David Cotton
  • Home
  • Work
  • Info
  • Contact

Translation

28/11/2014

0 Comments

 
So, as promised, here is a little more info on one of my current projects. At its most basic, Translation is a map I've drawn incorporating an ancient Babylonian design, which I then tore into fragments, and distributed pieces individually to other artists. As the project is still 'live', some are currently working on 'restoring' or rebuilding different sections of this map, treating it as if it were an incomplete historical artefact. Because of this, I don't want to reveal too much of how my original looked, but I did want to show something of its style in these teasers.

The text below accompanied the exhibition COLONIZE at Third on Third Gallery, and gives the best attempt I've managed at explaining what it is I've set out to do with Translation.
Picture
In an ancient Babylonian artefact, the world is depicted as two concentric circles pressed into a clay tablet. Commonly known as the ‘Mappa Mundi’, it is only a couple of inches across, and outside the borders of the map is a dense covering of script, front and back. The inner circle represents the Earth, with Babylon at its centre. Surrounding this is a band of water, the ‘mê mūti’ or ‘bitter sea’, an ocean that extends to indefinable limits.

But somewhere out on the edges of this sea, on the map at least, are eight triangular outcroppings. These ‘nagû’ supposedly refer to distant lands rising out of the sea, yet they are not just physical outcroppings but linked inextricably to the culture and mythology of ancient Babylonia.

Each land is also a story, containing accounts of the fantastic creatures that can be found there or else a legend of an ancient king or battle, the Babylonian equivalent to filling in the empty areas of the map with images of fearful beasts and the warning: ‘here be dragons’.

No doubt these stories are based in truth somewhere, most likely accounts from travellers that have become distorted through their countless retellings and embellishments. Sadly, the words on the tablet have largely been lost, eroded over the years so that only fragments of text remain. And, in a different way, so have the blank spaces on the map. Satellite imagery has worn away the unknown corners of the globe and shows us the world as it is, not the world we imagined.

Yet any representation of the world transfixed onto a two dimensional surface comes with its own set of errors, distorting the earth’s contours to fit the shape of a square or rectangle. It is obvious in most commonly used maps today that Greenland and Antarctica look disproportionately huge, while the landmass of Africa is reduced to fit in place.
Picture
Text panel from the exhibition COLONIZE at Third on Third Gallery, Jamestown NY
 Can these modern and ancient styles of cartography be reconciled? The Babylonian view of the earth as a disk surrounded by sea, with Babylon, the modern day Middle-East, taking centre stage instead of Great Britain; but updated to contain all the lands discovered since that empire crumbled, filling in those fabled ‘nagû’ with the locations they may have been supposed to represent.

So the arduous task was set. But after countless hours spent poring over maps, drawing, redrawing, tearing up and starting again, ironically only fragments of this sought after map remain. One piece from this fabrication sits alongside a section reconstructed by the Serbian artists Dušan Savić and Marida Avramović, yet only hints at the identity of the whole.

The rest of the world is blank, waiting to be colonised once more by the imagination. The act of depicting the world should be a collaborative event, and not a selfish burden of my own. The world is an open invitation to explore and this map offers you the same, either inside your head or committed to paper.

For the invaluable help given to me deciphering the original Babylonian artefact I must thank Dr Irving Finkle of the British Museum, and apologise for any mistakes I have made in these descriptions. This is just another story, muddied in the act of retelling.
Picture
0 Comments

mapping Projects

23/11/2014

1 Comment

 
Something I've been up to in the background recently has been research into mapping imaginary spaces, and hopefully I'll have a few outcomes to share in the coming weeks before Christmas. I've always been fascinated by maps; not only are they beautiful to look at, but they can tell us so much about how we view our place in the world. Civilizations, both contemporary and ancient, reveal much in how they position or distort different areas of the world, from what they leave out - or what they add in that isn't there.

Translation was another mapping project I began almost exactly a year ago. It was borne out of a desire to reconcile one of the oldest known maps of the world - an ancient Babylonian clay tablet (see the photo below) - with modern day satellite imagery. The Babylonian artefact is sadly damaged, but its representation of the world as an eight pointed star - with the Earth as a disk surrounded by a 'bitter sea', and triangular outcroppings representing far off or mythical lands - was unlike anything I'd ever seen. And Babylon is firmly pressed into the centre of this map, unlike the Anglo-centric projections we use today. What would an updated version of this map look like?

I knew from the start I wanted this project to be collaborative - I didn't want this to just be my view of the world, but an effort that involved people from different countries and cultures. And its still ongoing, so frustratingly I can't reveal too much from the results just yet - but that also means there is the chance to get involved... send me an email if you're intrigued, of watch out for more specifics about Translation appearing on here soon.
Picture
'Mappa Mundi'
Image © Trustees of the British Museum
If you're interested, there is more information about the map tablet on the British Museum website. I spent several days studying this artefact in person at the British Museum in November 2013 and would like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff in the Middle East department for their help, especially Dr Irving Finkle for his invaluable assistance in translating the text on the map and helping me to understand its cultural significance.
1 Comment

Making microscope slides

17/11/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
This is one of my first attempts at making a microscope slide. There are so many fascinating subjects close to hand, the only issue is preparing them! Unless the subject is already wafer thin it will need slicing to only a few micrometres thick, a specialised skill it itself. This image is from a flower petal and so came fairly well prepared as it is, although the slight variation in its thickness has caused the bottom right portion of the photo to be out of focus. Then there's that small circle opposite, caused by a trapped bubble of air between the glass slide and its coverlet. Still, practice makes perfect, so I'm off to make more.
0 Comments

Colonize

6/8/2014

0 Comments

 
So, a little late in posting this - ok, really late - but in April I was over in America to put on a group exhibition in Jamestown, New York.

