My room is generally a mess; I do not have time to tidy it as my job as a chef means that I work busy hours and split shifts. I feel embarrassed when you come to visit and I am very thankful that you often help me to tidy it! I know you wish my bed didn’t make so much noise but I am pretty sure you love my duvet. I love how you make my bed for me when you come around, and again in the morning when you leave if you have stayed. I know my room isn’t perfect: there is a weird smell coming from it which you say smells like off milk, it is probably a yoghurt carton under my bed or something. And it’s always hot and stuffy because my window doesn’t open. But I like it. I can see your arm. I guess you took this one of the nights you came over to watch television with me.

I stay in this bed on a regular occasion. I am here almost every night. Your duvet always smells like a mixture of comfort washing powder and cigarettes. I can normally find strands of loose tobacco on the left side of your bed, your side, where you always roll your cigarettes after work. Your bed also creaks far too much. I remember you telling me you got it from the clearance section from Ikea and were really proud you managed to put it up on your own. I remember when you first bought this duvet, it was the day in which you cooked me dinner for the first time. I was so excited. You had been to Lakeside in the day and had purchased new sheets and a lovely king sized duvet, It replaced The tiny, quite groggy single duvet that you once had, it was always a battle between the two of us to who would get the majority of the duvet. You would normally win. The television remote reminds me of the nights we spend curled up watching TV. You always make me watch such rubbish. I think that is your arm in the photograph, you didn’t know I was taking it. This image reminds me of the millions of nights I have spent at yours. I always make this bed for you but it always returns to this state, crumbled and messy.

This image looks almost like a photo that shouldn't have been taken. It's a bit worrying really like as if it was taken in a prison cell but at the same time it's too comfortable for that which is strange. And it's really quite blurry which is frustrating. Um it gives it away that the remote is in there. So there is probably a television in the room, or something. Maybe the people in the room are watching television right now, as there is a hand or arm or something in the bottom left of the image. And the light radiating from the middle of the photo sort of looks like the sun in the middle of rainclouds. Which gives it this sort of ambiance that you wouldn't expect to find really. Its like you’re intruding in someone’s private space but this image has a really comforting feel about it.

This image truly shows the brute survivability of the human race, you can clearly see how harsh humanity is just by looking at the grimy looking pillow.

This is a pillow someone has slept on! Eeew! Omg I want to smell it!

Ok I see a bed that is, unmade and a little scruffy, as if in use at that very moment, and I see, a remote laying to the side. The first thing I feel is a sense of comfort, I think the bed is definitely an area of comfort. The remote oddly adds to this emotion. Lying in bed, watching TV - pure recreation and relaxation. I feel happy as I think when you’re in bed, you’re in your most vulnerable state, makeup free! Bed hair! Tired! All barriers are dropped, that you have in everyday reality, when you get in bed, and so I guess the photo sparks a sense of loss of inhibition. And vulnerability. Like. Perhaps when you are in bed you are at your worst, visually, which is one of the most embarrassing things for most of us. But perhaps, a bed represents when we are at our most truthful, as we lose all front that we put on when we’re outside and mixing. And it also sparks, a sense of love as of course, a bed is an area shared intimately with a partner. It reminds me of cuddles at night. However, the photo is quite, dark...almost eerie.. Yes so the photo is dark, eerie - I can’t help but think whose hand that is and why they are not in the photograph. Did they run from the shot? Did they not want to be shown at their most vulnerable? That’s how I would feel if someone attempted to take a photo of my bed. It’s very private to me. And I alas almost get a sense of uncomfortable-ness when viewing this photograph. It's like an insight into someone’s privacy and I feel bad looking at it. But at the same time I am fascinated, as we all have a bed, we all lay in it, and it's just a hub of primitive actions and emotions from love to the need to sleep. So it's almost like, representative of the human nature really...

The unmade bed suggests chaos, it also suggests that the person who lives in this house is messy and possible doesn’t care about appearance.

I see a bed, probably a students due to the inexpensive looking duvet covers and the general mess. Also I see the TV remote and the hand grabbing it this also suggests a student who cant be bothered to get out of bed and the damaged wall says cheap flat.

I like this image. Its personal, i believe a persons room is often quite private. i just think a bed is definitely when we lose all our barriers.

I see mess, the evidence of pure laziness - a bed not made by morning, so left to rot and gain till night. The covers have a soft brown and beige coloring to them, but the focal point of the photo comes in the form of a television remote - propped up by a hand.

The way this image has been cropped makes me want to see more, as only part of someone can be seen. This involves a sense of mystery behind the image, the 'not knowing' what has happened. This image appears to be in a ill kept environment, with an unmade bed, basic walls which also appear to have holes in them, which adds to the 'unknown' concept of the image.

The colours, are notably very grey, dingy and dark and this puts a very brooding, stormy atmosphere over the whole photo. And the mislaid bed covers add to this, it's very, strange, at least it emits that feeling to me. And the focus isn't perfect - this isn't a perfect textbook shot. It's a shot of human nature at its finest, truest, not false and perfect. I reckon this image was taken on a mobile, since it's not as near crisp as a proper camera shot. But that's why I like it as I find cameras far too perfect, to the point of perfection, and nothing is perfect is it? Are humans perfect? No. So this shot is very real, true, despite not being perfect focus.

The colors in this image are quite dull and dreary – to be honest its slightly depressing. Its very badly exposed, of a really bad quality and to be quite honest I think the content is rather rubbish!

This image is very poorly focused but you can still make out the image content quite well. It appears to be an unmade bed, and there is the presence of a person on the bottom left on the image. I imagine this image was probably taken using a mobile phone camera. The colors are quite dull; I don’t really find this image very exciting.

I am looking at a poorly composed, badly underexposed photo of some bedding, taken with a mobile phone, I’d say. It doesn’t comply with any rules or conventions of photography and it really have no meaning at all. It’s bedding. Camp Bedding. Perhaps in a hostel or a crappy hotel – although the layout of the TV remote suggests that they have Freeview so it can’t be that bad a place.

The photograph shows bedding that is crumbled and I immediately wonder why so. Did the person just not bother to make their bed in the morning, quite happen to relax in their mess (a person is quite clearly apparent here and can be seen in the left bottom corner.) Did something happen in this bed? Is there more than one person present in this room? Has someone just slept in this bed? Is it daylight? Is it night? The lighting looks artificial which leans to the image being taken at nighttime. The photograph is not exposed very well and is quite obviously recorded on a mobile phone – but why? The content is not very interesting, why would someone want to take a photograph of some crumbled sheets, a television remote and a hand? What are they documenting? Has something happened before this image was taken that the viewer is blissfully unaware of?

The thoughts I first got were – TV, sex and pizza. And that is a winning combination.

The bed to me, suggests a cage and entrapment due to the metal railings. I find this quite contradictory to the fact that a bedroom is normally a place you can be yourself, and be free in. I also find this image intrudes into someone’s personal space, I feel quite uncomfortable looking at it because I don’t feel I am allowed to. The hand suggests human presence and it is also very likely the occupant did not know this image was being taken. This only adds to the feeling of intrusion.

Okay I think that, I like how, the bars of the bed, they almost look cage like, which is quite a contradiction considering a bed is a place, in my opinion, of freedom and truth. I think those solid black bars enhance the general grey, dingy atmosphere of the photo. I find the hand that is poking out of the corner very effective, and it adds a whole new layer to the photo, it makes you start asking more questions, it makes it more personal, it turns it from any old bed, to SOMEONES bed, that someone peering so softly in the corner, And the remote, instantly brings it down to Earth, such a casual piece of electronic, brings the image to reality, of everyday life, television, watching programs - this isn't art imitating life, it IS life.

