Prompt 2: What are we looking at?

Prompt #2 asks us to describe what we see. Take an object, and do something to it. Or, take an image, and place it next to another image. Post a picture of the result of your exercise and answer the question: What are we looking at? 

For inspiration on looking and seeing, on ways of working with objects, with words, with pages, with moving images, with the eye and with the mind, see below: 

Notes on Ways of Looking / Ways of Seeing:

Dieter Roth

ON THE VISUAL ARTS: (Dieter Roth, Collected Works v. 7)

Take a thing and put it on one thing
Take a thing and put it on 2 things
Take a thing and put it on 3 things
Take a thing and put it on 4 things
Take a thing and put it on 6 things
Take a thing and put it on 7 things
... sell any time.

Jasper Johns

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. (Jasper Johns)

Anne Carson

A page making something on a page will suggest other ways of making such things. The imagery itself generates other imagery.  This happens a lot when you’re using glitter.  (Anne Carson)

Robert Bresson

Excerpts from Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography:

·       An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

·       Don't think of your film apart from the resources you have made for yourself.

·       The sight of movement gives happiness: horse, athlete, bird.

·       The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sounds and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition.

·       IN THIS LANGUAGE OF IMAGES. ONE MUST LOSE COMPLETELY THE NOTION OF IMAGE. THE IMAGES MUST EXCLUDE THE IDEA OF IMAGE.

·       Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along under your gaze. Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserve.

·       Dig into your sensation. Look at what there is within. Don't analyze it with words. Translate it into sister images, into equivalent sounds. The clearer it is, the more your style affirms itself (Style: whatever is not technique.)

 

Eye

If one looks at the etymology, one finds that to denote directed vision French resorts to the word regard [gaze], whose root originally referred not to the act of seeing but to expectation, concern, watchfulness, consideration, and safeguard, made emphatic by the addition of a prefix expressing a redoubling or return. Regarder [to look at, to gaze upon] is a movement that aims to recapture, reprendre sous garde, [to place in safekeeping once again]. The gaze does not exhaust itself immediately. It involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery or reconquering what is about to escape. What interests me is the fate of the impatient energy that inhabits the gaze and desires something other than what it is given. It lies in wait, hoping that a moving form will come to a standstill or that a figure at rest will reveal a slight tremor, insistent on touching the face behind the mask, or seeking to shake off the bewildering fascination with depths in order to rediscover the shimmering reflections that play on the water's surface.

                                                                --Jean Starobinksi, The Living Eye