DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

A few months ago I brought you this story - from my fridge.

And now I see that there is a wonderful blog here all about ‘passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers’

Do other people find notes round their houses?

This is the latest one in my house:

Rosa likes to leave notes … another one here…

I think it is interesting the way people leave text around the place. Sometimes with no hope of seeing most of their audience.

This one is quite bemusing:

And I like Lemon2’s shot here which captures a moment where the text seems to have a relationship with the person in front:

But the relationship is only made by the reader. There are just two items in the image and we as readers join them in a narrative; we make connections between one element of the image and another.

I am really interested in the ways in which environment can change the meanings of text and vice versa. I am interested in the way text changes over time. This one is funny:

But really I am interested in interactivity of the environment - including people, and even the weather - with texts that are in the street …. specifically streetart and grafitti. The life and meanings of street texts.

I feel a a new project coming on ….

I love to take photos and then fiddle around and use photoshop to crop or fiddle with colour etc.

Lots of people are against such post-photographic tampering. But I see it as aprt of the whole photographic process. Even in the ‘darkroom’ used for processing film, there are decisions to be made about chemicals, exposure time etc etc. The type of film used brings about differebnt results, and of course printing can make a qwhole lot of difference in terms of colour outcome, type of paper (glossy or matt), size and even borders.

I like to use photoshop and because I think that because you have to frame the image, focus in a particular way, shoot at a particular angle, wait for the right moment (etc.) the image is always just a representation, never ‘real’. It is not a snap from reality but a version. It is the photographer’s view; it reflects a set of choices or circumstances. It is amazing how you can get so many different types of image when many people take a picture of one thing. (Compare the shots of the same Banksy stencils, for example.) .

I photoshopped this image:

I wanted to also play with the idea that you can shoot in black and white or colour. I called this ‘Shooting in Colour’.

I also wanted to show my position on streetart - that it brightens the environment and can improve and humanise negelgted and forgotten spaces.

I like this video about transforming a model through photography. The video is supposed to shopw how shallow we are in having only one version of beauty. It is apart of a campaign for ‘real beauty’. What is ‘real’? I like the transformative process. It interests me a lot. And what do we mean by ‘natural’ or ‘real’?

I love wikipedia.
I love the way anyone can contribute.
You can contribute in many languages.
You can look up practically anything you are interested in - and it is usually there … like

this;
and this;
and this.

(I love street art). …

If you want to you can register on wikipedia and start adding to the knowledge base by editing a page. It is as easy as ABC (which is not easy for everyone.)

But

sometimes

naughty people mess about like when I once looked up info about Alison Krauss. She is a fantastic singer and VERY modest.

Someone had deleted all the ‘proper’ text and replaced it with ‘Alison Krauss causes cancer.’ (And I doubt the veracity of this claim).

But the wiki community quickly sorted out the silliness and the text was back in order within the hour. (I this kind of incident is a small price to pay for the uptodateness - especially in comparison to the staid and non contemporaneity of leather bound tomes on library shelves - The Encyclopedia Britannica goes out of date before it is printed.)

With so many people reading and contributing to wikipedia I think it manages to be a dynamic and incredibly uptodate encyclopedia; but no doubt it does enshrine certain idelogical values.

And some people have had ENOUGH . They have set up their own wiki which is more Christian; more Conservative and apparently more pro American.

And so what ever you think of these values, at least they are explicit that they have them.

Ladies and Gents I give you…. Conservapedia.

And funnily enough you will notice Conservapedia has (ahem) used very similar software to wikipedia. .

These are some of

the complaints Conservapedia levels at wikipedia.

And of course wikipedia describes Conservapedia … like this.

So knowledge is not neutral. We know that.

But at least open collaboration and shared writing on wikipedia is an attempt to be inclusive.

And finally, for your information, this is how Conservapedia defines street art.

What do you think of THAT??

Oh well. (And you might like to read Dana Boyd’s take on wikipedia). She is a great commentator of all things apophenia.

So Christmas is over and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. 

TT and I went to the outlaws and then came back only slightly scathed and then soaked ourselves in alcohol in the privacy of our own home.

Today I discovered that you can get Banksy stencils on ebay; and even Banksy repros especially shipped in from Hong Kong. (I wish I was joking.)

And in the meantime, having bought the kiddly wigglies a keyboard for Christmas, TT and I are fighting each other to have a turn … learning to play Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas is like performing brain surgery at the moment.  (TT is particularly bad). And somehow Miles has managed to work out how to play ‘Imagine’ using both hands and chords. (I can see we will need to ban him for a while.)

So.

Here is a thing from YouTube, showing Judith Supine at work on the streets of New York.

In this instance Supine uses found texts to produce something new; the art process consists of a reconstitution of the found texts which is then processed digitally and then put straight back on the streets. It is a kind of re-arrangement of the environment to make you sit up and notice. And the use of commercial art in this way is ironic; cutting up the magazines, transforming the beautiful models into something ghoulish, staring out from the walls at passers by.

