In Defence of Plagiarism

Ian Hamilton Finlay • Gary Hincks

"Originality is the art of concealing your sources."

Albert Einstein *1

I'm not at all convinced that plagiarism is an entirely bad or avoidable thing. However, if you're a student reading this in the hope of discovering a handy excuse to steal someone else's work I'm afraid I'm probably going to disappoint you.

Artists, musicians and writers etc have always copied each other. The list of rip-offs, cribs, copies, samples, purloined fragments, pilfered references, and stolen ideas is probably longer than history itself. People have always been influenced and inspired by one another and they have always copied, emulated, mimicked and borrowed. In turn they have helped disseminate ideas and provided materials, tools and techniques which enable new ways of being, understanding and communicating. Language itself is a battleground of plagiarism. Practically every word we speak or write has been invented or evolved by generations before us. We quite naturally build upon other people's work and this human tendency to recycle the energy and invention of others allows us to improve our environment and, in turn, to provide new foundations upon which others may continue to construct and invent. In this context, to believe that anything is truly original is surely delusional.

"By sharing of ideas, animals, and most especially humans, pool the ability of their group. The pinnacles of intelligence are exploited by the entire society. In human culture, this has led to the emergence of a kind of communal intellect the Collective Mind of man - that has pushed forward his biological progress at a prodigious rate" (Blakemore, C. (1977). Mechanics of, Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., p. 117).

There are frequent occasions when we simply assimilate new information, ideas and beliefs because they closely approximate or elaborate our own. Likewise, our memories are so porous that we often adopt other peoples' ideas without ever taking note of our sources. In everyday experience we’re rarely, if ever, tested with reference to our sources of information and opinion, and we’re often blithely unaware and unconcerned whether some idea is of our own invention or a notion subtly acquired from someone else. We read books, journals and newspapers, watch TV and films, listen to the radio, surf the web and engage in multitudes of conversation. In the process we unwittingly appropriate and assimilate all kinds of information, ideas and attitudes with barely a regard to the extent that these dilute or embellish who we are. We are each a complex “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. You might even ask to what extent a well-informed person is really anything other than a multi-sourced encyclopaedia.

“Oliver Wendell Holmes mentions how someone at the breakfast table sparkled greatly in conversation on certain topics. And seemed quite ignorant on others. Presently it was noticed that all the subjects he understood began with the letter A; then it was discovered that he was taking in an encyclopaedia in weekly numbers and the mystery was explained.” The London Globe, August 20, 1900 P.8 Direct Link here.

But we’re not robots, we don't simply absorb everything which is presented to us. We select, analyse, contrast, speculate, synthesise, conceptualise and all too frequently disregard or forget. This shifting pattern of absorption and reconstruction is a fundamental aspect of conscious thought. Sophisticated thought, far from being a tissue of quotations, is a multi- threaded tapestry who’s origins are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. This process of reconstruction, or more accurately - independent creative thinking - is what conventional attitudes towards plagiarism seek to elevate. But without absorption, appropriation and assimilation, what rudimentary, inarticulate, underdeveloped and uninformed things our thoughts would be. And how absurd would it be if we had to constantly reference every aspect of everything we said, made or did? Fortunately there’s no requirement upon us to do so, but in academia the situation is not quite so simple.

Students and staff who steal other people's ideas and claim these as their own, reap rewards which do not befit the meagre effort or achievement of these unworthy magpies. Indeed there is something particularly parasitic about such forms of plagiarism since they are not conducted in order to advance knowledge and understanding but to deceive in the hope of self aggrandizement or the avoidance of genuine effort and application. Parasites like thieves, are a natural consequence of environmental circumstance and opportunity. Wherever there is an advantage to be easily gained, someone or something will inevitably exploit it and it is therefore necessary, in such circumstances, to create boundaries or procedures to militate against abuse.

