Wedding Ritual #18: Tony Hall

Antony Hall

is an extraordinary artist, experimentalist and thinker. His work frequently plays with our perception of reality, sometimes presenting as everlasting magic tricks (for example, his Perpetual Coffee Vortex and Continual Slow Drip). Hall is also one part of Owl Project, the sound-art collective responsible for the iLog, at least one incarnation of which Bjork is rumoured to have added to her collection of instruments. The ENKi project explored the limits of human interaction with electric fish. I was fortunate to study at Strode College with Tony (on the course now led by Duncan Cameron, then our sculpture tutor), and have followed his artistic career with glee ever since. Most recently, he's been using technology to give himself an out-of-body experience.

Here follows Antony Hall's Wedding Ritual, in his own words. He begins by telling us, "For my gifts I would like to offer 4 different kinds of nothing. An Unseeable object, two examples of looking at nothing and a colour that doesn’t exist in the visible spectrum"...

Something Old

‘Plinth [with Unseeable object]’ 1999

"Plinth [with unseeable object] was a paradoxical device that was able to display an object - but also to automatically conceal it, if and when anyone entered the room or approached the plinth. At the time, I was studying sculpture and had started making kinetic work with mechanical and motorised elements. Enjoying this new-found access to electrical and mechanical parts, the plinth became my first real engineering problem. It was also the first plinth I had ever made. I made the mistake of using chipboard, which took days of sanding and repainting to get perfectly smooth. I devised a mechanism which used a series of switches, relays, and motors to open a hatch, and push up a platform, upon which an object was placed. A movement sensor ensured that when anyone entered the space, the object would rapidly retract, and close the hatch behind itself... only to emerge later when no one was in the space. It was possible that on entering the space, one might catch a glimpse of movement, or hear a mechanical clunk-and-whine as the mechanism concealed itself. I took a dark pleasure in watching the work from a distance; people standing next to the plinth motionlessly waiting for something to happen, to see if it was possible to trick the movement sensors. The mechanism ensured that you would not see the object unless you waited motionless for 15 minutes, and no one else entered the room. Once I saw someone at a distance through the window, having sussed the system, they waited motionlessly at the plinth. I made sure to casually walk through the gallery and reset the system to further test his patience. It was true that most people walked past the work, perhaps perceiving only in a peripheral sense, the absence of a thing, or a space unoccupied.  However, in my mind this had the effect of further proving the works effectivity; amplifying its essential and necessary obscurity.  

"This exploration into the subtle power of that which is not shown, fostered an ongoing interest in working with the environment of the art gallery, using this more like an experiential laboratory. I started making work that is activated through human behaviour, perceptual interventions in which the ‘viewer’ can (sometimes unwittingly) interact and become an active participant.

"Artists have always made use of illusion and deception in their work. An artist can encode and layer hidden meaning into their work as a way of revealing the unseen workings of the systems which underlie our daily life - and when we look at art, meaning is also created in that perceptual encounter. As Rip Cronk states, “art creates its own truth…The viewer decides the truth. Truth in art is not rational or objective. It discloses itself in the encounter.”  The artist’s role in society is all the more significant in a time of post-truth, when similar mechanisms of trickery and illusion continue to be used to disrupt and deceive for political gain. In our position as artists, we are empowered when presenting a work in a gallery; we are entrusted to deliver works which either satisfy and indulge the viewer’s aesthetic preferences - or, equally, we can choose to challenge and subvert, to play with the viewer’s assumptions and expectations, to ‘make strange’ and generate questions; to unearth or to create new truth."

Something New

"The restrictions imposed through social distancing afforded a number to challenges to my research in terms of participation. As a result, I had to take a different approach which would enable me to conduct workshops, hold discussions and collect data, in much the same way as I would in a gallery or at the studio. ’Object without perception’ is a new artwork that takes the form of a small group workshop. Participants receive a ‘resource’ through the post which contains the essential materials which enable the work to be set up at home and activated remotely using video conferencing. During the workshop they are guided thorough perceptual experiments and we have discussions about these experiences. After the workshop the participants receive a ‘certificate of participation’ to authenticate the artwork. The resource is more than just a token artefact, it enables the participant to continue and practice the techniques and experiments developed during the workshop.

"For Wedding Ritual, I created the ‘Obscurist’ edition 1/1 - a workshop which took place between myself and Wes. See the ‘Object without perception’ workshop and its documentation here - and read Wes' description of his experience here.

