Imaging Hybrid Space

I found very nice article about Dan Holdsworth's photography. From Gardian 2001


Border Lights: Imaging Hybrid Space
Dan HoldsworthPicture gallery Angus CarlyleFriday March 23, 2001Guardian Unlimited

'The lack of certain knowledge in a world of unpredictable change creates borderlines that exist as distinct, often extensive, spaces in vast grey zones of transition. These borderlines no longer separate certainties, but become spaces where uncertainties meet, interact, fuse or are repelled.' 1
'Hybrid space proposes an approach to architecture that creates new cultural codes and modalities - turbulences and disruptions within the physical and electronic networks that connect our international and local cultures.' 2

The work of photographer Dan Holdsworth is most cogently addressed under the sign of hybridity, the interaction of heterogeneous elements that occurs with greatest intensity at the planet's borderlines.
This hybridity is manifest in Holdsworth's fluid oscillation between commercial projects and more identifiably artistic enterprises.
On the one hand there are the extended assignments for the British Council, an Adidas campaign that saturated the cities hosting Euro2000, an evocative video for counter couturiers Vexed Generation, and various other scrupulously selected commissions through which his characteristic style surreptitiously infiltrates the consumer's visual field.
On the other, exhibitions at London's Atlantis, Chisenhale and Photographers' galleries culminating in last autumn's solo show at Cork Street's Entwhistle, by whom he is represented.
His successful movement between ostensibly disparate cultural locations enables him to be championed by The Evening Standard as one of the five faces to watch in 2001, while also attracting plaudits not only from the bleeding edges of contemporary publishing in Themepark, Sleazenation and Tank's coverage but also from the more sober photography journals like Camera Austria and Aperture.
It should come as little surprise that when the subjects of Holdsworth's photographic endeavours are explored, they reflect a parallel emphasis on the hybridity that is emerging at the planet's borderlines.
In a recent interview, Holdsworth declared his resistance to 'the idea of separation' that conventionally operates to demarcate the world into mutually exclusive poles: rural / urban, wilderness / civilisation, natural / artificial, third world / first world.
This declaration echoes a statement of intent announced four years earlier to investigate 'areas which I have termed "inter-liminal" spaces [and] in-between forms'.
It is perhaps this iterated commitment to mapping hybrid spaces which introduces a consistency to the potentially perplexing diversity of images.
The very number of these images that have appeared in a relatively short period of time dictates that in the few words that follow I only have the opportunity to discuss a fraction of this output.
Holdsworth's Autopia series locates itself in 'the empty halogen arenas that perforate our automotive cities' and the 'motorway flyovers' that punctuate the outer peripheries.
Yet the resultant images do not amount to any predictable day-lit representation of unsightly vehicular velocities colliding in a sulphurous haze.
Instead, the camera's exploration is conducted from a nocturnal perspective - in which the car parks are evacuated - and through a long exposure - from which any movement along the transport routes is visually compressed into ghost-trails from passing headlights.
The hybridity of these spaces depends to a large extent upon the dynamic opposition that emerges between the still, empty zones captured in the photographs and the viewer's appreciation of the frenzy that characterizes the same environments after sunrise.
Other inferred juxtapositions energize Holdsworth's more recent engagements with the spaces of traffic.
One of his contributions to Gasworks gallery's What We Call Progress depicts a smallholding that superficially evokes an autumnal American Gothic, yet investigation locates this chicken farm in the very immediate vicinity of the M8 motorway.
Similarly, the image Megalith manages to establish, through its framing of the skybound artificial light leaking from the top of a Dutch illuminated road-side hoarding, a strong vertical momentum.
This upward trajectory is positioned in interrogative contrast to the horizontal plane to which the just-out-of-shot motorists are hopelessly confined.
The vertical axis assumes an even more fundamental dimension in the At The Edge of Space sequence, which mobilizes a photographic analysis of the Port Spatial de l'Europe in South America.
Again, what is drawn out from Holdsworth's investigation of this French-Guianese installation of European rocket science - which he calls "the projection of architecture into space" - is, at least to this viewer, spatial hybridity.
This hybridity occurs across a number of borderlines between which the photographer identifies degrees of 'friction': the fecund jungle and the brutal attempts to repel its re-expansion; the supposed order invoked in the base's clinical interiors and clutter of equipment that threatens to destabilize it; the cosmological consciousness potentially provoked by contemplation of the extra-planetary environment and the worldly banality of satellites' functions once successfully sent into orbit.
Holdsworth's most recent project, as yet unpublished, involves a sustained exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland.
Initial encounters with these images might intimate that his arrival at even higher levels of creative distinction has simultaneously involved a departure for a gentler intellectual terrain, one less fissured by borderlines and less vulnerable to the instability of hybridity.
Yet, closer examination reveals that the ideas which animate his other work continue to exert their powerful presence, yet are now more submerged and, ultimately, more effective for that.
To describe the conceptual component of Holdsworth's photography as submerged in his most recent work should not be regarded as an implication that his earlier images announced their meaning with crude blatancy.
One of the intriguing aspects of Holdsworth's work relates to its resistance to being coherently located along the continuum between abstraction and representation.
Although the images possess figurative veracity, they are rarely inhabited by human presence or labelled by overt signage and they succeed as optical impact, characteristics more clearly associated with abstraction.
In Holdsworth's own terms, this formal hybridity invites the images to be engaged with as 'indeterminate', refusing to 'specify interpretation' and instead providing densely detailed 'surfaces of information' that are amenable to being 'scanned' for their multiple meanings.
Exploring Holdsworth's work, with its compelling mixture of cerebral sophistication and sensory stimulation and its persistent disclosure of the otherwise unseen, evokes for me the experimental energies in ideas and in image-making encapsulated by the following quotations.
'Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.' 3
'Here I am, a camera, pushed about by resultant force, positioning myself amid the chaos of motions, fixing motion after motion in the most complex of combinations… Here I am deciphering a world unknown.' And here we are, in front of Dan Holdsworth's images, encountering the sublime hybridity emerging at the borderlines.

