Post with 1 note
The last meeting I had with Skye we talked a lot about the role that technology and video games would play in the space. The Blindscape computer game that I mentioned in the first blog is a big part of what will make up this show. The audience members may be enrolled as players of this video game. Being reminded of this created a big shift in the way I have been thinking about the show. That said, all of the ideas that i have share so far still have a place. More that my role within the production has shifted and become better defined.
The way that the audience view this work, the way it is physically perceived, is really important. That there are physical and mental experiences that happen rather than the audience having to think them through. Physically some of those experiences can be engaged with through light, which I’ve talked about previously. Mentally it is more tricky and i have some examples here which are quite dark but I think we can take lessons from them in order to use them in a more positive manner.
Some of the examples that came to mind about the way that participants are enrolled in an experience were that of the Stanford Prison Experiment http://www.prisonexp.org/ and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0. These are extreme examples but I find them interesting in terms of how we participate in any environment. Certainly in Room 328 it was important to be very mindful of how you exercised control and how you gave it up. The telling word in these examples I think is that of dehumanising. It is strange how quickly you can be disregarded and disrespected if you show signs of not being present or are unresponsive to stimulus. Showing signs of humanness is so important in terms of having control over your place in an environment. The ability to affect a positive response in others not only creates respect and builds compassion but it affirms an individual’s existence in reality.
These experiments of control and freedom, prisoner and guard I think could be very interesting exploration points for Blindscape.
Thank-you Kieran.
As the city grows bigger, it seems that people re-evolve, lose touch with their bodies, become disembodied almost, live only through their brains. I’m interested in how we learn to survive in the city. At times I find it beautiful to ponder destruction.
Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Tragedia Endogonidia A.#02, Avignon
I really enjoy this sequence of events and recommend watching part 1 first if you have time. In this second part at about 4mins 40 there is a projection of quickly flashing letters. it is really interesting as the after image effect that Olafur talks about happens here and the letters start to blur together. I really enjoy what this does to your imagination.
Tetsuo: the Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto. This was incredible in terms of how visceral the sounds of the body play out and the way that he plays with perception.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Clock scene. I really enjoyed the movement in this film and thematically it was interesting as well.
I watch a lot of films so naturally when i start thinking about a new project a whole bunch start to come to mind. The films i’m going to post are related to ideas that i had relating to tension, movement, theme, content and colour.
James Turrell has been interesting as well. He uses the dark to frame a lot of his light sculptures. One work i remember reading about actually required the viewer to stand in the dark for 30mins(?) before their eyes were able to adjust enough to see what was in the room.
And the section from this book is interesting as an example of how to share light with an audience.
‘After pre-liminary conversation and amenities in the living are of the Mendota, Turrell and his guests went to the studio area and proceeded to view a sequence of constantly changing light events. Indeed, the nature of the audience’s participation, their active engagement at basic perceptual levels, and their movement from one studio space to another gave the work a structure reminiscent of a Happening, albeit a very subdued, ethereal, and formal one.’
The work detailed below and Room for one colour could be of particular relevance to this project. He also talks about ‘afterimage’ which is the burn that is left in your vision after having been exposed to a bright light. These can be shapes or the silhouette of something and reminds of a work a really enjoyed by Franko B. i’ll post pictures of that next.
‘Your colour memory investigates aspects of color perception, one of which is afterimages and their temporal relationship with their sources. If we enter a room saturated in red light, our eyes, as a reaction, produce so much green – with a delay of approximately 10–15 seconds – that the red appears much less intense; it is almost erased. If the color of the room were to change from red to colorless, a clear green after-image would appear on our retinas. In Your colour memory, the color fades from one to the next in a sequence of 30 seconds. In that minute the single color slowly appears, ripens, and subsequently fades into another color. If the room is blue when you enter, after about 10 seconds you will begin to produce an orange afterimage; if the installation fades from blue to yellow, the subsequent movement of afterimages in your eye will be from orange to purple. The retinal fade-out occurs with a delay of about 10–15 seconds in relationship to the actual change of color in the room. There are, in other words, two color curves at work: one pertaining to the work itself, one being created belatedly in your eyes. One could argue that another curve finally appears, namely the curve of colors perceived by the brain, which is an average of the two preceding curves. If we spend enough time in a blue space, our eyes will create enough orange afterimage color for the space to gradually fade into white. If I were to enter the color-saturated room some time after you, my experience of the color would differ substantially from yours, as you would already be enrolled in a sequence of wall colors and afterimages that determine your present experience. I, on the other hand, may not yet have produced afterimages that color my perception to the same degree – so to speak. Our perception of the room, therefore, depends on the amount of time we spend immersed in the changing colors and on what use the room is to us’
This text was of particular interest to me. It is really interesting the way that he creates an environment in which we are the ones that are physically affected. The change is something that happens to our body and our minds kind of catch up to that.
‘Sunrises and sunsets that take place in the narrowest space against a dark background and in the shortest amount of time provoke the most varied sensations, depending on the mood you are in when entering this insular and yet completely cosmic world. Just as in Room for one colour, everyone brings something of her own to the experience, something indispensable, an afterimage not in the literal but in the metaphorical sense. Space refracts into an emotional afterimage of the landscape (the external one, but also the mental, inner one that reflects it) from which one entered the dark cube, the product of a singular conjunction of memory, expectation, and something unpredictable: amazement and astonishment on account of the darkness, perhaps a feeling of strangeness, or a rush of happiness at the gift of a small flash of light, a sensation of transience and futility, or simply—the comedy of the situation. Is this your idea of horizon? Do you even have one? Don’t you need one?’
One of the first things that I thought about when it came to Blindscape was the work Olafur does with light and the way we see.
The first big question that I guess i have to elucidate on this blog is ‘what is Blindscape?’ This has changed a bit over the couple of months that have passed since I have been on the project. The initial idea that came from Skye’s brain was that of a computer game that was played with no visuals. You would navigate by sound and touch. The concept of complicating sight is a recurring theme and seems to be the question that we come back to if we become too tangential.
The other element that has remained constant is that of the chinese pole. I have had the opportunity to have a bit of a play and it has been a lot of fun, a few bruises but good fun. I’ll post a couple of videos of some excellent pole work. I’m aware that i am not a circus performer so my intention in regards to the pole is to become very good a getting up and down it and to think hard about how i integrate the things that i’m good at as a physical performer and see how i can translate that to pole.
These two elements of complicating seeing and the chinese pole are the constants that we have at the moment. There are probably more than that but i think these two are key. There are many conversations and ideas that we have discussed around these but in the next posts i will start to tease out some of my initial influences and images that i was drawn towards on first hearing the concept.
thank-you
So this blog is an attempt to get my ideas, influences and process out onto a public forum so that i, and others, can see it all in one place and receive some critical feedback about it’s journey. Thank-you to Margi Brown-Ash for suggesting to start this (it is my first blog) and also to Skye Gellman who’s project this is, I will also cross-post postings from the official Blindscape page http://blindscape.tumblr.com/.
Thank-you.
