Glow Light Screen

Developing the first project to include more material interactions was tricky, since glow liquid is a dim source. I wanted to make sure I continued to emphasize the light as a liquid, so I thought, why not allow the glow liquid to interact with water? The glassblower on central campus cut a smooth dish for me, which I used in doing a few tests of water/glow-liquid interaction, which you can see below:

The glow liquid and the water remain separate, much like oil and water. I'd hoped the dripping glow liquid splashing into the water would cause waves of light and shadow, but the effect was too subtle to see in person, much less in video form. For that reason I decided to include a screen of some kind- ideally white, to pick up the bright colors of the glue liquid- which could then perhaps cast shadows onto the floor.
To this end I cut a series of circles out of a piece of white museum board, and then folded the corners of the board upward. This way, the circle cutouts closest and flattest to the ground would have sharp, circular shadows, and the circle cutouts raised off the ground would be distorted and fuzzy ellipses. One effect that also happened, which I had not considered, was the effect of the light source moving far away from the screen (the "compact fluorescent bulb") to close to the screen (inside the bowl of water.) When the light source was far away, the shadows were clear, but as the light source dripped and moved lower, the shadows became fuzzy and less defined.


Time and change were still important factors with the screen, as they were before. One particularly neat suggestion that was brought up in class was replacing the screen with a mirror, which could operate as a surface for the glow liquid to splatter onto, as well as doubling the appearance of light and depth through its reflections.

Here's the stop-motion movie of the dripping glow liquid, which I showed in class on Monday: