[Note: I’ve not finished writing it yet, but I can tell from where I am that this post isn’t going to end how I originally intended it to end, and this opening paragraph isn’t going to make as much sense I originally intended it to make; but I’m not going to re-write these first paragraphs — I’m too busy thinking — so it will have to suffice.]
Lover Mine was originally the name of a small edit of photographs of Liu Bing, my other half, that I put together while in Zhuhai, a city in Guangdong. It was a very personal set of photographs, but a set that I liked and wanted to work on further; the problem, however, was knowing what to do with it.
And then today I had an idea: use erhebung as a platform for ongoing series — chains, arrays, lines — of connected posts, each series based around a theme, each post within a given series containing a single photograph (or possibly more than one) that fits that theme. An essay wouldn’t be revealed all in one go, but would emerge gradually, episodically, over time: a temporal progression of images evolving and adapting with both creator and consumer, the journey as crucial as the destination. Seeing the whole, the idea of the finished work, gradually accrete would become as important as, if not more important than, the whole itself.
I like narrative. I like to read, I like to watch films, I like to construct diaries of my life, and I like to see the diaries of others. I am fascinated by our experience of the flow of time and by our attempts to record that experience in art. I am deeply invested, personally, in finding newer and truer ways to present my experiences and my art. And when I say “invested” what I mean is: I think about it a lot, and not doing anything with all that thinking would surely be a waste of brain-energy. And this is what I have been thinking about today.
To come back to the idea of chains, arrays and lines, of many thematically connected series, the plan is to present work, whether it be prose or photography or finger-painting, not as a fixed, finished, complete entity, but as an ongoing stream (photostreams on Flickr are, to a certain extent, never-ending, circular constructions: the end, the most recent work, is at the top, viewed first; the start, the oldest work, is at the end, viewed, ninety-nine times out of a hundred last — this is unusual, and very different to the “traditional” method of presenting photography online), each entry in a series part of definite narrative, but the series itself open-ended (within reason, and as far as it is possible to generate new work), the work continuing until it naturally stops, or until it returns to its beginning, the circle closing.
I’m not doing this, talking about this, simply for the sake of it: I genuinely have difficulty knowing when something I’m making is finished, and in the past I have too often found myself prematurely terminating a creative process solely because I felt I had some obligation to produce a complete thing (it goes back to when we were at school, perhaps, teachers in all subjects requiring finished items, rarely interested in something that was gestating or growing over time). And there is no such obligation, or no need for such an obligation, on the infinite landscape of the internet. The internet, this blank canvas without edges, provides the artist with the ability to present his art however he chooses; all the artist need do is imagine (preferably imagine wildly).
But most methods of presenting art online are far less imaginative than the art itself, and a large part of the problem is pace, tension, time. When designing online galleries people think about space — pixels and browser dimensions and leading edges and margins — but rarely about time. And time is important. When people read books there is an element of time built in to everything: the time to pick up the object itself, the time to open it, the time to turn the page. And time is frequently taken into consideration by the author: long sentences slow the reader down, shorter sentences get the reader reading more quickly. Designers, too, will typeset different novels differently, some novels given lots of white space, space in which the reader can muse and mull, some novels given far less, the reader driven to dash through, ignoring possible deficiencies of prose so they can jump from one key plot-point to another. Paintings also factor in time, those on larger canvases requiring the viewer to look for longer, the eye, unable to take everything in at once, forced to wander from character to character, from brightly-lit focal point to more dimly-lit side-show: the more opaque the object, the longer the time needed to see it, the greater the feeling on finally experiencing the reveal. Time, put simply, creates texture and rhythm, pacing and tension. But on the internet there is very little pacing, even less tension (unless you count the tension of waiting for a page to finish loading). Flash galleries are ram-raided in brief moments of quiet at work, photographic essays are skimmed through with an idle finger on a too-quick mouse, the last few photographs rarely receiving as much attention as the first few. We can do better, surely?
In place of HTML galleries that go from beginning to end or flash galleries that have play and pause buttons and progress counters (I dislike progress counters, particularly with films: I don’t want to know how much time is left, as knowing how much time is left utterly changes the experience), why don’t we try other things? Galleries that begin at a fixed point but give different options for where to go next, different options for what photograph you see, which chapter you read (imagine a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure version of The Americans where after each photograph you could select what you saw next: “Click here for more on servitude, here for more on the suburban life, or here for more compositions featuring out-of-focus subjects”), or galleries that unfold completely randomly (Koudelka meets the iPod Shuffle, each viewing completely different to the last, each unplanned but fortuitous juxtaposition a source of delight; flick your wrist and hope that this time you get the dog in the snow), or galleries that are released gradually, photograph by photograph, over a period of days or weeks or months or years (the original black and white version of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta was released chapter by chapter over a three year period, forcing a pace of consumption that must have created almost unendurable tension). All these things could be done, or could inspire other even wilder things to be tried.
I’d almost forgotten where this began, but then I remembered: Lover Mine; presentation of my work; seeking something new, something closer to the truth of my experience. I’m fed up with rules, tired of the tired-old, same-old-same-old ways of presenting things online. I want to present things, and want other people to present things, in a way that goes beyond putting up the page and saying: “Hey, here are twelve jpeg files arranged on a grid; take a look and try not to flick through them in less time than it took the page to load.” There must be other better ways. All of this is really about pace, about slowing down the speed of consumption to begin to better match the speed of production. When people used to read the periodical installments a Charles Dickens’ novel there must have been a strong sense of the man behind the words, the craftsman steadily grafting a story. Or there is meta-time: the online release of Dracula that posts new installments from the epistolary horror novel to a schedule delineated by the novel’s internal time, Mina Murray’s journal entry of August 14th published online on the 14th of August. Endless possibilities.
Coming back to my work, Lover Mine will hopefully become the first episodic series (chain, array, line — call it what you will) of photographs, a new post appearing on erhebung on a regular basis (weekly, maybe, or twice-weekly), each post containing a photograph and perhaps some text, each post building towards a greater whole, but the process, the journey towards that whole, in no way marginalised. Another series will probably focus on my photographs “of China”, a series that may or may not appropriate the title My Country, My People. If it does appropriate that name it will appropriate it in the full knowledge that the new MCMP will be very different from the old, the new accepting that the project can’t possibly be finished when the reality, the experience, is still being lived. An episodic My Country, My People would wander anywhere, curling in on itself, crossing over places its been before; it would be, to borrow a quotation Hugo showed me, the “train that never [stops] traveling”. Yet another thread might be called something along the lines of One-shots or Singles, photographs that exist purely in and of themselves, photographs (or pieces of prose, or finger-paintings) that do not seek to be collectivised. And there will no doubt be other things, probably, as it isn’t as though I’ve planned any of this coherently.
Why, some may ask, not just use Flickr, a service that is all about flow and endlessness? Flickr, for me, is the light box where you place things and squint at them, the table in the pub where you argue a point over pints, the round-table discussion where you come up with a strategy for taking over the world; Flickr, for me, is the wall at which I can throw anything, the good sticking, the bad falling to the wayside. This place, erhebung, is more like a fanzine handed out at college, or a photocopied A5 pamphlet sent out in the mail, or a stencilled protest poster plastered to a lamp-post. The one thing has to happen before the other, and neither really makes much sense without the other. That at least is what makes sense right now, as I write this, late at night, a coffee on one side of me, a whiskey on the other; I fully accept that it may make no sense whatsoever.
And here seems like a good place to stop.
