Research

Spent most of Tuesday in the library doing research, which involved trying to read Merleau Ponty's Phenonmenology of Perception, looking-up artists both historical and contemporary that are working in the field of light, motion, and colour, or whose practice resonates with what I am interested in doing. I also came across a couple of dissertations by previous GSA students, specifically 'Living Rhythms' and 'Rhythm and Flow' that were useful in terms of shedding more light on the subject (the former giving a generalised overview of the universal rhythms in life and their significance, and the latter that going into the connection between chaos theory, particle physics and house music!). It's no surprise that the subject of light, colour and motion has occupied and captivated the imagination of artists, philosopher's, scientists and just about anyone (I say that as I cannot imagine anyone who is not in awe of seeing a rainbow or enjoy motion picture in one form or another!)....so I am feeling pretty overloaded with the amount of information surrounding this field!

That said, I have tried to distill some of the key artists to look into further:

I have specifically chosen Kandinsky and klee as they are both pivotal in developing the language of abstraction and important colour theorists, so will be pertinent references for my own work. Moreover, a lot of the historical artists that I am interested in researching, practice in the field of experimental animation or were early pioneers in computer generated art. Although it is still early days in this project, I tentatively envision the end work for the pitch possibly take the form of a projection or animation...having said that I am not ruling out more traditional sculptural mediums. The plan is that I will try to explore and test some of these ideas out in the next week or two before committing to a final idea for the pitch....going to see some of the work at GI might influence things! 

I've also gathered a preliminary selection of texts that will inform my research. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list but for a short project I reckon there will be enough there to get me going. The top left book, 'Unravelling the Ripple' by Helen Douglas was one of the books that came up for the library catalogue search for 'rhythm'. Douglas is an artist who works primarily in photography and creating 'visual narratives' with photos and text in the printed artist book format. The photos are beautiful and the layout of the the images really tell a story and create a rhythm to the work.