Project: P/F
My research focused on anamorphosis and perspective(viewing angle), and the project wants to explore meanings of letters/words and people’s competition through perspectives. The individual P or F means little more than a letter, but with the discourse of pass/fail, we humans attach meaning to these letters, which is also crucial for people’s life. “Where there are people who pass, there are people who fail.” This is the central message in this project. I also want to clarify that the word “perspective” might convey different meanings below – the rule or people’s viewing angle.
Traditionally there are two types of anamorphosis: perspective (oblique, the rule) and mirror (catoptric), but things are more than that. Apart from a form of painting, anamorphosis can be an interdisciplinary concept that “offers creative interactions and unexpected overlaps between psychology, figurative arts, geometry, advertising, mathematics, street art” (Lazzaro and others, 364). Dominik Finkelde, for example, analyzes how the theories of anamorphosis inspire ideology theory, political philosophy, and “the excess of subjectivity in a shared ‘space of reasons’” (10). For the art itself, the “constructed viewpoint” means where people see the whole pattern, and the “reasonable viewpoint” is where everything is perceived as parts. Finkelde mentions Kant’s concept of the “focus imaginarius” which is “reason’s need to presuppose a transcendental target point that gives acts of perception a goal of coherence.” This is a “transcendental auxiliary construct” that represents the many “pieces” embedded in our learning of the world. And the “constructed viewpoint” of a subject is the receiver of a coherence. At reasonable points, “the representational coherence gives way to environmental particulars, and radically different proximal stimulations start to pressure the visual apparatus as it now has to focus on all kinds of entities without knowing how to classify or align them according to ‘reasonable patterns’” (Finkelde 8). This is quite related to Gestalt theories, meaning we perceive the whole more than its parts according to their placement.
However, in the contemporary installation/sculpture context, I feel that the topic expands more to viewers’ movement and viewpoints, and how the work interacts with them accordingly. This way, I found many anamorphosis and perspective(viewing angle) works a kind of 3d/physical expansion of Gestalt theory, because people are viewing the 3D dimensional thing as a whole, but with different angles of view. Therefore I re-categorize them into:
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- Reflection
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- Shadows
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- Perspective
- Structure
- Perspective
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- Composition
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Mauro Italiano, creator of many anamorphic artworks, thinks that besides decoration and aesthetics, anamorphic art also “[interacts] with another perspective, almost a rupture in reality, throwing in a conceptual aspect that goes beyond the portrayed situation.” “It interacts with the surrounding three-dimensional world. It never gets boring or repetitive.” This sets me to think how the project can utilize the space to lead and speak to viewers. It needs to stimulate people’s curiosity/engagement through movement of body or view in the space, so that they are not just viewing but also exploring.
Inspirations
I found many artwork/projects involving words and letters. It may be partially because of easier structure and more straightforward meanings, but also explores communication issues. These sparked my idea of the meaning of the letters “P” “F”, and show how interaction happens by the change of viewing angles. There would be one “constructed viewpoint” where people see P changing into F, but it can also be viewed from other angles.
Materials
Chris Dorosz uses acrylic paint to compose human bodies. According to him, “ I’ve been working towards creating a narrative of materials as the groundwork to explore changing ideas of human physicality.” So the colorful material he chose works to convey human’s composition, like particles of DNA, and changing physicality. This set me to think about materials to form the letter. I think the colorful appearance like paint somehow gives people a childish and joyful feeling, so I’m planning to use toy/lego figure readymades to represents the crowd, the individuals. I want to try if a contrast can be created.
Also: stepper motors, threads, connectors, wood sticks, acrylic boards
Sketch (Old version, see the new one below)
Update:
After the discussion in class, I re-considered on these issues:
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- The relationship between the sculpture and sensor at the doorway. Are they far away or close to each other? Can/Should the viewer know how it works?
- All the examples are still while the project is moving. While motion does tell a narrative, what if it’s compared with motion of people’s view? Is it really engaging the viewer by its motion or viewer’s movement?
- For the letter, people only understand the meaning of Pass/Fail when the P and F are putting together like “P/F”.
They are all about how to design/present the project. Therefore I made some revisions on the appearance and “working flow.” There are two letters separately, one fixed and one moving. A “fake” doorway is placed in-between. In this way, the movement of people who walk through becomes part of the project, and when standing around, one can also view the whole “story” and explore different angles of view. The theories are the same, but the concept would be more clear.
Technical Methods
Stepper motors with threads to control the up and down motion. The challenge is see how to place the motors on the top and hang them consider the heavy weight.
An additional sensor is needed to trigger the motion. I think a distance sensor should be enough when put at the “door” and detect one period of time when people pass (ex. 1-2 seconds).
References:
Finkelde, Dominik. “Reason, Anamorphosis, and the Snowden Case.” Diacritics, vol. 44, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016, pp. 6–29, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26382957.
Fox, Serena. “The Art of Anamorphic Illusion By Serena Fox.” https://creativecloud.adobe.com/zh-Hans/discover/article/the-art-of-anamorphic-illusion
Paolo Di Lazzaro, Daniele Murra & Pietro Vitelli (2019) The interdisciplinary nature of anamorphic images in a journey through art, history and geometry, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 13:4, 353-368, DOI: 10.1080/17513472.2018.1506627