Encounter Total

Well it has finally come to the end of my week and its definitely been a busy one but i set myself the challenge of trying to create, experience or have, 100 meaningful encounters withing one week and its time for the total. 

This week I have achieved and documented 

102 ENCOUNTERS!

Now remains a difficult decision, my work for this project has been completed and I now have the choice of maintaining this blog or starting up a new one. Regardless I shall continue to make and produce work whether through interventions or the physical. I will keep you posted but to send you on your way this is one of my most recent pieces that looks into the tensions of the relationship by looking into the way an object can contain reverence or presence, and  questioning juxtapose relationship between the themes of religion and alcoholism. 

Images copy right of Benjamin David Viney 2012

An encounter with failure and success

Having a brother or sister is one of the best things in the world, someone to share your time growing up is something amazing and I’m very close to both my brother and sister and always have been. When we were growing up my brother learned to juggle in a summer workshop. Thinking it was th coolest thing ever (I was 6) I begged my brother to teach me how to do it but he refused. This meant I spent a long time trying to teach myself which meant a lot of juggling balls and other objects flying around my living room, garden and bedroom. As you can imagine a lot of things got broken but I eventfully managed it.

But the fact remains that whilst learning to juggle I was experiencing every time I dropped a juggling ball was an encounter with failure, until I had master how to juggle. The first time that I managed it I was hit by a wall of elation because of my recent success and therefore had an encounter with success.

I wanted to re-enact this process but using other people in an experiment to see if they would react the same and see how they feel when encountering these two emotions. I also wanted to document this process. 

So I purchased a selection of fruit and gave three sets of tomatoes or apples out to random people and then documented their efforts and experience through videos and images. I also realised that the batter fruit soon became a literal documentation of their efforts and encounters with failure (I encountered very little success when people were juggling).   

 

 

Copy Right Benjamin Viney 2012

 

 

Busking

Last week I got given a different themed project titled scavenge and we were told to go out and scavenge anything we could find this included everything from bits of old tier found at scrap yards to sound files of dripping water.  At some point within the week we were given the challenge to go and scavenge in a particular place. The place I was set to go to was the canal.

The canal actually proved to be quite disappointing it was a lovely place to go but just too well kept and clean to scavenge anything of uses in order to make art. Even my frivolous attempt to gain access to the councils waste department ended with a ‘sorry, without special training we cannot give you access to the specified area’ I which someone could have told me before that annoying phone hold music started playing for the 27^th time in a row.

This meant that I had to scavenge by other means, so I decided to see if I could document the canal in varying rays hopping that I would be able to pull something together when I got back into my studio. By happy coincidence I was busy recording the traffic from underneath a bridge and found that you could play around with the echoes that were produced there.  This led me in turn to create a sound piece that used the echoes in the tunnel in combination with the sounds from the area around the canal.      

Leading on from this I decided to return to the canal this week but with a different intention to see that if I posed with a busker what sort of reaction I would get from people and weather any of these could be turned into an encounter.  

Busking is something that has always interested me, whether it’s exploring why people decide to uptake it or giving buskers and performers as a platform to express themselves. For me it’s something that I’ve only dabbled in briefly but to my brother its second nature.

 

This was the bridge that I busked under found it tricky to take a picture of myself whilst busking still havent developed extendable arms yet!

Encounter Count

So its time for an update of how many meaningful encouters that i have manged to create or make through the means of art. It may only be mid week but at last count ive manage....

'76 encounters!'

 

I'm currently on for my goal on 100 meaningful encouters through the means of art in just one week!

Encounter with an object

My next idea was try and form an encounter with an object. This is something that happens on a daily bases but I also wanted to explore the possibility of having a ‘meaningful’ encounter with an object, this may mean the object or piece of art must have an air of reverence, spirituality or preciousness that it can be at the very least associated with these types of artefacts.

I started looking at dated artefacts and started to stray down the path of strange contraptions invented by Victorians, an era renowned for their creative prowess and attempts of shaping the new world that they would eventually heavily influenced. After conducting research from my the university library and internet resources one of my the Fine art technicians came over and we entered into an animated discussion about animation (a subject we have discussed at length before) and its humble beginnings in the form of Zoetrope’s and flick books.

Unknowingly John (the Technician) had kindled the beginnings of a new idea!

