Brian Eno
Eno (1948-) is a British artist who focuses primarily upon large scale light show projections. Originally, he began his career as a musician, and has worked with high-profile artists such as David Bowie, the Talking Heads and U2 making mainstream rock music. He is perhaps best known for his personal work, creating non-traditional, ambient music. This music, which involves a great deal of white noise and repetition, could easily be ignored by an audience, but it was intended to entrance and transport any listener who chooses to engage with it. Eno also attempts to convey this ambient, hypnotic experience in his visual artwork, and does so effectively in his 2009 project, “700 Million Paintings.” This project involved three hundred of Eno’s hand-created, abstract drawings and paintings, digitally broken down into tiny parts and reassembled in a particular configuration by a semi-random computer logarithm. Eno slowly animates these reassembled digital images, creating an abstracted, highly colorful and evolving image which has aptly been described as “kaleidoscopic.” He often combines the work with his own ambient music, a choice which contributes to the hypnotic quality of the projection itself. This project has so many different possible combinations that, as Eno has stated in an interview, it would take 9,000 years to cycle through all of them, even if broadcasted at its highest speed. Projections of “700 Million Paintings” have been displayed in many fine art venues throughout the world, including San Francisco, London, Venice and Tokyo; in these venues, the artwork was projected onto a flat wall or screen. However, Eno also chose to project the work in a public space, specifically onto the white sails on the Sydney Opera House in Australia, a choice which significantly modified the meaning of the piece itself. The projection piece became visible to a much wider audience when placed in this very busy location, particularly because it is broadcasted upon one of the most iconic buildings in the world. However, as Eno states, the piece does not simply color in the Opera House with an eye-grabbing pattern. The imagery and the sound projected near it interacts with the associations we have with the Opera House itself, bringing to mind the abstract beauty and constant evolution inherent in music itself.
I am interested in Eno’s work, particularly “700 Million Paintings” when displayed at any of its venues, because of its tangible ability to entrance and capture the imagination of the audience. The experience of the slow progression of images, and the knowledge of how long the project would take if every possible combination was projected, allows the viewers to think about time in general and experience a new form of time. His wrapping of the Sydney Opera House with this projection deepened the work’s meaning, allowing it to interact effectively with the location. I am interested in evoking a sense of abstract time while engaging with an entire object onto which I am projecting, as well, so I believe it will be beneficial to consider Brian Eno’s work in conjunction with my own.
Sources:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1188229/Sydney-Opera-Houses-white-sails-turn-giant-canvas-spectacular-light-display.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901061016-1542767,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8071639.stm |
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Karen Aqua
Karen Aqua is an American artist and animator who has been creating short animated films 1976. A graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, she primarily creates her animations by creating huge series of hand-made drawings, photographing them and animating them, now primarily using digital media to combine the images. Although the majority of her work has been solo projects created meticulously over several years, she has also collaborated with other animators, artists and musicians, including her husband, musician Ken Field. Aqua’s films and collaboration projects have been shown internationally, winning numerous awards and fellowships to create her work. Since 1990, she has also produced numerous film sequences for the children’s television show Sesame Street. Her work in her independent animation ranges from highly abstract to highly representational, the latter of which primarily using stylized figures, such as humanoid, animal, and invented creatures, moving and interacting through space in semi-narrative scenarios. She uses her films to develop larger ideas, such as time (in her film “Perpetual Motion,” 1992), the experience of modernized society (“Kakania,” 1989), other cultures (“Andaluz,” 2004), and, more recently, her own experience with cancer (“Twist of Fate,” 2009).
Many of the figures, shapes and arrangements form within her videos make clear references to ancient forms of art, such as Mesoamerican or African design. The references to these forms of art convey a sense of ancientness and/or distant culture, which makes her work seem mythical and perhaps even timeless. One of the most compelling and comprehensible uses of this sort of imagery was in her 1997 film “Ground Zero/Sacred Ground,” in which explores ideas of ancient life with destructive modern culture. She focuses upon a site of ancient Native American art in New Mexico, which was located only 35 miles from the test detonation of the first atom bomb. The film displays constantly morphing petroglyphic figures, some of which spring from the rock and react to a great explosion in the background. The work is complex, visually compelling, and clear in its message despite its somewhat abstract and magical narrative quality.
I am interested in Aqua’s ability to make clear statements about larger, sometimes abstract ideas by pictorial means, often symbols or figures. I hope to similarly use representational form not exactly to tell a story, but to explore a larger idea about the interception of cultures. I am also interested in the hand-drawn quality of her work, a choice which both makes her works a more spectacular achievement (to think that she drew thousands of images for a few-minute-long film!) and contributes symbolically to the sense of humanity she attempts to portray in much of her work. The film “Ground Zero/Sacred Ground” was particularly interesting for me, particularly because I want to explore similar subject matter (Native American vs. industrial American culture). Her visual choices used to explore these ideas, such as to personify and hypnotically morph the forms, are compelling and effective ones, which I may consider as a springboard to developing my own imagery and animations.
Sources:
http://mysite.verizon.net/karen.aqua/index.html
http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/index.php/2009/08/13/karen-aqua-talks-animation-collaboration-and-short-films-in-somerville/
http://www.thesomervillenews.com/archives/10707 |
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