laurieopal

Laurie says:

This is a group of shadow pictures that I’m considering for my major work in progress, Memory Landscapes. The gallery is here and a description of the project is here. Since I'm in the process of creating a complex aesthetic of memory and memoir, the description of the project is also a work in progress.

I'm putting them up much larger than usual to give a sense of what they'll look like as iPad art.


I posted about some of the shadow images earlier this year. I’ve been working on the photos and the associative memory chains but haven’t been writing about them nearly enough. The shadow pictures represent a place where you space out and “your brain goes to Brooklyn”, so to speak.


We remember vividly, with intervals of presence without definite thought or focus. (This is not the optimal description but I’m working on it.)

I have a newer “in progress” version of the associative memory chains that includes some spoken word pieces and shadow photos that I’ll be linking to and writing more about pretty soon. Here is the present version I have up. Check it out if you’re not familiar with the project.


I’ve been somewhat obsessed with these shadow images in recent months. I’ve also been working on some shadow video that I’ll be posting about as well.


I’m taking some down time so I probably won’t be posting for a few weeks. Then I'll be putting up a major photo from Memory Landscapes.

(Cross-posted on livejournal as laurieopal)

It looks like I'm writing a lot more often about my Memory Landscape project.

I posted recently about shadow photos for my Memory Landscape project. Check out the whole project here.

"These photos are images that may be part of the aesthetic of memory, where rather than have your mind go from one associative memory to another, instead it goes very briefly to a space that is not about remembering but simply about being. I’m in a place where I am considering things rather than making decisions."

For myself, I think of it as my mind going to Brooklyn. And Emma Humphries, who is working with me on the tech for this, is simply calling these images Brooklyn.



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While the project has a very strong intellectual framework, I'm fundamentally thinking about it visually. Seeing extended patterns of memory images, some times partially changing, sometimes not. When Emma was talking to me about the code, she drew some it out for me in pictures (we both think in pictures in different ways). Then I realized that the html code and the hyperlinks were very much my memory visualization, and just how well suited this language is for a non-linear memoir. A non-linear memoir feels much realer to me than the usual narrative forms that we use to reframe and remake our stories in. So there seems to be a deep harmony between Emma's use of code language and the visual language of my art.


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If you look at these images and the ones in the previous blog, you can see the harmony between them. At the moment that feels very right to me, and may have ways of developing that I've just realized while writing this post.

I'm still considering the kinds of images I want for the brief state of simply being, but these will be part of the work in progress. As the new associative memory images and paths develop, I'll be posting about them.

I'm excited about having my Memory Landscapes panel at Worldcon.  It's my new work in progress and it's really expanding my art both conceptually and aesthetically. I'm delighted that Eileen Gunn and Brenda Clough will be on the panel.
So far I've done the panel three times.  The conversations with the audience and the panelists about time, memory, and our lives and work have been intensely good for developing the art.  And it feels like it has been rewarding for the participants.
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Memory Landscapes

Friday 12:00 - 12:45, 302AB (CC)
Photographer Laurie Toby Edison is working on a new digital project called Memory Landscapes, a feminist visual memoir. Memory is a form of time travel through your own time line.  A visual memoir takes you into the artist's time line and lets you choose your paths through their lives. 

Laurie says, "I started thinking about memory, and how what is remarkable is not how much we forget, but how much we remember. My memories are not linear because, as Penelope Lively observed,
'Inside the head everything happens at once.' Linear narrative is a useful construct, but it's not how we actually remember.  I want to re-engage with the memories of my life, to create an autobiographical visual memoir, to express the poetics of non-linear time. Memories are filtered, by who we are now, who we were then, and what has happened in between. We view our past through layers of memories, and the past is everything that happened except this moment. It will eventually be an IPad app that creates an aesthetic of memory."

During the panel, we will look at some of Laurie's work in progress, and discuss the ways panelists and audience re-engage with memories of our own lives.

Panelists: Laurie Toby Edison, Eileen Gunn, Brenda Clough

(cross-posted on livejournal as laurieopal)

I've been thinking about and working for a long time (sculpture long time) on a pendant making a design for an old wedgewood-like piece that has a woman with a demon tail. Part of the reason it's taking long i is that as it evolves I remove and make changes.


