REPETITION IN ERROR
In trying to repeat something perfectly you see the spaces in between the thing. In trying to repeat something imperfectly you start to see the thing perfectly. Many of the sketches you see below come from my attempt to draw something over and over again from memory. Depending on the day I would give myself less or more degrees of freedom. After the initial execution I would move into cuts and folds, trying to use the negative space as mark making tool. This is when I was intimately connected to my roll-through scanner.
By using time as an element in these pieces the differences between each individual iteration could be seen more clearly. Later I moved on to animation as a way to be able to showcase this.
I began to then take segments of these pieces break them apart and reconstruct them, constantly recycling the material and using it to create the next iteration. Sometimes when I would try and recreate a pattern perfectly again and agin I would notice somerhing fundamental about that shape or form that I had overlooked before, this type of tactile meditation was like a therapy for me. In dealing with my own suicidal ruminations I’ve often gravitated toward process driven work as a means of therapy. The repetition and focus that is needed to committ to this practice is a calming and productive distraction from a feedback loop gone awry.
This work, the idea of repitition - lead to more earlier prototypes of the converyor belt pieces that I’ve most recently worked on in the Dollarstore Ouroboros . Particularly because it demands the viewer to do the same work that I was aiming to do with these repetitions, they are cued into a rhythym with the piece. Below is a snuff film of some of the earliest prototypes for the conveyor belt pieces.
The scan line animation piece aimed to try and replicate this same process of repetition with movement through a pull through scanner. I would scan the same image 100s of times, trying to pull it through more quickly at just one point. The result was a shimmering image which showed the imperfection of each one of my pulls.