Season's Greetings

Project News: Do Something Wrong

The new issue of 12-Pages, TBC Artists' Collective's online journal is now live on the TBC blog - www.12-pages.com. Edited by Charley Peters, the project challenged TBC members and their invited associates to 'Do Something Wrong'.

Project News: Artificial Intelligence

Detail from Document V: The I with which I see / Conversations with Berger (Helvetica 60pt)

Wrong, the new issue of TBC's 12-Pages Online Project Space features new work from me called Artificial Intelligence. On Friday 26th November 2010 I entered a university library in London and took a copy of John Berger’s influential text ‘Ways of Seeing’ from the shelf. During the next two hours I cut out all the references to sight, seeing and the visual from Chapter One of the book, rendering it meaningless. I replaced the book on the shelf and left the library.

New Homepage

A new homepage with links to online galleries of my work, TBC's 12-Pages and Carbon Particles:
charleypeters.net

Trace Elements

Trace Elements opens on 20th November as part of The Show London. TBC Artists' Collective's latest exhibition project, Trace Elements will continue to develop the themes outlined in Delineation, exploring drawing through erasure, repetition, accumulation, trace, memory and the interruption of surfaces.

Project News: The Show / Trace Elements

Along with my fellow TBC artists Beverley Bennett, Laura Davidson and Paul Mendez, I will be participating in The Show. The exhibition of drawings, 'Trace Elements' selected by curator Eddie Otchere will open 20th November as part of The Show's cultural events programme on Millbank.  The Show presents 'the freshest concepts and objects amongst the spectacle of art, music and magic' (theshowlondon.com)

More information to follow...

Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing Closes

Selected works from Delineation

After a successful five-day run, Delineation closed its doors to the public yesterday. The Delineation project however, continues to develop. A post-exhibition catalogue, featuring critical responses to the exhibition and essays exploring contemporary drawing practices, will be edited by TBC over the forthcoming months.

Anyone interested in being kept up-to-date with the progress of this and other TBC projects should join the TBC mailing list by emailing with the subject heading 'Mailing List' to: info@tbcartistscollective.org.

Jim Mooney - Critical Responses to Delineation

Dr Jim Mooney in conversation with members of TBC Artists' Collective

On Sunday 31st October TBC was joined in The Crypt Gallery by Dr Jim Mooney, Reader in the Theory and Practice of Fine Art at Middlesex University, who led a discussion based on his responses to the exhibition Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing. During the afternoon Jim shared his critical observations of the curatorial policy of the show and led the artists through the gallery in order to give a close reading of each work and identify underlying shared concerns among the exhibiting artists.

TBC would like to extend their thanks to Jim for his insightful and generous contribution to the exhibition programme. A transcript of the discussion will constitute part of the catalogue for Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing, which TBC will be writing over the forthcoming months. This publication will also contain a transcript of yesterday's panel discussion led by artist John Timberlake and featuring TBC members Beverley Bennett, Charley Peters, Laura Davidson and Paul Mendez, as well as a collection of critical essays addressing current concerns in artists' drawing practices.

Installation: Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing

Today, installation began on the Delineation exhibition. The exhibition of critical drawing practices within members of TBC Artists' Collective will open at The Crypt Gallery NW1 on Wednesday 27th October.

For more information see tbc-artistscollective.blogspot.com

Sketches

 

Compositional study for Xerox Drawing series.

Cut tracing paper and light. 

 

White on White (Erased)

Pencil crayon on paper

Supporting study for Xerox Drawing series

Graphite on layered tracing paper

8x8 Squares, Partially Erased
Graphite on paper


Today work in the studio has continued with supporting studies and material explorations in advance of work on a new Xerox Drawing. The forthcoming exhibition Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing will feature an area of artists' diagnostic drawings.

12-Pages Online Project Space: October 2010

Above: Charley Peters Displacement (2010)

Graphite square (erased) and accrued erasings

12-PAGES introduces the Online Project Space, a monthly project set to create specially-prepared works for the 12-PAGES blog, that interrogates individual theory and presents works on a digital wall space.

The theme for October was notions of the home, incorporating the importance of having a home, and perhaps experiences of not having a home. Contributing artists were asked to spend a short time applying this theme to the process of their current practices.