Split over two venues, Dykeman Young Gallery and 3rd on 3rd Gallery, the exhibition featured artists from the UK, USA, Sweden and Serbia.  More info to follow, but for now enjoy these photos from the exhibition.
0 Comments

Nightscape series

8/7/2014

0 Comments

 
I'll be showing some new work at Arena Galleries this week when Colonize: Revisited opens at Arena Gallery in Liverpool this Thursday. The studios have a great energy to them so it was a pleasure to be there installing today and having a nosy around. The exhibition is a kind of follow up to the recent exhibition in Jamestown, New York (photos from which I will put on here at some point, I promise) with the work I'm showing directly influenced by my residency over there.
For want of a better name I've been referring to these images as the Nightscape series, after misreading the title of a Stephen King book on my reading shelf. But the name seemed apt, and it stuck. I often suffer insomnia and these microphotographs are from one of my more productive bouts, pinpoints of light illuminating oases of colour in the darkness.
0 Comments

Parallel View

1/7/2014

0 Comments

 
Parallel View is a text based adventure game set within the real life exhibition 'Far Lands' (see previous post). Except, the real 'Far Lands' opened after I made the game. And the real exhibition, in many ways, looked completely different to the one I imagined. They have both grown from the same seed of an idea but have flowered into two very separate things. That's where the parallel part of the title comes in; parallel in the sense of parallel realities, a what-could-have-been exhibition existing only in a virtual plane.
Although the (physical) exhibition is now over, the digital version of 'Far Lands' will live on in the internet. Parallel View was built using the Quest engine and will be available to play on their website soonish - just having a few technical difficulties with the upload presently.
0 Comments

Far Lands

25/6/2014

0 Comments

 
This weekend I'll be taking part in 'Far Lands', an exhibition in Sheffield's Millennium Galleries that celebrates  art inspired by video game landscapes.
Picture
Artwork by Joe McKenna
I'm (still) in the process of making new work for this exhibition. Titled Parallel View, it is an online exhibition set within the exhibition itself. Made using only the proposals by the artists in the show, and without seeing any of their finished work, Parallel View refashions 'Far Lands' as a speculative digital landscape. Appropriating the conventions of text based adventure games, it invites visitors to explore an open ended narrative structure set within the gallery.

The exhibition runs on the 28th and 29th of June, but for those who can't make it over to Sheffield I'll post a link to the game up here after the exhibition closes.
0 Comments

New microscope

2/6/2014

0 Comments

 
I finally got around to upgrading my hardware to something that can accommodate my SLR, and after spending the day playing around with it I'm pretty sure it was the right decision. You can see the difference in scale between the instruments in the photo of my studio. Much more to come from this in the near future, but for now here are some highlights from today's experiments.
0 Comments

Biotech

21/5/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
This image is one of my favourites from a residency I undertook earlier this year in New York (see previous post). Technically, it's three images, recombined to show cellular structures - the cytoskeleton has been dyed green, mitochondria in red and each nucleus lit up in blue.

Crafting images like these requires access to some pretty sophisticated equipment - an Olympus fluorescent microscope in this case, since you asked, a piece of kit I'm not so secretly coveting now - but far more than that I am indebted to the biotechnology staff (and students!) at JCC for their enthusiasm in sharing their research with me, their seemingly limitless knowledge of the field, and their trust in giving me almost free reign in the labs.

This image presents some interesting lines of inquiry.
While these are fairly typical visualisations of cells, to my mind at least, they are also very selective in what they show - each filter reveals a different aspect of the cell, yet there is more invisible to us that isn't revealed by these three wavelengths of light. But in reality our vision is always constrained within a relatively narrow spectrum. There are an abundance of ultraviolet markings on flowers, for example, which insects are able to detect. What else are we missing?

0 Comments

Something Personal

19/5/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
I feel that my fist blog post should be personal.  In time I will be using this space to show what I'm getting up to in the studio or during residencies, record exhibitions, and publish information about other artists working in scientific fields. But for now, something personal.

This is a photo of my DNA. More accurately, genomic DNA isolated from cells in my cheek. It should be appearing on your screen at about life size. It is... remarkably unimpressive. Yet those stringy, lumpy strands nestled in the tips of these two PCR tubes arguably contain more information about me than any photo you'd care to name.

The process of extracting DNA was, likewise, almost disappointingly simple. Given the complexity of the molecule itself, the extraction process could be done in your own kitchen using just a little soap and alcohol, if you're careful. I was fortunate to have access to more precise equipment while artist in residence in the Biotechnology department of Jamestown Community College, NY. But more on that another day. For now, I give you this: my first (and so far only) self portrait.


0 Comments

    David Cotton

    Exploring the boundaries of art and science.

    Archives

    November 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.