noun/pôrtl/
portals, plural

1. A doorway, gate, or other entrance, esp. a large and elaborate one

2. An Internet site providing access or links to other sites

• a grand and imposing entrance (often extended metaphorically); “the portals of the cathedral”; “the portals of heaven”; “the portals of success”

• portal site: a site that the owner positions as an entrance to other sites on the internet; “a portal typically has search engines and free email and chat rooms etc.”

• portal vein: a short vein that carries blood into the liver

• Portal is a general term describing an opening in the walls of a building, gate or fortification, and especially a grand entrance to an important structure. Doors, metal gates or portcullis in the opening can be used to control entry or exit

• A portal in science fiction and fantasy is a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations separated by spacetime. It usually consists of two or more gateways, with an object entering one gateway leaving via the other instantaneously.Places that a portal will link to include a different spot in the same universe (in which case it might be an alternative for teleportation); a parallel world (inter-dimensional portal); the past or the future (time portal); and other planes of existence, such as heaven, hell or other afterworlds. Portals are similar to the cosmological concept of a wormhole, and some portals work using wormholes.

In hallucinations of self portraits – people’s faces are nearly always motionless and expressionless (eyes and mouth closed). Floating – top half of body only. Disembodied. Intermediate phase between waking and sleeping.

In dream consciousness, using the brain stem which is closer more primitive area where these ideas come from. Spatial, lower level brain (simpler).

Self and performed self.  Phantom limbs.

The REAL treat was to see the Think Art…Act Science exhibition which was organised about / with? Artists in Labs from Switzerland, the science residency project I was looking at. and had a big work by Christian Gonzenbach – the chap who was trying to make sculptures of dark matter (quite ambitious!) and I watched a documentary with him explaining his work at the lab and how he had revised his goals. Awesome to stumble across this.

Time and Memory

Time, history and memory, exploring motifs such as erasure and ephemerality in order to capture the fragile and elusive nature of these immaterial themes.

Examine the ways time impacts people, places and things, by turns activating an awareness of ourselves as subjects in history and manipulating the expected presentation of time as linear and fixed.

Smoke, haze and evanescence also figure in many of the pieces seen here. Such effects reinforce the sense of images coming in and out of focus, appearing suddenly or vanishing completely in an approximation of the way memory functions. In these works, histories are alternately clear, forgotten, or remembered only in fragments.

Link # 7
1999
Video on TV screen, carpets
17 :50 min.
Continuity and discontinuity are fundamental themes in Link. The artist’s starting point and basic material is the film classic « Sleuth » (1972), an English ‘whodunnit’ spoken in slang, by Joseph L Mankiewicz (featuring Michael Caine and Lawrence Olivier).
The original film is shown being run on different television screens in different apartments.
The editing in the original movie corresponds with changes of location in the Pierre Bismuth’s « remake».
The use of « Sleuth » is significant since all the filming took place on the same set. By constantly changing scene in the different apartments, the artist’s Link becomes a paraphrase of the original’s adaptation.To make this piece the artist is (still) looking for producers who will each finance 170 seconds of his remake.

Since seeing a talk by Pierre – still preoccupied with this piece. The camera does a 360 pan around the apartment that the TV is in and then back to the screen, continuous soundtrack but on every revolution the TV is in a different apartment.

Possibly doable for the globe pieces – inside the globe on every revolution – different location with one object the same, centre. How does this relate to ongoing work? – enclosure of spaces, encapsulation….

Superficial (2004)

MIrror, glue, cement / Vosges, Alsace, France

Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency, that led me into the forest to envelop the contour of a large stone with fragments of mirror.  The large stone, tucked away deep in the woods, became a reflective surface for its surroundings.  In this play of splintered radiance, the rock disappears in its reflections. Because it reflects one cannot be mislead by its presence, yet we cannot seize it, rather it is the rock that reflects us.

Designboom link.

I saw Chiharu’s work at the Hayward, maybe last year? But before that I had been using an image of her work, a piano and audience chairs surrounded by the wool in my symposium lectures. I felt the wool was a representation of sound, an idea that fascinated me, making visible an invisible thing.

I found her talk inspiring and unique. Speaking slowly with careful pauses, the slideshow and video presentations were very well shot and paced.

Heres what I wrote in the dark:

Traces of the past. Studied under Marina Abramovic in Germany.

Artwork must be an understanding of yourself. If you only learn techniques and put that into the work it will be empty (this is what I feel about mine at the moment – that its empty).

Presence in the mist of absence.

Her paintings were too distant from herself (I feel this too).

Body, eyes, touch, me.

Art and life together.

Make a sculpture of the hole I feel.

What can I build in the project space?

- sound first, then projection.

Takes her 2 years from image to installation.

Feeling my way in the dark.

I picked this image for the post as although her trademark wool encapsulations are visually stunning, this was the performance piece I found most evocative. Her sitting in a bath of mud and pouring it over herself.

I feel this great disconnection between the videos and cold flat pieces that I’m making and the emotional richness, joy and pain of my own life here. There must be a way to bring these things closer together. I just don’t know how to do it. Maybe I need to change materials or do a massive brainstorm………

Notes I made about this:

Right brain: here & now, present, pictures, body, sensory.

Left brain: linear, methodical, past & future, details, organise, association with past events, language.