The room is neutral. There are defining features to this room. A few photographs of his nieces and nephews are placed above his bed. His bed is the defining feature. It creaks. It is covered in a cream and brown duvet that always smells like washing up powder. She likes it. It is comforting. It is a home. It is a cold day. She visits him after college; it is about 3 or 4 pm. She has left her printmaking lesson early in order to see him, she often does this. His days off are few and far between. He is going to cook her dinner tonight for the first time, she is excited. He has been to Lakeside in the day and has purchased new sheets and a lovely king sized duvet in the day. It replaces the tiny, quite groggy single duvet that he once had, it was always a battle between the two to who would get the majority of the duvet. He normally wins; she is normally very shy and doesn’t feel right stealing his duvet away from him when she still does not know him all that well. She liked his new duvet. It is warm and snugly and still has that lovely fresh new smell. Its clean, no stains from his late night takeaways or ash from the roll ups that he smokes. It is perfectly made. It is neat, It is tidy It is warm. She adores it; she wants to sleep in it permanently. He cannot keep it up. He gets frustrated. Angry. He jumps of the bed and start storming around the room, demanding answers to questions she is unable to answer. He throws himself on the bed and the pillow flips up and hits the side of a girls face. The tension is building and the girl is unable to handle it. She does not like arguments, she cannot cope with anger. She curls up onto the side of the bed and cries. He begins to cool down, and after a few minutes realizes he has upset her. She cries out of frustration and she is scared it is her fault. He strokes her hair and rubs her back, whispering quietly into her ear and declares how he finds her attractive, how he likes her, and how it is definitely not her fault. On the lives of his mother, his brothers, his friends. She does not believe him. The crying continues for a small period of time till she is too tired. She is sullen and sulky and he senses it. The atmosphere is tense. He turns on the television and begins to watch a film on channel 3. She is not interested. She cuddles up to him and he places his hand on the small of her back. She takes in her surroundings: she adores his room, the lived in clutter, the creaky double bed and the cream and brown duvet that spells delicious, like washing conditioner. She wants to cuddle in the bed and never leave; she wants him to want her there. She tried to speak: stuttering. She can sense him getting frustrated as she can never get the words out, and if she does, they always come out wrong. He threatens to tickle her if she does not tell him; he runs his fingers down her arms to reinforce this threat. She does not believe him. He climbs on top of her, pinning her arms and hands above her head, using his legs to hold hers down and tickles her until she is begging, screaming for him to stop.
They are arguing again. They are always fighting. Today is the worse fight they have ever had. They are screaming at each other. All she asked was an innocent question and she does not understand why he has flipped out in this way. It is scaring her. She keeps trying to kiss him and his lips remain firmly shut. She persists, kissing him one, two, three, four times before giving up. She leaps up off of his bed, and throws the duvet that she had just cleaned for him on the floor. He looks puzzled for a moment and then starts asking what the fuck she is doing. She blames him, screams at him, asks him what the fuck he is playing at and demanding to know why he would not kiss her back. He blames her for ruining the moment and also her mood, and this only fuels her anger. She starts to throw her clothes back on and inform him that she may as well fuck off home if that is how he going to talk to her. Later, when she looks back at this she will realize what a complete and utter pillock she was. He tries to talk to her, and tells her not to leave but she runs downstairs, claiming to need some air. She shuts herself into the bathroom like a little girl and bawls her eyes out, sitting on the toilet and holding her knees as she cries, unable to control her negative emotion and her tears. After a minute she hears him walking down the stairs, the kitchen door opening and then a tapping on the door as he asks to come in. The door opens. He crouches in from of her, trying to hold her hand, and tells her he is sorry. In reality, he has nothing to be sorry for but she is in a heightened sense of emotion and there is no reasoning with her. He tries to get her to kiss and cuddle her but she pushes him away, her negative body language is more than obvious. She pushes past him to run upstairs, and like a spoilt little brat cuddles up on his duvet, pulling it over her head and sobbing. She hears a door opening. he is sitting next to her now and there is so much tension in the room it is so unbearable. He tells her to grow the fuck up. All she wants is for him to cuddle her. She wants him to stroke her hair and kiss her forehead and hold her till she stops crying. She cannot see anything apart from the cream duvet that is over her eyes. Her chest feels tight so she runs back down to the bathroom. The boy is now ignoring her completely, this only adds to her frustration. She is sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor now. If his bedroom is warm and welcoming, this room is cold and cluttered. The cold floor tiles feel cool on the back of her denim short clad legs. She cannot breathe now. She wants nothing more for him than to come downstairs and look after her but he is leaving her to it. Her chest feels tight and her breathing is rapid. She gets the familiar feel in her stomach and she pushes her head over the toilet bowl and begins to vomit, retching at first and then feels the lumpy consistency and vomits, again and again, gasping for breath. After five or ten minutes of vomiting, he knocks on the door, and realises what a shit state she is in. He sits on the floor on the shower cubicle, almost falling over, and begins to stroke her hair and her face, and kisses a line from her forehead to her chin, joking that he is avoiding her mouth because he doesn’t want to taste her vomit. He takes her up to bed, tucks her into his duvet and kisses her forehead, before heading down the creaky stairs to the kitchen, bringing her back yoghurt he claims will settle her stomach and water to get rid of the vile taste in her mouth. She eats and drinks, and then curls up into the duvet and slowly drifts off to sleep, with the boy stroking her hair. She feels loved.
He has left the downstairs door open for her as he so often does if she is visiting him after work. She hears the pummelling of water in the shower, so she goes upstairs and sits on the edge of his creaky bed to wait for him.