1 Lebbeus Woods, 'Inside the Borderline' in: eds. Lebbeus Woods and Ekkehard Rehfeld, Borderline, Springer Verlag, New York:, 1998, p. 39.
2 Peter Zellner, 'Introduction' to Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999, p. 11.
3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Allen and Unwin, London, 1911, p. 1.
4 Dziga Vertov cited in Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity, Sage, London, 1998, p. 86.

The time scale - Reigionare di Lombardia

I thought of writing one of my favourite photo that I took this year. This is the construction site of Regionale di Lombardia located close to Stazione di Milano Centrale. I stayed in a house of a friend of mine whose gallerist and art collector. I was so lucky to come across with this balcony to have an opportunity to take a photo that depicts series of different historical layers in single shot of an image.
The discovery of a layer of roman remain at 6ft under the post war housing blocks emphasizes the scale of approximately 2000 years which is represented by the thickness of soil accumulated over such period of time indicating the city's history. What really fascinates me is that, this mass body of soil is held by thin layer of concrete retaining wall that seems to be resisting very hard to protect remains but at the same time confirming the scale of the future development on site. It seems what humans are doing in adjacent is powerless but stretching the maximum effort possible to make this development possible. To my mind, these machineries are trying to eat up the house next to the construction site.
I love the situation when series of both physical and metaphorical layers coincides in a single shot of an image. The optical counterpart of an object can be the scale of time here.

Making invisible visible - Theo Jensen

I found Theo Jensen's work by chance. He is an artist, sculptor and engineer who creates kinetic structure. His sculpture resembles large animals that walks, powered by wind.
I thought his work is astonishing when he introduced his work as sculpture making invisible wind as a visible object. An intention of his work is rather normal as creative starting point but expresses his investigation in figurative mechanism which makes coordinated movement with many discrete component resembling walking motion. Unlike sailing boat, the movement is not smooth and obvious, giving the sense of self controlled manoeuvre and strength that makes it look totally independent from wind. This unexpected-ness is not so mythological or phenomenological which many artist tend to express their obsession for. I really like this contradiction that plays with my un-expectancy...and also looks like Hayao Miyazaki's animation character.

