Below is the documentation of a presentation I gave at the ‘Challenges and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Creative Educators’ event, the Art House, University of Worcester June 7th 2023, organised by my colleague Desdemona McCannon.
My talk has the rather formal title ‘Using Midjourney to Explore Relations Between Word and Image with Level 4 Fine Art Students’. Before I get to that, I take a detour through some of my PKD-related work.
I will be giving a lecture about my work at the Royal Academy Schools in London on Monday March 6th at 11.30. If you would like to attend please email me (j.cussans@gmail.com) and I’ll put you on the guest list. The lecture will be in three sections:
1. Ritual Practice : Veve Kunigundis
Focussing on the ritual drawings I make with Roberto N. Peyre, specifically Veve Kunigundis made during documenta15.
2. Drawing Analogies : Invisible Machines
Focussing on a chapter about ‘Psychoanalytic Imaginaries and Paranoid Critical Theory’ from the book on diagrams I’m writing with David Burrows, Dean Kenning and Mary Yacoob
3. Critical Arts : Health Humanities
Reframing critical and socially engaged arts practices from a mental health and wellbeing perspective
If anyone happens to be in New York between now and the 19th of March, Whitby Weekender – the video I made with Ellen Cantor in 2006 about the Northern Soul scene – is being shown as part of the Video Store show at Foxy Production on East Broadway celebrating the gallery’s 20th birthday.
If anyone is in Stockholm this weekend, I will be speaking at the Conjuring Creativity conference about my ritual diagram work with Roberto N. Peyre. There are still ticket’s available here. It’s an amazing line-up that will include talks, performances and film screenings. See the schedule below.
Below is an edited transcript of a talk I gave at the first DRUGG (Diagram Research, Use and Generation Group) gathering at University College London on July 14th and 15th 2012.
Introduction
Diagrams play a fundamental role in the art of teaching, helping people do and understand things in ways that differ from and complement other teaching methods. Diagrams can be defined as visualisations of non-apparent systems, concepts, relationships, processes and ideas. They help students to recognise and understand parallels and structural correlations between things in the world; their constitutive natures; their internal structures; relationships; the systems of which they form a part; the processes they are involved with; their own physicality and subjectivity; the coming-into-being of all of these through time and space; and theoretical explanations for these becomings.
As visual and drawn objects with a pedagogical function, one might expect diagrams and diagramming to be established institutional objects and practices in art and design education. This is however rarely the case. Although diagrams and diagramming are often used in lectures, as tutorial aids and in student notebooks, they are seldom addressed in art education on their own terms. Having taught art theory and academic writing to art and design students for many years now, I have found them increasingly useful as teaching tools, particularly for helping students see and understand relationships between philosophical concepts, art theory, art making, thinking and writing.
Later I will try to construct a practical, systematic schematisation of diagrams. But for now I will simply include ‘diagrams’, ‘analogies’, ‘allegories’, ‘maps’, ‘plans’ ‘models’, ‘schema’, ‘pictograms’ and ‘technical illustrations’ in the category of things we might conveniently describe as diagrammatic. Generally they all combine, in an ostensibly unitary form, words, pictures, lines, figures, shapes, numerals, forms, axis, grids and tables. The diagrammatic in this sense is can be characterised by the following attributes: (1) graphic visualisation, (2) an economy of graphic means that minimise extraneous information (3) a high-level of representational and conceptual abstraction, (4) the representation of non-apparent systems and relations and (5) a generally didactic purpose. Later we will see that some of the key philosophers concerned with the diagrammatic depart significantly from this signifying, purposive and didactic schematisation.
Continue reading “DIAGRAM AS THINKING MACHINE/ART AS METAPRACTICE”Below is documentation of a work I made with Roberto N. Peyre during documenta fifteen in Kassel on June 17th 2022.
Veves are ritual diagrams drawn in powder during Haitian Vodou ceremonies that represent the cosmic signatures of the loa, the pantheon of Vodou spirits. Veve Kunigundis was designed to represent the patroness of the church in which Atis Rezistans and colleagues from the Ghetto Biennale were exhibiting.
St Kunigundis, or Cunigunde of Luxembourg, was Empress of the Holy Roman Empire between 1014 and 1024. She was canonised in 1200. The church in Bettenhausen was completed in 1927 to serve the growing Roman Catholic community in Kassel. It was closed for renovations in 2019 when serious structural damage was found in the vaulted ceiling.
The design of the veve includes elements from the mythology of St Kunigundis: the red-hot ploughshare she walked on to prove her innocence after having been accused of adultery, the serpent contained in her chaste heart and the imperial crown. The decision to dedicate the drawing to the saint came after a man came into the building during preparations for the opening loudly defaming the installed work as blasphemous, sacrilegious and satanic.
The veve was drawn using quartz sand poured from glass bottles.
When the drawing was completed we created a candle-lined walkway between the alter and the veve in preparation for the second part of the ceremony; Jann Pase’l Pase & Mache Nap Mache (Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk), the re-creation of a work first made by Roberto in collaboration with Jean-Louis Huhta and Jean Claude Saintillus at the Ghetto Biennale in 2013.
Beginning with myself and Roberto, artists from Atis Rezistans, the Ghetto Biennale and audience members paraded along the ‘catwalk’ breaking up the veve.
Here is the official video made by the documenta team. As you can see, it turned into a party.
And this is what was left in the morning.
Here’s a link to the recording of Leah Gordon’s artist talk which I hosted at the Art House in Worcester in November. For those of you who don’t know Leah’s work, she is the co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale and an artist, photographer and writer with an impressive list of works, curated exhibitions, and books on her CV. She is currently in Kassel working with Atis-Rezistans on a Ghetto Biennale on-site project for documenta 15.
I will be in conversation with the artist Logan Dandridge this Saturday at the Bawden Room, Jesus College, Cambridge between 6 and 9 pm. Tickets are free and you can book them here.
Logan is a filmmaker from Richmond, Virginia, USA and currently the Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College. Logan’s experimental approach to moving-image work connects Black experiences and the evanescence of memory with spoken word, sound and rhythm. We will be discussing our shared interests in Black music, Afrofuturism, deep space, sci-fi, spiritualism, ritual, and communion in music and dance via Bill Gunn’s film Ganja and Hess, Aretha Franklin and Kendrick Lamar.
If anyone happens to be in Worcester today there is a free screening of Kier-La Janisse’s epic Folk Horror Documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched at the Royal Porcelain Works in Severn Street between 2pm and 6pm.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with myself and Mikel Koven, who appear in the documentary, chaired by Darren Oldridge.
The event is free and you can book your tickets here.
I will be giving an online talk about the art of Beau Dick for the The Last Tuesday Society at 7.30 pm on Wednesday 19th January. Tickets are available here.
A hereditary chief and master carver from the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw) First Nation, Beau Dick was one of the most prominent and influential First Nations artists before his untimely passing in March 2017. His powerful sculptures, firmly rooted in the ceremonial culture of his ancestors, bridge the worlds of contemporary art, the potlatch traditions of the First Peoples of the Pacific North West and environmental activism.
In the talk I will discuss Beau’s work in relation to the gift-giving, title-conferring and theatrical ceremonies that connect several First Nation groups in the Pacific Northwest, the legends behind some of his most powerful works and Beau’s copper-breaking actions against the Canadian government in 2013 and 2014
Invisible Mirrors 