I started off by doing descriptions of the room, in third person of different events that have happened in this room. However I do not think it works because it is quite confusing and I think the idea of asking people to describe it will be much better as I think just one person defining the room is very dull.

I took photos of 2 different rooms - one a girls and one a boys. Both were taken on a mobile phone, of which the camera had a megapixel of 3.2. The images of the girls room was taken in the daytime, and the boys at night.

I want to use these photos to ask people to describe the room, and then compare the descriptions and look at what it is that people choose to describe/notice first, for example the colour, emotion, pattern etc. I expect people who study different things will have different opinions, for example, I imagine people who study art, history and science will all have different views of this image.

I think the second image is probably my favorite. Its grainy and quite blurry, with messed up duvets and the suggestion of human presence by the hand. Out of these images this is probably the one I would chose to use as my final image.

• Personally first notice the positioning within the image, angels positioned in the upper left third of this image, middle women slightly off center to the right etc
• Asking someone elses in my classes opinion, they first noticed the colours, which they said was quite bland and mudane

I intend to get an image that is well known by everyone and document peoples descriptions of it in a very clinical and neat manner.

I experimented with laying the text over an image centered in the frame. However I really dislike how it looks. I thought that the text layered over may have made it hard to make out the content of the image but instead it just looks messy and untidy. I think the text is far too big for this to work.

I wrote my descriptions on glass with a dry wipe board marker. I did not think this worked, the text was far too big and it looked really messy. I think I would like the text to appear much more clinical, which suggests it should be typed. Therefore maybe the text should be in the frame itself rather than on the glass.

This is an experimentation I did working with liquid latex. I first wrote descriptions of the room onto sketchbook paper, which I found was quite successful and I liked the way the words began to merge together. However it was quite hard to write with and I felt i couldn't get the text as small as I would like it. I would like to try to find a way to get the text smaller, prehaps by buying a nip to write with or using a paintbrush.

