Very pleased that recent video work Auroville Dream (Tales From the City)has been selected for Altered States curated by Toby Tatum and Mark French as part of this year’s Coastal Currents Festival Hastings & St Leonards, UK.
Altered States is an immersive multi-screen show of the latest experimental film and video work curated by the Hastings-based filmmakers Toby Tatum and Mark French. Altered States features moving image by over seventy of the most fascinating international moving image practitioners working today, much of it unseen in the UK.
This exhibition includes the fruits of a worldwide search for works that articulate film’s power to initiate heightened states of consciousness, transporting us across the threshold into a mind-expanding visionary state. The programme features a selection of cutting edge films that imaginatively reshape the base materials of the everyday world into something rich and strange.
Tobt Tatum
Venues and dates:Electro Studios, Seaside Road, West St Leonards, TN38 0AL, UKSat 29 August from 6pm – 10pm Sun 30 August from 2pm – 6pm
Sat 29 August from 6pm – 10pm Sun 30 August from 2pm – 6pm
Featured artists:Michael Woods, Sandra Crisp, Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Diego Barrera, Ellen Wetmore, Maximilian Le Cain, Ema Čulík, Duncan Reekie, Helga Fannon, Alex Carmichael, Helena G M, Leslie Supnet, Juliette Liautaud, Patrick Rowan, Theo Tagholm, Sandra Bouguerch, Philip Sanderson, Guli Silberstein, Lucinda Wells, Shaun Blezard, Sirin Bahar Demirel, Maria Nino, Grant Petrey, Mike Stolz, Alex Dickson & Greg Adsley, Eden Mitsenmacher, Tessa Garland, Joseph Curran, Anita Spooner, David Ian Bickley, Laura Focarazzo, David Asher Brook, Jeannette Louie, Laurel Beckman, Josh Weissbach, Stephen Broomer, Dalia Huerta Cano, Andrew Littlejohn, Joel Cahen, Peter Rose, Helen Flanagan, Juan David Gonzalez Monroy, Enrique Piñuel, Stuart Pound, John Davis, Alex Hovet, Joe Banks (Disinformation), Ben Barton, Michael Fleming, Margarida Sardinha, Richard Ashrowan, Brice Bowman, Demian Skogr, Zachary Finkelstein, Asha Tamirisa, Nicholas Bunch, Gabriel Rud, Hans Lucas, Alisa Berger, Mirjam Bromundt, Pako Quijada, Josh Yates, Harold Charre, Evguenia Men, Michael Betancourt, Jason Bernagozzi, Mark Street, Chiara Ambrosia, Rui Hu, Kera MacKenzie, Caryn Cline, ana b. & nuno m. pereira, Callum Costello.
For more information visit Coastal Currents website HERE
I’ll be screening new videoAuroville Dream (Tales From the City) for the first time in London at Shortwave Cinema as part of the Bermondsey Art Trail
Shortwave Cinema, 10 Bermondsey Square, London SE1 3UN
Saturday 11th July 2015, 1- 3 pm
Join the Bermondsey Art Trail –Simply turn up and take advantage of our guided tours who will show you some of Bermondsey’s hidden gems, with informal talks by artists and curator’s, plus some exciting short art film screenings & live bands.
Bermondsey art trail map 2015
Tour 1 @ 10.30am Tour 2 @ 11.30am MEET UP POINT Tanner & Co. 50 BERMONDSEY STREET SE1 3UD 3-4 mins walk from London Bridge Station
Two of my looping Kinteic Collage videos 102 avatars#2 and hashtag_mandala_2 have been selected for an interesting new exhibition entitled Common Bodies,East Street Arts, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK.
East Street Arts is proud to present ‘Common Bodies’, an immersive exhibition of new and existing video works by over 30 artists drawn from an international open call.
Dates & Times: Friday 19th – Thursday 25th June 2015 Tue – Thu (10am – 5pm) Sat (1pm – 5pm)
Venue: East Street Arts Project Space Patrick Studios, St Mary’s Lane, Leeds, LS9 7EH
Curated and produced by artist Tom McGinn, the exhibition examines the tensions and (dis-) continuities between video and sculpture, and the varying demands they make of their audiences.
Drawing comparisons to our daily, collective engagement with both the virtual and the physical, many of the works in the show foreground the material importance of the screen, as a device for communicating lived, bodily experience, and as a site for the sharing of knowledge via the ‘common’ language of images.
The fifth edition of the Festival will take place at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, Russia, April 21 – June 21, 2015. Space is a philisophical category as well as our everyday routhine and the basic concept of architecture. Artists turn to the architecture of the present, projects of the future and runins of the past. They explore a space that exists in the relationship with time and a space as an expansion and dimension; personal space and the space of the ‘other’.
Program catalogue
This year the festival has received 1046 applications from 67 countries.
