User:Sebastian Cimpean/gradproj/artofprojection

Art of Projection / Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon / 2009

The Long and The short of it: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from natural magic to the avant-garde / Tom Gunning

Notes

[…] its velvety eclipse of space, its obscuring of orientation. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of night, “it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surface and without any distance separating it from me. All space for the reflecting mind is sustained by thinking which relates its parts to each other, but in this case, the thinking starts from nowhere.” What happens in the dark? How does light structure and create its own world? Projection indicates a throwing forward, in this case of light, but also of shadow, with a collision occurring between light, shadow, and a surface or screen. There is a space in front of a screen that seems to be cancelled out by darkness, the “throw” of the beam of projection. If darkness cancels out this space, the screen or projection opens up another space, a space of illusion perhaps, or representation, or simply of the play of light.
(pg. 23)
// this text brings forth the idea/importance of darkness when thinking of projection. Also the idea of the screen opening up a space for me relates to the work of James Turrell (especially, The Royal Flush).

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I want to trace this play of projection back to its most elaborate spectacle - the phantasmagoria […] - and use it to think about the nature of shadow and illusion, but most of all about its dual role of canceling out and conjuring up space. To engage space in this way, as a transition between the tangible and the virtual, means to most obviously engage the most basic aspects of human perception and cognition, the données of space, but also of movement, and to play there with our most fundamental categories of world formation and orientation, of belief and confusion, of certainty and play.
(pg 24)
// again, the importance of darkness, but clarifies the idea of opening up a new space, and the tension it creates... the tangible vs the virtual.

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The phantasmagoria (like the movie projection system that ultimately derived from it) created its illusions primarily by concealing its means of projection. Thus it modernized the long tradition of magic shadows, which created the impression of miraculous events by hiding the real process from view, through the implementation of new optical effects. As an illusion, it worked directly on the people sitting in the audience, limiting their viewpoint, manipulating their perception either by withholding sensual information or by over stimulating the senses (the combination of limited sight due to the gloomy atmosphere while the ears were assaulted with eerie or unfamiliar sounds).
(pg 28)
// concealing the source of the projection enhances the experience, and another way of manipulating the perception of the audience

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The radical possibilities of the phantasmagoria might be summarized by describing it as an art of total illusion that also contained its own critique. This startling experience in the darkened room denied its own reality even as it was being presented, simultaneously overwhelming and calling the senses into question. One could think about avant-garde art of the ensuing century and a half as moving between these two poles – a direct and overwhelming appeal to the senses on the one hand, and the critique of illusion on the other. The critique seems to carry on the Enlightenment project, while the sensual approach often questions the powers of the rational mind and circumvents rather than demonstrates its powers.
(pg 30)
// the idea of controlling how much of the audience's sense you affect is a direct continuation of how you affect their perception. and it is something to be considered, since their sense could include vision, but also sound. an already done test of overwhelming the visual sense is to project a strobo effect.

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Boudelaire had already articulated the experience of synesthesia as the idea of Symbolist art: artworks that not only addressed all the senses, but blended and transformed each sense into the others.
(pg 33)
// just interesting, and a continuation of what was said in the previous note.

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Situating the artist’s power in his or her ability to manipulate sensations through form, texture, and color, tone, rhythm, or movement in order to create a direct route to emotions and thoughts, this new conception opened the way to an art no longer conceived as the imitation of either appearances or ideal models.
(pg 33)
// the artist’s power

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Simultaneously popular in its address and yet often abstract in its forms, it plays with its audience, causing sensations that resolve themselves into both fear and laughter. Unlike canonical high modernist art, this art is not overly concerned with object hood or even the materiality of the artwork. Rather, its manufactures machines and devices for shaping light and darkness, constantly aware that its true material consists less in its projections than in the sensual experience of the viewer. It seems to me to be a model that continues to have an uncanny hold of life.
(pg 34)

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Today, with another fin de siècle under our belts, can the complex history and implications of the phantasmagoria still haunt us? […] A new generation of artis is exploring the possibilities of image projection from film, video, or computers sources outside the usual contexts of experimental film and video, thus dealing less with the established formal paradigms of frame and screen and audience, and playing with ambiguities of space, motion, and ontology.
(pg 34)

