The Course of Things

In the beginning:

My interest is in sunrise so I've begun to break down the project into parts to be tackled separately and then brought together.

Here are the bits so far, beginning with dawn, the time just before the sun breaks the horizon. To help explain, here are some notes I've been working on.

The qualities of light in the early morning, as we perceive them, are due in large part to the sun's position relative to the horizon and the amount of atmosphere that the light must travel through.

Like water, the atmosphere "bends" the light or refracts it because it changes speeds (ever so slightly) between mediums (vacuum of space > air). Not only does this cause us to see the sun before it has actually reached the horizon, but it also causes it to change shape - but again only slightly, and it isn't normally observable.

The diagram above describes my intent with this portion of the work. I want to recreate the affects of refraction. My hopes are that the apparatus will manipulate perceptions of time and refract the light, mimicking the natural sunrise.

Another aspect is color. The colors of sunrise are also caused by the amount of atmosphere the sun must travel through before it reaches our eyes. The red and orange colors we see are caused by particles in the air which scatter the other wavelengths [colors]. Predictably with my work I've found that the color of light transmitted through the acrylic, when it is used as the transient medium, changes depending on the amount of material the light must pass through.

p.s. there are spelling mistakes in my notes - sorry.

Some more Awesome Stuff I found, not related to anything...

I found some really awesome stuff online!!

its all found on this website, but I will post the really awesome work by a few different artists.

http://loop.ph/bin/view/Loop

Metabollic Media

Sir John E Walker

Sonumbra

Rachel Wingfield & Mathias Gmachl

Digital Dawn

Rachel Wingfield

(See image above)

There's just so much on this website that was screaming light.

Please check out some more of the site's stuff!!

Hope this is cool to you guys too!

Precedents and Progress, Week of March 14

Here are some of the things that I've tested so far...

For this project I wasn't so much thinking of artists as I was materials and things that exist in the world that perhaps I could mimic in a different way.

I was thinking about combining these two concepts, and have some sort of physical connection with sort of spreading the light by way of blocking and diffusing the light.

These images show that my illustrator file was all screwed up, and I didn't draw the shapes right. With the awesome help of Chris Wheeler, he helped me laser and fix everything so that the pins would be able to be stuck in. (THANKS CHRIS!!!!!!!!!!!!) On the foam core, the space between the two semi-circles was way too small, but in the cardboard it seemed to work out well the second time, after we had adjusted the shapes.

The laser was also doing some funky things, and we had to fanagle with it a little in order for it to work correctly(...those darn laser hogs.) After that, everything seemed to run correctly so that I could completely assess what I needed to do to get everything to work exactly the way I want it to come Monday.

I plan to set it up on a table of some sort, with only 5 sides to the cube, so that it will sit above the light source, and people will be able to, well, plug it in, plug it in.

Hope this is what you guys wanted for the weekly update!!!

What We've Been Doing This Week

This piece started out as a collaboration of images in our heads. Jack was initially interested in clothing and light with simple gestures and Laura was thinking about light escaping from underneath a skirt like a crack of light under a door. While the ideas and execution have evolved and gone in many directions, we have come back to an aesthetical experience and the interaction of clothing with lights. We are learning how a steady artificial light affects the surfaces and interiors of clothing while dually exploring the intersection of male and female. The clothing is comprised of manufactured materials assigned to a specific gender. It relates directly to the human form and a certain quality of gestural movements created by a wire understructure that replaces the literal human.

We wanted to work together because we bring both a male and female perspective and personal aesthetic to the work. We want to find a way to pull those together so that they compliment each other. Laura has a lot of experience with dance and the physical movement of the human body while Jack has a strong knowledge of the anatomy of the body as well as light bulbs and colored light.

Below are some video clips of different things we have experimented with throughout the week. Jack is going to post our photo documentation as well.

Interaction of Fabric and Light Bulbs



We moved on to try to sculpt light into a physical body shape which led us to trying many different things including talk of vaccu-forming a body, filling it with smoke, and using that to contain the light. We also tried making a tape cast of my arm and filling that with smoke. We went back to working with light bulbs and clothing because it was an aesthetic experience we seemed to have lost when we moved on to smoke and physical forms of bodies. It wasn't the right direction.



We got more clothing from Salvation Army and we experimented with our first constructed wire form under a shirt. We looked at both colored and white lights and their interaction with interior and exterior spaces around the shirt. The way the wall ends and there is brick under it really bothered us. We want to do something more interactive between the male and female parts of our work. We are going to build an substructure that can stand on its own and intertwines the male and female forms physically in space. The light will also play out between the different colors and surfaces of the clothing.

Hi Everyone,

Here are a few images from the work that Laura and I have been working on. We are considering making the work into a free-standing structure where the two different sets of clothes are entangled in each other, but we do like how the light splashes on the wall.

Jack & Laura's Precedents

We're doing a collective post this week since we're working together on our surfaces project. I'm going to put up two precedents we found for our work.

1. Atsuko Tanaka--Electric Dress, 1956

Tanaka was inspired by neon advertising signs so she made a dress out of light bulbs and cords that she wore out to openings and other events. The dress refers to the circuitry of the body as well as clothing.




2. Joseph Beuys--Felt Suit, 1970

Beuys tailored multiple copies of one of his own suits in felt and hung it up, absent and disconnected from the body, in many different places. He was interested in the idea of distribution and repetition as well as overcoming some of the elitism of the art world (hence many copies).

Glowing Light Precedents

Glow Dancers



This may seem like a silly precedent in some ways, but I really enjoy the spatial and illusionistic aspects of this glow performance. By selectively controlling what the audience sees, the dancers can perform any number of 'impossible tricks', but they also directly control our spatial understanding of the dance. We are only able to spatially conceive of what we can see; in this case, it's the dancers' glowing costumes and various floating lights. The choreography defines how we understand the spatial relationship between each object.


Long-Exposure Photography: Traffic



This photograph by Martin Gommel is a good example of light taking on a very particular spatial quality. Ironically we never see the car or headlights, but only the light itself is captured on film. Through the motion of the light we're able to understand the source, and the spatial behavior of the source. It reminds me a little of my glow light project because in both cases, movement of the source itself is important and gives us a spatial understanding we could not obtain without the moving light.


Glowing Jellyfish

Glowing Jellyfish from Adam Sowka on Vimeo

I'm interested in biomimicry, and while that doesn't apply directly to my project, various aspects of the glowing jellyfish do, and it's always productive to learn by observing nature. Again, our spatial understanding of the jellyfish and the movement of the jellyfish is largely augmented by them emitting light from their bodies. The jellyfish also embody a fluidity of motion which is not commonly associated with light, which would be a pleasant challenge to incorporate into future projects.


Long-Exposure Photography: Sparkler



This long-exposure shot by Eric Constantineau takes on a very different feel because of the swirling sparkler light that circulates through the graveyard. I see this as a precedent because both projects have a strong component of time. Even though my glow project involves experiencing a slow change over time and Constantineau's photograph collapses a length of time into a single image, both use visual media that incorporates evolution over time.

*edit* At Eric Constantineau's request, here is a link to his website: http://www.ericconstantineau.com/


Light Painting



Jan Wöllert and Jörg Miedza are two artists that practice "light painting" or "light drawing." They use long-exposure photography in dark settings with moving light sources to create surreal effects. In many ways it's a similar approach to the photograph above, where light takes on a more substantial quality, and we tend to focus on the light itself as the subject instead of using the light to highlight a subject. The artists are able to capture a phenomenon that is normally too fast for us to perceive in real-time.

(Titles of each section are also links to further information.)