Japanese Contemporary Garden - Mirei Shigemori 重森三玲

Ryoanji, Kyoto

Tofukuji, Kyoto - Mirei Shigemori

枯山水 - Karesansui

I had never questioned the meaning of Karesansui, one of the three types of traditional Japanese garden. It is described as "rock garden" in western world but it is literally means "withered mountain and water garden". It is interesting to see the contradiction behind its concept. The garden is described as "the death of nature" uses non-life materials to represent a range of imaginative live features like water and surrounding landscapes in motion.

I love this power of abstraction through dialectical representation between optical observation and imaginative perception, unlike Moholy-Nagy's work or any cubistic art. (may be because motif is not figurative...)

I thought of it when visiting a photographic exhibition on modern Japanese Garden by Christian Tschmi and Christian Lichtenburg at Bibliothek Basel today. It is all about Mirei Shigemori whose work influenced Isamu Noguchi and other modern artists and architects.

I noticed in most of his work that the abstraction of the image from which he was inspired, are represented, in such a way, to directly communicate with the observer. The pattern making of the garden can be very expressive that sometimes looks like they are on a verge of kitch and extravagant.

But few of his works like in Tohukuji are exceptionally beautiful, an imaginative composition of stones within a thick carpet of moss directing your attention to and from. It has such a power that it triggers many thoughts in different areas. How the moss is grown around the edge of stone creating convexity and concavity on the ground surface, eventually disappearing into the sea of white stone and trees. It looks as though you are viewing a vast landscape from a high point looking down at some human settlements in the forest and the disappearing topography fading into the sea. This is only my perception of this garden and it is super fantastic the way it draws out your imagination.

I am starting to think I might like the thing that has a small morphological transition on a surface which is able to draws out a vast topography of imagination.

Illusion of Space - László Moholy-Nagy

I Just came across a book of Moholy Nagy in my office library today. It brought back a memory of what I was going through in University of East London. I only realised sometime later that the methodology of teaching was adopted literary from Bauhaus which was already then 80 years old. Still today, we can see some artists going though similar thinking process as those days, but done with more contemporary manner. Moholy Nagy's has always been one of my idols with his transcendence work with objects, images and paintings. His photogram through the transformation of the object into an obscuring image makes an interesting representation of a condition in between material and the image. I feel its so mythological. One day, I would like to make an image that represents my mythological counterpart.

"Composition Z VIII" (1924)

To achieve the illusion of space, in these work an objects altering from foregrounded, background, translucent to opaque, light to dark. Moholy-Nagy stated, "Tearing apart the old visual conception, the cubist painters originated a new means of rendering, as well as a space articulation.

"Construction" (1932)

Not only a depth of space, but movement, floating without sense of gravity. He expressed in 'vision in motion, floating objects in space, no longer grounded, but achieving a new harmony in a state of equilibrium. Eventually Moholy-Nagy saw the limitation inherent in pigment on canvas and worked towards the use of light as a means of achieving new imagery and qualities of abstraction. Moholy-Nagy began working with light-sensitive technique, the photogram. Exposing light to light sensitive paper revealing a translucent shape: literally "painting with light.

Black, White, Grey" (1932)

A Moment - Olafur Eliasson

I have always been interested in Olafuer Eliasson's Olafuer Eliasson's work, but until now it has never really deeply touched me. It all changed when I recently visited his exhibition at Kunsthaus Zug , in Zurich. His work of Lava is extraordinary as your perception of it increases gradually as you look at it more carefully. The sound also made by walking on the lava sand plays a sensational game with the exhibition space, echoing within the museum's white cubes. His video emphasises the significance of the moment which only exists when our presence is the counterbalanc to its phenomenon. It is great to hear 'this is not here when we are not here' The magic lies with the extrapolation of discreet component of its phenomena and perception/sensatoin.

The magic is... signification of descrete component of its phenomena/sensatoin.

from iheartphotograph

I found this image at http://iheartphotograph.blogspot.com/ by Daniel Whibley. Its quite interesting how single image is broken up into few segments and composed in a way that has story in three dimensional field, of course helped by graphical trick.

To start

I have decided to make a record of my inspirations and thought of my everyday life that started to become a little regular.25.11.07