Here is a selection of test A4 printouts of images from Kinetic Collage project via my desktop printer plus 1 x A3 archival on Somerset paper. I’m testing out how large the images can go as each image has varying resolution.
Sandra Crisp: Inkjet prints of various sizes upto approx 80 x 80 cm
kinetic_array3: Printing in progress with A3 archival desktop printer
I have Just received a very nice catalogue for FILE Electronic Language International Festival 2014 in the post. A big thank you to the nice people from FILE for taking the time to do this
Double page spread from FILE festival catalogue with my work pictured bottom left.
The full FILE online .PDF catalogue can be downloaded via a link on this page HERE
I have just started work on a second, extended version of this video work in which will continue to explore 3d modelling and the city explored via memory, real and digital space.
Tales From the City (1 minute) will now be travelling to Ickle Film Festival – Dundee’s own independent film festival taking placein various venues across the city, 18 – 21 October
ICKLE will be taking over the city’s alternative screening and arts spaces including Roseangle Café Arts and Tin Roof, bringing together films and filmmakers of all flavours across an exciting weekend programme of screenings and events.
Helen Schell – Bloodsmock Barbara Monteiro – Walking Anton Hecht – Tango Master Rua Acorn – Sharing Spaces Liam Rogers – This is Not a Test Trish McRae – What do We See Michael Davies – Unsettled Rebecca Fairman – i-phone Madness Rebecca Fairman – Telling Tales Sandra Crisp – Tales from the City ( 1 minute)| Bada Song – SEND-IT Richard Miller – Scratch
Photo credit: Shortwave Cinema, Bermondsey
Art Trail Details: 11am – 5pm Saturday 12th July (free) Saturday 12 July Meeting point : The Horse Shoe Inn 26 Melior Street, SE1 3QP (4 mins walk from London Bridge Station)
Tour 1 @ 11.00 am Tour 2 @ 12.30 am
Pick up a free large scale map at London Bridge Customer Service desk next to
the Rail ticket office or from the guides at the meeting point. Or HERE
Delighted to be invited to contribute, alongside many other other artists to two of Sumi Perera‘s great collaborative print-based installation projects including ‘Collaborative Universal Artist Book Scroll’.
Universal Artist Book Scroll A tribute to James Joyce & his collaborators by Sumi Perera & Company SuperPress Editions
I had fun creating my contribution or ‘block’ for the project which had to completed quite rapidly by return of post to be included in a forthcoming exhibition in Cyprus…
The project will be installed at:
Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios Mansion, Nicosia, Cyprus 16th May-28th June 2014.
My mini-contribution can be seen in the photos below surrounded by various research sketches and scribblings in the form of digital drawings:
Sandra Crisp: Collage for ‘Collaborative Universal Artist Book Scroll’ project by Sumi Perera. Collage & inkjet on on colour montype using rubber stamps and collage derived from vector drawings Collage on on colour montype using rubber stamps, inkjet and collage, Surrounded by digital vector drawings. Photo credit: Sumi Perera Collage on on colour montype using rubber stamps and collage derived from vector drawings
UPDATE: Universal Artist’s Book Scroll (detail) by Sumi Perera RE ( exhibited at LOOP, Bankside Gallery, London
UPDATE: Thought I’d add this image which is a new collaboartive project by Sumi – Paper-cut over etching, utlising printouts of 3d models created for video ‘Tales From the City (1 minute)’
In 2013, I was deighted to receive the Printmaking Today award at Print International exhibition, Oriel Wrecsam, N Wales.
The award included an editorial on my large format digital prints entitled Manipulating the Media, as part of the Artist’s Eye feature of the magazine which was published in Spring 2014 issue of Printmaking Today.
This following post attempts to reveal the multiple layers of research embedded within a particular artwork – A 2013 Video work entitledTales From the City (1 minute)
Tales From the City (1 minute) is made up from many different visuals and interconnected strands used to layer, collage and filter memories of the contemporary city both through reality and the imagination.
Underlying themes embedded within the final work and notes about experimental digital processes are recorded here in the form of a digital sketchbook. However, the purpose is to illuminate my practice rather than explain the work as this must function as a self-contained artwork alongside the briefest synopsis.
Whilst work is in progress each visual graphic, photo, audio-clip or map fragment holds personal significance leading me through the process of making. But once the work is complete, only glimpses of these fragments and their origins remain. This post is an attempt to rewind and unravel some of the concepts and processes behind the work.
Drawings and Notes
I currently now work almost exclusively as an on-screen digital artist and no longer keep a ‘proper’ sketchbook in order to work through ideas.
