Erica Tan : Artist Visit, Setting the Scene and Project description.
Sinopticon
I'm going to start by telling you a little bit about my practice.
I know a number of you here are going down the Film Arts route and I am aware that you are making work that I do not necessarily engage with. I do not consider myself a filmmaker. I am an artist that works with Moving Image. Lots of my work is not single screen, they are multi channel pieces shown within a gallery context.
If I do make single screen works, then I am all so thinking about the gallery audience. This isn't hard and fast, it's something that I found myself within and it is probably something that I want to challenge myself about in the future.
For the moment the next piece of work that I'm going to present to you is about making a piece of work for the gallery space. Possibly it is going to be a multi screen piece, or it may be a single screen piece.
I will now go through some work which will give you an idea as to how I use the image.
One of the last pieces that I made was a 13 DVD piece. It was called the Tin Tactical Impossibility of Approaching with a Pure Heart.
A lot of my work is made within a specific context so it is either the context of an exhibition that I'm going to be working with or as part of a commission. Or as in this case a two-month residency in Japan.
I went to Japan with very few ideas. I have a body of work that does explore issues around ideas of travel, translation, cultural difference. So I came with some of those ideas already. I ended up making this 13 screen DVD. I will show you how it was installed in the gallery.
I will show you how it was installed in the gallery. There are some LED signs, very small DVD players, three other screens that are placed in a portrait shape rather than a landscape shape, there is a projector, there are printed materials, an overhead projector There is a participatory element of the project where people came in and drew of Mount Fuji from their recollections or their imagination.
This all takes place within the one space. So it exists in the form of several different video works.
So that is one element, another element Made up of animation.
Basically it is animation made up of many layers of the drawings that people gave me while I was in Japan of what Mount Fuji looked like. So my research in Japan, my project, started to take shape around this idea of going to Mount Fuji, this iconic place that you see that represents Japan. But every time I actually went to try and see Mount Fuji I ended up with an image like this (foggy image). So I then went round and asked people for these drawings and I started to put together an image of a sort of collective idea of what Mount Fuji might look like.
When I left Japan in the aeroplane the last image that I saw was that I got a glimpse of Mount Fuji with the haze sitting around it and when I got home I found hundreds of images around Mount Fuji on the Internet, drawings, would block prints, geographical photographs, tourist photographs, and compiled them into a very quick stop frame animation there is a subliminal reading, you are left with an image of Mount Fuji. So this is what makes up that piece of work there lots of different elements.
One of the ways the West became knowledgeable about Japan was through was through wood block prints that were produced and sent out from Japan and there are some very iconic images of Mount Fuji from that. So lots of people from Japan who had never actually been to Mount Fuji were able to draw me images of what they thought it looked like and these images were very similar to the wood block prints. In a way I was interested in what we think Mount Fuji looks like even though we haven't been there.
So here is another piece of work. It is a single screen piece and was made from material I gathered during my residency two years previously which I didn't use at the time.
I was doing some research around ways in which China has been written about within academic texts. That it seems to provide a place beyond our imagining. So I took the texts from these key writers and I brought them together with the material that I had shot.
This was a piece that was made for the Singapore Bienale within an old court room. The way the installation worked I used 6 DVDs in different locations within the courtroom. One in the judges seat, in the witness box, the defendants and prosecutors and it included a sound installation. It was a site specific piece of work and worked only within the context of that space. But the material was generated from material that was generated from the Internet again and re-siting a puppet of myself within the shots. A lot of the material was around the singing of the national anthems, about the process of singing oneself into a nation. I re-filmed myself within those clips.
This is from a piece of work called Persistent Visions.
It is made entirely from super eight and 16mm film archival material that was held in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. I was given the opportunity to go into the archive and have a look at the material there and I decided very rapidly that I wanted to use the material that was considered amateurish, much more personal material. Most of this material was un edited and the way in which it sits in the archive is that literally it is material that people have donated. It won't be chronological, you won't know where the material was shot, South Africa or Malaysia. It is really difficult to know where you are and when this was taken and who was taking it.
I was really interested about the process of what someone does when they see archival material and how they work with it, think about it. So that was the source material and then the eventual exhibition has been primarily been shown as a three screen installation with no sound, no voice-over. There is nothing that tells you what to think about the images or indicate to you where you are or what you are looking at. You as a spectator have to bring that to the material.
There is also a version where I show the three channels in a single screening which have either had live music performed to it or use a live my so that the audience is encouraged to do the voice-over.
It is silent and it is made in four parts, each part is 3 to 4 minutes long. It is structured, there is a lot of thought going into the development of the piece but initially it is difficult to discern that without seeing them all together.
