Unending Sequence, 2012, macro video, light emitting diode, paper stencil,
dimensions variable
In understanding time’s mutability, we use stories to comprehend things otherwise invisible. As we think of light moving in a straight line, we thus understand time to have a similar linearity…moving from a single point, in one direction... This can be altered by the mind.
The properties of light in nature, inspires innumerable fictions when we use our illumination-based technologies. With film, video and projection, the indications of light in Nature seem to transmute to substance (within the illusion of the image) With these images, there is functionality with the physical and cerebral worlds…the unassailable photons in service to the imagination. Art emerges into its newly professed reality.
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Margaret Feike
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Comments
Zanelle, I like the idea of a mass hallucination, especially regarding time. Thanks for taking a look and read!
"When we talk about light, we are really speaking of time,
and how theories tell us there is elasticity
in the body’s relationship to space and motion.'
TIME IS A CONSTUCT that is also a sort of mundane
reality, an elastic medium that "means"
nothing except if one is conscious of it,
which we are, alone...
alone in the universe far as we know...
" Even in understanding time’s mutability,
we use stories
to comprehend things otherwise invisible"
that is the creed of any artist worth their...uh..time..
we are put upon this earth somehow,
and plunge down into timespace...
or, are constructed from it..
the
answer is not clear...
time is the enemy, it is money, they say.
they are
the ones who want to be forever, somehow, anyhow.
if ya got 1 milllion dollars, how can you possibly..run out..
of time.
Thanks so much....
Stacey, I'm touched so deeply by your poetic commentaries....you have a way of seeing to the heart of mine and many other's intentions. We are so profoundly analog, and that is our celestial blessing.....
Thanks for your great, insightful comment.
Lezlie
As the Monty Python group might have said, "And now for something totally different." And "something totally different" is very welcome in these forums.
I love to play with light, reflection, refraction and such. Actually got several minutes of fun last week out of some oil that had been drawn up by a small pool of water in the golf cart crib at the course where I work. The subtle colors swirling around were fascinating--give a kid like me a stick to drive the motion and the moment results in lots of satisfaction and a huge grin.
Your play with light did that for me this morning. I appreciate the invitation.
Hello Frank, I am so happy you came over to comment! Part of the excitement of this process is the play aspect of it. The magic, or un-reality of the images are sustaining as you visit over and over. I appreciate your response to them…thanks!
Hello Bob! Thanks for the visit!
Julie, I thought you might like the top one. It is quiet and has a friendly quality to it. Thanks so much for coming by…ox
Hello Sheila, Yes the black and white reminds me of the films of early century artist like Man Ray, and Jean Cocteau. I also think of the old Film Noir style with Sterling Hayden and Barbara Stanwyck.
Vowels, The slow blur and fast sharp is the defining aspect of that piece. I hope to work with it more in different hues and motion. Thanks for coming over!
Hello Robin, I love how you defined the image as depicting something we already know…A beautiful thought, suggesting a former memory, or even life that has crossed through a veil, bringing the images that are true and necessary… Good to see you Robin..missed you…oxoxo
Maybe it depends on what kind of day one is having. . . .
Chicago Guy, thanks for coming by. I think both processes are at work when you include the maker into the mix of the experience. I tend to project meaning on things and events where there might be little or no intent to create meaning on the part of another artist. Art critics do it (project meaning)more than most of us (with the exception of Art Professors).
I find sometimes we try to bleed a student's project dry of meaning, making calculations based on what little we see in a given work. Many times the work is so underwhelming, the imagination has no choice (it may be silly to talk as if the imagination has it's own free will...but why not?)to serve the work.
In the case of these videos, I'm confident about a richness of information that can be gleaned from them, regardless of the technique, or original intent. I won't be around forever, and having one's work survive for even a decade, or two or three..or even four after the artist is gone is miraculous, and a result of the imagination/s serving the work.
Good to see you Roger, as always, and I am constantly enamored by your increasing body of writing...
Of course, the message received may be quite different across those strata. Then, too, there is a visceral reaction as well as an intellectual reaction.
