Roger Ackling – 'Cloud Arc' (1979)

© Annely Juda Fine Art, London

In the 1980s Ackling produced a body of work that harnessed sunlight as his medium. Using a small glass lens the artist focussed the rays of the sun so that they burnt into wood, bone or card. Although he recognised the parallels between his work and that of the early photographers who used sun to develop images onto chemically treated papers, Ackling regarded his work as being in harmony with nature, and that followed in the American Indian tradition of using fire and smoke to carry messages across vast distances.

From the British Council Visual Arts Website here

Jocken Gerz – 'To Cry until Exhaustion' (1972)

Rufen bis zur Erschöpfung
Le Blanc-Mesnil, France 1972; Saarbrücken, Germany 1973

Performance without public.
In a barren area of the construction sites of the future Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Autoroute du Nord highway, Gerz stands sixty meters away from the video camera. He calls out the word “hello" as loud as he can. At first, his voice carries well then, gradually, the gesture begins to take the place of the fading voice. After eigheen minutes his voice is inaudible.

Object: video camera, microphone, tripod, Duration 18 minutes; video bw, sound. Cameraman: Jan Herman. Recorded with a 1/4-inch Akai video camera (Blanc-Mesnil) and Saar TV ARD (Saarbrücken).

“Crier jusqu’à l’épuisement is a duel between the artist, the “original", and the mechanism, the medium of reproduction. The issue of deterioration of the original with regard to time is a recurrent theme in Gerz’s work. Set in front of the camera, whose potential for resistance is greater than that of a human being, the “I" is depicted by its physical limits. The dialectic between the individual and the machine comes up again in Exhibition of Jochen Gerz next to his photographic reproduction (1972): after standing next to a photograph of himself for two hours, the image ends up taking the place of the original. However, the outcome is not always unfavourable to the living being in this dependency-hate relationship between the artist and the machine: in La Fumée, a work made in 1970, Jochen Gerz takes photographs of a smoking factory chimney as often and rapidly as possible until, after 196 pictures, the camera jams."

In: Jochen Gerz, In Case we Meet, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2002 pp.34-35. Catalogue of the exhibition: Jochen Gerz Temps détournés – Vidéo et internet dans l’oeuvre, 1969-2002; Centre Pompidou, Paris 2002

From here

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Paul Nash at the Tate Britain (2017)

The first and only group exhibition was held in 1934 accompanied by a book Unit One, subtitled The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture. It consisted of statements by all the artists in the group, photographs of their work, and an introduction by the critic and poet Herbert Read, who was an important champion of modernism in Britain. The other artists involved were John Armstrong, John Bigge, Edward Burra, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Edward Wadsworth and the architects Welles Coates and Colin Lucas.

More here.

'Genesis' (1924)

The full book can be found here: https://www.fulltable.com/vts/aoi/n/nash/gn/a.htm

'The Diving Stage' (1928)

More here

'Battle of Germany' (1944)

"This work was commissioned by the WAAC in 1944 and was originally intended to depict a flying bomb. In a letter to Clare Neilson on 5 September 1944, Nash described that 'K. Clark wanted me to do a sequel to 'Battle of Britain' on the flying bomb but it has fallen through I think. I did not find any point of departure, no bomb site as it were to launch into a composition. Besides I can think of nothing but my invasion painting which is now in its critical stage.' The 'invasion painting' is probably 'Battle of Germany' which was delivered to the WAAC in September 1944.Nash wrote a text to accompany the painting: '...The moment of the picture is when the city, lying under the uncertain light of the moon, awaits the blow at its heart. In the background, a gigantic column of smoke arises from the recent destruction of an outlying factory which is still fiercely burning. These two objects pillar and moon seem to threaten the city no less than the flights of bombers even now towering in the red sky. The moon's illumination reveals the form of the city but with the smoke pillar's increasing height and width, throws also its largening shadow nearer and nearer. In contrast to the suspense of the waiting city under the quiet though baleful moon, the other half of the picture shows the opening of the bombardment. The entire area of sky and background and part of the middle distance are violently agitated. Here forms are used quite arbitrarily and colours by a kind of chromatic percussion with one purpose, to suggest explosion and detonation. In the central foreground the group of floating discs descending may be a part of a flight of paratroops or the crews of aircraft forced to bale out.'"

More here

Joseph Faber's 'Euphonia' (1845)

In December 1845, Joseph Faber exhibited his "Wonderful Talking Machine" at the Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia. This machine, as recently described by writer David Lindsay, consisted of a bizarre-looking talking head that spoke in a "weird, ghostly monotone" as Faber manipulated it with foot pedals and a keyboard.

