The first pun was inevitable, I suppose.

On Friday, our group finally put together the thoughts we were brewing into a written manifesto. Though it ended up being much different than what I had anticipated, and this new approach is reframing my approach to making work about the issue at hand.

As a group, we were presented with a couple of different questions to help us create the space that our manifesto would inhabit. Our group is talking about content addiction and screen culture, and figuring out the most targeted audience for whom the issue is the most urgent was a critical step.

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We started to write with a pre-determined idea of what a manifesto should look like: short, clear-cut statements, demands, and etc. We created an outline based on that principle and began to frame our stance on content/screen addiction as we would a public health announcement, using campaigns against cigarettes as our frame of reference.

This manifesto was set to have quite a serious tone, and the words that we used were quite important and specific. It also placed a good deal of blame on certain parties: phone users, peers, and institutions that are responsible for engineering screens and programs on phones that make them so addictive.

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We thought we had a clear direction of where we were going, and then our group was exposed to an unconventional manifesto, Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada. His manifesto is quite poetic. He breaks his message down and builds upon it in a Fibonacci sequence, doubling up and expanding on his message every time it starts over. A lot of it repeats, but it creates a very important and intentional contrast when he decides to break from the form and change. Too, the repetition creates a sense of intimacy and while showing an increasing strength in the manifesto’s writer. The repetition seems like a person practicing in front of a mirror at first, drafting up the words he/she/they wants to say, but then the repetition serves to solidify and embolden the argument as a means for expansion and clarification to the author and the reader.

This manifesto shook us because it was so personal. Originally, we found other manifesto examples to be much more applicable to our central idea. Perhaps we would use humor and absurdity to make our point as was the case with a couple of other manifestos that we looked at. However, we took the challenge in stride to try to write our own manifesto in a format that felt counterintuitive to our message to see if we could mine anything out of it.

It worked surprisingly well. In Black Dada, Adam Pendleton repeats the same opening phrase in each growing iteration, ‘it’s a matter of fact’, but we chose to use the gesture of repeated engagement with smartphones, ‘tap tap’. Pendleton swings between observations and personal insights, offering an increasingly detailed window of the his perspective. We attempted to create a similarly fractured picture by detailing gestures that a user would employ to interact the phone while also shedding light on the user herself. The user is no character in particular–she is just a person who is becoming increasingly aware of the addictive nature of her smartphone, much of that information delivered by the smartphone itself through statistics and ‘news updates’.

We decided that we liked the picture that this style of manifesto allowed us to create. The exponential growth allowed us to address the rapidity of the appearance of the affliction of screen addiction. It made addressing the problem much less about creating guilt and casting blame, and much more about illustrating a problem that came about quite subtly and where addressing culpability is not necessarily the most productive path towards healthy engagement with phones.

In each growing iteration, we explored different narrative possibilities and raised various questions surrounding the issue, while hammering the same point home of the centrality of the screen. It isn’t finished, but the poetic tone allows for a wide interpretive space, and I am excited to see what we will produce.

Clare gave the Fine Arts students a very compelling introduction to the print in our first pathway session on Thursday. The idea of a print is an impression, and contact is the central mechanism of the process.

We experimented with ink and the press to investigate the different types of marks that are possible and their effects on different types of paper, with . masks. We also worked with wet and dry embossing using a word that was relevant to our manifesto project.

The word that I chose to explore was Scroll, and I was interested in using embossing to explore the ephemeral nature of the gesture. However, going forward, I am much more interested in experimenting with what I can do to create the sensation of the gesture in the word itself.

Or, perhaps, I will just experiment with gesture alone and the impression that makes.

Wednesday, the 24th of July, our cohort went to two different museums with the prompt of Manifesto in our heads: how do artists create work in response to a collection of ideas/beliefs or a call to action?

First, we went to the Hayward Gallery to go and see the exhibit there called ‘Kiss my Genders,’ the subject of which, as the title would suggest, was to ‘explore and celebrate gender identity and gender fluidity’ as portrayed by artists over a period of 50 years from around the world.

The broad, projected mission of the show and the scale that it claimed to achieve with the exhibited works, however, were a little inconsistent. When discussing the exhibition with peers and tutors, we found it to be lop-sided in a couple of different ways. The time period of representation seemed to be largely skewed towards the 70’s and 80’s, with a couple of anachronistic pieces from much earlier and much later. Additionally, it was pointed out to me (by Lee) that there was an over-representation of a feminine male body, and a disproportional lack of representation of images of masculine female bodies. This triggered some questions for me about the relevance of the mission of the Guerrilla Girls in the context of imbalance within the spectrum of gender fluidity. How can we quantify representation within this spectrum? Should we? Under-representation of any sort only offers a small window of the picture, but quantification of that representation here seems a bit blurry. Is the ‘starting’ point, or the observable assigned gender even important? Gender and identity have such unique character that perhaps any attempt to capture one example of it may seem like it would skew an exhibition’s snapshot of it.