However, occasionally I do make sketches
Sandra Crisp – (Left) ‘Telerings’ – A drawing made developing 3d models in a previous video entitled ‘Oceanics’. Pencil drawing in an old diary (Right) Three video stills from ‘Oceanics’ show the same stacked cylindrical structure recreated as 3D models in Maya and textured-mapped with borrowed media visuals. These ‘Telelrings’ are loosely based upon found diagrams showing the inner workings of an orbiting space satellite. I became fascinated by this large -array telescope which collects huge amounts of data and runs in the background hidden from view so that we aren’t aware of it’s complex processes.
However, most of the time I don’t create pencil drawings towards video projects instead preferring the spontaneity and risk involved in drawing and evolving new forms, and ideas directly on the screen.
More often than not, my visual ramblings appear more like these two pages below
Below, another pencil drawing for Tales From the city (1 minute)
Sandra Crisp – (Left) Drawing, pencil on paper. (Right) Labyrinthine 3D model created in SketchUp free architectural modelling software. The second city scene in ‘Tales From the City (1 minute)’ incorporates a journey where 3d cameras move through a segment of this model. The original drawing is based upon the rooftop view of an unusually organic local building viewed via Google Earth. The G Earth image was rather distorted and fuzzy and visual information missing – This loss of detail has been translated into the drawing. The imprecise nature of the G Earth image encouraged me to improvise and transform the structure into something entirely new and quite surreal. I enjoy using technologies such as G Earth and Streetview as they are contemporary processes that reveal the world to us in new ways. We can access the information almost instantly in virtual space
Collage & Texture Mapping
Tales from the City (1 minute) continues my interest in how collage may be reconsidered in terms of new digital media’. With this video and several previous works such as Oceanics I’m using 3D modelling to reinterpet previous layering/ collage approaches used in my large format digital prints such as Memory Surface series, for example. Creating 3D sculptural assemblages that are rotate-able in the space behind the monitor screen.
As in previous videos, models within this video have many different facets and use a technique called ‘texture mapping’ where surfaces may have visuals pinned to them. For texture mapping, I use a vast array of visual material culled from many diverse sources including on-the-fly camera-phone photos rapidly shot whilst walking through the city or borrowed online maps, such as Google Earth and Street View. I also download online visuals that are the results of specific searches connected to work-in-progress ideas and concepts. I often use alpha transparency to evoke a sense of memory in these structures, as if the visuals have attached themselves to surfaces over time.
Although I’d been experimenting with texture mapping for some time in previous works, for this work I reconsidered the different facets and transparent image-surfaces as memory-membranes: Forming a kaleidoscope of continually altering visuals that recall the city in a tumbling time-based stream-of-consciousness.
The video begins with the camera rapidly descending into a cluster of multi-coloured models depicting a futuristic and anonymous looking city space. This could be any 21st Century city site but the models are actually based upon Canary Wharf, London, UK.
I used Google Street View map elevations of the area to construct the models. The flattened perspective of the aerial maps acting as a guide to trace out and then elevate the various rectangular structures. The tower block surfaces are textured mapped with visuals of nearby and much older residential Poplar housing estate that exists in the shadow of these wind-swept, glass and steel towering structures. I was thinking about the shift between old and new buildings existing cheek-by-jowl in the city.
Then, as the sequence proceeds, a small rectangular graphic in rapid motion beginning at the bottom left corner of the video frame pops-up and sweeps the viewer into the next contrasting subterranean-like scene – This flickering mini-video thumbnail depicts Street View captured in the moment when the viewer pushes through the virtual streets using a mouse within the browser window.
I am fascinated by Street View’s illusion of reality which is seductive and convincing until a glitch or error in the the seamless panoptical view occurs by way of a blurred-out road, gap between structures or a mis-matched building reminds us that this is really a kind of virtual collage put together by code and algorithms seeming to portray real- World reality.
Two examples of glitches in the Street View process – Errors in the usually seamless panoptical view presented by Google Street View where visual information is mismatched or blurred.
The Heygate Estate Sequence
Work on Tales from the City (1 minute) originally began after a visit to the soon-to- be-demolished Heygate housing estate in Elephant and Castle, Wandsworth, London. The estate was home to more than 3,000 people but only a few of the residents now remain. I spent a sunny afternoon in October 2012 meandering around the estate with it’s striking Brutalist buildings, furniture discarded outdoors, boarded up windows and barricaded elevated walkways all pointing towards the Heygate’s imminent demise.
I expected to find a foreboding place but discovered activities taking place such as Parkour in a clearing beneath a dense canopy of old trees and a lush community garden with it’s own irrigation supply, endless wall paintings saturated the walls.
Heygate Estate
I was fascinated by the cycle of decay accelerated due to the relocation of many of the previous tenants. The photos taken on that day were eventually used in the 2nd subterranean sequence to texture map the labyrinthine 3D model.
