Transient residency: Digital Remains

The following works were all produced as part of the Transient Residency.

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Thanks to Curatorspace I came across the Transient residency opportunities in July. I was really pleased to be accepted and for the last week I have been posting to the @t.ransientt Instagram feed. The guidance was for a maximum of two posts a day, and that the best posting times were between 2 and 4pm.

I confess I started the week thinking two posts a day sounded very modest, but as I was trying to develop some new pieces as well as expanding existing work, I soon discovered it needed a lot of thinking and making time! Working digitally predominantly and being an online residency meant this was a good opportunity to revisit my body of work and connect with a new audience. My goals were:

• To spend a focused period of time on my creative practice
• To showcase my work through a new channel
• To get feedback from a wider audience
• To try and learn some new digital skills – primarily Adobe After Effects

I had some ideas for the week and wanted to produce new work as much as possible. At the beginning of the residency I was introduced on the channel and shared what I would be doing through my own IG account. I was also given the account details for @T.ransientt, which was a bit nerve wracking – the last thing I wanted to do was mess up someone else’s account!

I had an outline plan for the trajectory of the week but not the precise details of each day’s posts. I was able to post every day and produced new work as well as taking some existing work further. To produce the work, I used a lot of my archive and a range of digital tools from photoshop, to GANs, to phone apps. Most involved some form of AI.

I hadn’t anticipated the Together Apart and Transient  residencies would overlap and while this intensified my creative attention it meant juggling the two areas of focus and this meant that by mid-week, I was feeling a bit frazzled and was getting frustrated with how best to create a coherent and interesting body of work. I was getting positive feedback which was motivating  and gratifying. I tried hard not to compare myself to previous residency artists but couldn’t help wondering about the feedback others got. I also had the benefit of applying the learning from Together Apart at the same time.

By the end I felt good about what I had produced and recognised the need to keep working through the frustrations and tussles of emergent work that might not be evolving as intended. My biggest frustration was reserved for getting to grips with After Effects and while it remains a bit of a mystery, I do feel some satisfaction with what I managed to achieve. My computer was also very buggy with it which didn’t help, a bit of a reminder that I need to sort out my archiving and storage!

Overall, I found the week incredibly valuable, it was a rare privilege to focus so single-mindedly on my artwork and while that brings its own pressures, I am pleased to have had the opportunity.  Reminding myself of my research in this field was incredibly helpful and I think has given me more clarity. At this point I think the work has a joint purpose:

• Interacting with technology in a process of creative destruction, to highlight the issue of digital remains
• Sharing information about the need for everyone to consider their wishes when it comes to the future of their digital assets after death

I am starting to think of it as socio-digital practice.

If I would have done anything differently it might have been to have had more of a plan at the outset although I am aware, I often resist having things too fixed, I work in an emergent way and need a process that allows for that. I did allow some of my consultancy work to creep into the week and with hindsight that was a mistake as it proved distracting – a reminder of the need to say ‘no’ from time to time.

I will take a number of things from the residency into the future:

• The importance of ‘showing up,’ and the need to be putting my work out there
• There is definitely a role for text in my work going forward
• Continuing to learn new apps and platforms will be important to keep bringing more depth to the work, at the same time as being mindful of not getting gimmicky
• Programming dedicated ‘making’ time into my diary is important, but that needs balancing with not feeling pressure to always create resolved work
• Continuing to look for new opportunities and projects to get involved in
• Knowing I am still motivated by project work around ‘digital afterlife’

Massive thanks to Transient for giving me the opportunity. There may be other things to come out of the work – more of that later!

About the works:

1. Digital Afterlife: Computer generated and animated abstract image. Notions of a morphing digital archive once I am deceased
2. Over Time: Computer generated and animated. Based on a non-digital decollage created from layers of my digital archive
3. Five Centuries: Glitched image created from a non-digital decollage. The decollage includes reference to the paintings of women Dutch still life painters. Five centuries separate their work from mine. What might people be looking at in five centuries time?
4. Digital Legacy: computer generated abstract using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Imagining how AI might interact with my digital archive in future
5. When the pixels fall: GAN generated and animated
6. The truth is…: GAN generated abstract, trained on abstract expressionist images
7. Digital Assets: GAN generated abstract, trained on abstract expressionist images. Text is a draft clause for digital assets in a will
8. No right of survivorship: Based on a non-digital decollage and animated with the No Right of Survivorship clause for Apple iCloud storage. Their accounts are not transferable and content may be deleted on death