April 8, 2010 11:24 am
This hastily spawned project was inspired by a reading a got to slip while backtracking to school, leaving me with 2.5 hours of extra transit since it was during “let’s-keep-the-hard-working-night-owls-away-from-their-soft-beds-for-even-longer” hour.
Inspiring excerpts from “Sensing a Dwelling.” The Green Imperative. written by Victor Papanek.
“Scientists tell us that we experience the world primarily through our eyes…We are endowed with five senses and more: we have sensory nerves which make us aware of the body position and movement in relation to a space (kinaesthesia)…”
“Why are we only now becoming increasingly aware of the impoverishment of our sensory ablilities?”
“It has been known for decades that certain red-orange colour will kick into high gear several psycho-physioloogical systems that deal with aggression and sexuality; recent studies in colour thereapy and photobiology seem to show that ‘passive pink’ (the bubble-gum colour), has an almost immediate effect on aggressive behaviour. When people displaying berserk behaviour are put into a small passive-pink room, they tend to calm down within minutes and go to sleep.”
“We walk through three-dimensional spaces with light changing through windows, clerestories anf other penetration of walls or roof.”
“Light through a rose-window in church floods the space with brilliant colours.”
“… visual acoustics.”
“Light needs space: it is the room that dictates the flow of the light – it is the light that modulates the volume of the room.”
Color therapy and photobiology has always fascinated me, so these notions easily peaked my interest. Through framing of architecture and infliction on our line of sight can create space and a feeling of enclosure. This could easily be illustrated by creating blinders to wear over you eyes to create a physical blocking of peripheral movement and light. At the same time this gives the wearer a feeling of privacy and focus on one’s work. This can also be illustrative of the desensitizing of our other 4 senses. We have the whole of our body outside of this small enclosure, having a constraint on our vision that is uncommon for us punctuates the what we might take for granted and heighten the senses that might have been dulled through neglected conscious awareness.
There was surely more to explore, other than physically enclosing a space around your field of vision, and what feelings that might invoke. There was room for color and light play.
This was a project that was a resourceful one. I wearily (though not reluctantly) looked around my room and spotted my materials, black frame glasses without lens, a small box, and a stack of colored origami paper.
The idea was bind the box to the glass frames and create a sliding system of which to interchange color slides made of cardboard with the origami paper adhered to it. There would need to be a fine slot cut into each of the slides in order for you to see, still obstructing your view to a fine plane.
Once the box was attached to the glasses, I put them on and immediately knew that the color slides would be useless due to lack of light. The slides would not me immersive enough anyhow, it wouldn’t effect your mood nearly as much as being surrounded in a room by one color.
Well, this led me to turn to the component that is the LED. From here, the project become a proof of concept. An LED, or five for that matter, would not be a controlled enough frequency of light wave with the right tint of red on painted on the bulb. It could still effect you mood, but with a “you take what you can get” attitude.
This is what I proceeded with, the idea of installing five LEDs into the blinder box with an on/off switch.
quickly sketched schematic
silver conductive ink used to paint on traces
I hit the underneath of my pre-punched holes of too for extra coverage
taped down components to traces
upside down and inside look at the installed LEDs
March 30, 2010 9:05 pm
Admittedly, I procrastinated a bit on this project knowing how frustrated I would be… plus I just could not get inspired. I didn’t have an Ah-ha! moment or get fixated on one intended goal. Which can usually lead to underdeveloped, weaker projects. With learning coding though, I find that when I stubbornly have a fixated goal that is way above my head in execution, I then give up all means of adaptation and willing to beat the path that can be started by something serendipitous.
So having said that, I did my usual tripped up process coding in C++ using openFrameworks, constantly changing and scaling my goals to meet my results.
The first thing I did was stray a bit from the assignment. I have been wanting to hook up one of my soft-designed sensors to some visuals for awhile. I took the opportunity to do so using the Arduino class for oF.
All that needs to be done is load standardFirmata onto your Arduino board (if using 0017 and higher). On the oF side, open up the firmata example and edit the bold bit in this line >>
ard.connect(”/dev/ttyUSB0“, 57600);
by plugging in your own boards serial port.
Build and follow the pic to set up your breadboard and arduino for the initial test.
I was able to get an example from class working with a soft sphere sensor. By squishing the sensor, I was able to cause displacement of m pixels taken from my web cam.
As far as the assignment went, I decided to attempt to grab from live video and use some of Francis Bacon’s and Gilles words and ideas of multiplicity and collage and capture over time. The lines provide a nice screen of which the captures over time can mesh with one another. Another goal of mine that came up was to have the lines born from 0 on the y axis and travel down in an automated fashion by the press of a key, and then with the drag of the mouse deposit lines across the x axis as they grow towards the bottom. You can either let them hit the bottom or click to stop them where you want and start a new batch of them.
I have not been able to get an animation of lines the same way I was able to while using the video class. Even when I out them in draw( ), the behavior is different. I plan on getting answers, so check back or message me if you are curious as to why.