In academia the standard solution to plagiarism is a "zero tolerance" attitude where punishments are severe and the rules are narrowly defined and explicitly stated. The requirement is that all references be clearly cited and sources fully attributed according to "Vancouver" or "Harvard" or whatever referencing system is in favour. Deviation from these rules can have severe consequences and even minor mistakes often result in penalties. Such rules are necessary to ensure that all new and original thoughts and ideas are fairly encouraged and rewarded. However, as with all systems of regulation and constraint, it simply forces abusers to be more cunning and the gatekeepers to be more obsessive about correct procedure. James Atherton has discussed this very problem on his blog “On the shibboleth of Harvard referencing”. In particular he raises the tendency among examiners to overemphasise correct referencing. Fortunately, professor Atherton shrewdly recognises the real issue at hand:

“…in the final analysis it does not matter whether or not they [students] can attribute an idea to Bernstein, Bloom or Bruner, Pavlov, Piaget or Poppleton, any more than it matters whether a gardener can say who made his/her spade. It does matter what they do with it; whether they can use the essence of that idea to inform their practice.”Atherton, J. 2009 Blog: On the shibboleth of Harvard referencing, 3 April Direct link here. accessed 25 October 2009.

There's a software application often used by academic institutions to detect plagiarism called Turnitin. You simply paste a section of the suspect text into a box and Turnitin searches through a vast catalogue of scholarly information, references and online essays etc in a manner very similar to Google. As a method of detecting plagiarism it's an extremely useful tool and a powerful deterrent to would-be plagiarists. But this is in many ways typical of the wrong-headed attitude of academia: regulating students rather than supporting them. Far better than a plagiarism detector would be a reference organiser/maker: a software application that takes an essay and accurately attributes each quotation to its original source. I'll wager that this will happen in the not too distant future but, for the moment, the best students have access to is Bibme.

The issue which is all too often missed or subtly ignored in cases of plagiarism is whether the material stolen is in any way substantive in relation to its new context (ie: does the plagiarized material bring about an improvement which would be otherwise unlikely?). If it does, then the accusation of deception is hard, if not impossible, to counter. However if the plagiarism is trivial then, I believe, we should be gracious enough to ignore it. This is why we can easily forgive William Shakespeare or Robert Burns or Bob Dylan for the many acts of plagiarism they perpetrated. For the most part, these acts were insignificant in comparison with the vast quantity and/or quality of their output. This demonstrates the often concealed ambiguity at the heart of plagiarism. Generally speaking, plagiarism is condoned so long as its extent or quality is not in any way substantive. Or, as my mum said to me when I was a child “It’s okay to copy other people, so long as you do it better!”

But academia can’t deal with such ambiguities. If cheating is not seen to be regulated and disciplined at every level then the floodgates would surely open to all manner of abuse. And so the argument goes. Unfortunately, as with every regulation instituted in order to deter the abuse of opportunity - whether it's checking-in at an airport, watching an avant-garde film, working with children, taking photos at the swimming pool or writing an academic essay - we all have to be careful that our intentions are clear and, if necessary, prove that our age, qualifications or agenda are appropriate. Such are the insidious consequences of social regulation.

If such academic constraints were extended to fine art education, this would certainly make a mockery of the freedoms we expect of fine art practice. As it is, academia could learn a lot from the ways that the art of the past century has transformed our understanding of appropriation, recombination and contextual transformation. Despite this, art students - like all other students - must still follow the same rules of attribution when it comes to the writing of essays and dissertations etc. Even I, as a Masters student in the 1990s, had to carefully reference the tissue of quotations I compiled as part of my master's thesis on the subject of appropriation. If I'd had more confidence at the time, I’d have strung together the entire essay with as few of my own words as possible. In 2007 Jonathan Lethem did exactly this (here), with supreme skill and authority, which just goes to show how powerful plagiarism can be, when done with intelligence, comprehensive research and the confidence to know that there’s a genuine and important point to be made.

Recently I had another idea on the on the subject of plagiarism, which is to re-attribute fragments of Roland Barthes' entire essay "The Death of the Author" through HTML thus:

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” etc.