Sandra Crisp – Use of Heygate Estate photos for texture-mapped surfaces in the subterranean sequence. Here, featuring work artists from the Elephest festival that was scheduled at the same time of my visit. 1) Articles of clothing attached to a long washing line placed there by one of the artists marking the estate’s entrance 2) Hand-made paper-making underneath the concrete walkways 3) Nadia Berris ‘The Last Waltz’ performance, where the public danced on the crumbling tarmac of the five-aside football pitch
At the time of my visit in October 2012, the Elephest festival was also in full flow and various artist’s site-specific installations added an extra layer of interest to the estate. These artworks were also incorporated into the video
Shortly after my visit I discovered Anna Minton’s book and great page-turner Ground Control ‘Fear and Control In The Twenty First Century’which is an illuminating and impassioned account of contemporary urban gentrification and loss of personal, and psychological space in 21st Century UK cities – A critique of heavily surveilled, squeaky clean and ordered new city spaces such as Canary Wharf, and Liverpool One.
The book confirmed my own negative perception of over-large oppressive and depersonalised shopping malls that lack the lively/ human cacophony of noise and activity present in the irregular networks of open-air, ground-level city streets. Such ideas eventually permeated the video by way of the contrasting upper and lower-level structures/ spaces and the juxtaposition of organic/ geometric forms and austere/ bustling spaces.
Making the Models| SketchUp experiments| Process| Low-tech
Tales from the City (1 minute) is also a result of experimenting with a free 3D modelling program called SketchUp for the first time. This software is designed so that anyone who is not an expert or CAD trained designer may make detailed models of real-world building or objects.
SketchUp Make (The free version that I use) is not able to render high resolution video frames as Autodesk’s Maya which I used for Oceanics, for example. The animated output option is not really designed for artist’s video, more as a quick and dirty visual tool for architects and planners so the result is thinner colour and less dense contrasting tone. However, I do really enjoy the challenge of co-opting free software such as this and adapting it for my own practice. My approach is to avoid using the software in the more prescriptive ways and pre-set tools in favour of finding and exploring small corners of the software in which to work. Using a rather go-against-the-grain approach in relation to what the software is supposed to do. Using SU to create intuitive, abstract and organic models texture-mapped with collage-based visuals.
Unfamiliarity with new digital process at the start of a project is an advantage as I then avoid the repetitive pitfalls of becoming a technical expert in specific software packages, therefore my practice remains stubbornly low-tech to keep the focus on experimentation and serendipity.
I have always taken the approach of being consistently perfection-adverse in all chosen media including previous printmaking where I exploited the unpredictability of chemical lithography or etching to alter and layer found photographic imagery.
Of course, the drawback to taking such a fly- into-the-unknown software approach is that it can take a long time to find that relevant small corner and many rejected test pieces occur that remain unused! Also, ideas tend to arise as projects progress via ‘thinking through process’ rather than starting at any precise starting point, although I do frequently revisit themes such as the urban environment or today’s media saturation.
SU, originally owned by Google then Trimble, encouraged 3D model production by the public in order to populate Google maps in the form of crowd sourcing – Indeed a pretty clever way for Google to populate their online map apps for free.
Google held a yearly “Model Your Town” competition. These promotions certainly have added to the amount of 3D data in Google Earth, but the world is a big place and it would likely take centuries of such projects before the data was collected in one country, let alone the world.
As a result of the past connection to Google, the current version of SU still has a very useful tool via a pop-up window that can connect with and download images directly from Street View without leaving the actual program window. A feature that I happily used to directly grab Earth visuals and attach them to the surfaces of models.
Creating a Model
SU is really quite user-friendly even for beginners to make basic geometric models onscreen, facets can be grabbed and extruded using a ‘push/pull’ tool (See diagram below)
Sandra Crisp: Using SketchUp’s ‘Push/Pull’ tool to elevate and transform flat surfaces into 3D objects. This model, which appearsd in final scene 2 ( see top left hand corner of the diagram) is based on **Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion world map projection.
Eventually I found a way to sketch out more fluid line drawings and forms, still using a mouse to draw with but this time using a freehand draw tool in the software’s menu. This allowed for 3D models that are much more intuitive, unpredictable and organic such as the subterranean sequence in the video.
When I first started wroking with SU and experiments progressed with model making, and texture-mapping I discovered that a camera could be ‘taken for a walk’ around these virtual models to form an animated sequence viewable in SU. Then, I eventually figuring out a way to export these sequences to Quick Time or TARGA image-sequence files and reassemble them in video editing software, such as After Effects to produce the final video.
I always start new work in the same position of anxiety thinking that I should know exactly where I am going. However, aside from vague starting points and intentions on the peripheries of mind, I never do – Work has to evolve gradually through process resulting in a convergence of many different elements over time.
By shifting visuals from physical reality ‘out there’ (in the form of the Heygate photos for example) into digital space and transforming online Street View maps, and drawings of Google Earth into digital models – I am interested in exploring how digital tools may be used to filter reality through memory and the imagination, and how these new online spaces are continually forming new realities.