March 24, 2010 2:23 pm
Loose Ideas:
creating a figural landscape made out of multiple people’s bodies
the closest they are to each other, an effect is more prominent than if they are farther away
playing with the figurative representation of proximity
replacing what color is found within a pixel with it’s opposite, or some other result from an equation.
Inspirational works:
Francis Bacon
Gilles Deleuze’s words on his work
John Baldessari and Koen van der Broek
=================================================
I took notes and copied straight text from two main pieces I found online. The first is a David Sylvester article here. This one came to me from another class and I found it very fascinating and inspirational from a philosophical standpoint while still giving me keywords that I can translate into technical approaches. The second is a summary of several interviews of Francis Bacon, conducted by David Sylvester that you can read here.
Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation, written by Daniel W. Smith
Deleuze’s analyses Bacon’s work “…from the simplest to the most complex.”
not what it means, but how it functions.
Deleuze treats Bacon’s work as a multiplicity and attempts to isolate and identify the components of that multiplicity.
Deleuze’s three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings:
- the Figure
- the surrounding fields of color
- the contour that separates the two
Modern art and modern philosophy can be said to have converged on a similar problem: both renounced the domain of representation and instead took the conditions of representation as their object.
Deleuze suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the cliches of representation and attempted to attain a “sensation” directly: either by moving towards abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural.
An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye; by constrast, an abstract expressionism, like that Pollock, went beyond representation, not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of manual line and colors.
The geographical world, the world recorded on maps, is perceptual and conceptual; it is an abstract system of coordinates with an unspecified perspective. A landscape, by contrast, is sensory; it is a perspectival world, enclosed by a horizon that moves as our body moves. In a landscape, we do not so much move in space as space moves with us.
But the lived body, says Deleuze, is still a “paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power,”
the power of rhythm in its confrontation with chaos. Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational.
the critique of pure reason – Kant
- aesthetic comprehension
- rhythm
- chaos
- force
under the heading of chaos…
Cézanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its chaos: he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities.
Translated into Kantian terms, both Cézanne and Klee mark the movement by which one goes from the synthesis of perception (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) to aesthetic comprehension (rhythm) to the catastrophe (chaos), and back again: the painter passes through a catastrophe (the diagram) and in the process produces a form of a completely different nature (the Figure).
On the other hand, this use of color claims to bring out a peculiar kind of sense from sight: a haptic vision of color, as opposed to the optical vision of light. What Deleuze calls hapticvision is precisely this “sense” of colors. The tactile-optical space of representation presents a complex eye-hand relation: an ideal optical space that nonetheless maintains virtual referents to tactility (depth, contour, relief).
From this, two types of subordination can occur: a subordination of the hand to the eye inoptical space (Byzantine art), and a strict subordination of the eye to the hand in a manualspace (Gothic art).
Deleuze in turn suggests that a new Egypt rises up in Bacon’s work, this time composed uniquely of color and by color: the juxtaposition of pure tones arranged gradually on the flat surface produces a properly haptic space, and implies a properly haptic function of the eye (the planar character of the surface creates volumes only through the different colors that are arranged on it).
In this regard, Deleuze will place Bacon in the great tradition of Turner, Monet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh—the great modern colorists who replaced relations of value with relations of tonality.
As reference to blind people receiving sight after surgery:
They would acquire a perception of the world only after an often-painful process of learning and apprenticeship, during which they developed the schemata and “Gestalten” capable of providing this prereflective sense experience with the coordinates familiar to ordinary perception.
…such as found in infants… sensory world populated by pure intensities (of sound, light, hunger, etc.) in which the baby cannot yet distinguish between itself and its world.
=====================================================
Interview with francis bacon, given by David Sylvester (Questions in bold)
“I’ve had a desire to to do forms”
“It was like one continuos accident mounting on top of another”
“… this transformation of the image in the course of working…”
he wants to paint specific things like portraits, but when you go closer to analyze them, the image is made up of contours and shape that have nothing to do with the image, you won’t know what you are looking at, because really it is a complete accident.
“For instance, the other day I painted a head of somebody, and what made the sockets of the eyes, the nose, the mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which had nothing to do with eyes, nose or mouth; but the paint moving from one contour into another made a likeness of this person I was trying to paint.”
“Because this image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction”
If people didn’t come and take them away from you, I take it, nothing would ever leave the studio; you’d go on till you’d destroyed them all.
Probably so.
But aren’t there other equally great portraits by Velasquez which you might have become obsessed by? Are you sure there’s nothing special for you in the fact of its being a Pope?
I think it’s the magnificent colour of it.
“So the images that I’m putting down on the canvas dictate the thing to me and it gradually builds up and comes along.”
he has this interest in things other than the subject, than the why, but how it is created instead. the aesthetic elements that configure the painting as the portrait that it is.
He was really interested in matters of form and color
Bacon has been heavily influenced by 1920’s picasso
