Residual Juice of My Today's Documentation

Problems to take care of:

-Bills: rent, catch up on utilities, debt collections (phone, TV, power, impound fee, credit card, taxes [almost done! ☺] loans, tickets).
Solutions: pay rent with next checks Alex will move in soon, when that happens you will have more money to take care of bills!

-Car: Battery, Ownership, Insurance, Tickets
Solutions: batteries are cheap, insurance after ticket, tickets in bills area of problems

-Grad School: Its going to be expensive, want to do more work for my portfolio with the new ideas, depressed and starting to feel like my art is not good enough, bills are taking away from productive energy
Solutions: Find a program to pay for you, Do more work especially when Alex is moving in and also, you have been doing work a lot with Alex and the inLimen project… so don’t underestimate what you’ve been doing; you’re art is good, in fact its better than a lot of stuff that ends up in galleries sometimes, you just need to focus your effort into something more solid through more examples, keep making more art; once you have a schedule to pay bills with and you are organized, a lot of this frustration will just go away. ABANDON YOURSELF TO YOUR WORK.

-I’m going to die one day: Death is starting to feel like a big restriction on my life!!! The more I realize its capacity, the more it becomes like walls in a room where you are growing too big for. You want to be able to do more than you have time left to do. The confining aspect of it makes me feel lonely at times. When others die it is like the room they had in this space became to confining, its like we’re all in that same room and then some people grow too big for it and you don’t see them in that space again because of it!
Solution: You can say all you want to think about a different perspective with which you can see dying with, but its just true. You are just going to die. You are not alone in thinking about this either because everyone is going to die. Everyone has to deal with this no matter who you are, no one is better than someone else in this way because no one can avoid it… its kind of an interesting halt upon the importance of the individual. It may be due to this that I feel an abrupt shift to the importance of the group of us sometimes (i.e. everything that exists along side me). The importance of the self seems to be better utilized if the effort is shifted to the importance of what is to come, who is to come and what you can do for those coming before you are gone. It’s the only thing that matters since the situation is futile.

The Documentation of Baby Smiley

Here is a blog that documents the activity of a stuffed toy called baby smiley. There is no explanation as to what is going on, the blog just begins to document baby smiley doing different things from an alleged day that baby smiley arrives. Baby smiley is the only one in any of the pictures, aside other stuffed animals and toys... people are in these pictures but are only there in pieces. A hand holds the toy, a body with a face hidden under an umbrella holds the toy in the hood of the jacket on the back, only baby smiley is the focus in each image. Its interesting how baby smiley comes to life through this way of dedicating documentation to nothing but baby smiley. There is one mention of someone human in the most recent blog, the person is referred to as Master3yrs...

http://babysmileyinct.blogspot.com/

Improvised Collaborative Story Telling

I would like to mention here a certain project that Alex Chiu and I have started recently, collaborative story telling. We have currently dubbed Tuesday nights as our practice times for this. Below is a link to the Myspace page I created to host some of the results of these joint story-tellings (feel free to add us).

inLimen

The term limen refers to the threshold of a physical or psychological response. The whole process of each story tends to be built in a threshold which is why I chose the name. I put it up as our Myspace title name for now... we'll see if it stays or not.

What I like about the process of the collaborative story telling that we do is that we begin and tell the entire story with no real preconceived ideas of how the story will start or where it will end up. Having two people direct a single story makes it so that there is more of an unexpected component. This creation and its emphasis of the unexpected allows for more reliance on spontaneity.

Playing with the unexpected has always been one big thing that separates performance art from traditional theater. This activity is also similar to other things such as freestyle rap and improv acting.

I think the difference so far with our activity, in comparison to other similar improvised activities, is that we record each story we tell and consider it the actual piece. It has not been an activity that is practice for something else; all of the flaws and mishaps become what is the story. The reason I put it here is, of course, because I am exploring the relationship between documentation and the self (or the ephemeral quality of life).

We are also planning on finding places to do this live. Right now I am trying to talk to Ray At Night and will most likely be able to participate in Sound Walk once again with this activity.

Two Portrait Collage

The above photo, as the title mentions is a collage of two faces. I wanted to see what blending two portraits together this way would be like visually. I am working on another one that is using the same two photos as in the one above but I am cutting the pictures into rectangles and the photos are different sizes (here they are the same size of course). I think for strip cuts the same size looks better.