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This ambition to use the medium in itself as a critical tool could be seen as continuing Robertson’s and Philidor’s dialectical and demystifying showmanship. Contemporary artist Judith Barry claims her works tries “to make technology in its many guises visibly part of a larger ideological context.” Barry’s variety of projection surfaces (including public buildings) not only makes technology visible but redefines public spaces and familiar shapes, as images challenge spectators to reorient themselves in positions other than the traditional audience-screen configurations.
(pg 34)

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Ultimately, I believe that as diverse as it is in its effects, technology, and aims, this new work marks a fundamental change of emphasis within the modernist paradigm, one closer perhaps to Rimbaud and the Symbolist model of works of art as the overwhelming of the senses than to the canons and concepts of modernist art established after WW2.
(pg 34)

Enclosed by images: The EAMESES’ Multiscreen Architecture / Beatriz Colomina

Annotation

The essay particularly describes the use of the Eameses’ Multiscreen installation/performances and their effects. It starts by describing the show they did in Moscow, then goes into some details about their inspiration and also connections/links that can be made between their work and other disciplines, like architecture, the circus and so on. A strong point is made with their link to/belief in architecture, and how both, architecture and (multi)media create space(s), how they are constructed and how spaces and their barriers are interchangeable. The essay concludes with a link back to the notion of attention, sensory overload, the effects of this, the techniques used by them and so on. In thinking of sensory overload, and the idea of overstimulation for attention, what they did may not be as evident today, as we live in an even faster environment, but for that day and age, they were essentially predicting the future.

Notes

The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate, as if we – all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information – could be diagnosed en masse with attention deficit disorder.
(pg 36)
// the idea of having people to fight, and decide which way to look. Like the idea that we need chaos to have more attention

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Reference: Pg 39 – Disney’s Circarama – 360 degree motion picture

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The huge array of suspended screens defined a space within a space. The Eameses were the self-conscious architects of a new kind of space. The film breaks with the fixed perspectival view of the world. In fact, we find ourselves in a space that can be apprehended only with the high technology of telescopes, zoom lenses, airplanes, night-vision cameras, and so on, and where there is no privileged point of view. It is not simply that many of the individual images that make up Glimpses have been taken with these instruments. More importantly, the relationship between the images reenacts the operation of the technologies.
(pg 40)
// space within a space

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The space of the multiscreen film, like the space of the computer, compresses physical space. Each screen shows a different scene, but all seven at each moment are on the same general subject – housing, transportation, jazz, and so on. […] According to the Eameses, repetition was employed for credibility. […] The idea was, as with the “Sample Lesson,” to produce sensory overload. As the Eameses had suggested to Vogue, “Sample Lesson” tried to provide many forms of “distraction” instead of asking students to concentrate on a singular message. The audience drifted though a multimedia space that exceeded their capacity to absorb it.
(pg 47)
// If there is sensory overload, I could, theoretically, apply the idea of not being able to comprehend everything the dimension about the one you live in.

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One journalist described it as “information overload – an avalanche of related data that comes at a viewer too fast for him to cull and reject it… a twelve minute blitz.” The viewer is overwhelmed. More than anything, the Eameses wanted an emotional response, produced as much by the excess of images as by their content.
(pg 49)

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Reference: Pg 49: Herbert Bayer, diagram of the field of vision, 1930

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From the “sample lesson” in 1953 to IBM in 1965, the Eameses treated architecture as a multichannel information machine – and, equally, multimedia installations as a kind of architecture.
(pg 50)
// multichannel vs. architecture (and the theories of the Eameses)

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All of the Eamases’ designs can be understood as multiscreen performances: they provide a framework in which objects can be placed and replaced […] Spaces are defined as arrays of information collected and constantly changed by their users. This is the space of the media. […] The logic of the Emases multiscreens is simply the logic of mass media.
(pg 50-51)
// (con’t from above) the logic of the Eameses multiscreens is simply the logic of mass media.

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Their technique of information overload, used in films and multimedia presentations as well as in their trademark “information wall” in exhibitions, was used not to “overtax the viewer’s brain,” but precisely to offer a “broad menu of options” and to create an “impulse to make connections.”
(pg 51)