Hover your mouse over the text. Each hypertext link takes you to a webpage where the identical linked phrase can be found, but in an entirely different context. It's a simple idea, but a big job, and I could do with a hand to complete it. So if you like the idea, feel free to collaborate or, if you prefer, to steal!

Homage to RM and IHF, Jim Hamlyn, 2006. Pastel on Ingres paper

*1: "Originality is the art of concealing your sources." This quote, which is often falsely attributed to Einstein (as I have done above), was actually coined by Benjamin Franklin.

Postscript:

Since writing the above I've come across several excellent resources on the same subject which you can find below:

"Cut-and Paste Is a Skill, Too" By Jason Johnson The Washington Post, Sunday, March 25, 2007

Larry Lessig on "Laws that Choke Creativity" Video on Ted.com

"If I Was a Master Thief" by Imaginary Boundaries, 2010. This is the final part of a group of 3 brilliant essays on the subject which reference much that I have also referred to, and much besides.

Brian Pickings also posted a great extract of a letter by Mark Twain to Helen Keller on the subject of plagiarism that echoes some of the points that I have made above.

The Woodcutter and the Trees

The wrong time
The wrong place
The wrong generation

This post follows on from a post I recently wrote about the plans to build a civic square over the top of Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen and the "I Heart UTG" campaign to stop it.

Last summer I returned home one day to find some workmen uprooting the trees outside my studio window. I live in a tenement building and my groundfloor neighbour decided to emulate his friends, who live in neighbouring buildings, by having his front garden paved over. The trees, which were the only trees on the entire street, were partially obscuring the light from his windows, and the garden was beginning to be difficult for him to manage in his old age. I was very disappointed that such well established trees were being destroyed for no good reason, but not being the owner of the land, I didn't feel able to make any real objection and certainly not in time to make any difference.

Yesterday I attended a consultation meeting about the plans for the City Square Project in Aberdeen. Sir Ian Wood and two of his high-power cronies were there to present their vision for the scheme. The presentations trotted out all the usual buzzwords, smiling faces and sunny 3-D visuals to support their case, complete with images of multi-million dollar squares in Melbourne, Chicago, Houston etc. They also made all the predictable emotionally laden rhetorical points about drunks in the city centre and Union Terrace Gardens being what they strategically termed a "chasm" supposedly designed to face the north of the city, and they even had the gall to suggest that they intended to "raise" the iconic gardens to street level (raze them to the ground more-like and then replace them with an undernourished and under-supported simulacrum).

When asked about how their plans for the square would deal with the problem of drunks in the city centre, Wood raised his hands (or should I say rinsed his hands) to indicate that the project made no promises to solve the problem - nonetheless, I think everyone in the audience picked up on the cynicism with which he was happy to use the spectre of "drunks" to punt his hollow plans.

Another of the many sad facts about his intractable position on the whole issue is that he's clearly under the misguided delusion that the only public resistance is due to the competing project for Peacock Visual Arts’ new Art Centre. This is certainly a major point of contention but meanwhile there's a majestic gem of a park nestled in the heart of the city silently awaiting its fate. Yes, this is also emotive language, but then trees, as mature and unyielding as they seem, easily buckle under chain saws and JCBs without uttering a single word in protest.

During the consultation meeting, the question was raised about the possibility of only building over the carriageway and railtrack's which adjoin Union Terrace Gardens leaving the gardens themselves unaffected. It was immediately obvious from the expressions on the three faces of Wood etc that they wouldn't even countenance such an idea. Once again we heard the mantra of the "chasm" and Wood stating that such a solution would be "just plain ugly". Considering his clear lack of vision so far, one wonders how he could know this so categorically? Genuine Vision has the sense to recognise that with imagination, ingenuity and common purpose, solutions can be found for all kinds of problems. It’s now patently clear that Wood's only conception of a solution to any problem is either to wash his hands of it or to cover it over. That’s a vision Aberdeen could do without no matter how many millions are attached to it.

