Week 8 – After exploring Out of Hand exhibition, we continued the theme of Materialising the Digital by forming into groups and recreating a work. Using light, shadows and displacement in the form of multisensory interaction we attempted to recreate Olafur Eliasson’s work ‘Your Uncertain Shadows’. Using a combination of 4 different coloured lights we placed them alongside each other projecting onto a large white canvas. We did have a white light but once we took that away we realised it only limited the colours and the work looked much better without it. The use of light was softer allowing to fade out rather than have the hard cut border which would have occurred if we used a projector.
By stepping in front of the lights you cast multiple coloured shadows onto the canvas, to add even more effect we placed a few more coloured lights on the other side of the canvas as well so that two people could create shadows at the same time from either side. This created an effect where two people that couldn’t see each other (only their coloured shadows), were moving together in the same piece, and creating a beautiful magnitude of colours. Looking into progressing this work we thought about adding more light, including chromatic sensors or even adding sound.
Week 9 – We wanted to continue investigating the projection of colours and the inclusion of sensors as well as include the theme of satire in order to accommodate everyone’s specialties from the group. We began by projecting a large coloured video onto the wall with a human size silhouette of the hulk in the centre of it. The aim was when a person stood in front of the silhouette then the sensor would react and project a contrasting moving black and white geometric pattern onto the person where the silhouette was.
The problem we found with this piece was projecting onto the person, what the person was wearing had a big influence on how well the projection looked. As well as that, the person standing in the piece couldn’t actually see what was happening only audiences watching the person interact could see the change.
Week 10 – We decided to move into another direction this week, looking into the idea of facial mapping and projecting onto a face, using the work of Nobumichi Asai as inspiration. We realised the difficulty in projecting onto peoples’ faces and began testing by projecting onto a Styrofoam face. Again by using the theme of satire we projected different portraits onto the face (some still and some moving) with an addition of sound that works with it e.g. Johnny Depps’ face and Pirates of the Caribbean theme music accompanying. The audiences’ reaction was that the look of the face being distorted and not fitting into the Styrofoam face was more interesting than the image matching up perfectly.
Week 11 – Again – I think because of the diversity of the group – we moved on to something different this week. Moving into a theme of horror we wanted to create a gore inspired scientific experiment prop to the likes of Frankenstein. We were also inspired by the footage of Russian scientists attempting to reanimate a dead dogs head the footage was the biggest influence for us to incorporate sound to the piece. Using projection, we wanted to place both still and moving images onto glass jars. After experimenting with the projections and sound we came across many difficulties and the work with this design was very unsuccessful with none of our members being satisfied. We decided to go back to scratch… the work we recreated by Olafur Eliasson using shadows. We took another work by Dpt. And Laurent Craste, Dancing Shadow Sculptures as inspiration and tried to create a piece focusing on light and shadows. At this point, our group decided to split with one member focusing on shadows, another on gore and myself and Isabelle going back to jars and projection.
Week 12 – Using the theme of ‘life preservation’ Isabelle and I played with the idea of medical procedures and genetic modification. In two different jars we placed a bone with a screw drilled into it and a chuck of meat with aluminium sewn into it. This was slightly inspired by a 3D printed work at the Out of Hand Exhibition by Anatomics Pty Ltd Melbourne Australia ‘AnatomicsAcrylic Custom Cranial Implant’, where subatances are imbedded onto humans to prolong life.
In another two jars we had carrots, tomato’s and apples and accidently when someone else’s work crossed over with ours some numbers were projected onto it. The vibrant green looked really effective on the red tomato and orange carrot. So disregarding the meat we began to play around with the fruit and projecting genetic codes for fruit and veggies onto them. During these experiments we discovered that water creates a really effective magnified visual of the fruit and also brings a relevant problem of rising water levels to attention.
Week 13 – In the final week, we finally built on the previous week rather than starting from scratch. Bringing in multiple jars filled with a variety of fruit and veg and filling them with differing amounts of water, we placed them at eye level and projected onto them. The aim is to explore the global increase of genetically modified fruit and vegetables, as agricultural conditions change and water levels continue to rise. The information that is projected is from the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code – Standard 1.5.2 –Food produced using gene technology and a series of genetically modified PLU codes found on stickers placed on fruit and vegetables. Our work can be associated with Vincent Van Gogh’s still life with vegetables and fruit because of the layout of fruit on the table which looks neat and organised. However, to push our theme more and to stray from still life painting to a science project we put fruit in jars and then labelled the jars with the scientific names of the fruit and veggies inside and numbered them by how many tests had been done on them. This way our work would rather relate to the work of Piccinini whose art practice explores how technology, nature and the artificial are changing society.