The next piece of work I want to show was a project, again, for the Singapore Bienale alongside the courthouse and was cited in this old army barracks. It was a tiny black hut which was 8' x 4". It's really difficult to understand what the hut might have really been used for. So I completely blanked it out and I was really interested in the view out of the window and I wanted to try and find a way of manipulating the view. So I thought around all different sorts of ways it could be done. I eventually came up with the idea of making an animation of the view which included other people's artwork in the exhibition for example outside the window there was a wrapped tree.
All of that was included in the video animation.
When you go into the hut it is completely dark and when your eyes adjust you start seeing the image coming from the outside in a kind of camera obscure way. The idea is that you are getting a direct replay from outside. Instead of the real image of the view it actually played off of two television screens. So what you end up seeing is a very, very, very faint image. There is the view on the bottom right and the manipulated view. The actual thing that you would see is really dependent on your eyesight and ability to stay in there, wait in the dark until you finally see images coming through. It also had a sound piece. So people started to imagine all sorts of things that they thought that they could see.
Okay the next piece of work was a performance event that happened in Margate in Kent.
It was collaboration with the coastguard to produce a beacon on Margate pier.
It was about working with them to light up this building that was out on the pier and to relay a Morse code message and to ask people in town either to come out with torches or in their own homes to relay the message back to imitate the signals they were seeing from the beacon. They would flash their torches or the lights in their homes. It was filmed by a group of media students from Margate. There were about 23 cameras set up around the town filming and then after the event there was a film made that was also showed that a local gallery there.
Finally this is a very old piece of work and it is called Pigeon Interrupted Transmission.
It is a way of using technology with a program called Smart Pack tracks. It is a program that is used in theatres to control lighting. It is also used in gallery spaces as a way of controlling DVD players. So instead of playing something that has already been edited you have a loaded data in a computer and your program is live. In a way its scripted, playing, streaming the material as you have scripted it and screening it there and then while the audience are watching it.
So this piece consisted of two projectors and the computer which was transparent and on view. The actual timeline was also on view, you could see what was happening and I worked with this software as well to include the kind of notation system you can use on the timeline but in this situation to display some of the text that I found in there to.
Context of Sinoptican
Sinoptican is not a term that has been used before.
It is Sino -- China.
Optican is about the optics -The optics of looking.
It is looking at that Foucault's idea of The Penoptican which is about the structure of seeing things in places like prisons and hospitals, the architecture.
Sinoptican is a show that is going to explore ideas contemporary Chinoiserie.
Chinoiserie is a 17th-century design or fashion which was enamoured with everything Chinese.
Britain, France and Europe had a love affair with China in a 17th/18th-century. This material was coming over from China it was seen as really exotic. It was incredibly expensive. Sometimes these materials were imitated and copied here in Britain. China also started producing things that they thought the West would like.
For me it is interesting you have this kind of pastiche, it's about fantasy, about imitation, copying, appropriation, piracy, all sorts really.
What you are looking at now is that I went to a conference and gave a talk about something. Again, in some of this mode that I use, I go to the Internet and I download lots of imagery. So these are all images from the Internet that are tagged to or titled Chinoiserie. It includes this stuff in the 18th century as well is very contemporary stuff. You can kind of get a feel, you start to see lots of motifs which are flowers and birds, dragons, Chinese people, scantily clad women. There is a slippage between the exotic and the erotic and for me that is quite interesting.
So that is the context of the project I'm going to be doing Saltram house.
It's part of the show that is looking at contemporary chinoiserie. The thing for me but that I'm interested in about chinoiserie is the cut and paste aesthetic.
Which I feel like has a similarity with, perhaps sampling music now. The way that we use material that already exists and we re appropriate it, we re-use it.
As a Contemporary Artist I think there is a way in which, perhaps, Contemporary Art is using material that can perhaps talk to the ideas of Chinoiserie.
There is another element;
Chinoiserie the way that it developed was about contact with the West. If you think now about the way that power dynamics in the world are changing. China is becoming a much stronger player in the world. There is also a love affair with China at the moment, the desire to be in China, opening up the markets; getting involved etc but also there is actually a lot of fear around China and what it will become in the future. So there are some political undertones to this project.
Saltram House
The project that I'm working on is in Saltram house. It is an 18th century English manor house.
For me Saltram house was once a manor house and a symbol of wealth. But now it is a National trust house so in a way a lot of houses that have been passed on to the National trust because people can no longer afford to own them any longer and they have passed them on to the nation.
Any kind of real or developing history is stopped.
They don't have a future for telling news stories.
The stories about the house will always be past tense.
That's important!
They have become historical relics and they now have to be preserved for the nation. I am really interested in a space like this what kinds of stories are preserved. What kinds of stories are told to people?
