Three photo collages, recording outcomes from three Modernist Coin Wash events. Each coin wash was organised and run by the artists Lindall Pearce and Marion Piper at Angelika Studios (now Work Hall). They were very enjoyable creative experiences.
This touring exhibition visited four venues in 2013/14. The This ‘Me’ of Mine web gives full details. Three of my outcomes were exhibited. Two in the first three venues and three in the fourth venue.
David Riley is an artist’s artist – he works with raw ideas and even when these concepts have attained [an ‘outcome’], as David calls them, they are still wide open for interpretation, further development and wide ranging tangential possibilities. His work could be seen as a springboard to so many other ideas in so many possible media. I continue to be amazed by his output and the sheer magnitude of his inspiration pool. David also is a keen blogger and has written several blogs on Artists Talking. Two of his blogs have been chosen as ‘Choice Blog’, the most recent by Linda Stupart. FORMAT is a unique blog, as Stupart points out in her article, and it is uniquely David Riley. FORMAT is an artwork. It uses the a-n blogging platform to explore the “facilities and limits within the context of an a-n blog,” as David writes in his intro. He explains, “this should not, in any way, be taken as criticism. The intent is to explore the limit of the facilities offered by an a-n blog (implied and actual) as a form of visual enquiry.” Stupart says, “Riley’s collapsing of form and content then is notable within the collective blog imaginary, which often fails to be critical of its own formal structure in a way that other types of practice could never get away with. Through an explication of limitation FORMAT also reminds us of the incredible potential of blogs as medium, as well as making visible the otherwise invisible restrictions of the institutionalized blog – a very big, fairly convoluted white cube, but a container nonetheless.”
See what I mean – a springboard wide open for possibilities.
Jane Boyer: The statement on each of your blogs reads, “I am a black box, an abstract device evolved to hide the complexities within. Given the appropriate stimulus, I can be triggered to display a transient pop-up model of my inner self and disclose a little of what would otherwise remain secret.” Beyond the stated reason ‘to hide the complexities within’, why do you present yourself as an object and your inner self as a ‘transient pop-up model’?
David Riley: I don’t intend to ‘present myself as an object’; a black box is a system metaphor so I use it to present myself as a system, a complex system that no one can fully understand (not even me). The ‘pop-up model’ idea was planted by Richard Taylor when he interviewed me for an a-n Degrees Unedited Blogger Profile back in 2010. The idea meshed quite naturally with my experience as an engineer, where I often analysed systems that were new to me by treating them as a black box in order to understand their true function. At art college we were encouraged to self-analyse our output and I found myself not fully understanding how I travelled from initial concept to final outcome. So, now I find it useful to think of myself as a black box where every new line of enquiry has the potential to reveal more of my inner (often hidden) self and my motivations for doing what I do.
JB: Your blog REMNANTS could be seen as a companion piece to FORMAT in its use of the blogging platform limitations. Your introduction statement is a philosophical one and reminds me of Deleuze’s observation “Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.” You state:
“Everything is T R A N S I E N T.
Although the tools here at a-n (and in general on the world wide web) try very hard to make everything permanent, this is not the natural order. Any impression of permanence is illusionary. The nature of the universe is for everything to return to the universe for reuse. I have removed (from this blog) everything the a-n system allows me to delete. I could hide the rest by unpublishing it, but this does not release the storage space for reuse.
So here we have a new outcome based on everything that has gone before: the R E M N A N T S.”
Can you comment on that existential triumvirate – memory, transience and reason, in relation to your enquiries and do you feel they are as present in your work as for someone who is working in more traditional media?
DR: If memory is knowledge and experience; if transience is the coming and going of a new influence or a loss of knowledge through lack of use; and if reason is the use of knowledge and experience to filter the infinite possibility into a manageable focus; then yes these factors are most definitely present in my work. I cannot speak for others who work in a different way or in different materials, but I certainly can see these qualities in the work of others. However, I am not in a position to judge the relative levels of presence nor do I aspire to be.
JB: On occasion you create physical objects. Is there a certain impulse which stimulates this physical output and does it satisfy a sensory need?
