Sissu Tarka at digital surface

Specific issues to the new piece of work

Barbara Rauch

1. At what point in the development of the work is the size of the image fixed? We could discuss here probably the size of the monitor. This kind of decisions you have to make towards the final work.

Sissu Tarka

The installation is variable in terms of dimensions, depending on the space, technical equipment and available budget for MDF panels. When has this decision become clear? Because of the nature of the animation, which initially consisted of animating approx. 5000 tiny bits of the image (each flip card of the card turners), and the delicate erasure of an image within the image, the logical conclusion to present the movie was on a fairly tiny screen to maintain a reasonably ‘good’ image: high resolution, no pixelation, no fuzz. After shifting working processes due to lack of time and limits of technology, and the occurring conceptual shifts, the work as it was shown at the ICA and Camberwell College of Arts has the capacity to be screened on a large monitor, even as a projection. Indeed, the desired screening format now is a large data-projection supported, surrounded by the wooden construction. Alternatively, the work works on a rather tiny screen, then it expresses a model character.

The scale of the work in relation to the viewer is therefore: an experience where the viewer/audience is watching the movie in a scenario similar to the real event, or to look at a construction/model type thing.

I remember a moment where even the ratio of the image needed to be discussed. Since we had to think about the format of the animation towards the final piece, this was crucial in terms of the image size and proportion. You tried to respond in a theoretical way, when you said it should be a computer animation rather than a video.

Yes, I think there were some misunderstandings during the work process, probably in communication, of what I want, what I can imagine, and what was possible in terms of monitor and players. At the end I was quite easy with it and thought let’s just do it and screen it. But then, I am still not sure.

I think the question of the choice of monitor came in when we were discussing presenting early video works on computer monitors and what kind of effect this has on the work of art. This is also because your images refer to the TV monitor when you introduce the flickering of the old TV monitor. That is why it was important to get this right. If you are referring back to an earlier technology, how do you want that concept to be presented?

It is a statement.

But maybe it is not as important to you, as I thought at the beginning of the collaboration. The solution at the end was that the monitor that we bought for your work would play from a DVD player and also from a computer. And we decided to not show it in a box monitor but flat screen, slick one could say.

Which I still don’t like, I still don’t agree with it. On the other hand, very often I am easy with the format, I don’t want to fetishize technology. But in terms of economies, I would not want the work on a super-expensive screen. This is another, more important dimension. Maybe it would best work as a projection. I am not totally sure.

2. At what point is the actual surface considered? That is if you were going for a projection as an alternative solution of presentation.

First thought: at the moment of realising that there is a very painterly consideration and treatment of the image? There was a moment during the working process where I started to think about painterly elements intrinsic to the piece. This had to do with the actual image that consisted of a mass of painted flip cards. There was a moment of the issue of surface that came completely from the image itself, and this was interesting. Of course in discussions we talked about this, but for me this was a moment that was interesting.

Would you have considered altering the look of the images that you had chosen?

If you don’t need to, don’t do it.

3. What factors determine the choice or creation of the surface in this new work?

There were two such factors: the research brief (the external factor), which determines a lot in a way, mostly at the beginning; together with the nature of the work and its conceptual underpinnings (the internal factor). And the work itself, its time.

But then I would add all the aspects of the installation with the painted boards. These were physical surfaces, and platforms that you introduced, having a say outside of the screen. You created surfaces that surrounded the painting on the screen. The colour palette was interesting as well. All together you always stressed that this is a work in progress, it is a very important aspect of your work. You did not present the monitor on the wall, for example, but you had a construction of surfaces that held your digital images.

Maybe it is to look aside the surface as in urban space – I mentioned this earlier on. I work a lot with architectural stuff, in a more oblique way, but it is always there as an element. Agency and action, strategic walking and territorial sites in crowded and vast places, interest me.

In another work, the book project, I talk about the surface of theory. There is always another dimension of surface, it can be the multiple surface of culture. That can take many forms.BR

Can I ask about the personalised surface. What does that mean to you?

We talked about this before. It is a deviation probably. Again, maybe it is like the analogue/digital, the idea about something personalised is already informed by the common, or the general. (We definitely talked about it during the ICA interview). It is the non-personalised, this otherness, that comes in – which is an interesting structure.

4. How does working digitally contrast with other practices that have used? I think you covered this recently when you discussed your work as not being technology driven. Your work doesn’t begin with the technology consideration. How do the drawings you currently do differ as works where you need to involve programming? Here you become more or less dependent of the programmer.