To see more work:

tbc-artistscollective.blogspot.com/

Charley Peters: Current Work on SlideShare

A selection of my current work is now available at:
http://www.slideshare.net/CharleyPeters

Charley Peters: Current Work

News: 12-Pages Online Project Space

TBC's 12-Pages editor Paul Mendez is currently curating work from the group to showcase in this month's TBC Online Project Space. TBC members were asked to reflect on notions of 'homelessness' and 'the home' in order to make an exclusive piece of work for 12-Pages.

Inspired by the collaboration with The House of St Barnabus, Soho, as part of the Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing exhibition,  this body of TBC work, including a new piece of work from me, Displacement, will be online over the next week so keep watching this space for more news. The House of St Barnabas is a charity that has been supporting those affected by homelessness for over 160 years, helping them to bring about a positive change in their lives. TBC is working with volunteers from HoSB during Autumn 2010 to provide a professional insight into contemporary art practice and foster the development of drawing skills within a group of participants.

Studio View: Viral Series

New work for Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing, photographed in my studio prior to framing. This is the first time the drawings have been hung together the correct way up, having been created with the paper hanging landscape.

Dead Media Archive...

Thoughts on digital photography from the Dead Media Archive:

"...In dealing with the digital we are dealing in things that are intangible. We can touch a computer, we can touch a DVD or a CD, but we cannot touch the contents they contain for they are located in encoded bits of information. All the more, the experience of the world comes through to some by way of the Internet and their communications through it. An empirical example of this can be seen in the constant need to photographically document all aspects of one’s life that is prevalent among many people today.

The great amounts of storage available on digital cameras have made it so that we can literally document everything that happens to us on a given day without having to reload the camera. Not having to develop anything, we can take these pictures immediately home and upload them: instant memories. But this new mode of image capture and image distribution has not come without serious epistemological consequences. Digital photography has fundamentally altered our relation to images of the world—how we come to have knowledge and form beliefs about the world.

Bernard Stiegler addresses this radical change in his essay “The Discrete Image.” Stiegler, drawing on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, argues that with analog (i.e. photochemical) photography, the viewer had a certain faith in the fidelity of the image to some actual past event; this belief is completely elided in the realm of the digital, what Stiegler calls “the discrete image” and the “analogico-digital image.” As Stiegler explains: 'The digital photograph suspends a certain spontaneous belief which the analog photograph bore within itself. When I look at the digital photo, I can never be absolutely sure that what I see truly exists—nor, since it is still a question of a photo, that it does not exist at all. The analogico-digital image calls into question what Andre Bazin calls the objectivity of the lens [l’objectivité de l’objectif] in analog photography, what Barthes also calls this was [le ça a été], the noeme of the photo. The noeme of the photo is what in phenomenology would be called its intentionality. It is what I see always already, in advance, in every (analog) photo: that what is captured on the paper really was. This is the essential attribute of the analog photo. That it would then be possible to manipulate this photo, to alter what was, this is another attribute, but it can only be accidental; it is not necessarily co-implied by the photo. This may happen, but it is not the rule. The rule is that every analog photo presupposes that what was photographed was (real)..."

From: Dead Media Archive, NYU Dept Media, Culture and Communication

cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Analog/Digital_Transition

Sketches

Carol Wilder: Being Analog

"...As a level of description, it [analog] is closer than digital coding to the physical world, closer to corporeality, more kinesthetic, tactile, more-dare I say- 'real'. This can be compared to the 'digital level of description' which 'represents a more abstracted disembodied consciousness, which is at once more expansive and less visceral'...''

From: Carol Wilder, Being Analog in 'The Postmodern Presence: Readings in Postmodernism in American Culture and Society' (2008)
Full essay, Being Analog, at: carolwilder.net/beinganalog.pdf

Viral Series: Delineation Installation Proposal

Above: A digital impression of the drawings from the Viral series in situ in the Crypt Gallery. The exhibition Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing opens on 27 October. Viral I and II are currently being prepared for framing prior to installation.

New Work: Viral II

 

Viral II (2010), graphite on paper, 200cm x 150cm

Viral II is the second new work to be shown at the forthcoming exhibition Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing at the Crypt Gallery, London. Another work from the series, Viral I, will also be exhibited, along with a collection of diagnostic works that interrogate the presence of drawing in my current practice.

