Installation Shots: Dark Monarch Exhibition

Final image for DARK MONARCH

'Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time External Recurrence Monad), 2009'
Backlit digital print on vinyl, 450 x 7660 cm

'Why are conceptual artists juicing again? Artists project in FRIEZE MAGAZINE (Sept)

Download PDF here:
'Why are conceptual artists juicing again? Because they moisturise its a glistening sparkle'
Artist project, Frieze magazine, September 2009

Installation shots: 'Faerie Poem' 2009, at EAST 2009, at Norwich Gallery, Norwich

Click to enlarge.

BOB GEAL IMAGES: PICTURING IDEAS. Vue Infinte & Poser

Bob Geal. Marx/Commodity form



Bob Geal. Deleuze/Leibniz: Monad



Bob Geal. Eternal Return + Monad

FINAL IMAGES. FAERIE POEM. EAST 09. NORWICH GALLERY

Click images to enlarge.


jpg of final image.

Faerie Poem, 2009
Backlit digital print on vinyl, 475 x 1064cm
Not good quality on here. See another version here

Faerie Poem, 2009
Illustrated poem, 21 x 29.7cm.

Youtube films 'visualising' MONAD

1. Film based on Monadology. Monadology is the work of Leibniz, the German philosopher of 18th century. The universe of Leibniz is composed of numerous independent substances he names monads. The monads are the basis of all real objects. HERE

2. [Part one of 4. The other four sections available on youtube index]. A video introduction into the monadology - an ontology of Leibniz. Leibniz was a German universal scholar who has written on several topics two of them being theological and metaphysics.
HERE

Preliminary Images 2: EAST

John Russell: Images/diagrams from Kant/Aesthetics Lecture

Miscellaneous images 2: Picturing 'ideas'.

J.L.David. The Oath of the Horatii (1784).
The primacy of the state.




Pod scene from The Matrix 1999.
'Brain in a vat'.





The Beyond (1981) Dir. Lucio Fulci.

Simultaneously Heaven and Hell.

John Martin. 'His Wrath' 1853.

IMAGE SET 1

This project tests and evaluates the critical and aesthetic implications of the ‘picturing’ or ‘visualisation’ of philosophical and political ideas as art.
Six sets of digital images will be posted on this site between the 1st March and 1st July, picturing the following philosophical ideas: Leibniz/Deleuze’s notion of the Monad, Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. A final image will be produced as a synthesis of these three. Your feedback gratefully received.

Research questions are:
1. How can philosophical and political ideas be ‘visualised’ or ‘pictured’ using computer generated imagery?
2. How might the contemporary virtuality and dematerialisation of the image and mutability of digital form relate to the ‘virtual’ nature of philosophical ideas?
3. How can these representations of ‘ideas’ as images be described in relation to existing theories of ‘mental imagery’ and the ‘picturing affects’ of language?
4. If images of ideas are combined visually, can this produce ‘new’ ideas? How can we judge the status and performance of these images as ‘ideas’ and as ‘art’?

These images are only first attempts but I am posting them up as they are otherwise I will never get started. Some are based on previous work, others are ‘speculative’. I would be grateful for any feedback on images or theoretical concerns suggested above, as well as descriptions or examples of other images (including drawings, sketches, lecture illustrations etc). Either by posting on this website, or by email j.a.russell@reading.ac.uk


1: Commodity Fetishism. Abstraction of Labour Time [Click to enlarge]




















Brief notes:
Call Centre Worker as an example of ‘contemporary labour’/abstraction of labour. With reference to Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Penguin Books, 1990.

Marx writes: ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ (Marx, Capital 163). And he continues:

"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses." (164-5)

The demonic dimension of the commodity (and in this respect Marx describes commodities as ‘possessed by the devil’) (302) resides in the fact that the value-relation between commodities has nothing to do with the physical properties of the materials from which they are made but rather with the social relations involved in their production and exchange. The fetishism of commodities arises from the social character of the labour which produces them and which is ‘congealed’ in them. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire uniformity of values (abstract labour time) distinct from their utility-producing or physical properties. Thus man-made material goods are artificially given a ‘life’ of their own, a value seemingly inherent in them.

In the first 80 pages of Capital, Marx breathes this life into inanimate objects, in his descriptions of the bewitching or animating capacity of commodity form. Objects come to life like the brooms and buckets in Walt Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence. For instance his description of an ordinary table, transformed into a commodity and evolving ‘out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table turning.”’ (163). Or his suggestion that:
‘Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.’ (163)


2: Eternal Recurrence [Click to enlarge]














Brief notes:
Image draws on the melodramtic format of public murals (I was thinking, in part, of community murals, like the one on the Brixton Academy, South London (below).



Eternal recurrence pictured as a particular moment of lived 'experience' as affirmation - ‘Yes to life’ - as opposed, for instance, to ‘a pure effort of thought’ or as ‘a test’ (Allison, The New Nietzsche, 28), or ‘thought experiment’ (Ridley, Nietzsche on Art, 103).

With reference to:
‘…the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most world-affirming man, who has not only learned to compromise and treat with all that was and is but who wants to have it again as it was and is to all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo not only to himself but to the whole piece and play …” (F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, New York: Penguin: 82.)

‘the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur – it will create me again! … I shall return, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle … - not to a new life or a better life or a similar life [but] to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and the smallest.'
(F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, New York: Penguin Books, 1978: III: 2/2.)


3: Leibniz/Deleuze’s: Monad [Click to enlarge]




Brief notes:

I’m having trouble with the Monad direct from Liebniz’s Monadology - in part because of the complexity of the system he describes. Currently looking at Deleuze's version in The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque. The image above is a 'hunch': images of catalogue models as 'archetypes', in relation to the idea of Monads as 'entelechies' (Aristotelian/Medieval idea: the becoming actual or achievement of a potential).

For instance: 'All simple substances or created Monads might be called Entelechies, for they have in them a certain perfection (echousi to enteles); they have a certain self-sufficiency (autarkeia) which makes them the sources of their internal activities and, so to speak, incorporeal automata. From Leibniz, Monadology (1714), in Philosophical Papers: A Selection, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969, sec. 18.

IMAGES SET 1: Miscellaneous images

Images from Google Image

IMAGE SET 1: Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY: What do ideas look like?

Carusi, Annamaria [Oxford e-Research Centre, Oxford University], 'Scientific visualisations and aesthetic grounds for trust', Ethics and Information Technology archive, Volume 10 , Issue 4 (December 2008): 243 - 254.

Araya, A. 'The Hidden Side of Visualization'. Techné, 7(2): 27-93, Winter 2003.
From http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v7n2/pdf/araya.pdf.

Keller, E.F. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Kemp, M. Visualizations: The 'Nature' Book of Art and Science, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kessler, E.A. 'Resolving the Nebulae: The Science and Art of Representing M51'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 38, 2007: 477-491.

Latour, B. 'Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,' in H. Kuklick, and E. Long (eds), Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, 6, 1986: 1-40.

Lynch, M. and S.Y. Edgerton Jr. 'Aesthetics and digital image processing: Representational Craft in Contemporary Astronomy'. In G. Fyfe and J. Law (eds), Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations, London: Routledge, 1988: 184-220.

Pylyshyn, Z. Seeing and Visualizing: It’s Not What You Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Card, S.K., Mackinlay, J.D. and Shneiderman, B (eds.) Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think. San Francisco, Calif : Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999.

Esrock, E.J. The reader's eye : visual imaging as reader response, Baltimore, Md. ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.