Exactly, it goes further back. I don’t think in terms of the digital as a contrast anyway. The (colour pencil) drawings are more direct and the work is infinite. They are basic A 4 drawings, but there are problems with basic issues as well, for example the light in the studio needs to be right. In my basement flat where I also work, most of the day there is no light. Not enough light. I cannot use artificial light. This is for example a major difference. In practical terms it is so much easier to work with the computer as it has its own light.

Thank you very much!

PART 2

Barbara Rauch

1. Brief outline of the artist’s practice. Where do you position yourself? I refer here to a recent discussion we had where you said that practice is not only practice in the sense of “making”. You allow the practitioner to also engage in theoretical aspects of the making. Or perhaps you even don’t make the differentiation between a theoretician and a practitioner in your particular case.

Sissu Tarka

This “practice” is complex. Besides producing or making it probably has to do with consumption, and consequently modes of translating etc. On the one hand I read highly theoretical stuff, and comics, on the other hand there is visual input, and discursive elements that feed into whatever I assemble and accumulate, and then I am a practitioner in the more traditional sense of making work. When I create I would describe it as a practice of using particular material – in its widest sense – relevant to me in a specific moment, and this is not as ‘a cultural producer’ but as someone that carries out an activity, enacts sensibilities and uses perceptual tools – it expands into the everyday. So the work (also related to labour) happens on different levels.

And where would you position your artwork contextually? Would that be within animation, or installation, or perhaps within performance?

It is interesting because it seems a fairly chaotic thing, it is many things, disparate, not un-ordered but a constant re-assemblage; in some ways perhaps comparable to Maya Deren’s approach to her work organised as an “anagramatic complex”. It is not a question of medium-specificity. Recently I had to write a short biography, and I thought I’d go back and look at what I had written some time ago. Now I have to revise that, but how can I describe what I am doing just right now. It is difficult to find the language and a few words to appropriately provide some kind of clear image of what you do in this present moment. At that point it is important to think about the conceptual underpinnings as there is a continuum. What I am interested in has probably to do with certain sites that are temporarily politicised and how forms of resistance and ruptures can take place. I am interested in concepts of the imaginary, how work allows that to happen, in what way the imaginary is or can be linked to the political. Maybe this is where animation and the drawn line become quite a focus. Further, there is the theme of construction and the non-economical, that fascinates me.

One of the core dynamics integral to my practice is certainly the ‘liminal’, to address and include or even exploit the ‘liminal’ in the work, and to think how it can be a force in small interventions and the everyday. Then, how do we work with certain systems, either personal systems, micro- systems or bigger systems, and their linkages. How do we simultaneously inform and deal with certain systems, that is one of the questions underlying my practice. And this is on a formal and an everyday level.

In a way, you position yourself much broader in cultural, socio-political environments, rather than in the visual arts.

It is difficult to describe, maybe if we use a word like agency, or activism (- I am not an activist but I have this fantasy of being one, at some point -), then these forms of practice or positions do not identify ‘visual arts’ as being separate from the political for instance. This is not new considering art movements in the 60s or 70s for example, but now it has other dimensions, there are other economies at play. There is something that interests me in that position of an agent or equally of the non-agent (Jacques Rancière’s notion around having a voice, having no voice, around his thinking of the distribution of the sensible). But even if we look at Dan Graham’s early “works for magazines”, in particular the two-pages photo-text layout “Homes for America”, first published 1966 in ARTS MAGAZINE, where the socio-political is intrinsically bound with a ‘visibility’, a visible grid, where there is an image that means information and is repeatable in different ways, in different contexts; it seems that the artist here detaches himself from the work and simultaneously points to the image’s original source. This is a zone where one operates as ‘detached’ artist. Not sure. In present terms and in relation to what I described earlier, practice as model making?!

To increase the complexity of a practice, there are activities alongside my own creative work. In collaborations with Colm Lally the focus is on exploring event structures in contemporary practices, where the event shapes our understanding of a site, the artistic inter-vention, and social processes. Our work is an experiment and it adapts a dialogical structure during the creation of artistic encounters.

2. Brief explanation of working process.

When I received the questions and I tried to write down, identify and possibly analyse the working processes and methods I use, it immediately became a question of the way the conceptual and technical processes are interweaved and relational. What informs what, and what comes next, and what runs throughout but transforms. One could consider the process as a parallel, as opposed to a synthesis, of conceptual and technical processes – with detours because of limits embedded in technology for example.

Yes, in your case it was a parallel process. I would encourage you to reveal the way in which you have tackled the problems with the work. There was a constant change and development of the work, bringing new ideas in, looking for new solutions.

For me it was the first time that it happened in this amount of having to change conceptually until the work was at a state of being presented. Maybe this elasticity had to do with the openness on both sides, on yours, the curatorial side, as well as mine. What is its risk?

But would you call it compromising?