For instance, my initial reaction to Dali's Persistence of Time is that it is deeply unsettling, tho why that is so is hard to put into words. But let me at least try. The painting speaks to me of the ephemeral nature of Man's doings -- to say nothing of Man himself. I wonder, too, if Dali wasn't offering a wry comment on our obsession with Time, and the painting was his way of saying -- despite the title -- that Time, too, is ephemeral.
So what does the art you posted say to me? To me it says the same -- that all things are ephemeral, including art. Witness the travesty of the destruction of the Great Buddhas that stood in Afghanistan for fifteen centuries, destroyed by men with powerful religious convictions, but surely without souls. In my view, that, too, is a crime against humanity.
I wouldn't call it art, but the notion of the ephemeral was brought home to me years ago while watching the construction of the Interstate thru the mountains in Colorado. The massive effort to cut a narrow slot thru the mountains seemed so foolish, so insignificant compared to the mountains, and the thot flashed thru my head that no matter how great men's accomplishments, the mountains (Nature) always win. And to take it a step further, even the mountains themselves cannot stand against Time.
Not an overly intellectual observation since both, interestingly enough, move my imagination back to the natural world where time (as we *know* it) is insignificant, in many ways. As WS said, "There are no clocks in the forest." Timelessness for me emerges here too.
With Dali, being a member of the original Surrealists in Europe, he was exploring the subconscious and the imagery associated with most people’s dreams. This was for them, a kind of unreality, marked by individual prejudices and desires. All of the Surrealists were keenly aware of the ephemeral nature of consciousness and hence, the objects and inventions of human perception that “occupy” consciousness.
As eastern mystics will tell us, all things are temporary and ultimately illusory.
So the videos are ephemeral and illusory as well…they are reproduced illusions of illusions, with a slight time adjustment, and that adjustment, in the context of my re-defining this illusion, gives me at least temporary ownership, and that promise encourages me to keep making things.
I’m grateful you wrote about the Interstate being cut through the mountains…perhaps in 200 years, very little will be left amid the rocks and forests.
The top piece is suggestive of smoke, or atmosphere, moving through several permutations as if it had a mind, or a will. It’s the most quiet of all the macro-vids posted over the last 1,1/2 years on OS. I like the first one very much because for me, after I thought about it, the image was suggesting a performance one might see on a very dark night. This would be a performance by natural phenomena, perhaps even an unfamiliar ritual of sorts.
In Boy Scouts, we used to do Shadow Shows using a tent wall and our wood fire projecting shadows of both abstract and recognizable shapes. To us, the performance always took on a ritualistic flavor (in Scouts, its hard to avid ritual when one does anything). There would be shadow forms that only the scoutmaster knew how to make and this was a source of wonder and in some ways, folk Magic.
The second video involves a happy discovery where I was able to cync the rotation at the bottom, with the cycles of the HD video camera. The image is almost dreamlike, yet simple and of short duration. The whole image suggests a figure, but for me, most striking is the resemblance to a candle flame (just above the middle of the image). The flame shadow is the actual shadow of the spinning mass near the bottom. In a strange way, they seem to occupy two different time sequences, as if a 5th dimension was depicted beyond the 4th dimension of motion. Thanks for the visit…I, so sorry to hear you are having problems with the site.
The images and the interplay of light are stunning. They have this sort of ineffable dream-like quality to them.
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............... *•.¸.•* ♥⋆★•❥ Thanx & Smiles (ツ) & ♥ L☼√Ξ ☼ ♥
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True video art...not an easy format to grasp. Certainly Bill Viola comes to mind. That magic caught, time, speed, light.
The first one seemed like an ocular dessert! (Wow, you should totally use that term on your marketing stuff.)
Buffy, there is a humming bird in there somewhere! The movement mimics them quite well. Thanks so much…
Diary, sometimes the making of these is dreamlike, and when someone sees that quality in them, it is very encouraging. They are low tech in production, but with experience n doing these, you begin to know which ones are evocative.
Algis,…thanks for the visual flourish (warm front)!
Hello Beth, I like being compared with Bill Viola! He’s light-years ahead of me in so many ways and that’s a real inspiration.
“Ocular Dessert” is your term and I will use it with extreme care and deference… Thanks Beth. I value your comment so much, and I appreciate your thoughts on this particular pair of works.
Hello Sandra, I'm so glad you came by! My students are luckiest in having the smarts to deal with a misfit like me. thanks Sandra.