User:Emily/Thematic Project/Trimester 01/03
Review of Anthony McCall's exhibition and class
When I first read the text about McCall’s works, there are some principles/sentences describing the viewers’ behaviour are more highlighted to me that “the viewer should be the fastest thing in the room”, “viewers tended to turn toward the projector, away from the projected figure”, “The viewer is not so arrested” and “one strives to hold together the shapes of the light veils that fall from above with the patterns of the projected lines traced below. ” What reveals here like McCall puts is that viewers schooled in his language, through a progression of tests or performances. That is also what I tried to convey in my previous works, which is to make viewers, participants interact freely and differently or even sever as the content of the works during their interaction, the process.
After the masterclass, I considered what indeed make the viewers react differently in front of the same media, the apparatus. Although I viewed and heard a lot during the day about his sketches and methodologies that how he play with line, volume, space, and movement, they didn’t explain my concern. I tend to understand it simply how can a projection just be a projection itself rather than the projection for playing films or showing figures, which means what are the other possibilities for the projection. But it seems so limited and not enough to explain why McCall’s work turned out to be like this. Then I returned to the text, found that what provide the viewers the emotions they experience is that the work “implicates other mediums, in the process McCall reshapes the aesthetic field around him.” That is, the viewers “play not only with the paradox of solid-light, but also with the tension between the film-as-drawing and the film-as-sculpture. ” So somehow the medium is largely defined in differential relation to other arts.
I think this understanding is quite helpful to me. The medium can be understand in a broaden context. In visualisation of raw material, the interface can also be understood in the same way. That’s what I am now focus on. How to interpret the same material or the same amount of data in different way by showing different interface. What’s more, the importance also lies in the process. If I want to present how the interface exists the way for specific social reasons, I think it should be played by users not only with the apparent effect of the interface, but also with the tension of the transformations.