OPEN ASSEMBLY

Drawing on Rachel Garfield’s introduction to “Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s” and British artist Ed Fornieles’ Associations series, we explore the relationship between the internet and our own vision around the concept of image association through a series of visual connections.

We aim to challenge and expand the visual categories and concepts of Ed Fornieles’ image associations, and to center the ways social, artistic, cultural and political interventions are shaped by a continuous and associated connection. The technique we use produces a series of images in an unexpected order. The first image is a photograph of The Tiller Girls, which Garfield references in her text. The following image is chosen for its visual similarity to the one before it, and so on with the rest of the images.

In one way, the order that we use to create this work is for each image to simply follow the one that comes before. However, after the sequence of images is created, images that seem to be merely following the images before also exhibit an organic relationship with images not right before or right after. The organic relationship seemingly happens at random, but it, in fact, manifests the unconsciously built traces of the whole series in each element. Our vision constructs interconnected and fragmented pieces with associations that seem abrupt or unexpected but are deeply rooted in the environment that our visions originated from, are exposed to, and are stored in, contextually, psychologically, societally, and symbolically.

In this project, we also implicitly look at the “⌘ + shift + 4” shortcut (the screenshot command) as a necessary skill in the digital era. Screenshotting coincides with the prevalent problem of the contemporary social network development: to screenshot or to post? How to act on the associations and sorting that grow out of the flow of images?