Our research often begins withreading. We draw from a commonpool of literary and theoretical textsto generate ideas and structure thenarratives of our videos. We areparticularly interested in feminist,queer and auto-theoretical writing byauthors like Kathy Acker, LindaStupart, Silvia Federici and SaraAhmed.

Over summer, we attended a talk byTai Shani at Whitechapel gallery abouther project Dark Continent, whichcentres around an adaptation ofChristine de Pizan’s proto-feminist textThe Book of the City of Ladies. Hearingher speak about her researchinfluenced us to try furtherincorporating our reading into ourartistic practice.

In Sara Ahmed’s essay Queer Use, she discusses the vilification of queerness as a rejection of traditional, heteronormative reproduction under capitalist patriarchy. Inspired by this, during semester one, we made a video about queer abjection. Initially, we manipulated images of our bodies on Photoshop; we transformed ourselves into macabre pieces of furniture, which we later composed into domestic scenes. We then animated these compositions, before cutting the resulting clips together. When we presented this work at project space, viewers’ feedback highlighted its weaknesses: a few sound effects in the original cut were overly crass; we wanted the work to be abject, but unintentionally inserted toilet humour by pairing bathroom images with bodily noises. Additionally, the original audio featured human voices, which undermined the sense of absence intended by our omission of tangible characters. Moreover, we realised that certain imagery was unintentionally childish, such as a close-up of excrement in a toilet bowl. Considering these criticisms, we recut the video and simplified the soundtrack. Constantly re-editing the video functioned as material research as it pushed us to increase our proficiency using Photoshop and Premier Pro.

Films, TV shows and video art help us todevelop concepts. This year, we focussed onthose featuring body horror [like LucileHadzihalilovic’s Evolution (2015) andGeorges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face(1960)] and queerness [like Jessie JeffreyDunn Rovinelli’s So Pretty (2019)]. To viewvideo art online, we use open accesswebsites like Ubuweb, Youtube and Vimeo.As the content available on such platforms islimited, we emailed LUX and requestedaccess to videos in their archive.

We use Instagram to discover and followartists, and to see undergraduate artwork.Artists like Laure Prouvost and Tai Shani whodisplay video as part of larger installationsparticularly inspire us. We view images oftheir exhibitions online, but find it difficult toproperly experience them digitally.Considering this, we also visit galleriesfrequently. In September, we went to Londonto attend exhibitions. We were interested infinding new artists, and seeing whosepractices were being represented by majorinstitutions.

Because we make digital work, ourcollection of memory sticks functions asa library of sketchbooks; we use them tostore images and footage collectedacross our collaborative practice. Each ofour videos is composed of short, isolatedclips, which we combine with others invarious permutations to achieve the finalresult. We often play multiple videossimultaneously in separate QuickTimeplayer windows on our laptops to seehow they interact.

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We visited gift shops in London, and werestruck by their commodification of politicalartworks like posters by Guerrilla Girls. Weconsidered it reductive of the work’sfundamental politics – they were aestheticized,and cynically co-opted into a capitalist marketfor purchase by individuals wishing to increasetheir political and cultural capital. In general,we were disappointed by the commercial natureof the work in London galleries; it did notreflect the diversity of contemporary practicesthat exist. This incited us to question whichpractices receive sponsorship, and from whom.

We visited Saatchi Gallery, and discovered theywere holding a rave-themed exhibition to whichentry was £10. This felt ironic, as CharlesSaatchi’s advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchiproduced the ‘Labour isn’t Working’ postercampaign that aided the Conservative Party’s1979 general election win. Also, in 1994, theConservative Party implemented the CriminalJustice and Public Order Act, the lawresponsible for the criminalisation of raves.Unbelievably, although complicit in theshutdown of rave culture, Saatchi wasattempting to profit from its aestheticization.

