http://untitledthesecond.blogspot.com/

I filmed my friends climbing trees, although it turns out you can't drag out tree climbing for as long as it takes to make a cup of tea. Trees on Hampstead Heath simply aren't big enough.

I calculated as accurately as I could the time I spent worrying in a week, and the time I spent making tea in a week. I worried for 19 hours and 12 minutes, and I made tea for 34 minutes and 26 seconds. I was shocked at how much time I spent worrying, and quite surprised that a week's worth of tea making is equivalent to half an hour. I don't want to make this project into something very personal and deep, I want to keep it light hearted. I am trying to think of things I could do for 19 hours solidly. Here's a list:

walking
running......? (I don't think I'm healthy enough for that)
cycling
baking
knitting
drawing
painting
making..
writing
typing


Ah the list is long. I have more of a brain storm in my sketchbook. Unfortunately I won't be able to complete my 19 hour stint until next week, due to important family commitments, getting back to manchester and taking a driving theory test. I will spend that time coming up with something to do for 19 hours, and experimenting with things to do for 34 minutes.

Today I calculated the amount of time I had spent worrying (in the afternoon). It totalled just over 5 hours! I count worrying as having a churning sort of feeling in my stomach and feeling on edge. I have gotten used to doing other things whilst worrying, although I can't achieve my full potential when I'm anxious in this way.

Artists often talk about changing a space or an atmosphere with an object, I feel that I can change this counter-productive use of time, make it purposeful. I decided I am going to clock-watch obsessively for a week (until Friday morning), and calculate the amount of time I have spent worrying, and then, no matter how long, I will occupy myself with something "other", to change, displace, the way I use my time. I intend to occupy myself with this "other" activity over a continuous period of time, as I think that, no matter how I document this experiment of sorts, my activity/performance/appearance will show the time progressing.

I believe that, in 'timing' my worrying, I will alter not only the present - turning a fault into an asset, counter-productive time into time well spent - but I will also alter the way I experience time within my experiment.

I am also keeping a record of how much time I spend eating and making cups of tea. Partly for comparison's sake, and partly out of interest. I may well do similar experiments, but I think the main thing is to do with worrying.

I have been continuing with the idea of distance in terms of cups of tea. I have decided to try going up, as well as across. I feel that thinking about direction in a less linear way ties in with the idea of changing time, of thinking about sound as art. I will take my friends to the Heath on a sunny day, we will picnic and climb trees and it will be like something out of a famous five novel.

My interest in this internal narrative, these interwoven, interdependent stories, stems from one of my early memories as a child. I was in a shopping centre with my mother, sitting on a bench, and this woman walked past me. She was almost middle-aged (or at least she seemed old to me, being so young), wearing a red coat and trying to do a thousand things at once. It was probably one of the first time I'd really thought about there being anything outside of the little bubble that was my family and the people I knew at school. Certainly the first time I'd ever really considered that someone else, in their own world, was at the centre of it, conducting their own life, which would probably never have a direct effect on my own. Obviously my thoughts weren't quite as clear and concise as they are now, but that was the general jist of the situation. I suppose I was interested in how she'd moved across my path, and was unlikely to cross it again.



I was thinking about this when I decided to see how far I could get from my house, in the space of time it takes to make a cup of tea. I got out a map to see where I could go, only to realise that North Finchley looks more complicated from an aerial perspective than it seems to me at ground level. I then remembered the experience I'd had when I was young, and thought it would be interesting/fun, to create routes I could try using the roll of a dice. An odd number meant left, an even number meant right. I marked out my routes on photocopied maps, and set out, having decided to film my feet as I walked. This was more of an experiment than anything else, I needed to see how far I could get in a fairly short space of time (not as far as I'd hoped). I started to think about how much further I could get if I ran, or cycled. I'm going to try more walking and cycling tomorrow, and running when I get my trainers back.

I filmed my feet as I walked, and have tried playing the film along with the sound of making a cup of tea. It's strange how as the sound and the film don't match up, it was almost as if I had to concentrate on one or the other, as if they were totally separate fundamentally, as well as in the sense of a piece of work. I also noticed all the different types of pavement there are around where I live. I have decided to go and photograph the different pavements on one of the walks I did today, and then see what I can do with them when I have them developed. At the moment I think it could be quite interesting to categorise them in terms of distance and time.

I think the idea of the narrative, or my idea of the narrative, is something that is current and present in all of the work I produce, as it is a strong interest of mine, a subject to which I repeatedly return. However, as I continue with this project, the idea of time seems to be my overriding interest, although of course that interest could indeed morph into something else over the weeks.

I had a chat with John today about my work. As with every tutor I was told to stop worrying so much, but one thing we chatted about was film and sound. I said I thought if I used film and sound separately they would conflict, as they don't match up. I had never considered making a video, as in film and sound together. He then mentioned how different a film is without sound, how important sound is in terms of what you see, and I said that when I watch television on mute, which I do, I often notice more than I would visually than when the sound's on. Along a similar vein, when I want to work, I quite often have a movie playing, but I don't watch it, I like the sound, particularly the voices, just on it's own. I like the idea of thinking of art, which is such a visual medium, in terms of sound, which is why I chose to avoid film, making the sound the focal point of my work, however, I think having conflicting, mismatched sound and video could be quite interesting, and something I should explore rather than just writing it off. Hazel said something similar and I feel that there is a valid point here.

In terms of the sound element of my project, I have been experimenting with different ways of measuring time. I chose water-related intervals, for example, a dripping tap, filling a bottle, or a small glass with water and recording the different sounds they make. Once in the music program, it is interesting to hear the noises in comparison to one another, it is very rhythmic, yet simultaneously "lacking", somehow. I edited the sounds, emphasising their more rhythmic elements and have produced a piece that sounds almost like drums, rather than water. It is purposeful, pushing forwards.

Although the temporal element of my work has very much remained in the aural realms of the project, I do intend to mix and link the physical, narrative side, with the intangible temporal side. I feel using, in some cases, the narrative within the sound pieces I am creating creates this link, however I still want to experiment with expressing passing time in static images. I have tried moving images, books, writing, across a photocopier whilst it copies the images. I liked the images which resulted. They are indicative of the passing of time within a certain temporal boundary. Bearing in mind the subject matter - books, written prose - they are also relevant to the narrational side of my project, implying the passing of time intrinsically linked with the idea of story-telling. There is also a certain element of the images, basic though they are, which encompasses my primary ideas for my project; an unfamiliar, indecipherable narrative contained within a physical (static image) and temporal (the obvious movement of the original image) spaces.

I cut out squares of the images and hung them from my ceiling using cotton. I photographed them in motion, and will attempt to photograph them with someone (me?) entangled within them.

I have been continuing with the same ideas using sound, contrasting different ways to produce a narrative: writing, printing, typing (on a type writer and a laptop), whispering, reading. I have found that I can then use these sounds to create atmospheric sound-pieces.