Digital Art

I have always had a rather ambivalent attitude towards technology. However, I have also this strange compulsion to explore new media and digital arts, it is not that I am interested in the technical wizardry of some of the effects that can be created, but more a case of seeing it as a means of communication that can be profoundly engaging and therefore impactful. According to Jean Baudrillard, we are living in a 'hyperreal' society where we are constantly bombarded by images, signs and symbols...all things considered, it is no wonder our attention span for the simple, subtle experiences in life are somewhat reduced or degraded. Everything needs to be flashy, move about at great speed and come with dazzling sound effects to get our attention....or does it?

So where does this leave my interest in mediums like moving images, digital art and animation? Well I guess my argument is that there must be a way these mediums can be reconciled with real-life whether it is through a more tactile expression of materials, engaging the viewer in ways that are quietly contemplative or arresting the viewers most basic primal senses. I think this is where I go back to my earlier post about the artist Takehito Koganezawa. His animated drawings do all of the aforementioned for me as well as bridging the gap between traditional and new media.

Another artist that I have a huge amount of admiration for his Camille Utterback.  She is a pioneering artist and programmer whose use of computational systems links human movement in a way that activates the viewers experience of their own bodies. In Untitled 5 (2004), the viewers movements are tracked by a video and translated by computer code into gestural, painterly marks that are displayed on a screen. There are so many things I love about this work...the beautiful abstract painterly marks generated create a very 'tactile' experience that in some ways seems more connected to real life than if the imagery was entirely computer generated. The work is also quite playful in the sense that the viewer almost rediscovers like a child how certain movements create certain marks. For me, the experience of wonderment is one that is so special yet often lost as we move from childhood to adulthood.

In an earlier work, Text Rain (1999), viewers stand or move in front of a large projection screen where they see a mirrored reflection of themselves in black and white and animated letters. Using their bodies, they lift and play with falling letters. The letters actually form lines of a poem about bodies and language. Again, like Untitled 5 I love the interactivity of the work. Furthermore, I find the idea of the viewer seeing themselves reflected as being very important to the work. Awareness of our own body and that of others - how can this be expressed in a work - I feel this is an important line of enquiry and exploration. Last but possibly more significantly, I really like the rhythm of this work. The motion of the falling letters is reminiscent of falling rain or snow, a rhythm found in nature that is defined by repetition (order) and chaos.

Participatory Art

I went to hear Gabriel Kuri at the Friday event today. I did not know much about his work before this event, having only read a brief introductory paragraph about him in the GI guide. Nevertheless, I had been intrigued to find out more as I was interested in his formalist approach to materials and his predilection for found, discarded or quite utilitarian materials like concrete, steel and glass. Although I am not naturally inclined to want to work with discarded material, I do like the idea of working with raw, unfinished materials like plywood, concrete and glass as I feel they would 'ground' my work in real life. A lot of my interest is in capturing the more ephemeral experiences in life and I think incorporating these materials would in some way give it a more tangible connection to daily life. 

Image source: Art Comments Blog

Anyhow, going back to Kuri's work. Aesthetically, I do enjoy the formalist qualities of his work but it was the participatory nature of some of his works that really caught my attention, namely the piece Items in Care of Items, a four part metal sculpture created for the Berlin Biennale in 2008. The piece was created as a kind of coat check system where visitors to the exhibition would be issued magnetic numbers and would place their number and their own items on the sculptures itself. I think it is always a nice change to be able to touch a sculpture in an exhibition, but more importantly, what I really like is what he said about the work, that the work began with the viewers interaction with it (i.e. placing their items on it), and was not just the forms.  In the past I have always enjoyed works that required some level of audience participation as I feel this is what makes art accessible and potentially more impactful.  Enough said for today I think.

 

Motion Animation

I am trying to consciously avoid my usual default mechanism of going straight into secondary research and then resurfacing a week or two later to find that I've neglected my primary research and then not having enough time to develop my idea....

So on that note I decided to jump straight in and play around with making an abstract animation based on the idea of taking a video of a landscape whilst in a moving vehicle (I hasten to add I was a passenger and not doing some dangerous driving and filming at the same time!). The idea of stop motion animation essentially involves taking numerous frames and making a slight change in each frame to the subject so that when all the frames are played in a sequence,  it creates the illusion of motion.  However, in my movie I basically reverse the process with myself moving instead of the subject. 

This is a clip from the original movie I took on my DSLR camera. The car was travelling at speeds of about 30mph. Some of the scenery becomes blurred and almost painterly.

To create the animation, I basically used imovie to create frames from the original clip at the rate of 10fps. I chose a selection of those frames which I adjusted in photoshop and then reimported into final cut to create the movie. I found creating frames at 10fps resulted in too few frames and the resulting animation was very jumpy i.e. the 'objects' in the frame do not move smoothly from one frame to the next. So I redid the process at 24fps. I think it is a slight improvement but definitely still needs work. Perhaps I will experiment with slowing down the car and possibly saving frames at an even higher fps rate. Annoyingly blogger will not allow me to upload the 24fps movie so the 10fps movie clip is shown below just to give a rough idea.

