why

My initial concept didn't have the strength to stand alone and is both airy, in its lack of concrete definition; and muddied by the marrying of concept to process. It's not enough to index, via the process of casting, the absence of the objects that I've selected, and in order to dissolve the boundaries between the past and the present I need the casts to do more than just exist as dumb objects.


A suggestion was raised in a group crit today, in relation to the concept of information storage, that I should explore a comparison between the capacity storage of a floppy disk with that of modern day hard drives, external or otherwise. The common format 3 1/2 inch floppy disk has a capacity storage of 1.44MB. Working on the formula that 1GB is equivalent to 1024MB a 16GB USB flash drive is therefore equivalent to 11,377.78 floppy disks; with a 500GB external hard drive equivalent to 355,555,56 floppy's. 


I recently moved from PC to Mac after the hard drive failed on my DELL Inspiron 1545 2GB PC (equivalent to 1422.22 floppy disks). Following on from the crit today I'm now really enthused about the idea of incorporating this hard drive failure into my work. I've had a series of low end PC lap tops that have lasted at the most 2-3years before experiencing faults on the hard drives. Floppy's may well have outlived their usage but they were nothing if not reliable.

how not to

Vaseline oil isn't an effective release agent.

Casting in materials other than porcelain (crystal resin as above, and cold casting using brass/bronze/aluminium powder) is something that I anticipate exploring further on completion of this module.

why

Ron Arad

Concrete Stereo (1983)

record player, amplifier, two speakers, electronic components: incorporated into concrete

Su-Mei Tse

Stille Disco (2010)

installation of stone sculptures

Onkar Kular

Betacam Tape: The MacGuffin Library (2008)

black polymer resin

The broader my research is becoming, the more I want to cast in different materials. There are other avenues I could explore from my current position: the destruction/deformation of the original object; glazes and firing; the durability of the porcelain; digital production methods (CAD/CAM/CNC routers/laser and water-jet cutters???) etc: however it is the actual casting material that I want to plumb.

Resin seems like a natural choice as it'll result in a transparent solid that would provide considerable contrast to the ceramic objects. I'm really concerned though about the release agent as each each substance that I've researched (silicone/soap/beeswax/Vaseline oil/petroleum jelly/PVA/spray paint) seems to match success story for failure. It's important that the mold doesn't end up as a waste mold and is reusable, however as with any kind of casting it is essentially a game of chance.

what

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8646699.stm - The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk by Jason Palmer, BBC News, April 2010

"There are people who ride technology for as long as it can be ridden without falling over."

Are there really? I think that "old habits [do indeed] die hard" but surely our hands are forced when the technology of today shuns these 'habits' so entirely. Essentially there isn't anything that outperforms the floppy but still it finds itself supplanted. Why?

how

I've been thinking about delivery systems for a while now. It's a difficult thing to approach when the concept itself is still so ill-defined. There is, however, something quite charming about encasing the casts in the tape/disk carriers, as pictured above. They, rather conversely, become quite precious, due to their individual clear perspex display cabinets, and at the same time less precious as they move closer towards the object and further away from their fragile structural actuality. 

what

what

what

I can't seem to achieve the same level of exactness with the VHS/Betamax tapes as I have done with the cassette tapes, and this project doesn't afford me the time I think I'll need in order to do so. Because of this I've decided to focus my attention on the smaller devices (cassette tape/disks) for the time being.

what

I'm relatively happy with the results of the cassette tape (what 26/10/11), however I am wanting to improve on the quality of the cast and move the reservoir to a less obvious position. They work really well as dumb objects, but they need more precision and exactness to avoid looking like naive casts. At the same time I'd like to (re)attempt to cast the above objects. I'm moving away from the devices used to read data, and focusing on the actual data storage discs/tapes. 

I have been really concerned that I'm trying to marry a concept and a process that don't sit well together, however I have this urge to make/cast, and I feel that there is something exciting in what I'm doing. Like Whiteread I think the idea of seriality and repetition could draw this out.

untitled

It's not possible to work in the manner in which I am and fail to register a connection with work by Rachel Whiteread. It comes up in tutorials and crits alike, and has resurfaced from time to time in my research. The most definitive parallel is that I cast directly from known and familiar objects.

Whiteread has demonstrated an almost unparalleled dedication to the process of casting, however avoids being typecast as a traditionalist by shifting from material to material (plaster/wax/resin/rubber/marble/aluminium) and working in seriality and repetition. Her work approaches the concept of dematerialisation by supplanting the object with it's opposite: the space around it.