This particular house its unique selling point is the fact that an architect designer, Robert Adams, designed the interior is. It is classed as having some of the finest Adams interiors in the UK. Then there is the painter, Joshua Reynolds, is a very famous painter, a family friend of the people that live there and again Saltram house is said to have one of the finest collections of Reynolds paintings in the UK. It also has a lot of pieces of furniture, Sir Tomas Chippendale, a key furniture designer in the 18th century.
It's got all of these very, very British key designers, furniture designers and painters in this space. But it is has also got some of the best Chinese wallpaper which again reflects the period of Chinoiserie, the importation of this material and decoration within the house.
There is a story attached to the saloon room. It is difficult to tell whether the story is true which is what I'm interested in, about the stories that aren't true, the stories that are orally transmitted. The stories that people tell about a place that nobody can actually verify.
There is a story about the salon being the first place outside of London that the Waltz was danced in. The Waltz was a dance that came from Europe, primarily Germany. It came at a time when it was seen as a really risqué dance because it seemed like anybody could dance it, you didn't have to learn too much about the movements and steps. You also held your partner and that physical contact. It was sensationalist! People were very worried about this dance.
More recently in history the film director Ang Lee produced Sense and Sensibility at Saltram house. He also did Broke Back Mountain,The Hulk, crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He has become very main stream. He is originally from Taiwan.
Okay so here are some photographs of the house, the rooms are all in daylight. At the moment because the house is not open to the public in the winter time they are in complete darkness. All the shutters in the house are closed. It is a house that lives in darkness! So for at least half the year it is a completely dark space.
Which I think is interesting when you go into a place and realise that half the time you cannot see any of this material.
My approach to this project is really about storytelling, about tropes of storytelling. About the way we tell stories. The stories that we choose to tell, and how we count them.
It is also about history and it is about the future.
I am interested in exploring the way in which instead of following one narrative storyline we can actually follow multiple storylines.
So this piece of work will not be a conventional linear narrative. It will be a non-linear, multi-narrative piece of work.
This is not only the way that I prefer working, but a way that I find produces quite an interesting way of viewing as a person. You are the author of the work as you are viewing it rather than watching something that you feel isn’t going to be authored already. There is a lot of space for the viewer to have two start making a story work for them.
The way I have broken down this project. The elements in the piece of work are around the manor house, English literature. I have to do at this point to refer to somebody called Edward Saiede(?). He is a writer who writes a lot about post-colonial issues. One of the things that he uses is this idea of a counter point. He is interested in looking at history for these multiple perspectives. For example he says if you are looking at English literature you cannot look at it without also looking at British colonial situations, the development of the British Empire and issues such as slavery. Those very economic structures that allowed English literature and things like the English manor house to be developed.
So Sense and Sensibility was written by Jane Austin and she is writing in a period of time when all of this political stuff is taking place. But within her novels they are usually really focused on a domestic, kind of English, very minute perspective. It is all about the relationships, there is hardly any referencing to what is happening elsewhere and outside.
All the structures that we look at within a novel like that are dependent on the greater politico and social issues.
So I interested in the English literature as well as the English manor house!
I am interested in a place like a Saltram house in the objects that are there.
How objects speak?
OR
Don't speak and how we make objects perform for us so we put an object in a museum and it is the story we tell about this object that allows that object to exist.
I am also interested in exploring different tropes of Moving image work. So mainstream cinematic tropes of narrative Cinema at all so documentary tropes.
Breaking it down even more there are five elements.
There is the house, it's the physical building. The way I interested in shooting this house is very still, static camerawork. It is about the way that the light comes into the building. The house is old, it's dark, it's creaking , it’s groaning, its decaying, and one of the things that they are really precious about is keeping the blinds closed so that all the UV raise don't come in and destroy the stuff inside.
One of the elements of this piece of work will be the slow opening up of shutters and bringing light into the space. You see the space exposed in front of your eyes.
A second section is about inhabiting the building.
The daily sort of activities in the building are that there are keepers that go around sweeping and clearing, they take every minute bit of dust off of things. And they have special instruments and wear white gloves.
So instead of the keepers that exist there already I am looking for a group of young Chinese men to inhabit this building. They will go through the motions of a Day in the life of somebody who works and lives in the building. They will be cleaning hanging out, eating in these big spaces that you have seen already.
Then there are the objects. Primarily it is the wallpaper that I am interested in. A lot of the Chinese wallpaper has the figures of two women on it. Now these two women nicely overlap with the two women, (the two sisters) in Sense and Sensibility.
I will be working with two dancers, two Chinese women to do some dancing in the space.