Too, there was certainly disproportionate representation of gender through the body, and a performative, observable phenomenon of the human figure. Fluidity of forms that were not human bodies was something that was largely unexplored in the curatorial space except for a few exceptions.

This was an important exhibit for us to visit because I think it did have many compelling works, but the mission of the show was perhaps too over-reaching for the works that were actually shown. The show as a whole was successful in showing and elevating components of the gender discussion over a period of time, but where the mission of the exhibit as a whole went a bit awry for me was the extent of that spectrum that the exhibit as a whole attempted to claim.

This was an interesting contrast when juxtaposed with the permanent collections of Tate Modern, which we visited that afternoon. Of course, comparing the two is impossible. The order of magnitude of the works at the Tate versus the Hayward is on a different level entirely. However, the Tate’s permanent collections are broken down by time periods and general subject matters, which gives an essence of a period without putting too much pressure on the works to substantiate a thesis imposed by the curation.

My group found that the works in the display about Media Networks were particularly relevant to our own manifesto about content addition and screen culture. The works presented a variety of approaches to a dialogue about the incorporation of new technologies into society, consumer culture, and the implications for artists. Cildo Meireles’ 2001 piece Babel, an imposing tower of radios all set to different frequencies, was a striking totem that spoke to the overwhelming nature of media in its physicality. On the other hand, the 2003 collaboration by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla Ten Minute Transmission at the entrance to this room of displays presented a subtle material exploration of the intricate, invisible connections that happen every time a signal goes up in to space in a wire representation of satellites suspended from the ceiling: a material interpretation of the miracle of communication and the extensive components of those networks that are forgotten in their use.

Beyond this, I was fascinated by the way that different artist were using light in certain works and in the ways that integrated and personal screens were re-shaping the way that people navigate the gallery space. Light seems to have this effect of making space immediately interactive, but it also seems to game-ify experience. There is something that we are supposed to ‘get out’ of it and some sort of way to personally, externalize our experience in phones. This may be something that we can explore in our manifesto.

This is a little bit of a backlog, but on Tuesday of this past week, we had an induction to Photoshop and the Capture Studio at the White City Campus. The Photoshop tutorial was a vehicle to start thinking about words and images for Manifesto. We were tasked with creating a slogan that is relevant to our topic and using images/text to enhance that meaning.

I made something that I don’t think I like, but the tools for hiding and revealing in Photoshop are quite pertinent to the the core of my group’s manifesto: screen addiction is a public health concern.

On Monday we launched out firs project: Manifesto. The project will have three goals which will be actualized over the course of three weeks, largely in groups, but there will be individual outcomes as well.

However, the title is fairly self-evident: Manifesto. Essentially, we are being asked, what do you want to say as artists? Further, what are the ways that we can address it within our individual pathways that add to a dialogue created by our peers in different artistic practice.

We were divided into groups that have people from each pathway and from around the world, but Monday, we were all tasked with cutting up a bunch of headlines from British newspapers to identify a problem that we would all address with the creation of a written manifesto.

It was difficult to choose amongst us because it seems like there were different opportunities within certain headlines that were motivated by pathway-specific approaches and individual interests. Ultimately, the group did come to a decision. We were attracted to the word data, and our manifesto will center around content addiction, specifically in regards to screens.

After that, we teased the idea apart by brainstorming some controversial statements about screens and addiction as well as pathway specific outcomes to respond to this problem.

Now, to actually write it.

The first week was a whirlwind. My brain is saturated with names, faces, and terms that I’m sure will achieve effortless recall in a matter of weeks. However, at this point, every acronym and term requires a conscious effort, on top of making sense of the London Underground. So far, I have gathered that the Central Line is universally regarded as garbage.

There are a lot of firsts. I have yet to use the printer, and that initial encounter is my greatest source of fear, which speaks much more to my character than to the nature of the induction week. But, I was also afraid that I would never find the White City Campus. I am now firmly aware of its location.

Fear and excitement are the same physiological phenomenon: cold sweats, increased heart rate, adrenaline circulating. The difference between the two is simply what the brain decides to call it. Above all, I am excited, and that is because of the people and their work.

Our means of introduction largely came through the Pecha Kucha assignment, which was to create a brief, image-based introduction to ourselves and our work. Seeing the work of our student cohort and the course leaders was incredible. The variety of stories and mediums is truly astounding, and I am thrilled to have my peers as inspirational resources and collaborators.

Now, to start making.