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.