No, it is not a compromise. I wouldn’t do a compromise. It is rather a re-thinking. A work and an idea of a work have lots of possibilities/potentials and you can go in all different directions in a work like this animation. I mean, I do drawings, and there is a concept and I follow the concept, there is no way out. It will look the way I anticipated, and the ‘strict’ drawings are also precisely about that. But I think for the work mmicrocosm, there was a clear idea, but, paradoxically, it was at the same time fairly rough. And both projects I would consider as conceptual works. . .

Yes, in this unusual approach in asking about the personalised surface, this is probably not a question that you would confront yourself with as a major concern. But because the work is within this context of the surface, we were reminded regularly to think about the format and form of presentation that the work will find: is the data projected, or what kind of screen will we be using for the final piece. Did this disturb you? Your solution would probably have been to sort the final screening much later. Am I right in assuming this?

The format of presentation was definitely a question. I think it came up somewhere where I talked about it before, there are factors. . . See question 2.3 below!

External factor: the brief.

Internal factors: other list.

The working process, LIST:

a) identifying relevant lines of thought embodied in previous animation work and what the new work takes as its starting point: MICHELIN tyre man, economies.

b) question of how to incorporate the political

c) re-working written concepts after discussing copyright issues etc.

c) image search online

d) testing possibilities of animation (Flash/Aftereffects); shift from the idea of working with free software to corporate software because of time-limit and working with programmer Ray Barker)

e) screenwork demanding its ‘frame’, setting, props. Leads to the design of ‘exhibition architecture’. Model. The Model as most appropriate tool/device.

f) invest in methodology of the imaginary

I know in some of your previous works you have also responded to briefs that were proposed to you with strong and interesting results of yours. I see this as one of your strengths to work site specific and context driven. You don’t seem to lose your identity with this process, but find a personal response to a given situation/ an environment.

The theme of the surface was interesting because this was a big theme for me during my PhD research. The surface was a core element of/within my main question, it was about the image and surface in relation to animation, precisely: “how does computer-aided art (animation, video and interactive installation) address the connection between surface and image, particularly when digital manipulation is used to consistently postpone a totalising view of the image?” Perhaps now, I wouldn’t talk about the surface as such because I worked through it and there are other, more important issues, that I wish to bring to the foreground. In this sense the surface is now, in a Bergsonian understanding, virtual, not actualised, but there.

Also, in our brief we talk in fact more about the printed surface. While I thought it would be important to bring you in with your knowledge on the screen surface, the broken screen, or the disrupted screen. Flicker for example you discussed in a text where you explained the disturbances on the screen. I really thought this would bring an important aspect to our debate; printed surfaces for me are beyond the print on paper.

Thinking about the digital screen or surface, I go back a little bit to describe how I understood and developed it. I talked about the surface as open surface. This has to do with ideas about multiplicities and the actualisation of the image. When you have a certain surface as a top layer of something, some kind of depth, and the image comes up, breaks through, then it moves from its virtual to its actual state. This surface is receptive, and with this concept of actualisation and virtualisation, I would claim that it is very different to the printed surface. Maybe it is a question of where the potential lies, the potential for ANY image to emerge or appear. With the printed surface this pontential is embodied only very early on, but then, there is rigidity. It is more of a fixed set, materially and conceptually. Hm. Although artists like Richard Hamilton probably followed a different concept – when the printed surface amalgamates with a painted surface for example. Other situation.

Yes, I worked with the screen as a skin in Wicked, and made the screen split in a cartoony way in Splitter.

With that you probably answered aspects of the third question:

3. Relationship of digital technology to other processes/technologies. I think in your work it is more specifically on the digital screen and programming.

Im not so keen on using the word technology so much. My work in general is not technology driven. Incorporating the digital emerges from my interest in today’s experiences of the everyday, sociopolitical space, and its images. The everyday is always informed by the digital (digital sensibility), and vice versa, at least in our present forms of experience. Even if I make an analogue drawing it is informed by the digital in the way that my experience of the image, or the (colour pencil) line, is necessarily affected by the digital. This doubleness occurs in the act of looking, we are used to looking at digital images, and we cannot say that something is a purely analogue thing. And what’s important is that I don’t think that that is the question anyway. Of interest to me is the idea of analogue processing, Brian Massumi’s discussion on that. There are these “analogic processes” that transform some material qualitatively, make a code legible, whether it is digital or not. The code/material is transformed in the moment of reading or listening, for example. It is a question in relation to our body making possible that we see, understand something, experience sensation to be more precise. I quite like this idea of analogue in that sense. Massumi talks about the body as the “sensor of change”.

Which text do you refer to?

It’s some paragraphs in chapter 5, ‘On the Superiority of the Analog’, in Massumi’s book Parables for the Virtual.

