just the place where all the solutions should be written.


SUMMARY // FINAL THOUGHTS

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Final ThoughtsOverall I am quite pleased with the results of the project. The book is quite an interesting solution to the brief and unique regarding other students who were doing / researching Christian Marclay. Also, I got better understanding how Grpahic Design applies to various print based objects.

However, this book may still be improved.. Maybe use the cover as part of the puzzle solution – make use of the package. Then also make the instructions of how to use this book properly with a short summary of the contents in order to attract the people to use this book. Additionally, I could create an interesting cover from vinyl material to represent Christian Marclay’s work.

And maybe I will manage to do this within the nearest future as I am quite interested in continuing this project even though the project deadline will pass.

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