In these times, in this place and for this generation - and no doubt for future generations also - the outmoded idea that you can transform a city by wiping part of it clean away and replacing it with paving slabs (no matter how expensive or artistic) runs distinctly counter to prevailing ideas about the need to retain and champion green space. You only need to watch a pulp movie like Avatar to see that the tide is turning, particularly for young people. Wood's idea is simply old-fashioned but let me present you with an alternative vision which may illustrate exactly how this is so.

With the £40 million Wood is offering (under certain conditions of course) Aberdeen could buy and plant 200,000 trees in and around the city. That’s two hundred thousand trees, which is no wood but a veritable forest – a forest which would transform Aberdeen from a grey granite city into a verdant arboreal treasure, the envy of every city in the world and a green flame in the torch of ecological progress. If Wood truly wishes to leave Aberdeen a cherished and enduring legacy in the heart of the city then this is just one vision which he could easily sell overnight and by it his name would literally live not just in the hearts, but in the minds and streets of Aberdonians for generations: “The Wood Project”. After all, it would seem fitting that the project were created from trees: the very things that formed the oil upon which Wood’s and Aberdeen’s prosperity has been built in recent times. In fact, there would be no need for time consuming consultations or expensive promotional materials because such a project would be welcomed by the people of Aberdeen. Some ideas, some times, some places and some generations are simply right. Others are distinctly not.

If I'd had any power to stop my neighbour destroying the trees which stood before my window last summer I'd certainly have raised more than my voice in protest. As it is, I now have a neat but entirely soulless expanse of cheap paving on my doorstep and a constant reminder and regret that I did too little to stop it.

Devil in the Detail

There are points in the production of artworks where decisions need to be made about what is intentional and what is accidental. Sometimes the accidental qualities of artworks can be interpreted as having a close relationship or contribution to the meaning or associations of the work. Such serendipitous circumstances are a very welcome addition, which enhance resolution and resonance and are often highly prized by artists for this very reason. But much more common and undesirable are the accidental details which detract from the overall effect or undermine the integrity of the work. This is why many artists are obsessively punctilious about every aspect of the work they produce. They recognise that it’s unwise to ignore even the minutest detail or nuance because these are the very stuff of articulate and refined expression. To take the view that certain elements of an artwork are irrelevant is to make a fatal mistake about the perceptions of one’s audience and to assume that there’s an automatic and commonly regarded hierarchy of relevance based upon what one intends rather than acknowledging that every detail contributes to the whole. Bad luck and good fortune are flip-sides of the same coin – so, if superfluous details are irrelevant then serendipity is also. This would be like narrowing our palette to a reduced spectrum where both the highs and lows are disregarded because our perceptions are either too coarse, too insensitive or most likely too ignorant to notice.

Reflecting on Learning

As a student, looking back at your time at art school, it can often be difficult to determine what exactly you've learned. There are many technical processes which one could point to as examples, but the cognitive lessons are much harder to grasp and describe. I was talking with a student last week who mentioned that when she looked over her work of the past year she felt that it was all inadequate or naive in some way. It occurred to me, at that moment, that she was describing an evaluative position in relation to previous decisions and actions taken, and that this was in many ways a key to understanding the learning that had taken place. Critical perspective only arises through the acquisition of new knowledge and understanding. If we unpack this new critical positioning it's possible to determine the constituent parts of what we call learning.

Clothing Moths

Fourty-two moths and one fly.

Sustainable Suffering

"The delight which a man has in hoping for and looking forward to some special satisfaction is a part of the real pleasure attaching to it enjoyed in advance. This is afterwards deducted; for the more we look forward to anything, the less satisfaction we find in it when it comes."

Reading Schopenhauer and thinking about his ideas on suffering has led me to consider the extent to which suffering is based on a drive to do as much as possible whilst "suffering" as little as possible. By this I mean that our "nature" is to exist and propagate ourselves as efficiently as is possible vis-à-vis suffering. Suffering is a limiting factor, without which, there would be no means of averting an unstoppable procreation and consumption.