And on a very different subject, I just found out that my Memory Landscapes panel will be at Wiscon - more about this later

I just did the Memory Landscape panel at Fogcon and it was great! People came up to me for the rest of the convention to talk about the panel. They gave me a lot to think about. It's about my new work in progress “Memory Landscapes", an iPad art project.

Please check it off on Wiscon 39 Programing if your interested. It's a the bottom of "Feminism and Other Social Change Movements" under "already staffed". We did it at the last Wiscon and the audience's comments and involvement were exciting and useful.

"Photographer Laurie Toby Edison is working on a new digital project called “Memory Landscapes", a feminist visual memoir. Memory is a form of time travel through your own time line. A visual memoir takes you into the artist's time line and lets you choose your paths through their lives. She says, “I started thinking about memory, and how what is remarkable is not how much we forget, but how much we remember. I realized that my memories are not linear – because ‘inside the head everything happens at once.’ (Penelope Lively) Linear narrative is a useful construct, but it's not how we actually remember.

I want to re-engage with the memories of my life, to create an autobiographical visual memoir, to express the poetics of non-linear time. Memories are filtered, by who we are now, who we were then, and what has happened in between. We view our past through layers of memories, and the past is everything that happened except this moment. It will eventually be on Ipad app that creates an aesthetic of memory. On the panel, we will look at some of Laurie’s work in progress, and discuss the ways panelists and audience re-engage with memories of our own lives."

Panelists: Pat Murphy and Nisi Shawl are among my intellectual collaborators on the project. I'd also like to add a musician since music is an important part of memory."

Kim Stanley Robinson was superb on the panel at Fogcon and is interested in being on it at Wiscon.

(cross-posted on LiveJournal as laurieopal)

I wrote about my new project a for the first time as part of a post on Body Impolitic about a photo Choice exhibition catalogue called High Stakes.  I've proposed a panel
at Wiscon  Time, Contingency, Memory – As Elements of Art. The new project is tentatively called Memory Landscapes: A Life in Time.  If you're a member of WisCon, you can check "I would like to attend this panel" on the programming web site the panel is the very last one in the "Feminism and Other Social Change Movements" category.

I’ve been thinking through the complexities in fascinating conversations with literary friends, especially Debbie Notkin and Pat Murphy, who are on the panel.  I want it to be the basis of larger conversations with them  and the audience.  About how our concepts and narratives of time are expressed in our work and how we see our lives in time.

As many of you know, I've been a photographer for 25 years, doing black & white fine-art darkroom social change portraits. I realized at the end of my 25-year series of portrait projects that I wanted to do something completely new and different.
I wanted to create a memoir.  I'm 72, and have had a long and complicated life.  I started thinking about memory, and how what is remarkable is not how much we forget, but rather how much we remember.

After a lot of time, thought, and less-than-successful experiments, I realized that my memories are not linear - because "inside the head everything happens at once." (Penelope Lively)  Linear narrative is a useful construct, but it's not how we actually remember.  I want to re-engage with the memories of my life, to create an autobiographical visual memoir, to express the poetics of non-linear time.

Memories are filtered, by who we are now, who we were then, and what has happened in between.  We view our past through layers of memory, and the past is everything that happened except this moment.

Photographing my memories is a way of capturing moments in time.  Not mythic moments, but images constructed from carefully chosen real objects, some only for aesthetics, many relics from my life through time.  Objects are arranged and contexted to express narratives that are autobiographical slices of my life.

I had already been thinking about iPad art, separately from any project.  With an iPad, for the first time one can make work where viewers everywhere see the original art, not reproductions or recreations.  iPad art is also illuminated from within, presenting the opportunity to express the layering of memory.  In a sense, I am creating memory landscapes that are iPad still lifes.

The project's first three photographs (of a projected 25) are included as work samples.  One, "My Father and I," includes:  photobooth pictures of my father (1932); a hundred-dollar bill; fragments of a shot glass; a black hacksaw blade; razor blades with our mutual initials; his cremation tags; and marigolds for mourning - all on an illuminated background of gray silk.

Making the images starts with thinking about the memories, the histories, and what initial objects will express them.  Then the objects are arranged, rearranged, remade, contextualized, often replaced.  The image evolves, is demolished, rebuilt, until the final memory landscape emerges.

I'm looking forward to many conversations that explore and enlarge on what I've been thinking.