What am I going to make?

About a week ago now we were told that we should have some kind of idea of what we'd like to make this term with the theme of light. So what did I do?
I drew a damn mind map of course!

The damn mind map. Click to expand.

 The mind map didn't actually get very far. I consdiered some kind of mobile with lenses and crystals hanging from it so that they would refract light that hits them, a bit like the crystals I have hanging in front of my window that fill my bedroom with rainbows most mornings and bright days:

A sunset viewed through one of my crystals.

I thought a mobile could be good, even another classmate suggested it to me. It would also fulfill our unit about problem solving as balancing different weighted objects would be quite hard.
The other idea I had on my moodboard- the one you can tell I went for because it's slap bang in the middle, was to hold some kind of light installation. I'd experimented with light in a store room a week before and I'd really enjoyed the ephemeral and performative elements of what I'd done. My mum has also taken me to quite a few exhibitions in my life and I've always enjoyed and been interested in gallery installations.

'Line describing a cone' - Anthony Mccall

So I wanted to make an installation? Yes!
I had a kind of idea in my head of what I wanted; hanging lenses,  projectors, movement.
How was I going to do these things? Well I have a few lenses already, maybe I could suspend them somehow. I chatted to Young, a tutor again and we drew up a design to build a frame for a lens of mine to suspend it from.

I'm about to write a WHOLE blog post about this thing.

So what else am I going to incorporate into my installation? I could use the things I've been experimenting with already; Projector, overhead projector, card with lasercut holes, dancing people. Dancing people! I really like dancing people. I love the 2D shadows made by moving people and the human interaction with the light.

Classmate Lena and myself gettin' down n' funky before some overhead experiments.

Now, I haven't really planned any more than this so far and the 3D part of the theme of light ends next week. I probably won't be able to make a whole finished thing but I'll have some proofs of concept, some photos, and quite a lot of experience by the end of this!

Unconsious Inspiration

Inspiration can come from everywhere! I've noticed that a few of my photographs look visually similar to the cover of Solid Air by John Martyn. My dad had this album in his vinyl collection and I used to enjoy getting all the gate folds out and looking at the artwork on them.

I searched for the artist who made this iconic art but to no avail. I did, however, find out the technique used to capture the image; Schlieren photography, a form of Shadowgraph photography. I would love to try this form of photography some time.

This photo was taken last week as part of my experimentations with a few classmates. When I saw this photo later on, I was instantly reminded of solid air. Was this unconsious inspiration or just chance?

This is a photo I took almost a year ago now, not only does it make me think of multi dimensional beings communicating with us but it also features a hand silhouette. Funnily enough, quite a few people have likened this photo to Solid Air also.

Pinterest as a research tool

I resisted the encouragement of my teacher to use Pinterest at first. I'd been on it before and only saw cakes, wedding dresses and recipes but I also noted the useful ability to create seperate 'boards' that you can 'Pin' any image on the internet to. I realised that this feature alone could be used to collate visual research images from the internet. So I made an account an a board for our current theme; Light.


I instantly started pinning my artist research to the Light board. Research was easy as I could pull images together, give them a breif description with dates, titles and artist info. I could then view them all visually and together in one big stream. I've then been pulling the images from Pinterest over here to Blogger to do more in-depth research.

I've been calling Pinterest my digital scrapbook, because that's what I've been using it for, rather than a social network to share my favorite wedding dresses on.

Experimentation 20.01-26.01

Yesterday I set up a crude little make-shift studio in one of my college's store cupboards. I had a little white strip of paper between two shelves. Occasionally people would come into this very cramped room to fetch something (in the dark), they would ususally look at me a bit funny.

My Suitcase scale studio! Note the art materials overflowing from the shelf above.

Using a lens, I was able to focus the light coming through the triangular apertures in the lasercut card onto my paper backdrop / projection screen.

And then I experimented further..

I even filmed some bits using a tripod. I quite enjoy projecting onto my body, later on in the week I experimented with dancing and full body movement in front of projections.

A gif I made of projecting onto my hand.