"But misfortune has its uses... if the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly—nay, they would go mad...

If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature."

"In his powers of reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows."

This is why we can "choose" suicide because (notwithstanding the fear of death - whether instinctive or otherwise) we are able to reflect upon our current circumstances and make a considered decision about the relative merits of curtailing current (and presumably unbearable) suffering or enduring suffering offset by the promise of future pleasures. Animals, of course, don't have this choice and this is an important point because, considering the human capacity for immense suffering and the conscious contemplation of it, we need the most formidable disincentives to counteract the logical conclusion that life isn't worth living at all.

But what does this mean as regards the "alleviation of suffering"? If we alleviate suffering in one quarter are we not simply creating the conditions for suffering in another? For example, if we alleviate the suffering of an animal experiencing pain, do we not then encourage the potential for this animal to live longer, to consume more and to perpetuate itself and thereby create a increasing demand on limited resources? So whilst the negative effect might not be immediately encountered, it will nonetheless, be exacted at a later date and probably to a greater degree, if not on that particular animal, then another. This reminds me of the second law of thermodynamics, of which, as biological thermodynamicist Donald Haynie has said:

"Any theory claiming to describe how organisms originate and continue to exist by natural causes must be compatible with the first and second laws of thermodynamics."

This law states that the entropy (disorder) of a closed system will increase over time until an energy equilibrium is reached (ie: all the energy is used up OR until there is a equilibrium between energy available and energy consumed). But this shouldn't lead us to the conclusion that to alleviate suffering is a pointless task. Speculating about some future increase in suffering is simply that: speculation - any amount of which shouldn't give us licence to renounce our responsibility to make the present as devoid of suffering as possible, whilst propagating a minimum of future suffering. This is surely what "sustainability" is all about: creating a balance between the resources available to us and our consumption of them such that we can endure.

The strange but deeply affirming thing about Schopenhauer was that despite his devastatingly pessimistic views, he was able to rise above these miseries and indicate a way forward:

“In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another… and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow.”

Who Knowes Raymond Moore?

Raes Knowes, 1980

When I was an art foundation student at Trent Polytechnic I lodged in the house of an art teacher working at a nearby school. Ivan shared my interest in photography, and one evening he invited me to watch a television programme about the work of a British photographer called Raymond Moore. As with many of the artists I saw at this time, I tried to emulate Moore’s work as a method of understanding his approach and ideas and as a way to develop my own.

Untitled, 1987

The following year Raymond Moore visited the course (which I had subsequently joined) as a visiting lecturer. There were a total of 18 students on the course at the time and Ray was only employed for a single day, so I was lucky to have a tutorial with him. I can remember very little of what he said about the work I showed him. I had been making a lot of colour landscape images with a Diana camera at the time. I imagine he was rather unimpressed with the distortion and vignetting caused by the camera and I’m sure he felt that this was an unnecessary distraction.

Maryport, 1980

At this time Ray and Mary Moore Cooper used to run occasional photography workshops at their home in the Scottish borders, which were attended by serious amateurs and students. Quite soon after the events described above, my course was offered a free place on one of these workshops and it came down to the toss of a coin between myself and a rival student. Luckily for me I won the toss, but my good fortune was short-lived since, for reasons which I fail to remember, the workshop was called off. As compensation, I was offered a free place for the following year but before the year was out, Ray had died at the age of 67 from a heart attack.

Forrest Town, 1978

A year later, and in a completely different phase of my work, influenced, for the most part, by long discussions about Marxist aesthetics and the emancipation of the proletariat, I was asked by an exchange student what I thought of the work of Ray Moore. I replied cynically "Genteel nonsense!" or something to that effect. I remember the response very well, which was far more than my ungenerous reply deserved. The exchange student asked me whether I thought that such work might become meaningful to me later in life. I don't remember my response but since my tendency at the time was always to replace lack of opinion with dismissive cynicism I assume that it must have been in the negative.