Untitled: Twenty-Four switches (1998)
aluminium

I saw this piece recently at Tate Liverpool. I was really surprised at first thinking that the cast captured positive space as opposed to negative (which is very unlike Whitread), however on closer reflection the switches and the screws are inverted which gives rise to the fact that the face, at least, is a negative cast. The thing that really struck me however was the fact that the switches are randomly positioned, and in a solid aluminium cast of a piece of electrical equipment, this portrays a very human influence. In much the same way that Essen used his antiquated concrete radio to broadcast recent events (the rioting and looting across the country in August of this year) it moves past process and artist to suggest the relationship between us and the object.

why not

skills acquisition = ample
success rate = feeble

postmodern postmortem

'I recently gave a lecture to a group of young artists: 20-somethings living in Berlin, born elsewhere. Among the languages I could identify I heard French, Portuguese and Swedish. Despite the linguistic diversity, my lecture went smoothly - until I made a joke about Postmodernism. No one laughed because no one knew what Postmodernism was. [...] The problem here was not a generational gap - that Postmodernism was replaced by globalization - but a shift in the way a common culture becomes, well, common. Our problem was not what we shared but how. Before the Internet, Postmodernism linked different people by designating different cultural phenomena. [...] These artists didn't need a culture - let alone a neologism - to bring them together:.Their Postmodernism is Facebook: not a catch-all phrase but a catch-everyone technology. The common comes automatically: the culture can always change. In light of social networks, the ubiquity of Postmodernism appears as its most revolutionary trait. The term likely disappeared so quickly because its force was not its multifaceted meaning but rather its capacity to link once-disparate cultural phenomena and once-distant people. Postmodernism may be the first word to become obsolete because it was replaced, not by another word like globalization, but by a technology that did the same job more effectively.' [...] The last bastion of subculture is not a particular style, let alone a super-hybrid version of Goths channelling Bad Brains, but an outdated technology, which resists online sharing. Writing in The Guardian in March, Dorian Lynskey noted how underground music labels like Scotch Tapes are reviving the near-defunct audio cassette - not just for nostalgia. "It keeps (the music) from becoming mainstream," said one fan. In short a subculture may rely on format, not content, to maintain its status and politics. Imagine telling a Rastafarian that vintage hairdryers, eight-track tape recorders and wooden long-stem pipes are more potent than dreadlocks, reggae and weed. But in our era of super-hybridity, the medium is truly the message.'

Allen, Jennifer (2010), Postmodern Postmortem: Has a theory been replaced by a technology?, frieze, Issue 133, September 2010, p.21. 

The September 2010 issue of frieze was a front to back, page-by-page read for me. Entitled super-hybridity?, it addressed my thoughts and fears on the acceleration of life, reality, media, culture, discipline, technology, communication, and on. I don't really understand the notion, if there even is a clearly defined one, of super-hybridity. It seems to skirt around origin; ownership; culture; identity; material; pace; method and a multitude of other constructs that start to make the term super-hybrid seem more like a headfuck than a sexy neologism. What I feel I do know, however, is that the experience of media plays a heady part in the discussion, and that makes it pertinent to my current position. I keep asking myself why I'm casting these objects. Yes, I believe it indexes an absence, combining that which is present with that which is the other, and also in a sense dematerialises the object by removing the original function, materiality, weight, density, opacity, etc (essentially the only recognisable element is form). But I don't think, at this stage, that that is enough.

what

Cassette casts fired to bisque [approx 1000ºC] with repositioned slip reservoir.

multiple, 1.33:1

David Jablonowski
Multiple 1.33:1 (2010)
mixed media

'David Jablonowski questions the potential of communication in contemporary visual culture. Through sculpture and film, he explores the way language is established and developed and then reproduced technically in relation to political and historical discourse. Jablonowski's interest in display systems and information transfer has as much to do with the hardware that is used in the staging of knowledge as it has with the knowledge itself. The repetitive and unsustainable promise of a valid direction of communication is expressed in works which question the understanding of sign systems; making us aware of the transience of visual language.' - http://www.iscp-nyc.org/artists/current/david-jablonowski.html

I first came across this piece last month in an issue (No 350) of Art Monthly, in an article about the supposed dissolution of mass culture due to the digitisation of public time and space. The more that I'm reading on subjects such as these the more it seems that the concern isn't that we will become consumed by technology and lose our connection with the physical, but in fact, whether we already are/have and don't know it. It's about as determinable as an analysis of the origins and principles of postmodernism, so I'm guessing the more that I read, the less that I'll know. What I do know though is that it is really pertinent to my choice of media.

