User:ThomasW/eyemasterclassThomasW

On Monday the 28th of September I visited the Anthony McCall's Masterclass at the EYE in Amsterdam. I had not heard much about him before attending the masterclass.

I really like the simplicity of his light installation Line Describing a Cone (1973) . The use of light, shapes and smoke to give the illusion of a 3d object. It felt like a hologram, it was a really amazing and cool experience. I think it was really exciting to see the way the installation bridge image to physical space, something that can be used to bridge the digital to the real world.

The sketches and plans that had got into the work where on show, often the plans are lost and only the finished work remains. The other work on display where the sound scape installation, a installation that where interesting, but lacked the unnatural and mystical factor that the lights had. Maybe its my hight abut a never did experience the “sound wave” that most other people seems to experience being in that room.

Later we had a the Masterclass/talk with Anthony, followed with a Q&A. The talk where he explained his work was fine, but no really new information from what we had been reading about his work before hand, most of it felt like a repeat of old information. The Q&A after felt even less interesting, a lot of obscure references that I had never heard about and questions that where giving but never got a really good explanation for. I all felt like he has done the talk before so much he don't have the excitement to talk about his work no more. But ideas about the question about analog film and digital film felt really good.

From the perspective of my profession, the light work as exciting, but the rest did not really excite me, I did not see that much the connection between the topic of archiving and his work outside the sketches and how to replicate a holder sett up of his work. Outside the Masterclass we had a quick talk with the main curator at the experiment film archive at EYE, a talk that I felt did go to quickly and wish there was more time for questions. Personally got more from that quick talk, then the “Master Class talk” on the topic of archiving.