Galloway, 1977

Three years later, while still studying (and my Marxist tendencies having been subtly mollified) I was offered the opportunity of work assisting Mary Moore Cooper with the Raymond Moore Archive in Dumfries. I spent several weeks camping in a nearby campsite and cycling into Gracefield Arts Centre to make contact prints of several thousand rolls of film which Ray had never contact-printed, believing as he did, that 35mm contact sheets were next-to-useless in determining the most successful image to be printed. Once I had served this initiation in the dim confines of a darkroom and the similarly cramped gloom of a tent, I was allowed to assist Mary more closely with the preparation of the archive. The following year I was invited back to Dumfriesshire to assist Mary with her own work. Throughout these times I was uniquely privileged with an opportunity to experience first-hand the images, paraphernalia and library which Ray and Mary had amassed and to hear many fascinating accounts of their life together from Mary and friends and visitors to the archive.

Maryport, 1982

The extraordinary thing about these priceless experiences was that I was actually being paid - I couldn't have afforded to do otherwise. The impact was therefore twofold - I was able to save money to enable my final studies and I was being exposed to the work and rich remnants of one of the most gifted British photographers of the 20th Century. You may feel that such a claim is overstating the point - for instance, how come Raymond Moore isn't a household name? Or why, at least, don't photography students know his work? Unfortunately the answer to this question is the most lamentable aspect of the whole Raymond Moore story and one which continues to shroud a body of work which represents such a profoundly important part of the legacy of British photographic history.

Dumfriesshire, 1985

Galloway, 1981

Ray was fascinated by the commonplace, by the quotidian and by the landscape of border towns and domesticated borderlands. Nobody has taught me more about the variety, depth and nuances of boundaries and boundedness than Raymond Moore. Whether through fields or walls; fences or frames; windows or verges or darkness and light, Moore was a visionary of the boundary.

Allonby, 1981

Unfortunately, too few people are interested in such subtleties in the UK, even though (and perhaps in spite of the fact that) Moore’s vision is archetypically British: its modesty, its reserve and its gentility – yes, I still believe it’s genteel, but it speaks with such a charm and quiet wit and such a sophisticated precision of form that, understated as it is, it vehemently questions why so many people, who should know better, are seduced by the mind-numbing superficiality of a Crewdson or La Chappelle.

Galloway, 1980

I have a Raymond Moore print on my wall at home (which Mary kindly gave me as a gift) and every time I look at it I'm filled with both admiration at it's achievement and sadness at the intractability and lack of vision of people more intent upon their own sense of something’s monetary value rather than its more ineffable and therefore difficult to quantify value as a product of human ingenuity and love – for certainly Ray loved what he did and wished to share this love through his work and his teaching. I can’t help thinking that the history of British photography is so much the worse off for the neglect of the deeply significant contribution of Raymond Moore. And I don’t mean history in the sense of something dead and gone but rather in the sense of something which still has the potential to change people’s lives - that is an experience which no pricetag can ever put a value on. It's depressing to know that this potential continues to be withheld at a time when the work's ability to resonate with people can still be felt in its immediate effect.

Or, as John Berger has written:

“...art is not timeless and eternal. Great works survive their period, but that is not to say that they do not die. After that period they live again by virtue of a sort of resurrection. This after-life, however, is never the same intense, committed thing as their original life... If this is true, one can better understand the horrific absurdity of artists consciously working for the future - ‘ I shall only be properly appreciated in 100 years’ time.’... We must recognise that there is such a thing as the natural death of a work of art. Nor is it morbidity that makes me say this is a recognition we should celebrate. Only if we recognise the mortality of art shall we cease to stand in such superstitious awe of it – only then shall we consider art expendable and so have the courage to risk using it for our own immediate, urgent, only important purposes.”

