3 posts tagged “isco”

Assignment:

My piece is an installation for 6 screens and 6 speakers, each screen being tethered to a speaker which sits on the floor below it.  On each screen is a simple looped animation consisting only of a bright yellow rectangle, the size of the entire screen, abruptly popping up on the screen and fading out to a bright green rectangle behind it.  As the yellow rectangle pops up, the sound of a sine wave is played on the speaker below it, and as the yellow fades away the sound fades out.

Each sine wave is one perfect fourth down from the one coming out of the speaker to its left, and each screen pulses and fades yellow at a rate of about one second slower than the one to its left.

The basic idea behind this was to tie minimal music to minimal sculpture and minimal video art in a way that they all work together naturally.  Things remixed:

Steve Reich's Phase Pattern music

Brian Eno's "Music for Airports"

Dan Flavin's light sculptures

Tony Conrad's "The Flicker"

I was asked in class why I chose the colors that I did, and why I chose such a minimal color scheme. The piece is intended to create a soothing and pleasant mood in as clear and direct a way as possible, and I feel, like the artists I'm referencing,  that the best way to do this is to use as few elements as possible, and make the relationship between those elements so clear, that the viewer, regardless of his or her understanding of of the works referenced, or the greater cultural picture the work fits into, has to do as little thinking as possible to understand the feeling I'm trying to evoke.

I chose green and yellow largely by the process of elimination.  Using blues to represent calm is something of a cliche.  Reds imply tension and hunger.  Orange represents fire and warmth in such an obvious way it also makes me nervous of running into cliche color usage territory. Black and white are too stark and too sterile.  There's both warmth and coldness in bright green and bright yellow, but not too much that their goal seems as obvious and the viewer will so quickly "get" the work that they'll grow bored and walk away.

Using more than two colors, which here really only represent a positive and negative, would have only clouded the viewer's experience. This piece isn't about contrast, and adding more elements than necessary would go against that.

Link to Flash Movie here

Character:

Diamond Eyes and his kind eat gems, diamonds, and other shiny things. He spends his day searching for them. He eats his findings until full, then brings the rest home to his family.  He currently lives with a pink, circle eyed female. They do not yet have any children.  Periodically his current partner and/or their children will be caught and eaten by monsters and he will start over with a new female.

Diamond Eyes is essentially a flat, one dimensional character. But this is not because I, his creator, have been lazy and chosen not to further develop him ever though he is in this sizable project the main character.  It is because I see birds, and most nonhuman animals, as such. Their lives are controlled by the instinct of survival and propagation of themselves and their species, and they are surrounded by other animals of a similar plight, some of whom want nothing more than to rip them apart and eat them.  So for my purposes Diamond Eyes is a stand in for a large part of the natural world and the animal kingdom: all he wants is to eat (survive) and partner with females (propagate himself/his species).

Medium/Concept:

Projections onto a grid of 11 sound insulating squares on the rounded back corner of room 447 on the floor.  The projections are to be read like a comic, although they can be read both by row, as comics traditionally are, or by column, and the same narrative is to be had. I originally intended for it to be read vertically, by column, with the leftmost column just being decorative, and the other 3 being 1 piece of text on top and 2 illustrations of that text, but ultimately, as was pointed out in class, it can be read either way.

For the projections I created a Flash application which allows me to project onto each angled screen, record where its corners are in 2D coordinates, and distort the image on top of it by stretching its corners to those 2D coordinates.

This is a map of my experience going to, being on, and coming home from an 8-Bit Music themed boat cruise in early September.  There are a few decisions I made which are key to one's experience of the finished map, which ultimately make it more a smattering of individual experiments smooshed together onto one page than a work with a clear, singular purpose.

The graphics look somewhat "8-bit" in their cartoonish simplicity and saturated colors, but are not quite the chunky square blocks we associate with 8-bit video games.  I kind of wish I had been able to take the 8-bit theme to that point but when I shrunk, simplified, or obscured the symbols any further they became illegible as the entities they represent to the point that I might as well remove them and replace them with numbers or letters or some such symbols, which would likely be pretty dull graphically.

The symbols in the key relate only to experiences involving liquids.  For some reason, this is interesting to me. Not liquids, although I obviously enjoy them and they were an important part of this evening, but I am interested in moving a representation of my own experience, or some... some sort of human experience towards something abstract and interesting in its strange meaninglessness. Hopefully my thoughts on this will coalesce at some point this semester. I feel in all of my work I'm trying to walk some line between normal, coherent reality and something schizophrenic or incoherent (though this map is not the best example of that as I rarely do things as subdued or static). I will write about this more in the future as it becomes more relevant to my pieces.

The way the symbols move in single-file lines (hopefully) hint that they represent the movement of a single protagonist, or possibly   There is no way to know what direction the protagonist is going. Again, a simple experiment in abstraction.

As usual, the most interesting responses were ones that I did not anticipate and really did not even consider. 

First, no one besides those who were there or knew of the night's events ahead of time recognized my simplified, bright pink depictions of lower Manhattan, or of its Brooklyn, Governor's Island, and New Jersey borders. I had figured people would see the resemblance, but it really wasn't crucial that they do.

Second, someone asked why i chose to symbolize land masses with said bright pink, to which I had no response besides that I really like the color. Looking back I still don't have much more of an answer, besides that maybe certain aesthetic choices I've gone back to over the years (like the gratuitous use of certain loud colors) are so deeply ingrained I don't even think about them. It was actually the first choice I made when I started drafting, it happened very naturally.

Ultimately, seeing peoples reaction to my map was a far more valuable experience than the actual act of creating it. It made me examine the significant disparities between how I predict a work of mine will be read by its audience and their actual response in a way I haven't in quite some time. For my next project I hope to apply this thought process to