guessed guest writings

Guest writer Ami Ko has written a few posts for this site now, so I thought it was about time I fashioned some sort of response.

Let’s take this as an example:

明日私は朝5時に起きなければなりません。なぜなら、8時には東京・上野の美術館に行かなければならないからです。

もうすぐ、卒業の時期。我が女子美術大学も卒業展（五美術展）の準備にとりかかっています。私は出品しないのですが、手伝いとしていってきます。

明日早く起きれるか・・・心配� ！！

My first response to Ami’s posts is typically to copy and paste it straight into an online translation service such as babel fish.

In this case it returns something like this:

Tomorrow I must rise morning at 5 o’clock. Because, at 8 o’clock you must go into Tokyo & Ueno fine arts museum, because, is. Already immediately, time of graduation. Also our Women’s College of Fine Arts graduation spreading/displaying (five fine arts spreading/displaying) has started preparation. I do, being not to exhibit, but it keeps helping. … It is worry whether tomorrow to be quick happening it is cut off,!

This is OK to get some sort of overall impression of what the subject matter is, but I’m rapidly losing faith in these things for getting any sort of accurate meaning. Not too bad when it’s just a description of events, but things get messier when you’re dealing with people’s opinions!

Let’s get our hands dirty and try translating it for ourself….

First of all, what can I read without any dictionaries?

明日 [a day reference? It’s not today (今日), but it sort of half looks the same so I’d guess at tomorrow or yesterday]私は [talking about herself as the subject of the sentence] 朝5時に起きなければなりません [something’s been made a negative]。なぜなら、8時には東京 [I think this is Tokyo] ・上野の美 [art? the ‘bi’ in Joshibi 術館に行 [iku: to go?]かなければならないから [from or because]です [sort of “is”]。

もうすぐ、卒業の時期。我が女子美[Joshibi]術大学も卒業展（五美術展）の準備。私は [talking about herself as the subject of the sentence]出品しないのです [sort of “is”]が [“but” : the next part of the sentence might contrast against the first part]、手伝いとしていってきます。

明日 [it’s the day reference again, I’ve not seen any -した endings so let’s guess “tomorrow” rather than “yesterday”早く起きれるか・・・心配� ！！

Ha! Even though I’ve just run the text through babel fish, it’s amazing how little I retained of what I read. Babel fish already told me it was “tomorrow”, there was no need to guess!

I think that’s a part of the reason why I wanted to write this post: I think perhaps me having to translate Ami’s writings myself will force me to actually interact with them rather than just scan-reading an approximation and then moving on. I think if this collaboration is going to develop into anything more substantial it needs more engagement from me.

Here is my eventual translation:

Tomorrow morning I must get up at 5 o’clock. The reason being that I must be at Tokyo and Ueno Art museum for 8 o’clock.

Graduation time is very soon. Preparation has started for our Joshibi graduation exhibition (5 art schools exhibition). I’m assisiting because I myself am not exhibiting any work.

I have to get up soon… worried!

ARAKAWA.

日本は早朝から大騒ぎ

TOKYO

東京は雨。

最近は暖かかったのに、また冬の到来

明日。

明日私は朝5時に起きなければなりません。なぜなら、8時には東京・上野の美術館に行かなければならないからです。
もうすぐ、卒業の時期。我が女子美術大学も卒業展（五美術展）の準備にとりかかっています。私は出品しないのですが、手伝いとしていってきます。
明日早く起きれるか・・・心配� ！！

ami

This is AMI. 日本に住む、Nikkiの友達です。
今日は私が書き込みたいと思います！

日本。東京。雪はないけど今夜は冷えます。
私はオリンピックのスノーボードハーフパイプを見ながら興奮！
イギリスはオリンピックで盛り上がっているのでしょうか？？

ところで私は最近、金沢２１世紀美術館へ行ってきました。
英語でいうと、21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art,Kanazawaですね。
プールの作品が印象的。作品の規模と美術館空間がちょうどよく、見やすく、人にやさしいアート空間といった感じです。是非一度お越し下さい！

character sets: a tale of kanji and praseodymium

Last week I spent some time with a friend helping to get her website working more smoothly.