And also, the term technology involves so many different occurrences, for example writing is a technology, light is technology, it is broad, a vast field.

Yes, we always need to think about how far back do we want to go with our discussion, as any tool or support structure is a technology. If it is a new technology, it always depends on where you come in.

Yes, I like the phrase support structure, it is the in-between and that which holds it, triggers it and makes an idea and a work also possible, it provides the support and structure for something (an event?) to happen. Simultaneously, the idea of our access, and point of entrance and exit, is absolutely relevant, it is key and nonetheless the often over-looked aspect in any conversation, and communication about works or histories of art.

4. Indication of how you regard the surface in terms of importance. I think I would find it interesting to hear you elaborate on how this piece of research has changed your understanding of surface.

A few key things I like to say are important in my work now and probably I wouldn’t mention surface as one of them – as I said before. But my answer has to be more chronological: eight years ago, when I started with my PhD research, surface was a question that was not yet explored widely. At that point I started making work with the computer, small, insignificant experiments. There was some newness about the surface/screen at that time. Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media was published in 2001, all the questions of the computer screen as picture plane, or not. . . The digital in relation to analogue work, i.e. painting.

Some years ago I had a problem when thinking about flatness, today I am quite interested in flatness, not the superflat, like the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami – more the flatness of maps, a sort of abstracted flat. I am interested in it as a concept without returning to the picture plane which is a Western concept. Also, I never really thought of working with the virtual world understood as a parallel universe intimately linked to the non-virtual, I am definitely not interested in that. But sometimes, if I can’t deal with a problem, I imagine myself as a drawing, as an outline, therefore flat in the world. I make an image of myself within the world, and that makes it possible to deal with difficulties. (laughs). It is cartoon-like almost. There is some acknowledgment of the flatness. The idea of the image as such is an issue, which is also like a surface, non-representational, flat. This becoming drawing then might refer to the de- and re-personalised.

What else:

In my current drawings the material surface is A4 paper, tracing paper.

Looking aside the surface in urban space. Spatial constructions – without ‘surface’. Design interests me, or for example Liam Gillick’s treatment of screens, panels, and mediation.

Exchangeable surface, e.g. speech bubbles and erasing/replacing content.

Book cover project on “Surface of Theories”.

(Description: 100 best of (pencil drawings on tracing paper). 100 top cultural readers from the past 10 years are assembled. Their covers, “surfaces of theories”, are extracted – becoming drawings. I extract the primary surfaces and make them into secondary or third surfaces. This is a reduction in terms of the thickness of theory, the thickness of thought, and the thickness of culture. The marginal readers, whatever they are, remain invisible, secret, fleeting, interesting, neither superficial nor thick.

Information on new piece of work

1. Title of finished artwork

mmicrocosm

2. Size in cms of finished artwork

dimensions variable

3. Process/ steps

First concepts

Discussions

Second concepts

A series of photographs in situ (MICHELIN – tyre man)

Third concepts

Discussions with curators and subsequent selection of particular concept

Image search online

Selection of most appropriate image for digital animation

Searching images for replacing existing image within the image (includes taking more photographs e.g. of toy cars in toy car shop)

Animation programming tests with Ray Barker

Manipulation of a number of selected images in Photoshop with support by Keir Williams

Discussions (conceptual, technical) and more tests with Ray Barker

Negotiating the structure of the movie, how to use and transform a technological limit into a “new”, workable movie

Search for video disturbance to be appropriated for new movie

Try analogue (video tape) and digital types (e.g. After Effects plug-ins), effects unsuccessful

Create disturbance in Photoshop to achieve best results of video error (still too smooth. I think)

Creating major movement of the animation which consists of the disturbance (the lines that continuously run from bottom to the top of the screen)

Adjust right speed (simulating analogue disturbance, visual reference: Joan Jonas Vertical Roll, 1972)

Incorporate additional images into the timeline considering the effect of random appearance of these images

Define time of movie as a whole

Play on selected monitor

In parallel to animation construct exhibition environment, appropriate furniture or props that situate the movie in a particular space/site (possible reference: OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) first constructivist exhibition, 1921; time-limit does not allow for such delicate construction > rethink!)

Decide on ‘doubles’ of original flip cards held by the card turners during mass performance, build panels, paint

ICA: place MDF panels and monitor

See how it all works within the context.

Think of how the work can/needs to be improved, failure of work?!

Addition:

No sketchbook used. Not many notes of thinking processes. Changes/adjustments made mostly after dialogues and over a period of intense email exchanges, discussions with curators, programmer, technicians, other collaborators.

4. Material

mixed media (digital animation; MDF panels; paint)