Writing

He cannot keep it up. He gets frustrated. Angry. He jumps of the bed and start storming around the room, demanding answers to questions she is unable to answer. He throws himself on the bed and the pillow flips up and hits the side of a girls face. The tension is building and the girl is unable to handle it. She does not like arguments, she cannot cope with anger. She curls up onto the side of the bed and cries. He begins to cool down, and after a few minutes realizes he has upset her. She cries out of frustration and she is scared it is her fault. He strokes her hair and rubs her back,whis-pering quietly into her ear and declares how he finds her attractive, how he likes her, and how it is definitely not her fault. On the lives of his mother, his brothers, his friends. She does not believe him. The crying continues for a small period of time till she is too tired.She is sullen and sulky and he senses it. The atmosphere is tense. He turns on the television and begins to watch a film on channel 3. She is not interested. She cuddles up to him and he places his hand on the small of her back. She takes in her surroundings : she adores his room, the lived in clutter, the creaky double bed and the cream and brown duvet that spells delicious, like washing conditioner. She wants to cuddle in the bed and never leave, she wants him to want her there.She tried to speak : stuttering. She can sense him getting frustrated as she can never get the words out, and if she does, they always come out wrong. He threatens to tickle her if she does not tell him, he runs his fingers down her arms to reinforced this threat. She does not believe him. He climbs on top of her, pinning her arms and hands above her head, using his legs to hold hers down and tickles her until she is begging, screaming for him to stop.
They are arguing again. They are always fighting. Today is the worse fight they have ever had. They are screaming at each other. All she asked was an innocent question and she does not understand why he has flipped out in this way. It is scaring her. She keeps trying to kiss him and his lips remain firmly shut. She persists, kissing him one, two, three, four times before giving up. She leaps up off of his bed, and throws the duvet that she had just cleaned for him on the floor. He looks puzzled for a moment and then starts asking what the fuck she is doing. She blames him, screams at him, asks him what the fuck he is playing at and demanding to know why he would not kiss her back. He blames her for ruining the moment and also her mood, and this only fuels her anger. She starts to throw her clothes back on and inform him that she may as well fuck off home if that is how he going to talk to her. Later, when she looks back at this she will realize what a complete and utter pillock she was. He tries to talk to her, and tells her not to leave but she runs downstairs, claiming to need some air. She shuts herself into the bathroom like a little girl and bawls her eyes out, sitting on the toilet and holding her knees as she cries, unable to control her negative emotion and her tears. After a minute she hears him walking down the stairs, the kitchen door opening and then a tapping on the door as he asked to come in. The door opens. He crouches in from of her, trying to hold her hand, and tells her he is sorry. In reality, he has nothing to be sorry for but she is in a heightened sense of emotion and there is no reasoning with her. He tries to get her to kiss and cuddle her but she pushes him away, her negative body language is more than obvious. She pushes past him to run upstairs, and like a spoilt little brat cuddles up on his duvet, pulling it over her head and sobbing. She hears a door opening. he is sitting next to her now and there is so much tension in the room it is so unbearable. He tells her to grow the fuck up. All she wants is for him to cuddle her. She wants him to stroke her hair and kiss her forehead and hold her till she stops crying. She cannot see anything apart from the cream duvet that is over her eyes. Her chest feels tight so she runs back down to the bathroom. The boy is now ignoring her completely, this only adds to her frustration. She is sitting cross legged on the bathroom floor now. If his bedroom is warm and welcoming, this room is cold and cluttered. The cold floor tiles feel cool on the back of her denim short clad legs. She cannot breath now. She wants nothing more for him to come downstairs and look after her but he is leaving her to it. Her chest feels tight and her breathing is rapid.

Museum of the History of Science Collection Website

www.mhs.ox.ac.uk

How do people look at images?

Do you first notice the -
Context?
Emotion?
Layout?
Colour?

When different people view the same image what is the first thing that they will notice about it?

Look at it scientifically or in a more art history based way?
Present it clinically and neat - look at how work is presented in gallery or a scientific collection.

Take a famous image/piece of artwork and ask a variety of people from different backgrounds (artists, photographers, sculptors, scientists, historians, people with absolutley no interest in art whatsoever) and ask them to describe the image.

Ideas on displaying text

LIQUID LATEX
MASKING FLUID
PAINT
INK
FRAMED? PINNED DOWN?
DO I WRITE DIRECTLY ONTO THE BOARD?

I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY. I WONT BE AGRESSIVE TO YOU. EVER. EVER. I WILL NEVER EVER HIT YOU. DO NOT COME ROUND WHEN IM DRUNK. I DON'T WANT TO HURT YOU. ARE YOU PISSED OFF WITH ME? YOU ARE AREN'T YOU? IM SO SO SORRY. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.

BOOMMMMMMMMMMMTING GIRL. YOU COMING ROUND. AHHHHH. DRUNK.

I tried to shave but it didn't work.

I'm going to grab your legs.

I can't lift you up. You need to lose weight.

Open your mouth. Open it! Keep it open.

Gaz. GAZ. I can't do it. Please stop. stop. STOP I can't do it gaz.

I'm really sorry but I am very drunk and I need to get some sleep so why don't you fuck off.

Fine I will.

Marie. Marie. Marie. Marie. Come give me a cuddle.

No.

Why are you crying. I dont want to upset you. I dont. I dont. I'm going to hurt you. You always make me feel so bad. Come lie here with me.

He cannot keep it up. He gets frustrated. Angry. He jumps of the bed and start storming around the room, demanding answers to questions she is unable to answer. He throws himself on the bed and the pillow flips up and hits the side of a girls face. The tension is building and the girl is unable to handle it. She does not like arguments, she cannot cope with anger. She curls up onto the side of the bed and cries. He begins to cool down, and after a few minutes realizes he has upset her.