We began researching Saatchi and market-oriented artists likeDamien Hirst and Marc Quinn by watching documentaries aboutthem. We focussed particularly on Quinn’s cast sculptures ofbodies that fail to comply with normative beauty standards and/orhave been modified for personal or cultural reasons. Although hiswork concerns identity, it disregards the privilege his able-bodied,wealthy, Caucasian male status affords him. His use of vulnerablepeople as material in his practice is exploitative: he transformsthem into voiceless commodity objects. This kind of practicecreates a veneer of progression regarding the representation ofmarginalised identities without enacting any real change. Thesuccess of his work functions as a case study exposing theperformativity often coded into the acceptance of minority figuresinto major art institutions. Texts like Martha Nussbaum’sObjectification and Linda Stupart’s Virus have influenced ourcriticism of such practices.

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Mastering the 3D modellingsoftware Blender has formed thebasis for our material research insemester two. Online forums andYouTube tutorials have helped us todevelop our skills. Using Blender,we have increased the complexity ofour animations, and 3D printed ourown models.

We wanted to display some of our 3Dmodels as lamps, so we tried printingthem in different materials to see howeffectively light penetrated each. Wefound that transparent, colourlessmaterials shone the most brilliantly,but we preferred the aesthetic qualityof coloured, opaque plastics. To testcolouring the transparent lamps, weilluminated them using variouscoloured bulbs.

Alongside our videos and 3D prints, wedeveloped various textiles and props toincorporate into our degree showinstallation. We visited fabric stores andsearched online for materials. As welacked access to a sewing machine, wehand-stitched the textiles; this helpeddevelop our sewing skills. However, wedid not include any of these objects in ourfinal degree show plan; we felt that theirhand-crafted nature jarred with the digitalaesthetic of our videos and 3D prints.

We appropriated the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ postermade by the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agencyand altered the text to read ‘Magic Isn’t Working’.We tested the digital version of the poster invarious hues on Photoshop, before converting it toa grayscale image and risograph printing it indifferent colours. We decided that our A3 printswere too small, and the range of colours possiblewith risograph printing was limited. For the degreeshow, we planned to commission a large-scaledigital print of the poster from a commercialprinter; this would allow us to imitate the format ofthe original ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster to directlychallenge its orchestrators. As the degree showwas cancelled, we planned possible installations ofthis work on Blender.

Blender has allowed us to create 3D installationproposals. This has proven particularly usefulgiven our limited access to university facilitiesduring the COVID-19 lockdown. As the programsimulates real-world physics, we have used it toplan lighting for future physical installations.Creating accurate virtual models of the differentsculptural elements before physically manifestingthem is helpful in deciding what to include in thefinal installation. Learning to build variouscomponents of our degree show project insideBlender has greatly increased our modellingabilities.

We projected our videos on varioussurfaces to decide how to display them.This aided us in cutting together ourfootage, as it helped us select clips toincorporate into videos made for sculpturalprojections onto fabric. The projectionmapping software Millumin allowed us totake a more expansive approach to thedisplay of moving image work. We hopedto develop this experimentation into aninteractive performance as part of ourdegree show installation.

We presented videos in two exhibitions this year: ‘Between the Sheets’at Whitespace Gallery and ‘Buffering’ at Edinburgh College of Art. Asthese were both group shows, they each took place in brightly litspaces to accommodate work made by other artists. We tested outprojecting our videos for both exhibitions, but the ambient light in thespace washed out the projections. To circumvent this issue, wedisplayed our videos on digital monitors that displayed them clearlyregardless of lighting. For ‘Buffering’, we showcased two videos onmonitors hung side-by-side on a white wall; we were unhappy with thisdecision, as the curation of the screens reminded us of a commercialdisplay. Unfortunately, we did not have time to revise the presentationbefore the exhibition’s opening. We were also dissatisfied with thepresentation of our video on a monitor at ‘Between the Sheets’, as wefelt the screen was too small; we thought that displaying it as a large-scale projection would have been more effective, as it would have madethe work more immersive. For our degree show installation, weproposed exhibiting in our own space so we could control the lighting.This was a priority for us, as we wanted the room to be dimly lit tofacilitate clear projections, and to avoid using monitors to display all ofour videos.