unfound
risd thesis blog: james j gradyArchive for the everyday
thesis thoughts: unfound
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to best communicate my thesis. It has much to do with what I see everyday. I just came back from a trip to Kentucky and saw some beautiful horse farms on the outskirts of Lexington. There was a spot off one of the roads that said scenic viewpoint. This really made me think about my thesis. Why is this spot pointed out? While the gentle hills, iconic barns, and pristine stockade fencing were stunning, there were equally as many striking and artful images to be found in the ordinary or the “unfound,” most only existed for a moment in time.
I want to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and the beauty in the mundane and I want to share it with others. I want to stop people in their tracks, make them alter their routines for brief moments, and then shake them with the gorgeousness of the everyday. I want to be a part of sharing the beauty I find, so that others can share in this joy.
My thesis acts in a three-part process: as an operator, as a spectator and as the presenter. As an operator, I observe my surroundings and capture them through still photography and video. As a spectator, I review the captured footage, and am often bewildered by the new form it takes. I then distill and edit the footage to uncover the essence of the original observations. Finally, as the presenter, I transform the content into a new form: whether it be a printed matter, a video vignette, an interactive screen project, or a physical installation.
This thesis enters into a dialogue with the work and theory of other artists with similar concerns: the artist, Robert Rauschenberg, whose “combine” projects take objects off the street recontextualizing them into a new form of painting and sculpture; the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, who photographs the movement of humans and animals and translates them into frame-by-frame still imagery to reflect this process; the filmmaker, Michel Gondry, whose films warp perception by using everyday objects to perform surreal experiences; and the historian, Michel de Certeau, who uncovers systems of the everyday as a process that includes all of us in it.
My work aims to be accessible to a wide audience and to represent new scenic viewpoints in our everyday. I look forward to uncovering Graphic Design in the details as well as the majestic moments of the everyday in order to transform and share my perspective with others.
everyday time-lapse
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, a time-lapse film, initially inspires this project. Since November, I have been using an inexpensive time-lapse camera to document experiences from my everyday life. This camera has no viewfinder, so I never know exactly what is being captured. Pulling the files from the USB drive in the camera, is a great experiment in chance operation. It is also reminiscent of the magical experience of developing and printing from film. The algorithmic method of this piece comes from editing the duration, speed, and framing of the clips, but keeps the footage in a chronological order. My interest includes a set of seemingly disparate footage and how it combines to create a narrative. This voyeuristic point of view allows for a genuine capture of people and surroundings. Although the process is as important as the finished piece, the act of editing the footage helps me craft a unique narrative of everyday life.
I’m continuing to capture time-lapse footage everyday. Check here to the latest footage. Enjoy!
incarceration vacation
book view 1
book view 2
The video and book above are inspired by Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life and my daily commute from Boston to Providence. Cheers!
Strategies and Tactics
Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life explores the everyday operating in society. He describes two concepts, “strategies” and “tactics” that identify behaviors in the everyday: strategies become a way for corporations, governments and big businesses to control people as well as the environment around them; tactics are ways that individuals, negotiate these worlds. Certeau claims that individuals employ strategies by “constantly manipulating events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’” [xix].
The chasm between strategies and tactics
In Chapter VIII, Railway Navigation and Incarceration, Certeau describes the experience of riding the train. The train is a great example of the chasm between the strategy and the tactic: the train is a strategy—it is part of a larger system that incarcerates the passengers. The passengers however, use tactics to overcome this system, making each trip a mini vacation of sight and sound. According to Certeau “The unchanged traveler is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia” [111].
Order in chaos
The train gives passengers order in their everyday world of chaos. The train is a place of transition between geographical locations as well as home and work. Travelers often overlook the transitions in the everyday; instead, they focus on their destinations. The train offers them a time to look out the window, reflecting, wondering, listening and dreaming. Without this incarceration these possibilities would not necessarily be available.
Glass and Iron
Certeau eloquently describes the literal and figurative separation of the train and the travelers as “…the iron rail whose straight line cuts through space and transforms the serene identities of the soil into the speed with which they slip away into the distance. The windowpane is what allows us to see, and the rail, what allows us to move through”[112]. Travelers are incarcerated within a controlled system and at the same time they are set free by a sensorial experience.
Ambient sounds
Certeau describes the train sounds as “Only the partition makes noise. As it moves forward and creates two inverted silences, it taps out a rhythm, it whistles or moans. There is a beating of the rails, a vibrato of the windowpanes—a sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points of their frontier” [113].
Submission to the machine
As travelers are observing the everyday within this lens, they identify their independence within a system. Within everyday life there is so much to try and control individually; sometimes travelers could submit to the “machine” and take an “incarceration-vacation”.
Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix, 111, 112, 113.
everyday observations: light
With the ability to have a camera phone in my pocket at all times, I can document the everyday, anytime. This book evaluates a typology of images I capture on my camera phone and identifies a dominant visual theme of light: natural, artificial and reflective. This book takes excerpts from Allen Ruppersberg’s 50 Helpful Hints on Art of The Everyday; and I capture 50 images of everyday observations of light. Ruppersberg uses what I call ‘didactic-lite ’ language in the title 50 Helpful Hints on Art of The Everyday; he does not actually list 50 hints but uses the common categorizing style headline as a way to showcase some of his philosophies on art. With my images, I am using this concept in a similar fashion in order to let the viewer look at the ordinary in an extraordinary way and to interpret a narrative in their own way. Enjoy!
This book is available at the blurb bookstore.
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
