This installation can take many forms; providing that the text is projected onto a blank page in a book. The text states “ERROR 404 PAGE NOT FOUND”; a common HTTP error message that can be seen online when a web page isn’t available; it could have moved, been deleted or never have existed in the first place. Similarly to the intentionally blank page in an exam paper there is a need to reassure the audience that there is a reason behind a lack of content. People aren’t comfortable with blank space, there always seems to be the need to fill it with something. I have appropriated the message and swapped an online web page for the page of a book similarly to how I have appropriated the intentionally blank page for walls. The text flickers to hint at the technological source of the text, but the text itself is a play on words in the context of a book. This type of error code out-dates the technology of the book so to see them together is a clash of different worlds. The flickering text also draws attention to the medium of the text and its temporal state in the book as well as the fragile nature of language and its capacity to be stripped of its original meaning and placed elsewhere; perhaps the text knows that it is not in its ‘correct’ place and is flickering as a result of not computing with the paper pages.
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By projecting into a bookcase I am attempting to combine the two spaces that I have been occupying with text; books and empty walls. The bookcase as an object has a purpose to contain books. Yet an empty bookcase implies a lack of purpose because it is not doing its intended job. Again I am addressing the empty space and occupying it with words. The difference here is that the space is not all flat and is broken up by the horizontal planes of the shelves. Text can be made to sit on the edges of the shelves or in the voids between them.
I wanted to develop the idea of the projected wall text further, and made a site-specific installation in my studio space. Taking old work of the wall has left evidence behind, and so I took the time to map out the space using a series of arrows and labels. The installation switches between a set of labels that are descriptive to a set that are more ambiguous, playing with two separate lines of enquiry; the line of someone who isn’t familiar with the space, and the line of someone who is and can identify elements of the space. I also tested how my presence in the space could alter a projected text. By using white text on a black background, the background itself does not appear when projected, giving the illusion that the text is hovering on the wall/ on what is present in the room. It also gives a sense of the installation's temporal nature, and how it will not always remain in that space. After viewing my digital zines on-screen I thought I could push the viewing platform further and try projecting them onto the wall. The change in scale firstly made the books appear much more than an A5 sketchbook where the pages originated from but much more of a spectacle, especially with the pages turning themselves with a press of a button. I filmed the book as the pages turned to see what difference it made to the on-screen version. The combination of projected light and my camera meant that the film picked up a lot of extra colours than just the black and white pages. I photographed the pages as they were turning to capture this colour-shift, and as well as the change in colours there were moments where two pages merged and the texts overlapped or blurred, creating hybrid textual forms. I also tried to materialise my wall texts as projections. By taking the text directly away from the wall, the text occupies more of the space though the beams of light from the projector. The projection occupies the wall because of its proximity to the projector; it's the first thing that the light hits. Yet when the audience enters the space they occupy it, and the light hits them.
Here, the space is left 'blank' for the audience to occupy and explore the text that can be seen, either on themselves or on the wall. When my sketchbooks evolved to consider the ‘blank’ page, I was drawn to the memory of college examination papers, that occasionally has pages in them that contained no material; only the words “THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK”. This in itself is a contradiction; the page cannot be blank because of the message printed on it, yet the need is there to tell the reader that the page does not contain any other content; if the page were left with nothing on it at all the reader might believe it to be a mistake. So what if the page wasn’t left blank on purpose? What then? It implies that there is something missing; something that should be occupying that page. It gives the impression that we as readers cannot comprehend the reason for a blank page. There must be something on it. The purpose of a page is not to be blank. That is why the message is there to reassure us. “THIS PAGE NOT INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK” means exactly that; the page is not supposed to be empty and it isn’t. The message on the page states the exact reason that it is there and is not contradictory unlike the first statement. This leads onto the piece that I made in response to this, using the studio wall rather than the page as the ‘blank’ space. The two wall texts are presented on opposing walls stemming from the corner, similar to the layout of an open book. Like the book pages, one statement is contradictory whereas the other is self-aware. |
AuthorThird Year BA Hons Fine Art student studying at Falmouth University Archives
April 2017
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