Projection Design

“Projection Design” offers a hands-on approach to the design, planning and execution of digital projections in a variety of performance spaces by using a combination of industry standard and open source research software tools. This blog will serve as an online text for the developing book, "Technical Ecstasy" and link for the web-readings, online tutorials,software resources historical examples, video art and performance examples and essential class communications for Projection Design class taught by Patrick Pagano

Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Very Eye of Night


Astrophysics [For Maya]


Our bare feet in the damp grass, we spin after dusk,

As our mothers call us in by ones and twos, insistent.

Dizzy with freedom, palms and planets revolving together,

We play our games, pretend to be statues, or spin while laughing,

Giddy cosmonauts awaiting our landing.


Above us the stars traverse the stage in elegant alignments.

The Twins with their sculpted torsos cavort with the Pleiades,

Some goddesses so faint that they are almost forgotten,

Lost amid the rush of vertigo and gravitas,

Eleusian Mysteries conducted to flute, chime, and drum.


Three Graces pose themselves just so,

The curvatures of intention in a constellation of movement.

And for a while there is no up or down, beyond buoyancy,

No rules to obey, only floating perspectives,

The ancient forms breathing again,

For we are at the axis, peering into the very eye of night.

2 comments:

Francesca said...

this is such a beautiful poem! i think we should maybe use it for our collaboration?

I have a lot of sketches that I would like to incorporate with this.

esme_design said...

Thanks Francesca! I was also thinking about the color scheme of "The Very Eye of Night." It is essentially black and white. I remember a professor who was a master colorist giving us an assignment as undergrads. He said that he wanted us to create a piece that was about white (as a color theme) without using white, and one about "black" without using black (instead using darkened versions of colors light blue-black). His pieces were worked in cloisonné, which is made of fused ground glass and silver wires. What he did with this idea was truly beautiful.