Here is some stuff from MOO. If you are a member of Flickr then YOU TOO can get cards made with your own images. I used a big mix of images to see what I would like best and then plan to order some more of the ones I really like.

Today’s post has been about how we can use and re-use texts to make new ones with new meanings. I have become very interested in the idea of PROVENANCE; the way texts collect additional meanings from the journeys they have made and the associations they have picked up from being in other contexts.

More from Judith:

Did I ever mention I love the work of Swoon?

I took this in July in Chinatown in NYC.

And earlier in the year these:

One has to be very careful in NewYork if you are a streetartist because if you are caught it can be an imprisonable offence. So Swoon takes care not to be recognised:

(Thanks to Visual Resistance for the shot - taken in front of a OsGemeos painting - Swoon is the beautiful one in the middle)

I am so impressed with the nobility of artists who put their work on the street for everyone to see and there is something to be gained from it being ‘in the environment’ amongst people, seeing them interact with it and reacting to the weather and all that the environment brings … .

here is Swoon talking about her work:

” I studied classical painting, renaissance-style painting and
portraiture and then when I came to new york, and I no longer
felt connected to anything I had thought about art.
for at least two years, nothing made sense to me,
and everything I did felt aimless and destructive, and then things
finally came around.
so now when I feel like I’m doing things that make no sense,
to me, but I still feel deeply compelled to do them,
I take it as a good sign.’”

(From here)

Here is a really great interview with Swoon talking about the artefacts of her work.

Very exiting to receive two parcels from New York this week containing the work from Celso and Franck de las Merecedes

Before we even opened these babies we could feast or eyes on the way artists wrap their work….

Here is Celso’s wonderful painting (still in cellophone on the back of the settee):

And then the piece from Franck which we chose at his exhibition day in July:

(Made from shreds of Victor Jara poetry)

Anyway we are going to re-paint our dining room and rearrange all our pictures as we are going to collect work from streetartists. Yay!!!

Here is more from Celso and here. As you can see he is happy as a streetartist I love these installations.

And you can buy from Franck here.

City where there is huge Contestation over spaces (what they should be; who owns them;) … people make their marks on walls and live in spaces which others think do not belong to them.

Not everyone is happy with capitalism or that the wall came down. There is sadness and trauma.

But such things bring out creativity- mark making on the city walls reflects some of the characters who use the space

(Art can be transformative; people in the city interact with Art in different ways)

This is Tacheles which was a department store and is now a squat:

Backside:

Really have had trouble blogging lately.

Thought I would try and blog regularly again by not allowing myself to write much in each post. Then maybe I would want to. Straining at the leash, so to speak.

So no more than five sentences allowed … starting from NOW….

I have come back from Berlin ….a crazy mixed up city with people pulling in all directions, trying to lead in deciding what the culture IS. So much streetart, so many people wanting to express themselves out there.

Here then is a photo from the last day of my holiday … strangely misty:

This is supposed to be a moody shot showing the mix of architectures across the ages and reflecting the extremes of politcs and culture. The Palace is now being carefully dismantled and there are big placards explaining that is is not being ‘demolished’ - see here

Really great yesterday going into one of my research schools and seeing a teacher working wth his class on the critical lieracies project. Fantastic to see the kids so into it and working so hard. They have a formular PEE - make a POINT, provide the EVIDENCE, and give an EXPLANATION. And they are learning to ask questions to help them unpick the ideologies within texts.

Lovely to see the notices round Mark’s classroom and to see someone so talented and clever in action. The kids were really getting so much out of what was going on. RESPECT is a key thing in that place:

Ths was the text for the starter activity:

the kids were well into it and loving looking at the ‘rip off ad’ at the top of the page. they were really interested in discussing the business side and I think maybe that is a direction to take up next.

Or maybe Mark will be interested in looking at streetart and asking questions about that using a critical literacy frame….

Whose voices do we hear on the street?
What is streetart trying to do?
Where is the power?

Look at this pupil’s folder:

Do you think it belongs to a girl or a boy? (Why do you think that? Who is the folder aimed to please? What is it trying to do? What does it assume about the audience?)

Next I went to a City Learning Centre and heard Judy Robertson from Glasgow Caledonian University talking about developing kids’ storytelling skills through computer game design. She gets kids making ther own pc games and then looks at ways in which teachers can build on the skills the kids are developing.
She uses Never winternights. which I am going to buy and have a go.

Interesting that out of the 8 people who attended the seminar, one was a teacher advisor; one was me; one was the person who arranged it; two were PhD students; then there were three teachers. Two of the teachers said they did not think they would be able to use the ideas; one was already trying it at an after school club. This is going to be a long struggle to get people to be brave enough to use this stuff in school and to see that not all skills are listed on the National Curriculum. It is so hard for teachers these days as they hae to justify everything they do in terms of hitting pre-set targets - set by a givernment interested in developing literacy of the past century, but using technology from the current one.

In the meantime … I am going to watch BB tonight. All eyes are watching….