Year:
Duration:
Recorded:
The title of this video refers to the iconic work Ten Thousand Ugly Ink Blots by the Chinese, artist-monk Shitao (石涛)1 who lived between 1642 and 1707.
This video was originally titled Landscape #1 and completed in 1996.
The source S-VHS tape was digitised in 2021 and then de-interlaced and upscaled using software based on machine learning.
This algorithmic transformation from analog, Standard Definition, to digital, High Definition images, created a look – essentially, painterly digital artefacts – which resonated with many of my motivations for the original video.
At the time, I considered the video camera to be like a brush in my hand with which I paint ‘revelatory’ brush strokes – much like a squeegee on a fogged-up window.
‘Painting’ objects into being, in a sort of gestural, ‘direct communication’. I also think of it as a spontaneous, informal composition of shape, colour, movement and sound – much like our sensory interaction with the world.
An ‘act of being’ which unites camera, creator, viewer, subject and object.
I developed this approach during the nineteen-nineties while I studied the ink-based art of Zen / Ch’an Buddhism and Islamic calligraphy.
While most of the references and descriptions above are of a visual nature, I want to state that sound plays a pivotal role in all my videos.
On Saturday, May 20th 1995, I found myself in this incredible Joshua Tree landscape. On this fantastically cluttered plot of land where George Zelenz was building his new house, I couldn’t but respond spontaneously in this way.
It should be noted that the phrase – The Ten Thousand Things – is an important Taoist and Buddhist concept. It appears in Part 1 of the Tao Te Ching:
“The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
On a completely unrelated note – but somehow germane to the theme or personal context of this video – I want to mention that the thumbnail of this video always somehow reminds me of the brilliant painting Hinterhaus und Hof by Adolf Menzel – an artist I only discovered some years ago, but really love.
I found the similarities between Menzel’s brushwork and the painterly artefacts made by the AI video upscaling algorithm so compelling, that I took it further in a photo book titled 10K Ugly Ink Dots – Translations, Algorithms and Transformations. More about that later.
1: His real name was Zhu Ruoji (朱若極). Shitao was in fact an artist name – meaning Stone-Waves.