Work in Progress: Viral II

Work in Progress: Viral II

Top: Viral II, in progress.
Below: Viral II, detail
200cm x 150cm
--
vi•rus | 'vīrəs |
noun
an infective agent that typically consists of a nucleic acid molecule in a protein coat, is too small to be seen by light microscopy, and is able to multiply only within the living cells of a host : [as adj. ] a virus infection.
• informal an infection or disease caused by such an agent.
• figurative a harmful or corrupting influence : the virus of cruelty that is latent in all human beings.
• (also computer virus) a piece of code that is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.

da•ta |ˈdatə; 'dātə|
noun [treated as sing. or pl. ]
facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis. See also datum .
• Computing the quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, being stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media.
• Philosophy things known or assumed as facts, making the basis of reasoning or calculation.

Essay: The Paradoxes of Digital Photography

An extract from an interesting essay about the digitisation of photographic
processes by Lev Manovich:
--
...Digital photographs function in an entirely different way from traditional
photographs. Or do they?  Shall we accept that digital imaging represents a
radical rupture with photography? Is an image, mediated by computer and
electronic technology, radically different from an image obtained through a
photographic lens and embodied in film? If we describe film-based images
using such categories as depth of field, zoom, a shot or montage, what
categories should be used to describe digital images? Shall the phenomenon
of digital imaging force us to rethink such fundamental concept as realism
or representation?

In this essay I will refrain from taking an extreme position of either fully
accepting or fully denying the idea of a digital imaging revolution. Rather,
I will present the logic of the digital image as paradoxical;  radically breaking
with older modes of visual representation while at the same time reinforcing
these modes. I will demonstrate this paradoxical logic by examining two
questions: alleged physical differences between digital and film-based
representation of photographs and the notion of realism in computer
generated synthetic photography.

The logic of the digital photograph is one of historical continuity and
discontinuity. The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes
of display, and patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture -- and, at
the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image annihilates
photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.
In short, this logic is that of photography after photography.

Excerpt from:
Lev Manovich, The Paradoxes of Digital Photography
First published in: 'Photography After Photography',
exhibition catalogue, Germany, 1995.
--
Read the full text:
manovich.net/TEXT/digital_photo.html

Work in progress: Viral II

Above: Viral II, work in progress

Work on Viral II progressed in the studio today. I continue to work on the drawing with it hanging on its side, only for it to be turned upright to its exhibition position once the work is completed. Through this process I focus on drawing the abstract forms created by the enlarged, distorted photocopy I am replicating by hand. Figurative representation of the source material - a found google image, transformed through a series of printing and photocopying processes - is not a consideration at this stage of production.

Saatchi Gallery Profile Update

My Saatchi Gallery online profile has been updated today, with new artwork uploads and extra blurb about TBC Artists' Collective:

saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Charley+Peters/4351.html

TBC on YouTube

TBC TV is now live on YouTube. The first TBC film, TBC Studio Views: Charley Peters, is a short document of the production of Viral II, which can also be viewed here on Carbon Particles. The Viral Series will be exhibited as part of TBC's forthcoming show Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing in October at the Crypt Gallery

There will be many more TBC films to follow so stay tuned...

youtube.com/watch?v=OGBA0zNE0dw

Progress of a Drawing

Excerpt from a film documenting the production of Viral II, a new drawing for TBC Artists' Collective's forthcoming exhibition Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing. Filmed 13/09/10 in my studio.

Research: Defective Pixels

Above: Close-up of an LCD, showing a dead green subpixel.

Defective pixels are pixels on a liquid crystal display (LCD) not performing as expected. The ISO standard ISO 13406-2 distinguishes between three different types of defective pixel - dark dot defects, bright dot defects and partial sub-pixel defects - while hardware companies tend to have further distinguishing types, such as the stuck sub-pixel.

Similar defects can also occur on CCD or CMOS image sensors in digital cameras. In these devices, defective pixels fail to sense light levels correctly, whereas defective pixels in LCDs fail to reproduce light levels correctly.

Full article at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_pixel

The Windhorse Project: Article by Laura Davis

FIRST the RLPO hosted a concert from within the virtual world of Second Life, now a group of international artists are exhibiting their work in a gallery built within the digital universe.

Hosted at the Art at the EDGE gallery, contained within Second Life, the show features artist Vanessa Cuthbert's The Windhorse Project. Based on the idea of Buddhist prayer flags, a group of contemporary artists each created a piece of work expressing something they care about, with an overall ecological theme.

If the thought of visiting a gallery without leaving the comfort of your living room is just too freaky to get your head around then you can attend a special preview event at Manchester Digital Development Agency on September 16. You'll be taken on a tour of the virtual gallery on big screen, and a digitally made moving image Windhorse Project sequence will play in a darkened room. There will also be laptops and high-speed wireless broadband available to those who wish to independently explore the exhibition at their own pace.

The idea for showing the works on Second Life came from Dr Erica Wright, one of the artists on the project. She has this to say about it...

"Bringing this project to the prestigious Art at the EDGE gallery, is an important step forward for real world art. Second Life offers the global art audience chance to experience high end contemporary art in a whole new way, simultaneously viewing art in a gallery setting from armchairs and computer desks around the world. Through sharing the experience of viewing and discussing real art with others in a much more immediate way than is possible with other social media, Second Life's excellent free communication facilities allow for live conversation, note sharing and instant feedback about the art being viewed remotely. The potential benefits offered to artists and educators by this technology are simply breathtaking."

The Windhorse Project artists are Vanessa Cuthbert, John Hyatt, Charley Peters, Erica Wright, Olga Kenyon, Andrew Baker, John Goodwin, Linda Hughes, Vidyamala Burch, Neil Grant, Ian Whadcock, Mary Taylor, Tom Bingham, Ian McCullough and Claire Thomas.

In addition to their virtual world presence, the original printed works will continue to travel the globe.

Original article by Laura Davis at:
http://blogs.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/ldpartsblog/2010/09/first-the-rlpo-hosted-a.html

News: The Windhorse Project in Second Life

In 2009 Charley Peters was asked to participate in The Windhorse Project, a site specific exhibition of work by 15 international artists in Manchester's premier cultural quarter, the 'Oxford Road Corridor'. Initially exhibited in Manchester as part of The Cornerhouse Gallery/MIRIAD State Legacy venture, this project has continued to evolve since its auspicious beginnings, and is now hosted by Leeds University’s Second Life presence in their innovative ‘Art at the EDGE’ virtual gallery. Each artist was asked to produce a piece of work expressing an issue of global ecological concern, to be hung face-to-face with nature in All Saints Park, Manchester.


Above: Charley Peters, Addition/Subtraction (2009)

In September 2010 Dr. Erica Wright has brought The Windhorse Project into Second Life, and says, “Bringing this project to the prestigious ‘Art at the EDGE’ gallery, is an important step forward for real world art... Second Life’s excellent free communication facilities allow for live conversation, note sharing and instant feedback about the art being viewed remotely. The potential benefits offered to artists and educators by this technology are simply breathtaking."

Above: The Windhorse Project, Art at the EDGE gallery, Second Life (2010). Charley Peters' work can be seen second artwork from the right.

In addition to The Windhorse Project’s virtual world presence, the original printed works will continue to travel the globe, as new destinations present themselves. Project organiser Vanessa Cuthbert says, “The Windhorse works are part of an exhibition chain that began in All Saints Park and Righton Gallery, on the ‘Oxford Road Corridor,’ Manchester, a route that has been used throughout history for marches and protests. I hope to continue this project by sending the works to other locations in the real world, so they themselves will be carried off into the universe, in a sense, and the message will spread. The next host will add more works and decide a wide range of cultural, social and political differences on their journey. The works will change and be weathered, maybe subject to graffiti, and this will reflect the impermanent and ever-changing conditions that we are all subject to.”

Studio News: Viral II

Top: Viral II (work in progress photograph)
Below: Viral II (detail)

Work on Viral II continued in the studio today. The finished work will be shown at Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing at the Crypt Gallery, London in October 2010.

New website holding page

The new holding page at charleypeters.com is now online, with a direct link to Carbon Particles, which will remain, for now, the first port of call for up-to-the-minute news about projects I'm involved in. The full website is undergoing a redesign so stay tuned for relaunch news over the coming months.
charleypeters.com

Sketches: Xerox Drawings

'Drawings' generated on a photocopier. Sketches for future works exploring visual interference and drawing processes.

Research: Visual Interference

Found images of TV static, research for new work concerning examples of 'visual interference'.

Television is a gift of God, and God will hold those who utilize his divine instrument accountable to him -- Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the modern television.

Noise in analogue video and television is perceived as a random dot pattern which is superimposed on the picture as a result of electronic noise and radiated electromagnetic noise picked up by the receiver's antenna. Due to the algorithmic functioning of a digital television set's electronic circuitry and the inherent quantization of its screen, the 'snow' seen on digital TV is less random.

Anatomy of a Projection.

