Touching the 'real' through foraging

Touching the 'real' through foraging

Why did I get into foraging?
What was the motivation?
These are interesting questions I ask myself.

To put this blog into a context I want to explain myself a little. I am a interactive video artist who has been exploring digital technologies since 2006. Before then I had been a practicing artist using analogue video for fifteen years. I have always loved 'making' and 'exploring' and art practice has always been a fantastic vehicle to express myself. I am an international artist and I have had work published. At this end of this post I will add my website and as the blog develops I will attach any publications I feel are relevant to my pages. It was in 2008 that I started doing my PhD in practice led research (a research model in which the at practice leads the research). I completed my PhD in 2012 and since then I feel I had lost my creative instincts to 'create & explore'.

My research was about immersing the participant into the artwork via new digital technologies and the need to truly connect participants during the viewing experience. Philosophically the relationship between the 'self' and the art object 'as other' troubled me. The writings of the past always determined that the division between these two modalities was infinite. This was something that I could not agree with. Though based on a belief I believed there was no division between the body and the object but a relationship and a connection that could not be seen but experienced. So I set out on my quest to explore these ideas by making interactive video works. I won't go into too much detail as I cannot summarize my PhD in a few lines but you will get a taster of my research from my website. My most recent explorations were to use heart rate sensors attached to a participants body while experiencing and viewing video images. I was, and still am looking for ways to visualize our art experiences and the impact they have on the physiology of the body. This might be hard to imagine but I was using the human body as if it were a video player and through the participants beats per minute their heart rate could control elements of the video they were watching (so if the heart rate was say, 70+ bpm they could speed up the video or slow it down at -70 bpm). Ok so what does this have to do with foraging? I will be getting to my point. After struggling time and time again with the technologies I was using and finding it almost impossible to get support I was losing all faith in my work and ideas. I had these ideas which I just could not sustain in terms of money and technical expertise. Arts councils were not giving any support along with local and regional councils and local businesses so I am now re-considering how I work, what I create, and the way I create it. I had lost my intuitive way of working and felt I was merely a slave to the technology which was crippling my energy and enthusiasm. I began to question how I could continue with these ideas and maintain my creative integrity.

My main purpose of making these artworks was to 'touch the participant' in some way. To give participants something basic back - a real experience. To feel connected to the artwork. However while I was going through the struggle of trying to realize these ideas I was feeling more and more disconnected. When I am making and exploring I feel alive. When I am participating in my own art experience I also feel something more of myself. A lot of my research explored 'real experiences' and challenged what we mean by reality and the real. I realized I was looking for a deep 'real experience' to connect me as both the maker and the participant of my own artwork. I wanted to connect participants to a really real experience - a hypperreal. Struggling with the technology so much interrupted my flow, my reality and my experience.

I began to think about what makes me most happy. Foraging, exploring and making has always been a hobby I have loved over the years. I have been making face creams, lotions and potions for ever. Something my mother taught me many years ago. I decided to expand on my knowledge and get out weekly to learn more and more about what our ancestors gathered and ate. I am going back to basics and loving every minute of it. Foraging is enabling me to be creative and discover new things, raise new questions and touch a reality that I have been seeking in my artwork. The 'real' is a concept that french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan articulates as a way to understand the human condition. In short Lacan sees the real as something that cannot be articulated in language. It is imperceptible and indescribable which can only be accessed when we die. The way Lacan sees things is glum but also astute. When we use language to communicate (be it written or visual) it is a secondary source of communication through it's symbolic representation as a language. Language is what we use to communicate and it is not always a direct interpretation of what we mean or how we feel. Lacan goes back to the child during it's pre-language stage of development and locates this as a experience of the real. So when the child enters into language it loses the real. The only way to go back to this stage of development would be a re-birth and start the process all over again (in death). Though Lacan's ideas may sound desperate I see some truth in his observations. I cannot discuss in too much detail Lacan and his work (see his mirror stage) but I draw on some of his thinking to make sense of my own observations and experiences.

From my own research I see the hidden world of experience as the 'real'. These are experiences we cannot articulate in language and once it is said it has gone. This is why I turned to heart rate sensors in an attempt to visualize the hidden world of experience. To see the 'real'. Though it is a dichotomy to translate the physiology of the body into data (real-time heart beats on a screen) we are seeing something of human experience in another form of language that is getting us closer to the real - something I call an In[bodiment]were we are in the moment in the other (the artwork). I see this as being caught up between the 'self and other' understood as place that enables us to touch something more of ourselves in the other - a hyper-real experience.  This is were foraging comes in. I get a hyper-real experience when I am outdoors looking, gathering, exploring, and making. There is nothing complicated about these weekly ventures ... it feels natural and uncomplicated. I am focused on my task and I am truly absorbed in the landscape. I think and I feel and I am in the moment. I cannot express my reality but the feeling is truly wonderful. My reality is translated into the recipies that I make ... they are works of art packed with my hidden world of experience. The process is much more important then the product. Perhaps there will be a merger between my foraging and my art practice into something new and exciting. I expect these two worlds to collide because we are our experience.

As much as I find my interactive art practice exciting I am loving the foraging which will undoubtedly inform my artwork. I am so looking forward to developing my art practice in new and exciting ways that does not cripple my creativity and integrity and enable me to be much more autonomous. This is what foraging does for me it allows me to be creative, explore and heighten my connection with myself and the world around me ... were the body and the land crossover. It is through this blog I can share those experiences and give something back.

Go on have a go at foraging ... it's worth it. Immerse yourself in the fabric of the landscape.


Maurice Merelau-Ponty is an interesting read on the cross overs between the body and the world and also Zizek and his work on the 'Real'. For Zizek the real is what we experience through fiction.

References

http://lornam77.wix.com/lornamooreartist

Homer, S. (2005) Jacques Lacan, Routledge.

Zizek, S. (2002) Welcome To The Dessert Of The Real, Verso, London.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Intertwining-The Chiasm: In Lefort, C. (ed) The Visible and the Invisible: Philosophical Interrogation.  Lingis, A. (trans), Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. pp 130-155.