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)