medium & mediation

Perhaps a recap is necessary at this point of the project to date. Being rather broad I am looking at the nature, means and processes of representation but more specifically I am attempting to use projection as a medium and re-enactment as a way of creating and emphasising mediation, merging process and reception. This lingo medium and mediation has stemmed from the previously mentioned article on the work of Andrei Tarkovsky by Robert Bird. As with Krauss arose an expanded definition of medium, to include an intervening substance (or potentially person) of communication as well as the obvious connotations of material, with Bird’s article the definition of mediation has expanded to refer to not only the space between but also the materiality of this gap. The technical process of how something can come about. The very means of which allows us to transmit an articulation or representation of …well whatever it is we wish to get across. In terms of my thinking medium has come to refer to the means of production, while mediation refers to the materiality of the in-between process, between production and reception. By refusing to act as representation of a defined subject the work rather re-presents only the possibility of representation (how many times can I put that word in a sentence). What I am trying to get at is in its avoidance of subject or mimesis the work alludes to its own material construction as medium. Bird phrases it as ‘affirming the materiality of its mediation.‘ Rather than working with content, (for example re-presenting the close-as-it-can-be-to-real imitation,) the work allows for the confrontation of the corporeal of the very medium of its own representation. This undoubtedly has been affirmed in Modernism’s self-referentiality, with the stock standard example of Vertov’s Man with Movie Camera which uses its own medium to reveal the nature of its medium, but I still feel there is something to drive forward in all this.

The project to date

• Conflating the past (footage, notes & diagrams) with the present moment (mirroring, live performance, live feedback). Creating a spatial and temporal paradox or a collapsed present through layering site and duration.
• Relation of production, representation and reception, focusing on the documentation & re-presentation of a time based practice.
• Aligning through synchrony and proximity. Creating a conflation between my real self and former recorded self. a real situation and a past situation.
• Content- the search for content becomes content itself through re-enacting own actions in making, documenting and presenting the work. Attempt to understand and demonstrate the feedback loops I am placing myself within.
• Charged moment- a moment where the work lapses to reveal itself as a construction. Falls apart to reveal itself hopefully in order to question what is conceived as real and what is representation.