Troy de la Fosse: Letting the Splashes Work for You: Misprint as Method
This seminar presents practice led research that reframes 3D printing ‘failures’ as conceptually and politically generative artefacts. It draws directly from Chapter 4 of my thesis. Using situated action (Suchman), contingency and redescription (Rorty), correspondence in making (formerly linked to Ingold) and agential realism (Barad), I argue that misprints are not defects against an ideal plan but co-authored events in which human, machine and material negotiate outcome. Working with an archive of rescued misprints, including a formative mug example, I outline five descriptive categories: collapses, ghost trails, blooms, precision ‘failures’ and hybrids. These categories show how breakdowns record labour, friction and temporal process that standard accounts of digital seamlessness often erase. Parallels with Eva Hesse’s materially unstable sculpture and Jackson Pollock’s embrace of accident foreground an aesthetics of gesture and improvisation that privileges attentiveness over control. Methodologically, the project advances practice led listening: writing with the misprint to keep interpretation open and to resist premature closure. The seminar makes the case that attention to ‘failure’ discloses the politics of production, rendering visible care, effort and the limits of automation, and proposes the postdesign object as a lens for understanding emergent form beyond intention.
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, L. (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frieda Gerhardt: Towards ‘the Act of Filming‘
As I laid out in the previous seminar, revisiting film philosophy / theory, especially that centring around “sensory” aspects of the image, has allowed me to reexamine and refine my own personal practice. In this exploration I found a lack of attention to the actual filmmaking, besides literature about technical production aspects from an industry point of view. However, if the image is to have a sensorily evocative effect on the viewer, then why shouldn’t the capturing of the image be investigated for these aspects just as well. This is also part of my personal realisation, that the main part of the filmmaking process I am interested in is the “act of filming”. So, following my literature review that goes along with visual analysis and the establishment of a glossary of sensory film techniques, I have turned to investigating the sensory aspect and physicality of the act of filming itself. That is, the connection with the camera, the human quality of production and its visibility within the images themselves, such as breath, handheld movement, or imperfection and interference.
Because I am also interested in how experimental (or non-normative) filmmaking and the techniques I laid out in my glossary can be used to explore ways of being and experiencing the world that are not only highly subjective but might be classed as “non-normative” or “atypical”, I also need to acknowledge the restrictions of the apparatus and the possibility of the camera’s lens as an enforcing tool of an ocular norm that always also affects what and how can be filmed. Though this seems largely inescapable, many artists and activists have come up with ideas to circumvent this, for instance by rejecting best-practice and traditions of the industry or going as far as to interfere with, edit, and even “deface” or “destroy” the lens of the camera.
My method has largely entailed handheld long shots and macro-photography, that embrace the shakiness of my arms in response to the weight of the camera, as well as the breath and the movement of my body, into which the camera has come to be absorbed much like a limbic extension. The idea here is that by allowing these human factors to become visible in the footage, the apparatus is made a part of the process, rather than a “neutral” or “invisible” recording device that has no stake in the image. Instead, its existence and all the complications that entails, are acknowledged. This in theory, might help to take away some of the power the apparatus is often given through its ominous invisibility and the unquestioned acceptance thereof.
Vagab(o/u)nds Research 