Left: Viral I (detail), graphite on paper
Right: Viral II (detail), graphite on paper

The Viral series of drawings, which will be previewed at the Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing exhibition in October, explores the relationship between mechanically produced and hand rendered marks. The works reproduce the toner traces left on distorted photocopies of found images, projected and traced to generate a large-scale exact copy of the disrupted images. Viral I presents the pixellated visual interferences retained when images are processed through a digital projector attached to a laptop, Viral II the comparatively smooth contours of lines presented by projecting image data through an OHP - digital vs analogue information.

Delineation: Artists' Talk Confirmed 30/10/10

Exciting news...
TBC Artists' Collective can now confirm that there will be a free artists' talk as part of the supporting programme for Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing. It will be led by artist and writer John Timberlake, who will discuss the key considerations of the exhibition in relation to current drawing practice in contemporary art. A number of the exhibiting artists will be present to take questions from the audience.

Timberlake is an artist whose practice embraces drawing, painting and photography, and whose work is in a number of public and private collections in Europe and the US. He is Programme Leader in BA Fine Art, Middlesex University.

Further details on the talk and how to reserve a place are available at: tbc-artistscollective.blogspot.com/

Viral II: Progress

After two days of drawing Viral II is progressing well. Still many more days of work ahead...

Coming Soon - 12 Pages

The new edition of 12 Pages, 12 Minutes, will be available soon featuring specially commissioned work from members of TBC Artists' Collective.

For an exclusive preview: tbc-artistscollective.blogspot.com

Work on Viral II begins

The start of a second work for the forthcoming TBC exhibition Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing, which translates mechanical information into an analogue drawn language. Toner traces from enlarged, distorted photocopies are redrawn by hand.

Sketches

'The photocopier is one of the most recent in a long line of instruments conceived for the mechanical reproduction of visual material. But unlike predecessors such as lithography and photography, which originated from an artistic as well as a mechanical urge for perfect representation, the photocopy was not conceived in any way as a tool for artists...

...The price paid for the factual reproduction of reality was termed 'the loss of the aura' by Walter Benjamin, who in the 1930s meticulously chronicled the extermination of the artistic aura (unique singularity) through mechanical reproduction. According to Benjamin, 'the dynamite of the tenth of a second' in photography and film blew away traditional notions of art appreciation as contemplative fetishism. If we extend Benjamin's chronology to the present day, then photocopying and video can be seen as successors in the 1980s to photography and film. Yet our present vantage point also permits us to advance beyond Benjamin's verdict on the aura and to see our destruction not only as inevitable due to technological progress, but also, in artistic terms, as necessary.'

From Christian Brensing, Refracted Origins, A Brief History of the Photocopy.

Studio News: New work for Delineation exhibition

Viral I (2010)
Graphite on paper
200cm x 150cm

Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing opens in October 2010. The exhibition considers drawing as an expanded field that explores what it is to draw within the context of contemporary art practice. In the elegiac setting of The Crypt Gallery, Delineation will present works from TBC Artists' Collective that contemplate the nature of current drawing activity in physical, cognitive and virtual contexts. The exhibition will focus on the processes of drawing itself, and also assert its relevance to writing, sculpture, sewing, technology, mark-making, language, gesture and performance.

27 October 2010 - 31 October 2010
10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
The Crypt Gallery, Euston Road, St Pancras Church, London NW1 2BA

Day-to-day

Progress of a new drawing 13

Progress of a new drawing 12

Day 11: Six pencils down...

I'm running out of graphite fast, I've just placed an emergency order for more of my favourite yellow pencils.

Progress of a new drawing 10

Sketches

Research for new drawings

Progress of a new drawing 9

Sketches

Xeroxized to infinity

Our present condition has been described in terms of an “ecstasy of communication.” In an era of multiple media, technological advances in telecommunications and in methods of visual reproduction ensure that we are constantly being inundated with images. Televisions, faxes, photocopiers, and computers have become the virtual windows of the age of the information highway, conduits of digitalized impulses that link the individual with a global network of communications. The modern office and home are deluged with reproduced images and information: news on the hour, every hour; movies previewed, premiered, released, cloned into videos, and drip-fed through cable TV. It is a culture of the copy, a society of saturation, the second flood. The world has become “xeroxized” to infinity.

From 'The Saturation of the Image'
MIT Press.

Progress of a new drawing 8

12 Artists - 12 Minutes - 12 Pages

Work for the forthcoming TBC Artists' Collective publication '12 Pages' featuring work by 12 artists made in 12 minutes.

Progress of a new drawing 7