Just prior to this public exhibition, Joseph Henry visited Faber's workshop to witness a private
demonstration. Henry's friend and fellow scientist, Robert M. Patterson, had tried to drum up financial support for Faber, a beleaguered German immigrant struggling to earn a living and
learn how to speak English. Henry, who was often asked to distinguish fraudulent from
genuine inventions, agreed to go with Patterson to look at the machine. If an act of
ventriloquism was at work, he was sure to detect it.

Instead of a hoax, which he had suspected, Henry found a "wonderful invention" with a
variety of potential applications. "I have seen the speaking figure of Mr. Wheatstone of
London," Henry wrote in a letter to a former student, "but it cannot be compared with
this which instead of uttering a few words is capable of speaking whole sentences
composed of any words what ever."

Henry observed that sixteen levers or keys "like those of a piano" projected sixteen
elementary sounds by which "every word in all European languages can be distinctly
produced." A seventeenth key opened and closed the equivalent of the glottis, an
aperture between the vocal cords. "The plan of the machine is the same as that of the
human organs of speech, the several parts being worked by strings and levers instead
of tendons and muscles."

From here.

Celestial Navigation

Francis Barker & Son / Herbert Edward Purey-Cust - 'Celestial Navigation Glove' (c.1895)

Astronomical details on the sphere show stars represented by dots of various sizes and marked by their Bayer notation. A magnitude table is lacking. The constellations are represented by contour areas and some of the stars are connected by lines. A total of 19 stars and one star group are named. There are areas with names of the 48 Ptolemaic constellations and two non-Ptolemaic constellations. Nine of the southern constellations of Plancius are represented, as are two of Hevelius and three of Lacaille. The inventor of this celestial globe, Herbert Edward Purey-Cust (1857-1938) was a Royal Naval officer who was Hydrographer of the Navy from 1909 until 1914, when he retired. He became a Rear-Admiral in 1910 and an Admiral on the retired list in 1919. The instrument was used in conjunction with a star chart he published in 1897. For full details about the cartography and construction of this globe please refer to the related publication.

From the Royal Maritime Collection website here - http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/19736.html#RbT4VErPqjUKA2pV.99

Joseph Cornell - 'Celestial Navigation' (c.1958)

The box retains the typology used in 1936, with a cork ball rolling along the upper part and little cups containing glass marbles, in allusion to the planets and the invisible forces and energies holding them. The objects are in front of two manipulated sky maps; cartography that Cornell has used to construct a poetic background connected to the idea of childhood games and experimentation, in order to build upon the Surrealist proposals and explore connections between the world of science, and the world of the spirit.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio

From the Reina Sofia website here

In

Robert Rauschenberg - 'Scanning' (1963)

1. Robert Rauschenberg, Scanning, 1963; oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 55 3/4 x 73 in. (141.61 x 185.42 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Fractional and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab; © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; photo: Ben Blackwell

Scanning (1963) belongs to the extended series of silkscreen paintings (numbering about eighty in all) that Robert Rauschenberg executed between fall 1962 and late spring 1964. This series is devoted almost exclusively to photographic images, representing a departure from the artist’s immediately preceding Combines (1953–64), which incorporate all manner of found objects and materials—taxidermy animals, articles of clothing, automobile tires, working clocks and electric fans—along with photographs and images derived from mass-media sources. In the silkscreen paintings, commercially produced screens were used to transfer to canvas images derived from contemporary periodicals, such as LIFE and Newsweek, as well as Rauschenberg’s own photographs. On canvas, these images were joined with other silkscreened images and hand-painted marks. Like photographic negatives, each image could be reproduced multiple times. Andy Warhol (1928–1987) also used silkscreening around this time, creating repetitive, grid-like compositions that were often impersonal and designed to be executed by others.1 Rauschenberg, however, made the mechanical process malleable and highly variable, leaving it open to improvisation and the touch of his hand (via the squeegee used to spread ink through the screens).

All of the above information is from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website, with the quotation from an extended July 2013 essay by Roni Feinstein. For the full essay, see here.

In

Ted Kotcheff – 'The Human Voice' (1966)

TED KOTCHEFF
THE HUMAN VOICE, 1966
VIDEO, 90 MIN
Based on Jean Cocteau’s one-character play and starring Ingrid
Bergman, this film presents a woman pleading with her ex-lover
over the phone in a conversation constantly interrupted by a bad
connection. The voice on the other end of the line, however, remains
inaudible throughout, leaving the woman to appear as if she is
conversing with herself.
Archbuild/Associated Rediffusion

From here

In

Olafur Eliasson - 'The Weather Project' (2003–2004)

Photographs from the Tate Modern exhibition of Olafur Eliasson's 'The Weather Project'.

The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson at the Tate Modern
8 January 2004. Photographs - James Bulley

In