PROTO.QUESTION
What happens when language adds another frame, a South Cheshire accent? When the tradition of reading from left to right at a relatively constant rate is given pause. When an extra frame is added that allows the reader to consider the role of each letter and language becomes more closely aligned with an aesthetic act. Upon this realization, the reader finds merit in the fact that the same letter has been displaced at the ideal moment of linguistic blurring. The traditional role of the signifier encroaches on the turf of the signified by evoking a strong visual tendency through an act of dislocation. The next logical step might be to create symbols that confront representational norms, allowing them to leak into the physical realm and generate new realities.
PROTO.MISSION
PROTOCOL is a highly unstable design collective that seeks out visual thinkers driven by instantaneous visions, non-linear thinking, AND POSSESSes AN UNDEFINABLE PASSION FOR THE MOVING IMAGE. As an interdisciplinary studio, it lives on the fringe of cultural and representational norms and searches for the metaphorical dead bodies. The work of PROTOCOL participates in an active process of seeing and operates in a volatile temporal framework that is never comfortable. LED BY Brian Ambroziak, A CULTURAL THEORIST BY DEFAULT AND A BIG-WAVE SURFER BY TRAINING, PROTOCOL strives to generate theoretical constructs that challenge the status quo.
from Blurred Visionary: Gerhard Richter's Photo-Paintings by Tom McCarthy, September 2011
"There's a tendency to discuss the art of the past hundred years in terms of binary oppositions: abstract versus figurative; conceptual versus craft-based; painting versus photography; and so on. Richter, who since the 1970s has been almost universally acknowledged as a late-modern master, reduces these binaries to rubble. Here's a painter whose work is inseparable from photography; a man so devoted to craft that he reportedly makes his students construct their own pallet-trolleys before allowing them to raise a brush in anger, yet indulges in Joseph Beuys-style performances in which he lounges on a staircase grasping a wire (as in the 1968 piece Cable Energy), or Debordian critiques of consumer culture in which he installs himself on pedestal-mounted furniture amid a soundscape of advertising slogans (as in the 1963 piece Living with Pop: A Demonstration of Capitalist Realism); who exhibits colour-charts alongside pastoral landscapes; places mirrors around his paintings; photographs a single grey brushstroke from 128 different angles and lays these out in a large grid; or projects a yellow one, massively enlarged, on to fresh canvas and repaints it as a giant 20-metre streak … I could go on and on: his versatility and scope are stunning.
What is a blur? It's a corruption of an image, an assault upon its clarity, one that turns transparent lenses into opaque shower curtains, gauzy veils. Richter painted a lot of curtains; he had a curtain-painting hanging in his Düsseldorf studio, beside the curtain. He had left his own past behind an iron one; many of the blurred snapshot-scenes he produced in the 60s were of relatives he'd never see again, childhood locations become inaccessible. Beyond reflecting his own situation, the blur serves as a perfect general metaphor for memory, its degradation, for the Ozymandian corrosion wrought by time. One blurred Richter painting reproduces badly taken tourist snaps of Egypt, in which pyramids and temples lose their shapes and scale and grandeur.
"I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant," he explained.
He (Richter) not only overwrites our perceptual relation to the world by rerouting it through its glitch-ridden mediating screens; he also brings this logic to bear on the history of art."
I remember the first time I went to the cinema and, while I figured out that the two wheels were spinning rolls of translucent positives and light was casting pictures, I was amazed that it wasn’t like looking at one image after another, The speed of the stacking was so ferocious that I believed there was physical space behind the images I was viewing, The places that it became far more than the architecture I knew was when language entered the picture. Not in the sense of dialogue but to describe a squeaky screen door or a dripping guitar. These metronomes make rhythms that structure our memories for the rest of our life
I have always been taken by silent directors such as Coppola, Malick, Wenders. Architects that place emotion and atmosphere at the top of their decision making porocess.