She cries out of frustration and she is scared it is her fault. He strokes her hair and rubs her back, whispering quietly into her ear and declares how he finds her attractive, how he likes her, and how it is definitely not her fault. On the lives of his mother, his brothers, his friends. She does not believe him. The crying continues for a small period of time till she is too tired. She is sullen and sulky and he senses it. The atmosphere is tense.

He turns on the television and begins to watch a film on channel 3. She is not interested. She cuddles up to him and he places his hand on the small of her back. She takes in her surroundings : she adores his room, the lived in clutter, the creaky double bed and the cream and brown duvet that spells delicious, like washing conditioner. She wants to cuddle in the bed and never leave, she wants him to want her there.

She tried to speak : stuttering. She can sense him getting frustrated as she can never get the words out, and if she does, they always come out wrong. He threatens to tickle her if she does not tell him, he runs his fingers down her arms to reinforced this threat. She does not believe him. He climbs on top of her, pinning her arms and hands above her head, using his legs to hold hers down and tickles her until she is begging, screaming for him to stop.

Last night was awkward. It took me over half an hour to get out the words I wanted to say. I could sense your frustration.

untitled.

I am waiting in a room. The atmosphere is uncomfortable. I am not the only one. A women is on the phone complaining about how long she has been waiting. One looks ridiculously relaxed : She is filing her nails and flicking through a glossy magazine. The last girl is Indian and no more than 15. She hugs her knees and the fear is apparent merely by her body language. She is alone. I wonder if anyone knows. Her face is blank and expressionless. I am fascinated by her. I study her features, she is pretty. She has slim wrists and I envy her long, dark hair. It is the kind of straight I have always wanted. Micheal Jackson is playing in the background. It does not suit this environment. I clock watch, 5 past, 10 past, 15 past.

I am led to a room. In the room is a row of 4 beds. A nurse leads me into a side cubicle and makes me wait there. She must be around 24. She is smiley and she has freckles, as well as a distinctive Irish accent. I immediately take a liking to her. I can still hear the other room - sobs sounding similar to ones I had made earlier. One women is screaming - the nurses are having trouble making her quieten down. They are all weary eyed and blank faced. None seem aware of their surrounding, or seem to know what they have done. Apart from the screamer. She is taken to another room, she is having difficulty walking.

I am unsure.

It is positioned in the middle left third of the image, but also on the middle right third. It has vertical stripes. A child can be seen at the window. The grain is unfocused, it is hard to see clearly the texture. The colors are not bright - the clouds are reflected into the window.

There is a man with a large stomach that is often related with pregnant women. There are 16 poles in the image, 4 wooden fences and I can see land in the distance. There are 10 other people in the image ranging from the age of around 2 and 50. The majority of the image is made up from sea.

FIONA BANNERS WORK

Fiona Banner

b. 1966, Merseyside, England

Much of Fiona Banner’s work explores the problems and possibilities of written language. Her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’ – blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films, (whose subjects range from war to porn) or sequences of events. These pieces took the form of solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. Banner’s current work encompasses sculpture, drawing and installation but text is still at the heart of her practice. She recently turned her attention to the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films. Often using parts of military aircraft as the support for these descriptions, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation.

Fiona Banner’s work has been included in a large number of exhibitions both in Europe and the USA. She is represented in many important collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum; Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis; The Arts Council of England and the Tate Gallery, London. She was short-listed for the Turner Prize 2003.

