First week of meeting with my group mate we've decide to do research to see what we are interested in and where our project will be going. We are pretty much interested in light shadow and illusion so hopefully we find something different and will help us carry through out the year.
We have been doing a lot of research in illusion and there are lots of interesting work from artist incorporating illusion to their artworks. Me and Rebecca decided to have a page where we put all of our research together that will help us come up with idea and narrow our idea down. We also had a chat with one of the lecturers and basically, he told us that it would be a good idea to experiment with other works done by other people as it can also help us get an idea with it.
Too many ideas!! Needs to narrow everything down!
week 3
Still feeling spread out but I feel that our interest is heading towards light and shadow illusion. I am really interested in some the sculptures that has no value but when the light is shone on it and cast a shadow the value of the sculpture is then shown through the shadow.
For our concept, we had a thought of exploring other media that will help us explore illusion using light.
week 4
So, its finalized! Our interest is heading towards shadow and the importance of shadow! We seen a lot of works done about it. Most of the works are based on interaction with the shadow its like bringing back the childhood memory of playing with shadow and using imaginations to create characters.
week 5
I did some readings and these are some of key things that are stood out for me:
The shadow club by roberto casati
-people only believe in what they only see
-they are unable to consider the true hidden nature
-shadows are disturbing example of lesser entities. they are a diminution of the objects that project them.
-shadow is a lack of light
-children's perception of shadow
After reading them I was more drawn to children's perception of shadow. It is quite interesting and it made me question on our perception in shadow as we get older?
Children have are more fully aware in their surroundings and shadow has become their friends when they're little and that's when their imagination starts to run. I remember when I use to play with my shadow. I make shadow puppet turn myself to a shark or anything. For me, shadow was my key to get into a different world. A world where other people don't know about but me. But as I grew up I become less aware with my shadow and have forgotten about it.
week 8
Had a conference in Australia last week and I had a blast! Had a chat with Rebecca about what I've read and she is pretty interested with it. We then became aware of the importance of the shadow and so I am guessing our interest has narrowed down to shadow.
We starts to wonder if shadow have a color. So, we decided to go out and take some photos of interesting shadows. We've put the photos in photoshop and to find the color of the shadow we then increase that saturation of it. And it is really interesting what color the shadows are. So I start to wonder what if we make an installation where when people walk past it, it will cast a colored shadow. people might start playing with it and interacting with their own shadow and bringing back the importance of shadow and changing the perception to a children perception.
I though of getting some drawings from 5 years old that I could use to put in the installation:
week 9
I got interested in making a sculpture similar to those shadow sculpture but instead of making a sculpture that has no value and giving its value through shadow. I though of making a sculpture that has a value but is casting a different shadow. Its an experiment to see how much people notice shadows. I thought of using a pop up book as my main media as pop up books already has value and people's interest would be focused on the pop up book as pop up books have a way of hiding something inside that people would want to see.
week 10-12
We are getting closer to the end of semester and all that we've done are little experiment. still we don't know what kind of project we want to make. But we know that we want to make an installation where people can have interactions with their shadow.
week 13-15
So last 3 week of semester and we JUST came up of a project idea that we could do! So we went to Bunnings Warehouse to get what we need which is a panel of moulding wood for our frame. Our frame is going to be 1.4m by 1.3m. I've also painted the panel black. We chose moulding wood to create this old style frame and used painted it black instead of gold to give a modern look to it. Our final project idea is for the participant to be able to create their own artwork through their shadow or silhouette but claiming their shadow by us. This is done by capturing the previous shadow of a person and layering it with a new one and another one while the old shadow slowly disappears.
