Light and the Artist

One lasting saying that I have heard since a young age is “Thunder is always followed by lightning.” I have always listened and witnessed this happening but I never paired this saying with the relationship of light and sound. From the reading, “Light and the artist,” I found that the idea that light and sound go hand in hand was distinctly rejected in the 1800s and early 1900s. No one seemed to believe or understand the work of early pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Alexander Rimington. I think that one reason that people rejected this idea is because they had never seen anything like it before. It was interesting to me that when Rimington presented the first demonstration of Colour of Music on 1895 that people thought it was strange and some disliked it. But, people were not used to seeing these colors and music mixed in this manner. I think if I had seen the show I would have thought it was very exciting. I had never heard of a color organ until reading this article so I looked up examples on Youtube. One of the coolest ones that I came across was the LED Color Organ. In this display Join Collin synchronized light to sound using the power of analog circuitry. This video alone makes me want to work more with digital projection and being able to synch light, music and digital interactions. Collin has done a lot of research and experiments on the correlation between light and sound.

Thoughts on Fuller's Introduction to Expanded Cinema

One topic I instantly latched on to while reading the introduction to Expanded Cinema was how Fuller perceives the world. It sparked a creative thought pattern in my mind. He mentions how humans refer to things as being "up there" like the sky, or "down below" from up in space. It is the same for objects to the "left" of us, and those to the "right." Do these descriptions truly exist, or are they things we as a society made up in order to better understand the world around us? Fuller says it himself - "without the infinitely-extended lateral plane, the words up and down are meaningless." He notes that humans still think and view things superficially; we view things as "solids, surfaces, or straight lines," but he claims that "science has found no 'things,' only events." Why, then, have we become so accustomed to perceiving the world in this way? We have related certain "frequencies" to the five senses, others to weather conditions, and some to "things," and so on and so forth.

Fuller also briefly discusses the different frequencies and wavelengths of what is known as "light." He states that "all electro-magnetic waves can be beamed as well as broadcast", and that is exactly where projection design comes into play. As designers, we are able to manipulate our surrounding areas to create a temporary, new reality. Place a person into the REVE, for example. All of a sudden, he is immersed in a room with a 180 degree projection surrounding him. For a few minutes, he forgets the world around him and becomes one with whatever is being projected onto the screen, whether it's a nature setting, a geometric design, or a short movie. By adjusting someone's peripheral vision, we are able to create a new, imaginative world.

In reference to the "womb," "ignorance," and "new-dawning awareness," technology has greatly developed since the time this introduction was written. We are in a new era; people have more information at their fingertips today than they did even just ten years ago. He writes that "man wants to understand," With more information, technology, and research opportunities being available to us today, we are able to expand our horizons even more and finally come out of the dark, unknowing, mysterious womb and experience an awakening.

Expanded Cinema, Introduction – Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller, in his introduction to Expanded Cinema compares modern man on the surface of the planet to a baby gestating in its mother's womb.

He argues that a gestating child knows nothing of the larger universe and is only aware of the world within its immediate confines. After a child is born they go through a great process of being acclimated to the planet on which they life. And yet this is yet another womb, which doesn't reflect the reality of the universe, but a more simplified and understandable human womb.

He demonstrates this by our common language of left, right, up and down. They reflect thinking about place and position based on living upon a flat plane. He further identifies the flaw in nation states claiming land and airspace, and show how it mathematically makes little sense, nor does it make sense in the grand scheme of the universe.

This is an interesting metaphor that, while it seems like an almost sarcastic comparison, it reminds me of an argument by Joseph Campbell, stating that most human spiritual traditions contain some reverence and ceremony related to water (baptism, for example). He draws the origins of this focus on water to its ability to cleanse and sustain life, but also its connection to birth (amniotic fluid).

Buckminster Fuller's argument makes an additional twist on this idea. Earth is considered the blue planet because it has a large amount of life-sustaining water. In some twisted way Buckminster Fuller's metaphor is even stronger in this viewpoint: the earth is one of the only safe places in the universe that can sustain human life, much as the womb is one of the safe places for a nascent human.

Light and the artist

“Light and the artist”

            Being a musician for most of my life, I found this article to have a parallel conceptualization of light and color compared to vibration.  You can give a color or at least the concept of dark and light colors to music, specifically keys.  For example, when played on a piano, C major is much brighter than D-flat major, only a half step away.  It is interesting because Pythagoras was greatly responsible for our 12-tone tuning system in Western harmony, and talks about light in the sky appearing as cosmic harmony.

            The second article was cool talking about how through video art, the average consumer can experiment, using affordable equipment, and create their own art making use of moving images combined with sound and integrated with digital imagery, etc.  It’s a technological paintbrush.

The Emergence of Video Art

The Emergence of Video Art gives a broad introduction to video as an artistic medium, and provides a who's who of video artists, as well as the evolution of the form.

One of the most notable points made in the text is the point that, in the modern day, it is rare to see pure video art (or any pure medium for that matter). They refer to this as the post-medium condition, implying that for modern artists, the message is more important than the medium: an artist does not work in film, an artist expresses him/herself in whatever medium they so choose.

I find this interesting because it refocuses views or consumers of art on the fact that technology may bring new forms of media to artists, but it perhaps only brings a great expansion to art when that media allows new forms of expression. It is the message that matters and not the medium.

Source Reading

Light & The Artist

Thomas Wilfred's Light And The Artist offered an interesting view point on an art in its infancy. There is a similar modern sense of emerging art forms in the arenas of Game Design and Operating System Design: some are beginning to view  games and OS's as artful, given a certain intent and meticulousness in their execution.

On top of his description of Lumia as an emerging art, it is notable that he actually describes the elements of the art form: Form, Color, and Motion. Graphic Design, and indeed many forms are design are taught by defining the elements of the medium (line, shape, color, texture, etc.) as well as the principles in which the designer can interrelate those elements (motion, tension, anomaly, etc.).

It is surprising to me that Thomas Wilfred had in incredible awareness of the art form, and in fact, went to great lengths to define and support it so that others could start experimenting and pushing the form further (especially in 1947).

While I personally have never seen a Lumia performance, per se, it is hard to imagine any modern medium that doesn't make heavy use of 'light as art' in animation, atmospheric design, motion graphics, and special effects, among many others.

READING ASSIGNMENT

Please read and reflect, comment and respond to Thomas Wilfred

http://rhythmiclight.com/articles/LightAndTheArtist.pdf