She hadn’t been aware there was any problems: sat in Tokyo, using a machine set with Japanese defaults, all the text on her site looked fine. Both the text in Japanese and the text in English:

Unfortunately, to me (sat in Birmingham with my machine set to rule-Britannia-there-couldn’t-possibly-be-anyone-speaking-any-other-language defaults, the pages looked like this:

A mixture of English and absolute garbage.

We tracked it down to a missing character set declaration and, with the addition of a simple line of code, I can see both types of text correctly now.

Great!

Ami’s website is here: www006.upp.so-net.ne.jp/AMIKO/. Most of the important pages have been fixed now. If you can’t see the Japanese script properly, at least now you know why!

Meanwhile…

I’d been asking around the Department for any posters that people could let me have.

I managed to get my hands on a couple of rejects. A few of the mistakes were fairly obvious, for example where the printer had jammed, however some were much more subtle.

Presumably the printing computer lacked the correct character set information to be able to display greek letters correctly. Thus, what we normally consider to be a fairly infallible discipline instead confessed its ignorance…

henohenomoheji

I don’t know if “henohenomohe” means anything. It sounds very strange even for us.
Machiko Kusahara

more here.

Made me think of faces I’ve seen made up of roman letters, but I can’t remember which blog I saw it on…

that bunako thing

Last time was the turn of that juggling thing. Now I’m looking at that bunako thing. Still thinking about this thing.

The Set Up:

I was placed with the wood group in the sculpture department of Joshibi.

I was there for half-a-dozen or so afternoons.

I was shown a few techniques for working with bunako and just sort of left to get on with it.

The Results:

I grappled with it for a bit and started by making a couple of basic bowl shapes. …so, then I had a couple of basic bowls. hmmmm.

I spent ages just staring at them trying to figure out where they could go.

Eventually I focused in on all the holes that had been generated where I hadn’t managed to keep enough tension as I added new strips of wood. That’s right: I had two fairly shoddily made basic bowls!

I decided that I would try and make something of a virtue out of these things that would otherwise be seen as flaws. I started by highlighting each of the holes first with a penciled cross, and then later with drawing pins.

In an effort to try and produce something more sculptural, I then drilled out the holes and made some metal darts to basically point at the holes and shout “MISTAKE HERE!”.

For the second of the bowls, I made bigger darts out of cold-forged steel.

… and that was pretty much all I had time for.

I played around a bit with darts-pointing-in and darts-pointing-out and looked at how that changed the feel of things. My next challenge was trying to get it all back to the UK in one piece.

Back in Blighty I ignored it all for a bit, but then picked it up again and started to think about how I could try and move it forward. Again. This time I realised there were more imperfections that I could highlight. I worked a mixture of graphite and beeswax into the ridges left by my lacklustre sanding so that I was left with intermittent concentric rings around the surface.

[mental note to self: next time don’t use graphite for this – it doesn’t stay put and everything turns a murky grey colour.]

Did It Work?

Yes and no.

The problem is they still look like bowls. They’re bowl-shaped, and they’re bowl-sized. Too domestic and not sculptural enough. I think it has to do with the materials as well.

I talked with people about maybe using synthetic materials for the darts. Brightly-coloured plastic or something. Trying to get away from the strong craft-related association of the wood and the forged steel. Trying to get away from the novelty fruit bowl effect.

In the end I decided that it was the bowlness – the shape – that I wanted to destroy. The (as yet unrealised) solution that I might try one day is to cast some super-large darts: darts so large that they almost completely consume the wooden fabric of the bowl. Darts so large that by the time you have mode the holes large enough to accommodate them, there is hardly any wood left.

Of course, now you lose the 1:1 relationship of darts to mistakes…

On the plus side, I liked the idea that it all came from: find a characteristic of the process and run with it.

that juggling thing

… thinking about the stuff I did at Joshibi, looking at what I think I achieved in light of this earlier post.

Remember, I was looking at the way I work and trying to apply that to the situation at Joshibi.

The Set Up:

The group had been asked to use the paper pulp in a more experimental way. At least I think that’s what they had been asked to do: certainly the pre-amble had included references to conceptual art.

I missed the first session because I was being taught a traditional technique by one of the other tutors. So, that left me one afternoon to get experimental in.

I made myself some small balls of soggy paper pulp and three simple rules:

1. I can juggle with the balls, but I am not allowed to move my feet.
2. If I drop a ball, then it stays where it lands.
3. See what evolves.