The idea here is that the men will be filmed during the day, daylight activity. The women will be filmed at night either by torchlight or infrared. This is something that is still being talked about and developed. The women, (Caterina here is one of them) will be doing some gestures, enacting some vignettes, or dancing, turning and spinning. I also want to also film the objects that are in the house.
The different strands in this film are going to be filmed in very different ways.
Then there is this reference to the Sense and Sensibility film. Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. The re-enactments of that film I want to be exact. So it so it's about going into that space and copying, literally copying, the exact camera motions and movement and re-enacting them.
So where you see on the right hand side Emma Thompson, we will be taking her out and putting Caterina in. But we will have Hugh Grant meeting one of the Chinese ladies from the wallpaper. Take it out, putting in, superimposing.
This may be done by using a projector in the space or in postproduction. This is something I'm really keen to talk with whoever comes on board with and explore ways of doing this. That will be about looking at the film at the Chinese women actresses will have to do some lip syncing.(She shows a clip from Sense and Sensibility where the actors voices have been replaced with the sound of Chinese language being spoken, Emma and Hugh speak in Chinese)
You have probably never seen it acted in this way, there is something about a re-enactment for me which is about being able to go back and re-enact it differently. That is what is going to be explored in that element of the work.
Then finally at the end of the film, so there is a way in which there are different developments taking place but There is a finale, a big spectacle at the end of the piece of work. So whilst it is not linear there is going to an element where there is a crescendo.
The cresendo is that the guys that are looking after the house and going about their rather mundane daily duties. We will see them getting this room ready for something, suddenly the lights will dim, or go off, the lights will come on, there will be heavy music and suddenly they are transformed into Chippendale dancers.
Now this is a reference back to the furniture, particularly the Chippendale sofa stored in the house. Again there is slippage between Chippendale furniture and Chippendale dancers who will be Asian and male.
There is this idea of Chinoiserie where the Chinese starts looking like the erotic and the exotic.
There are two shifts.
The keepers being keepers to male erotic dancers and then there is a shift where suddenly dance stops. We realise it is a rehearsal. The camera starts panning, tracking and around the room in a semicircle and exposes a setup that is there. The dancers relax and they start slowly going into hip-hop, breakdancing, beep bopping.
For me there is a shift between performing for an audience that wants to see the erotic/exotic other to suddenly dancing together and having a dialogue between the dancers. This can be considered to be a dance scene, it needs some spectacle, wow, pizazz and that is at the end of the film.
On the website there are all sorts of image boards etc
Sensing Obscurity
Meeting: 5th Dec 12.45pm Plymouth College of Art / Reception
Attending: Ashley Cox, Deirdre Dowley, Kandemir Esmer, Kelsey Fox, Beverley Fulford, Rob Green, David Hoosen, Eve Mahoney, Gary Vincent Mead, Erika Tan. (Possibly also: Hannah Jones, Eliza Gluckman)
NB: Erika’s number if you cant find u or can’t make it: 07957 468123
Meeting needs to go through:
- Intro all (full names, address, D.O.B, mobile and landline, email)
- Run through roles and divisions, expectations
- Dates: 12th Dec 1pm onwards, 13th Dec till 6pm, 2nd Dec to 6th Dec and return of equipment (dates tbc)
- Shot lists/scripts
- Equipment: cameras, formats, lighting, peripherals e.g. steady-cam/track etc
- Update on cast, location, props, costumes, and legal, costumes
Note taking: each AD takes notes for their section. PM takes notes about overall issues. Camera and production agree who take notes for elements related to production. There needs to be clear understanding of Action points and who needs to do what. I expect AD’s to follow up with logistics, amending shot plans, figuring out daily schedules with PM. Camera/production – test cameras, ideas for shots, go to location and understand lighting, location of e.g. tripod, mains access. Clear indication about dates for doing things by, e.g.: next meeting 12 and 13th will finalise as much as possible. Will be some communication over Christmas break before 2nd Jan.
Some examples of immediate responsibilities for 5th Dec:
MP:
To create a
- Shooting schedule: taking on board and managing cast, crew, location needs, lighting, and transportation.
- Release contracts, crew contracts.
- Contacts for everyone.
Liaise with Saltram House.
AD:
- Shot lists – update from directors revisions, and input from Production
- Directors vision – update and amend with director
- Lists of things to sort, do, call, make, sort, test, confirm
DOPs /camera, production.
- Create Storyboard shots, angles, moves, lighting, gels, reflectors, time of day – feed this into AD’s
- Lists of things to sort, do, call, make, sort, test, confirm, purchase (purchasing discuss with Erika)
- List of equipment and peripherals, check its booked, idea of how much gear, who is responsible for daily checking, outline who else needed on the shoot i.e. Roles for AD’s re. hands on)
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