For more infomation about Raymond Moore visit here

Cardinal Points

Just after I took these images a man walked over and brushed the snow aside with his forearm, saying "There you go - now you can see it much more clearly!"

Moving with the Times

On the subject of HD and artist friends - last week a friend and part-time colleague, Anne Bjerge Hansen, gave a presentation about her work to students and staff of the Fine Art the Photography department.

For more than a decade Anne's primary medium has been video - from Hi8, VHS and SVHS to digital. Throughout these changes Anne has been quietly capturing a diverse and extensive world of objects in motion: the materials, dynamics and consequences of movement. This movement comes in myriad scales and forms, from human and animal locomotion, to mechanical and fluid dynamics; from clockwork mechanisms to a brief puff of mist momentarily refracting a spectrum of sunlight.

On the occasions where energy is not directly propelling or transforming something, the image presented is invariably of an object which strongly suggests motion: which is in some way designed or intended to transport its physical form from one location to another. Cars, bicycles, planes, boats, trains, animals and toys therefore figure prominently. Humans on the other hand, whilst ever present, are only ever partially glimpsed participants – anonymous instigators in this panoply of motion.

The work is born of a photographer’s vision and the remnants of this approach persist through careful framing and the almost unvarying use of a fixed viewpoint. This lends a quality to the work which is strongly reminiscent of the early Lumiere brothers’ films. Like the Lumiere’s, Anne’s camera also transports a fine band of electromagnetically sensitive polymer through a carefully engineered clockwork mechanism in order to capture the fugitive images we call movies, and like the Lumiere’s, Anna’s camera records the world in the squat rectangle we more commonly associate with conventional TV images.

High-definition TV (HDTV) has come to replace the conventional 4:3 aspect ratio and with it have come a range of technologies which are casting digital magnetic tape to the editors bin of history along with the analogue tapes and celluloid films which preceded it. I asked Anne about this shift to HD and what this means for the future of her work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was quick to point out that she’s not really interested in technology. I understood what she meant, but surely in another sense, one very important sense, all of Anne’s work is actually about technology: it’s about the many ways we exploit, harness, utilise and invent objects and processes to articulate and motivate our position in the world – our dynamic being and moving through physical space and therefore time.

Movement, of course, is inherently time-bound and the movie camera is our time-machine par excellence. But the newer this time-machine and the more unfamiliar its mechanisms, the more indistinct its history and the more vague its character. To know something is to have spent time with it, to recognize its quirks and to become familiar with its unique presence in the world. This is why people often refer to tools as old friends. The notion of choice is also important here. In a recent interview for DCA, artist Thomas Hirschhorn described his attitude to materials which he works with thus:

“I think as an artist it’s important to love the material you are working with. But to love does not mean to be in love with one’s material or to lose oneself in it. Rather, to love one’s material means to place it above everything else, to work with it in an awareness, and it means to be insistent with it. I love the material because I decided in favour of it – therefore I do not want to replace it. Since I decided in favour of it – and love it – I cannot and do not want to change it.”

I’m certain this is why Anna is attached to the tools and processes she employs: she has chosen them, and this choice has acquired significance through use and familiarity.

Objects and processes also gain value when their existence is rare or threatened - this is why many people cling to faithful old tools, materials and techniques and it is also why many people continually seek the new and expensive; such rarity confers value and offers the promise of advantage over previous versions and iterations. These are the choices that artists face – most particularly artists who work with processes which are constantly evolving: whether to “move with the times” or stand by their faithful and familiar friends. In truth we need both. We need the pioneers who seek the new and unfamiliar, who tinker and tamper with technology and uncover it’s foibles and deeper characteristics and we need the stalwarts, like Anne, who understand their tools intimately and have the perseverance and vision to create poetry from the motion and interaction of moving experiences.

John Clark

I was just idly browsing today and happened upon a site on the subject of High Definition aesthetics. I noticed a name which struck me as familiar, clicked on it and was pleasantly surprised to see a good friend who, due to geographic distance, I see far too little of.