I moved outside to give myself plenty of space and worked on a tarpaulin so that the paper pulp could be used again – I planned to use a lot of pulp, but not to keep any of it beyond the experiment.

The Results:

Phase 1: Juggling by myself
I was stood in the middle of the tarpaulin and a ring was just starting to develop around my feet when I acquired an audience…

Phase 2: Teaching someone else to juggle
A difficult enough task as it is, but made more interesting through trying to communicate across languages…

Phase 3: Another participant
This time throwing the balls to each other across the tarpaulin. Two more zones start to develop.

Phase 4: Bedlam
By request, the rest of the group joined in. I couldn’t really formulate a strategy for this, so we just let people get on with it ’till we ran out of pulp.

Did It Work?

As a piece of work it doesn’t really stand as much more than a tentative experiment. Ideally I’d do away with that nasty blue plastic and use an obscene amount of paper pulp. I’d like to see it splatted all over and into the place where the event takes place and at least knee high. So much so that you’d really have to climb out of and over the stuff when you decided it was time to call it a day.

I hadn’t really bargained for the extent to which other people would want to get involved. Bringing in extra people raised interesting points about communication etc etc, but diluted the splat-pattern(s) starting to emerge. If this were to become a piece of work then I think it might be best to stick to one person in one location.

As for the way I was working, I really liked the set-up of defining the rules of the system and then leaving things to work themselves out. Emergent systems? Something to think about later. This methodology harks back to earlier work I have done and I think it could well be an interesting line of enquiry to follow up on.

Proposal

So, how would this become a piece of work?

Well, we’re gonna need one hell of a lot of paper pulp. [does it need to be paper?]

This will either need to be prepared in advance, or prepared in situ as the event unfolds. [ok, so I seem to be thinking of this in terms of a performance piece with the resulting splat-mountain acting as some sort of documentation.] If the balls are prepared in advance, how does this affect their splattability? If the balls are prepared in situ, we’re going to have to think about a support team and facilities. Hmmm, not necessarily a bad thing – might add to the spectacle!

Who would do the juggling? Surely more effective if the person doing the juggling can’t actually juggle?

In a public place, you could recruit someone who wants to learn to juggle: they are furnished with the pulp balls and the same rules as before:

1. They are not allowed to move their feet (except perhaps for toilet breaks).
2. If they drop a ball, then it stays where it lands.
3. See what evolves. It finishes once they have learned to juggle.

The splats become a record of their learning a new skill.

So, the recruit has learned their new skill and the splats have been splatted. What happens next? Are they left where they are [environmental implications?] or can the whole thing be dried out, picked up, and transported elsewhere?

It might be quite nice to have the event taking place near steps or something. Then, when the mass is lifted away, you are left with the negative space of the steps. Ha! A new way of casting!

Joshibi 1

So, I decided I needed to put the lid on, shake things up good and proper and then see what came out: I needed to scare myself a bit.

I went to Japan; I studied at Joshibi; I learned loads; had a great time and was not ready to come back home. It may not have turned out to have been that scary, but now I’ve had some distance, I’m starting to realise exactly how much it’s turned things upside down.

To borrow somebody else’s words, “watashi no sekai ga hirogaru”. My world has spread. And that’s probably a good thing.

I’ve been looking at things differently:

• Wandering around with a camera, wondering how to explain car boot sales.
• Actually appreciating [some of] the architecture of Birmingham.
• Oh yeah, and myself.

I’d been questioning the way I worked for a few months prior to going to Joshibi. I’d been doing the Professional Development sculpture course at Dudley, learning stone-carving, wood-carving, more welding, more ceramics and more casting – but not being quite sure how that was going to manifest itself in my work.

Then I had a bit of an early-hours-of-the-morning-eureka-moment. My best work wasn’t to do with what media I worked in, it was to do with the way I worked. Joshibi was a chance to try out a few hypotheses.

Rule #1: A clean canvas

Don’t take any materials/plans with me. Don’t resume any existing projects.

Rule #2: Learn new things

Well, it would be stupid not to.

Rule #3: It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

OK Pugh, think defining the rules of the system and then leaving the rest to chance. Think putting yourself in a situation and then documenting the results. Think that compulsively collecting random things is entirely justifiable behaviour.

Rule #4: Relish being illiterate.

‘Cos it’ll be different next time I’m here.

I’m going to leave it there for now and have a think about what the results were…