http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/bio/fiona_banner

English sculptor and conceptual artist. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic, Surrey (1986–9), and at Goldsmiths' College of Art in London (1992–3). She had her first solo exhibition at City Racing, London, in 1994, and in the following year was included in General Release: Young British Artists at the XLVI Venice Biennale. Banner came to prominence with her ‘wordscapes', large text works that recount the plots of feature films or other events. The ‘wordscapes' led to the publication in 1997 of The Nam, 1,000 pages of continuous text describing the Vietnam war movies Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and The Deer Hunter. This unreadable text points to the excess of violence in such films, the numbing of critical faculties, as well as the mythologising and fictionalising framing devices used to interpret historical events. Towards the end of the 1990s she became interested in the implications of punctuation signs, dwelling on their qualities as abstract marks that give structure to text. By selecting a variety of fonts, enlarging the full stop signs to 1,800 pt, and rendering them three-dimensionally, Banner created strangely dramatic objects, simple signs disguised as Minimalist sculpture. These were displayed together in Polystyrene Full Stops: Slipstream, Nuptial, Palatino, Times, Gill Sans Condensed, New Century Schoolbook (1998–9; Los Angeles, CA, 1301PE). The use of weightless polystyrene, which commonly functions as a packing material, points again to the paradox of the physical insignificance and semantic importance of these object–signs.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2687&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

MARTHA ROSLER.

Chat Roulette

A current trend or obsession (particular amongst teenagers, young adults and men who enjoy exposing themselves to the previous) is Chat Roulette. This is a site in which you are connected with another user anywhere in the world, share live webcam feeds and are able to 'chat' virtually to them. I find that the this service is quite awkward, and you are exposed to things you may not necessarily want to see, this site is generally a bit of a gamble. You are never sure if you will be connected with a person similar to yourself, or a man whose intentions may be anything but clean.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1253960/Chat-Roulette-Exploring-disturbing-webcam-service-connect-strangers.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/tim-walker-chat-roulette-is-like-some-bastard-child-of-skype-and-stumbleupon-1899349.html

http://connect.icrossing.co.uk/social-media-lessons-chat-roulette_4638

CYBER SPACES.

The Lurid, low resolution, pixelated blurriness shared by the photographs in 'Cyberspaces' signals their origin as cheap digital images, in this case frame grabs from internet webcams. Enlarged from a 240 x 320 pixel video stream, the available photographic information - barely usable to begin with, degrades and flattens out, unable to meet the demands of a 50 x 60 cm Lamda Print. Seen live, in full scale, the printed images look over-saturated, tacky and weirdly beautiful. More than anything else, 'Cyberspaces' look overtly like 'art' on first view. Bright colours lend the work a perky and even decorative air, but only until you get past the pixelated surface of these unnervingly evacuated, intimately creepy scenes.

All of the images in 'Cyberspaces' are from sexcams but none of them are populated by the internet prostitutes whose working spaces they portray. Florid colours and low resolution initially lend the images an almost painterly, impressionistic quality and that briefly marks what is really going on here. The vantage point is up close, only one or two meters away and not much higher than the bed, chair or couch. Stuffed animals appear repeatedly, unsettling companions and stand ins for young women who we do not see.

Schmid began working on 'Cyberspaces' at a time where health concerns forced him to pass much of his time indoors, spending what he characterizes as 'too much time on the internet sitting in front of a computer screen.' He decided to make work about people doing what he was doing - normally sitting in front of a computer screen - as a way of questioning the nature of an authentic experience in a virtual domain. Hunting for situations featuring people who sit in front of computers, he eventually arrives at 'people who do it professionally - for sexcams. The first one I entered, it just happened that the women got up and left. I had a picture of an empty sofa and I said, this is exactly what I am hunting for.'

Schmid finds the resulting images of empty stages ' a strange, sad document of what is happening throughout Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia, a huge industry where young girls sell themselves for small sums of money... you look at the objects represented and you get an idea about the age of the young women working there. Basically, these are children's rooms.'

Descriptions.

For people who cannot see, how do they communicate? The use of braille, a form of code, which is something I would like to explore, and I would like to experiment with the use of relief print in order to create this.

I also thought about descriptions - creating a mental image. I was reminded of the scene in 'Amelie' in which she describes the surroundings for a man who cannot see.

NOTES.

MONOPRINTS.

This monoprint is created using the Binary Code alphabet that I found on the internet. I like the idea of taking someone that is computerized and making it hand rendered, although I feel the content I used (which was just a statement explaining what Binary code is) could be improved. I would like to experiment with different sizes of monoprints, and perhaps making them in the size that the image is, and then using the description or similar for the content.

This monoprint is taking from the code I created from the Eiffel Tower. I think this idea could be taken a lot further and I do not feel that is works just as a monoprint like this on its own. I would like to move away from this idea and work more on the binary code.