Abstract
Devices that produce images, such as cameras and microphones, invite their users to engage with the world by enabling a network of relationships (Røed, 2014). By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art and applying it to the moving image, this artistic research project builds on that idea and explores the capacity of video based art for enabling movement, transience, and body, in other words elements of performance characteristic to site (Kwon 2004, Kaye 2000). By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, the activities of the project consider how the moving image can manifest as a form of place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality.
How might the moving image be engaged to explore specific surroundings and to create artworks that operate across any dialectic opposition between experience, mediation and representation, as a form of placemaking?
How can the moving image be considered as a form of site in itself, rather than a mode of representing reality? This question challenges images and seeks to explore their capacity for movement, transience, and presence as characteristic to site-specific art, performance and field-recording (sound art).
How can artistic practices from visual art and film (video art, sound art, performance and cinematography) intersect to widen understanding of field recording within the fields of contemporary art and media?
Results
Image as Site has generated new insights regarding image, attention and perception in relation to the image, enriching understandings of place-making through artistic practice.
It has fostered discourse through explicit reflection in seminars, digital expositions, and conferences as well as exhibitions, performances, and publications.
At the heart of the project is an investigation of attention in relation to image-making. Cameras and microphones have been employed in order to shape and negotiate attention sa well as enable experience of place through audial and visual structures and movements that occur in and through sound and image, in relation to specific environments. A key method is the continuous development of custom camera rigs, allowing the artists to attend to and collaborate with forces already present at the sites in question, such as forest, architecture, wind and gravity.
The project's engagement with a situated practice of video art as inquiry offer a methodology that embrace a thick materiality that resonates with ethical and ecological concerns. Through meticulous fieldwork involving the custom-made camera rigs in various environments, including indoor and outdoor urban spaces, islands and several types of forests, the project has successfully investigated the intricate interplay between image, attention, environment and place. This has generated new insights about image, both in terms of image-making and in terms of experiencing image.
By centering a technical or machinic component in the image-making process the research opens a frame for contemplating the image as something other than determined by human vision. This occurs in a tension between a framework for contemplating the image as autonomous entity, with a significance found in what the image is an “image of” and its immediate appearance, and a framework that understands a site as a field of forces and where the appearance is but a part of an interplay of elements. By incorporating these elements in the image-making process, human control is decentralized, revealing the image's inherent tension between autonomy and its role within a broader field of forces.
Central to the project's results is manifestations of the moving image as something that is dependent on a vast, underlying, invisible and complex network. The image reveals itself as dynamic, temporally specific, as a process of becoming and as something that unfolds within a particular context that allows for its appearance.
Alien site
Reflections on Image as Site
by Rune Søchting.
Credits (all sites and pages)
If nothing else is stated, Photo/edit by Ellen Røed.
Colophon
The research project Image as Site is situated at the core of Stockholm University of the Arts’s profile area Art, Technology and Materiality. It is supported by Stockholm University of the Arts and The Swedish Research Council.
The research has generated a variety of activities in the form of seminars/symposias, workshops, lectures, presentations, concerts, exhibitions/screenings as well as an extensive series of fieldwork/fieldrecordings.
Two publications, IMAGE AS SITE: KOMPASS (2024) and IMAGE AS SITE: THE RIG (2024) have been published by Stockholm University of the Arts.
Research team Ashley Briggs, Signe Lidén, Ellen Johanne Røed, Rune Søchting.
Contributors:
Johan Andersson |
Technical support, SKH |
Johan Andrén |
Exhibition engineer, technical support, Trafo |
Annette Arlander |
Author, conversation partner |
Hild Borchgrevink |
Conversation partner, author |
Ashley Briggs |
Cinematographer, research assistant |
Ulf Carlsson |
Design publications |
Peter Dean |
Dissemination, photo, author, Trafo kunsthall |
Max Edkvist |
Technical support, SKH |
Patrik Entian |
Technical support, photo |
Harald Fetveit |
Conversation partner symposium |
Jostein Gundersen |
Research collaboration, musician |
Bjørnar Habbestad |
Co-researcher, performer, conversation partner, musician, editor |
Sanna Hagström |
Administrative support, SKH |
Robin Hedström |
Drone operator |
Katt Hernandez |
Fieldrecording, conversation partner |
Rebecca Hilton |
Conversation partner, author |
Saman Hosseini |
Technical support, SKH |
Signe Lidén |
Co-researcher, fieldrecording, author, artist |
Trond Lossius |
Co-researcher, conversation partner, fieldrecording, artist |
Timo Menke |
Graphic design/layout Research Catalogue |
Jez riley French |
Fieldrecording, conversation partner symposium, artist |
Hans Knut Sveen |
Research collaboration, musician |
Rune Søchting |
Co-researcher, editor, conversation partner symposium, author |
Ellen Røed |
Main researcher, artist |
Göran Wendel |
Technical support, SKH |
In addition, artistic researchers Jenny Suneson, Mia Engberg, Savas Boyras, Tinna Joné, Stacey Sacks, John Paul Zaccarini, Anna Lindahl, Chrysa Parkinson, Lina Persson as well as a range of other colleagues at SKH have contributed to the projects as conversation partners and engaged with the project through their own research in an Image as Site context.
Epilogue
The project builds on research conducted by Ellen Røed as part of a fellowship in artistic research at the Department of Fine Art at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, in which she applied video art as a means of exploring specific environments and reflected upon on how video may enable active and significant relationships between sites, devices and their users. The title of the project, Image as Site, refers to, or is taken from her article, Image as Site as a chapter of Estetikk og Samfunn (2015) published by Fagbokforlaget.
The original Image as Site text is available here as pdf. In it, Ellen Røed discusses how recording devices such as microphones and cameras provide structure and enable reflexive relationships between the observer and the observed, as she reflect upon how a particular artwork, Skyvelære#6 operates by turning images into sites.
Documentation of the fellowship project Processing Change, of which Skyvelære#6 was a part, is available at https://monoskop.org.
Is this the end? Or is it a beginning?*
The audio-visual material presented in this cluster of expositions intended to document processes and activites of the artistic research project. This includes unedited recordings, early drafts, test-situations, rehearsals etc. (not-yet-art*).
*) Florian Dombois (2019)