“The use of sensory deprivation as a means to induce hallucinatory experiences can be traced back to ancient times across cultures; the use of prolonged periods of meditation, silence or cave retreats in order to reach a heightened state of consciousness. The early Greeks practised sensory deprivation by visiting caves in order to receive wisdom through hallucinatory visions… Scientific attempts to explain the nature of anomalous visual experiences were rooted in the idea that light could be generated in the eyeball itself and that certain ‘objects’ could be perceived without direct visual perception. In the 1930s Gestalt psychologists spent extended periods of time staring at walls and in doing so experienced vivid hallucinatory visuals, they termed this the ‘Ganzfeld’ [total or whole field]. The ganzfeld is now a widely used experimental model known to induce an altered state of consciousness similar to that of a hypnagogic, or dream-like state.”

Something Borrowed

"I propose the ‘Spontaneous Sensations’ experiment originally described by George A Michael and Janick Naveteur which I regularly borrow for use in my workshops. Spontaneous sensations are those which occur all over the body, all of the time and often have no obvious trigger. I like to think about these like a sensory background noise. The experiment is very simple and requires no special equipment. To do this experiment you just need to stare at you hand for just 10 seconds and report the sensations. Use the description below, but I recommend the following modifications; Before the experiment draw around your hand and use this outline to map your sensations, using words and symbols to illustrate your sensations with drawings and words and the also indicate the intensity of these.  Also stare at your hand for longer than 10 seconds, try 1 minute. And finally doing this experiment with others, so you can compare and discuss the results. If you wish to share the results, upload them and tag @weddingritual via Instagram"

[You can also email theweddingritual@gmail.com, if you don't have Instagram. We'd love to know your outcomes - Wes]

Spontaneous Sensation experiment

Materials:

Paper, Antiseptic gel, Red dot or similar - 5cm diameter

Instructions:

1. Clean hands with antiseptic gel [optional*]

2. Place hand on paper and draw around it.

3. Focus on hand for 10 seconds

Convergent focusing [looking at the hand while focusing on the hand]

Divergent focusing [looking at red disk while focusing on the hand]

Make note of which method you used in drawing.

4. Now spend a couple of minutes completing the drawing by mapping your sensations with drawings and words. Rate the intensity of each out of ten. Discuss these and describe as a group.**

For the original experiment see 'The tickly homunculus and the origins of spontaneous sensations arising on the hands'

Something Blue

"'Hyperbolic blue' is a kind of imaginary or impossible colour that does not exist in the visible spectrum, instead it exists only as an after-image held in the retina when viewed in certain conditions, and possibly it is only me who is able to see it. Or thinks they can see it. There is no documentation of ‘hyperbolic blue’ that I can find, but if such a colour does exist it might be described as an impossibly pale blue - paler than the pale blue that can be made by any normally seen light.  I see it as a kind of semi translucent ethereal shimmering pale blue, but, being colour blind, I am not sure what others might see.

"I created a slide sequence using a series of  ‘fatigue templates’ followed by a ‘target field’.  The fatigue template is said to change the sensitivity of the colour receptors in the eye, and leaves a strong after-image in the retina. For example, staring at a yellow circle for one minute should result in a blue after-image when viewing a white target.

"Try the experiment and let us know what colour you see. [you can leave a comment - Wes]

"For a full explanation of Chimerical and impossible colours: some phenomenological predictions from cognitive neuroscience Paul Churchland"

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You can find out more about Antony Hall's work on his own website, and get updates via Instagram. If you'd like to join in with some of the workshops detailed in this profile (currently delivered remotely), you can contact him for more details.

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Wedding Ritual is an ongoing series of artist profiles curated and edited by Wes Viola. For updates, follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - or subscribe to get one update in your email whenever a new post goes up. The blog is open to submissions from visual artists, sculptors, musicians, writers, dancers, sculptors, filmmakers and indeed all kinds of creative practitioner. For more details of what's going on here, and especially if you'd like to feature yourself, check the always-popular 'what on earth is going on here?' page. For links to the Wedding Rituals performed by every artist featured to date, see Every Ritual.

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* This instruction is marked as 'optional', but at the time of posting we're all meant to be cleaning our hands extra-regularly to control Covid-19, so why not take the cue?

** If you're not in a group (and indeed if you are), please email your results to theweddingritual@gmail.com or tag us on Instagram.