Nevertheless, I think the result is quite interesting in that it is in some ways a representation or sketch of a landscape but does not resemble a recognisable one. When watching the clip, my focus shifts to the marks and colours that appear and how they move. Obviously because I was travelling forward the objects only appear to move in one direction...but I wonder what would happen if I move in quite random directions, as if to create the gesture of drawing?  Another consideration is sound, the original sound was lost when I converted the clip to frames, certainly I will need to evaluate what sound if any would be most appropriate with the images.

  

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. 

Caesura

I went to see the Caesura exhibition at the Reid gallery yesterday. The works of Naum Gabo, Raydale Dower and Ben Laposky stood out for me as they all deal in one way or another with sound, music and movement through space (concerns that I am also interested in exploring in rhythm, colour and form!).  The accompanying exhibition material refers to sound as being periodic in that it occurs over time and 'as a form exists as a motion through space'. It's interesting to see how the works of these artists all share the same conceptual concern over motion in space but their ideas are manifested in different ways. 

Ben Laposky, Oscillions (1952-54) 

Both Gabo and Dower's works are sculptural in nature...and though the are beautiful objects, I actually found myself more interested in the light and dark shadows cast by Dower's piece and imagining them in motion.

Naum Gabo, Linear Construction No. 1, 1942-43.
Perspex and nylon monofilament.

Top left and right: Raydale Dower, Poeme Electronique Revealed
Structure (after Iannis Xenakis, Le Corbusier & Edgar Varese, 1958)
 Bottom left: Raydale Dower, Untitled (Score), 2014.

New Project Brief

The start of term 3 and we kick-off with a new brief to develop a pitch for an artwork that is either gallery or public based. I am quite excited by this brief as I have a couple of ideas bubbling away that I would like to explore further and the fact that it can be as humble or extravagant as we wish makes it all the more exciting. Probably the big difficulty for me will be deciding which idea to take further for this pitch though I guess I can always revisit the other ideas later down the line!

First things first, I have a rough idea of the kind of work that I am interested in making (for the time being anyway). As mentioned in my earlier post, I am interested in motion, time and space, and in particular, to somehow make visible this idea or phenomenon of motion that we find in nature. The  kind of motion that I am most inspired by is both organic and erratic...like fallings leaves, the flow of water or the movement of a flock of birds. From this perspective, I guess my enquiry is phenomenologically based. From the last few projects, I have gained a better understanding of the processes by which I am interested in, drawing being one that features quite prominently. Other experiences that I am interested in is colour and how colour/light might be a medium used to express motion.  

Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July 1923. Oil on canvas
Source: Guggenheim Online

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the  hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul

Wassily Kandinsky

One of my earlier interests in art came from looking at the paintings by Kandinsky. I was fascinated by the idea of how according to Kandinsky, colour  possessed different qualities, including a vibrational frequency. He used colour as well as certain forms e.g. points, lines, geometric and biomorphic forms to express movement and rhythm in in his paintings, much like a musical composition. If that is the case for creating 2 dimensional works, how might I integrate some of these ideas in creating work that has a 3 dimensional-spatial quality? That is one of the questions that I will endeavour to explore in this project!

Drawing - Motion - Time - Space

Over the last few weeks I have been reflecting on the work I made in the first and second term, the emerging themes, and the areas that I am interested in developing further and doing more in depth research. It is becoming apparent that drawing is a large part of what I am in interested in, not in the representational sense, but as a process and as means of making sense of time, rhythm and space. Within that, light and colour are also integral to the expression of these ideas. It all feels like a big jumble of ideas in my head...which hopefully will start to make sense as I consciously integrate these interests and ideas into future projects.

One of the artists that I came across in my research is Takehito Koganezawa, a Japanese artist whose work brings together drawing, performance and video. I am fascinated by his works, especially the simplicity of some of the drawings, which when animated creates a whole new level of experience that is both mesmerizingly beautiful and meditative.

                                (RGBY) RG, 2004


In his work Dust, the rhythmic yet chaotic movement of the dust particles reminds me of movements found in nature.

                                Dust, 2010


Some of his drawings are compositionally simple yet poetic, with a lightness of touch that also appear to possess a sense of rhythm and movement.

                           Untitled (The Weather Project)
                           2009, color etching on Hahnemuhle paper 300g, 4 works, each: 42-1/2 x 31-1/2 inches, 
                           108 x 80 cm (framed), edition of 18
                           photo source: Christopher Grimes Gallery


His work has definitely given me much food for thought about the direction I want to take and how I can perhaps integrate animation into my own work.