The next day, my class had self directed study. I'd left my projector and lenses and kit in college so I got some classmates involved! We had an entire classroom to utilise this time and so the projection was on a larger, more human scale;

Myself dancing in front of the projector and Lena interacting with the shadows of my fingers. This had quite a theatrical, performative feeling. Like multi dimensional shadow puppets.

Multi-layered Hand dancing along to music. I'd love to choreograph some kind of light performance/dance along to music. Or to maybe even make a music video based on these premises!

We used cellophane as colour gels to tint the projector light and experimented with focus, distance and perspective. In the end, we had about five people dancing in the shifting light whose shadows interacted on a 2D plane, it was really fun! I have a video of it which I will upload at some point.

A few days later, on my birthday, we had another self directed study. So what did we do? We had another light show of course! This time, I found an overhead projector, which is designed to focus anything on its surface, perfect!

Using the overhead projector and my (possibly stolen) green man sign.

We learnt as much as we had fun, which is the beauty of experimentation.

Artist inspiration: Mariah Robertson

At college we were given a big list of artists we should look into, one of those artists was Mariah Robertson. I instantly liked Mariah's vibrant but dark images.

  

Gladiola Window RGB #3 & #1 [2007]

I could tell that Mariah has somehow manipulated the Red, Green and Blue layers of her image. There might be a technique to do this in photochemical processing but I knew this effect was also possible through Photoshop.

Here is my attempt made from a photo I took today while expreimenting in Young's class:

In fact, I am rather well aquainted with playing with the three colour 'channels' of an image.

I've used it in graphic design:

I entered this design to be printed on a t-shirt. Sadly I didn't win the competition. I'd like to try screen printing this some time maybe. This imsage was made along the same premise of every image on this blog.

A profile picture of mine and a concept album cover for a friend's band; Tescos Chainstore Massacre.

The two images above were made by warping the colour channels rather than rotating them.

A publicity photo of Chris James, musician and a maths based graphic design made by me.

Rather than being rotated or warped, the colour channels in these images have been scaled subtley to give a red and blue edge to images. This mimics the refraction of light through a lens as white light is split into the colour spectrum. Red and blue are at opposing sides of the spectrum.

Light- An introduction

When I found out that the theme for our second term at college was going to be light, I got pretty excited. See, I bloody love light. I love it's properties, it's mysticism and the fact that it is absolutely everywhere. Without light, we'd have nothing.

During the holidays I drew up this mind map all about light due to excitement for the project. Funnily enough, we were then tasked with making a mind map on our first day back, I just used the one I'd made already. Here it is:

My mind map of light

As you can see, there's a lot of things I relate to light in my head!
I can imagine that other people given this theme would approach it from their interests. Say I was interested in fashion, I would incorporate light into clothes. If I was interested in industrial design, I would make a lamp and so on.. but one of my biggest interests is light itself! A lot of my artwork I make already is about experimenting, understanding and interacting with light. I want to apply light to fashion, to film, photography, architecture, to everything! Light inspires a spectrum of ideas and artforms for me.

A photo I took a using a prism, bamboo mat & projector. I have noticed a common theme of ambient darkness in many 'light artists' work.

Light has so many different aspects that I'm interested in. I hope I will be able to isolate those aspects and discuss them individually so that I don't get lost in the hugeness of the theme. So let's delve into this mind map! The first thing that comes to my head when I think of light is Physics (If you know me, this shouldnt surprise you). To me, science is an art and art is a science- they're intrinsically linked.

Is Science and beauty linked?

Internal reflection and refraction of a diamond and a rain drop. This is what causes rainbows! 

The science of light is still too big a subject to be discussed in one blog post. So I'm going to divide it into these subjects: The Electromagnetic spectrum (X-rays n' stuff), Refraction (rainbows), Optics (eyes and lenses), Luminescence (Glowing things), Waves and particles (small things), Space (The moon, sun, stars and beyond), Colour (what a wonderful thing), Photography (capturing light) and Ideology (Life, Death, God, those things).
I might write some other bits, throw in some artist research and more work of my own. who knows? we'll see!

Sunset through an abandoned building in Birmingham.

Also, I have started up a Pinterest board dedicated to light. You can see that here.
Pinterest has proven rather useful as a digital scrap-book for me.