DR: I do quite a lot of physical work. I prefer to make work for a specific installation space. The web is an installation space and I make work for that space. Given the opportunity, I enjoy making work for a physical space, but I see little point in making lots of physical work unless that opportunity to exhibit exists. On the surface, I am a pragmatic practical person and I enjoy the physical sensations of handling and manipulating materials. However, I have a second side; I am a dreamer. I enjoy ideas and finding the most appropriate accessible way to realise them. Many of my ideas result in a series as output. The virtual world has many qualities to support displaying a series. Very large series can be shared at negligible marginal cost in terms of time, logistics and finance. So, much of my output becomes tailored to the virtual world. Every idea has an alternative real-world possibility, there are many recorded in my journals just waiting for the right opportunity to exhibit.
JB: You work in three modes of communication simultaneously, visual, textual and binary code, most of us struggle with each of these singularly. Are creativity and communication synonymous for you?
DR: I don’t think of communication when I am exploring, my only thought is about what must be the next step. In making that decision I consider what I found interesting about the last step. It is very much one step after another. Creating something visual is my way of recording those steps. I don’t see a distinction between text and binary. A character is a code, a word is s sequence of codes, and text is a sequence of words. I see text as code. I have nothing I want the audience to understand. Everyone is allowed to make their own connection between my output and their own experience.
JB: If the recording of your exploration is the primary goal in creating your artworks, can you explain the relationship you have to your work?
DR: My work is riddled with me. I made the decisions about what to explore and how to record that exploration. I made those decisions based on my own knowledge and experience. The outcomes must expose a little (or a lot) of me. I don’t see how it could be any other way. To me, it really is a process determined by my experience and environment, both past and present, with the outcomes shared in public as punctuation points along the way. I never set out to achieve a specific end. I don’t even think of outcomes as end points, they are just another step along the way. I do think the work is totally of me, that is, without me being me it could never exist exactly as it exists now. However, once an outcome exists it exists in its own space and doesn’t need me anymore. It is then up to the audience to bring their own experience and environment to their viewing and interpretation.
JB: You have two works in This ‘Me’ of Mine, Twitter User Names: Coded and Transcribed (follow the link on David’s page to see the virtual version of twitter names) and Bar EP Blues (kinetatic), tell us what is behind the further coding of what is often already a code name in the twitter piece.
DR: I chose to translate the Twitter user name into a different form, a form that would retain the full meaning but hide it in plain sight. As I wanted to use twitter, this had to be in a form that would still fit within the limitation of a tweet. If you can read my code then you can read the name, the meaning hasn’t changed. But even this is little more than a side-effect. My concept was to take the names and present them in what is to me a visually interesting way while at the same time engaging new people who might interact with me and stimulate new paths of exploration.
JB: You describe Bar EP Blues (kinetatic) as “contemplating a perceptual boundary between what is considered static and what is considered kinetic; and how sound may contribute to the balance of that perception,” what have you discovered about perception and this boundary?
DR: Everything changes with circumstance. Bar EP Blues (kinetatic) started as Bar EP (kinetatic), I was experimenting to see what pace of change in a visual stimuli might force us to question if we had witnessed the change, if we were aware. I found myself unable to distinguish the different stages of change and unable to know where in the sequence of the work I was at any one moment. I also found myself looking for rhythms and found the blues. In making the next step, it seemed natural to add a blues style sound track, so I did and I liked what this added, so I shared it.
JB: I admire the ease with which you move between codes and systems. One of your enquiries, stringing words , are stringing bungee cords which represent the alphabet, short phrases and now names. You mentioned earlier that you see text as code and so all language is code to you, does this affect your notions of communication and how you relate to others?
DR: My life has been riddled with codes, as a systems engineer I see them everywhere; consequently I am very comfortable with codes. On reflection, using codes may be a strategy, being an artist is relatively new and I prefer to keep an aspect of the process familiar while I explore other aspects for the first time. Changing one variable at a time is a familiar strategy for experimentation, working with the familiarity of codes allows me to handle the unfamiliarity of materials and reactions to my work. It helps me focus on the new connections I make with people and ideas through sharing my output. I am always absorbing new things and this feedback can influence and encourage something new further down the line. It is rare for this process to change my own perspective on the work, but it does happen on occasion, when it does this can lead to a new line of enquiry or a variation on an old one. Maybe there will come a time when I move on and explore a different aspect, one that takes a step away from code into a less familiar territory. Although experience suggests codes will always be there somewhere.
C O D E D I M A G E S 