I tried to align each photo when I took it, so this product is actually playing with the alignment of the pictures I took as well as with the two portraits. There is a flaw that was made in the process of trying to reassemble these photos together. I got a little lost but let it go after much frustration. Can you find it?

I would like to do more of these with more than two portraits.. maybe up to 5 or 6 even. Let me know if you would like to be in one of them.

Visual Study in Reflective Value Gauges

The more appropriate size for the captured individuals in relation to their effective importance on the environment which surrounds them: the art show (Curator and Artist respectively)


Actual documentation

Here I changed the sizes of the individuals in the original documentation to begin thinking about altering size in relation to importance within documentation. This idea is created in thinking of how Byzantine images varied sizes in their images to create significance and also to begin to think of the relation between old forms of documentation, its inaccuracy (i.e. paintings of Napoleon as a tall man when he was a short man) and how new forms come with relatively new inaccuracies.

How can I say that original photos come with new inaccuracies? Well, I suppose its off to call it a complete inaccuracy, but it depends on what you are thinking about. Photos and video are supposed to represent who we are, but a lot of times they fall short. I could take 10 pictures of myself at a party frowning to trick everyone looking at the pictures later into thinking I was having a bad time, when in actuality I may have been having so much fun that I wanted to trick you into thinking it was bad so you won't want to come to the next party and ruin my good time. Far fetched? Go look at your online photo album and ask yourself how many photos you deleted or decided you did not want to be a part of the reminiscence.

Photos and video documentation are reflective in that they can begin to decipher what we, on an individual level, value to be important in memory. SO, the above scale change of the individuals involved is a study to begin thinking about ways to alter and play with documentation with reference to story telling, ideas of reminiscence, transformation of visual information based on given value or personal importance etc...

Stop Motion Collage

First off, you should probably click on this image to get a better view of it....

This is the picture of a collage I did using various photos that were originally intended to create a stop motion animation. The way the project formed was this: I stood in the street and took a picture of myself, then stepped once to my left and took another photo. I did this repeatedly so that when you string the images together in some sort of video it looks like the background is moving while I am standing still, a typical stop motion technique.

Since I am interested in thinking about ways to play with documentation in regard to the ephemeral aspects of live art, I created a new way to view the same information (at least I think its new).

I took about 40 of the pictures I created, kept them in order and sliced them into 5 equal sections. After that I took the first section of every frame and placed them (in order from first to last) next to each other. I then did the same for the second section, third section and so on, for each of the remaining pieces... make sense?

Well, the resulting image is the one seen above. I was hoping that this cutting up of documenting my side steps to the left would create some sort of new way to think about motion via documentation. What I like is that it ends up sort of creating the idea of motion through a still photo collage.

I was also trying to go for something visually interesting, which I think I did achieve.

Tricking Low Pixels

Head banging


Shaking my face


Head waving side to side

These images were captured using my Mac Book Pro's iSight. I am not sure what quality the iSight is gauged at, but it is apparently low considering the amount of ease at which motion was able to create a large range of blur within each photo. Each time I took a photo I created a quick movement with my head so that the captured portrait picked up a blurry version of my face. The purpose here was to play with the "flaw" in the system (where blur is captured instead of a precise, instantaneous moment).

These images were created to play with ideas of motion in regard to the accuracy of documentation. A lot of things we consider to state who we are come from photos, so it is interesting to me to play with ways to create ambiguous images with a device we can sometimes consider to validate who we are... This is also interesting because of the increased usage of digital imagery present on the web.

...maybe I should play with a photo album

Live Art and Documentation

Welcome to my Live Art and Documentation study blog.

Hello, my name is Tom McDermott and I am a visual artist based in Southern California. This blog is meant to explore the visual qualities captured in the images I gather for the purposes of thinking about art making. Lately my main interests in art making have tended toward live art and installation art.

This blog is an exploration of how documentation may function in regard to capturing live art, possibly creating new projects via means of documenting live art (changing the original project into something new). My projects with documentation attempt to expose the flaws of documentation to create a play with the material in regard to performance (live) art.

My other blog here explores visual images for the purpose of installation art ideas, it may be viewed here: http://installationstudy.blogspot.com

Feel free to leave comments, enjoy!

-Tom-