The piece above, one of a series of similar pieces in an exhibition called perfection, simple, way, is comprised of a hunk of plaster trying to feed itself into/through a laptop, seemingly in an attempt to digitise itself.  

how

what

My next move is to produce a rubber (vinamold) mold of the VHS tape above, so as to be able to cast the object in plaster. There's a fragility to plaster that I want to explore in terms of smaller, more intricate pieces (in comparison to Cast Production). Figuring out how to arrange the mold split and plaster jacket (for support) has been really difficult because of both the undercuts and the fact that I want to cast it closed, without an open side. I'm also concerned about how resistant the tape will be to the heat of the rubber. When I cast the keyboard last year there was substantial distortion, however the keyboard felt more durable and was a lot denser than the tape. There's every chance that the tape won't hold up to it.

why

The Dilemma of Modern Media graph from Preservation in the Digital World by Paul Conway, Head of Preservation Department, Yale University Library, March 1996

Archives not only contain records of products/ideas/objects that have become obsolete over time, but are also acutely demonstrative of the very essence of obsolescence. This graph shows that while the quantity of information being saved has increased exponentially from the age of clay tablets and parchment scripts, the durability of media has decreased almost as dramatically. There is information within our archives stored on media such as floppy disk/VHS/magnetic tape/compact cassette/hard drives, and in time the hardware needed to read these electronic/digital/optical formats will become obsolete. 

Digital technology - based on incredibly precise mathematical coding - either works perfectly or doesn't work at all. "If you go beyond the limits of the error rate, the screen goes black and the audio goes to nothing," Mayn said, "and up to that point, you don't realize there are any errors. Analog technology" - used in vinyl records or electromagnetic tapes - "deteriorates more gracefully. The old wax cylinders of the original Edison phonograph sound faded and scratchy, but that are still audible." Mayn picked up some tiny plastic digital audiotapes that fit neatly in the palm of his hands. "People love these things because they are so small, compact, and lightweight and store tons of data, but as they put larger and larger amounts of data on smaller and smaller spaces, the technology gets more precise, more complex, and more fragile." He bends the little data tape in his hand. "We have a lot of these from the late 1980s and even the mid-1990s that can't be played at all."

Extract from Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology by Alexander Stille
http://www.lostmag.com/issue3/memory.php

what

I'm really happy with the crisp detail of the item cast. Both casts are drying to a bisque state and will need to be worked into to remove the remnants of the reservoir before firing.


I would like to produce another mould however, with a less heinously placed slip reservoir!

what

Cassette tape 3-part slip cast mould.

what's left

how



fill holes

build clay walls with keys for end part

fill with plaster

build clay walls for side part with keys, fill with plaster - flip and repeat (adding clay reservoir on one side for slip)

secure then pour in slip

poison pen

Katherine Morling

Poison Pen (2010)

porcelain with black stain

Poison Pen forms only a small part of what is a much larger installation [Out of the House: as seen at Collect 2011, Saatchi Gallery] of monochromatic ceramic objects.

There is a whimsical theatricality to Morling's ceramics. They are at once nostalgic; familiar; fragile; and mundane, and succeed in becoming a vacant representation of their former selves. 

Ceramics is a good imitator of other materials and is adept at taking on board a desired form, which makes it an obvious choice when wanting to replicate an object. It also offers a strong sense of history and tradition, something that, it stands to reason, is missing from modern day processes and materials. Slip-cast it can be solid or hollow which can also add to the solidity or fragility of the piece.

The idea of 'hinting at past times' is something that sits well with my narrative of obsolescence, and the reproduction of objects in ceramics that have simultaneously both a comfortable familiarity and an uneasy blankness is where my current thinking lies. It combines that which is present, through the form in which it takes, and that which is other, in the absence of the actual object.

concrete radio

Mark Essen
Concrete Radio (2011)
concrete sculpture and HD video, colour, sound

'Using George Berkeley's metaphysical theory of subjective idealism as a starting point, Mark Essen has developed a film work that encompasses his sculpture Concrete Radio. Filmed around the Wysing arts centre, Cambridgeshire, Archangel George presents the traces of human disruption in an abandoned and deserted landscape. The film adheres to Berkeley's theory of metaphysical perceptions of the mind; that the existence of ideas depends solely on their being perceived, and following thus, that ideas exist solely because of the mind. Essen's film posits that to exist is to perceive, or be perceivable and that it is the human presence that informs us of an action or consequence. Essen's sculpture will accompany the film in which it features'

I came across this piece at an exhibition called Crash at VIVID, Birmingham. For me, paramount to the idea of metaphysics and the weight of human presence and perception, is the fact that the radio itself reads as an obsolete relic, with the concrete representative of uninhabited space and emptiness.

what

Sony VHS tape

TDK D90 cassette tape

Sony C7 betamax player

G.E. answering machine

Mr.Data MF-2HD floppy disks

betamax/VHS tapes

These are a few items that I'm looking at to cast. I think it's important that I avoid anything especially nostalgic/retro, as they're really difficult notions to pull off in an artistic context. As a starting point, and with respect to my current position (my contexual research and conceptual exploration is still in the very early stages) I need to begin to make items that fit the criteria of obsolesence/out-moded/out-dated in an attempt to get the idea off the ground.