Before we go any further there is something that you need to know about me. I have always had a love for animation both traditional and modern 3D rendering and have even run workshops and classes to teach students how to use animation software such as Cinema 4D and Blender. This also means that I have created previous work involving the use of animations and in particular zoetrope’s.

Earlier in the week I had also created a table made up of scavenged wood and shattered glass collected from a selection that when lit became a completely different object and started to pull on the strings of becoming an object that you could have an encounter with. So I decided to pull together elements of both of these ideas to create a new concept (as far as I can tell something that has never been done before) and created a ‘Projectortrope’.

The basic principle of a zoetrope is that a sequence of images is placed on the inside of a circular tube and is then spun forming an animation which you can only see by looking into the tube or through slot cut into the side of the tube. A projector trope is where instead of the images being placed on the inside of the circular tube the images are mounted into the side of the ‘trope’and then when lit projected onto the surround eras Transforming not only the object but the surrounding area as well. There are also different variables that you can control when creating a Projectortrope such as, depending on the size of your photos and the distance of the light and the images will determine whether you have a clear cut or an abstract image.

Now I must admit to a mistake, I only found out about the variables when I had already set the distance and size, so I had little choice in the matter of the projection being abstract or a clear cut image. But this is something that I can definitely work on the next construction of the Projectortrope and even build in runners allowing different focus points of each image to be met. Having said that the transformation of a clear cut image to an abstract form made the Projectortrope take on a different form and I feel actually enhances that level of ambiguity and mystery that had begun to surround this object.

This also did mean that the stop animation that I placed within the sequence of images didn’t work but I’m not so sure this turned out to be a bad thing. I’m now planning on taking this piece down to market square and projecting onto a water fountain and see if then document any encounters that happen.

Copy right of Benjamin Viney 2012

 

   

Time it appear waits for no man?

Hey everyone well I'm pleased to announce I made the 100 encounter however it seems that I'm a little slow on the uptake of keeping this blog going but this is something I intend to rectify this within the next couple of days. So please bare with me the posts are coming your way!    

52 Encounters in one shot!

Ok I admit that 52 encounters in one go might be considered cheating but just hear me out for a second! Being a student in Nottingham as you can imagine I get bombarded with flyers and leaflets almost 24 hours a day, advertising everything from hair products to the latest bands. I even had one handed to me advertising for a job handing out leaflets which I'm sure has some has some comical significance. But this got me thinking about when you get handed these leaflets you’re immediately introduces to two encounters. The first of these is to the person handing the leaflet to you and the second the flyer itself. 

Let me ask you something, did you ever stop and have a full conversation with that person or just exchange of a few words? The likely hood is that you only exchange a few small words, such as come to 'Coco Tang' (a bar in Nottingham I'm constantly being leafleted for). But none the less this still counts as an encounter.   

So looking at this idea I started to play around with the idea of touring my studio, which not only contains all the first years but second and third as well and setting a large number of people a simple task through a basic set of instructions. 

I settled on using an old deck of cards and started to hand them out to people on my course. Most of the student that received a card I had never met before or experienced any previous encounters. They were issued with a set of simple instructions.

1. You must make one mark

2. You must write one letter 

Other than this there were allowed to do anything they liked to the card so long as the returned at least a segment of the card to me. 

Following this process I was able to quickly acquire a large 'portfolio' of encounters each documented by the card itself. Normally this would form my basis for further exploration into the subject however my current tutors have set me the task of simply to gather encounters so my further research for the moment will have to be postponed.   

Here are some examples of the cards....

Copy righted to Benjamin David Viney 2012

So where to begin?

It strikes me as a difficult challenge to try and create 100 encounters within the week. Let alone for each of these encounter to be meaningful and have some residual effect on my current practise and work. I think the best place to start is probably by looking at he word 'Encounter' itself.

The dictionary definition of Encounter is....

 ' A Meeting, especially one that is unplanned, unexpected, or brief' 

An Encounter could imply some spiritual aspect as well, being a Christian I face regular encounters with God weather it be through worship or prayer ect.... but I have decided to focus on the physical aspect of everyday life for the first part of the week at least. 

I may choose to focus on the encounters you have with people but also maybe experiment with an idea that you can have an encounter with an object. only time will tell!   

Work Examples

I should explain the when that I am a conceptual artist but also like working with my hands (which could be viewed as a little ironic I know) and I work in many different media's from everything to sculpture and painting to CGI animation, my specialist areas would probably have to be installation and performance and video this post is to give you a small flavour of my work and what is about to follow.