week 1 : notes
my first week of this course has been slowed by a mean flu I’ve caught a few days before the first session. the kind of mean flu that grows inside plastic tents, where some six million people drink beer and scream songs. if you don’t live like a hermit in those weeks it can get to you anywhere in the city.
it slowed me down in my physical art making as well, as the technique I currently like to use for my paintings can get quite exhausting. it’s a repetitive blending of chalks and solubles, nevertheless there is one painting that I need to get done before Thursday for the installment of an exhibition. so this painting has a chance of making it into the week 1 blog, or it will end up being squeezed into week 2. this is also a moment to practice being kind to myself.
as a less physical acitivity, I will start taking stock of words and photos I want to draw from for my project. as a next step in my process, I will map words from the glossary in photos from the stock.
at this early stage, I will simply take the words that I elaborated in my master thesis at TU Vienna. however, I will clear them of their categories that followed the chapters and thought process of my thesis. this is to free them from the structures of that finished project and make them more readily accessible for this project. I also want to re-think certain terms that I’ve used frequently, one of them being “element” with a less scientific term. as a first possible replacement the word “item” comes to mind. but I think, it will become more clear to me which terms I want to replace and which replacements make sense in my next step, the mapping. once I’ve defined the setting, I then like to dive into etymology and synonyms to define a term for my use.
the stock of photos will for now exclusively be photos of clouds. my stock of photos will expand to include other structures from nature in the future, next on my list would be water. what keeps me coming back to clouds is their capacity to hold shapes and forms you see elsewhere and their ephemeral nature. water has the capacity to mirror other shapes and forms and merge with them in the process. clouds and water embody what I described as the palpability of virtual space in my TU Vienna Master thesis. I therefore keep coming back to them as references and motifs to express what I wrote about visually.