Project 2

Title

Lumianimal

Project Description

We wanted to use our project as a way to transport viewers into an environment that is different from ours. The environment we decided on was a world of nature and animals. We were inspired by the Chinese phrase 管中窥豹, which describes the story of a man only being able to see parts of a leopard’s fur while peeking at it through a hole in the wall. Although at first we wanted to look into our project with the camera and show an actual animal, we settled on a more abstract approach. Our idea then became to emulate an animal’s home, with both the mysterious and fantastical aspects of that world. This setup would allow us to both see and hear an interpretation of a creature and its home. 

Perspective and Context

We were inspired by Thomas Wilfred’s interest in doing projects that stimulated observers looking into telescopes or windows. He also stated that light is part of the universe of flux, meaning that motion is necessary in visual art involving light. We wanted to emulate both these things by combining them and using the camera as a window into our world, while incorporating movements with and without light involved- making it a dynamic and engaging performance. 

Development & Technical Implementation

We knew that we wanted to use fog to represent both the elements of mystery and movement. The fog would act as a smokescreen for Snow’s color contacted eye, which is supposed to represent an exotic animal and looking into the unknown, which contribute to the mysterious vibes we were trying to create. We wanted to play around with different colored lights shining through the fog, but ended up only using white light and adding effects through max instead, which ended up fitting our concept better because of the color palette and different individual colors we could put on one screen. The movement in this section was Snow moving her eyes and blinking, which represented the liveliness and curiosity of nature. The flame and the sparkler are supposed to contribute movement as well as a life cycle of nature, since there is a beginning an end to both these things. The music was supposed to be imitate an unknown space filled with animals, which served as a good backdrop for our entire performance. 

Performance

The performance was a little bit chaotic as Snow and I had many things we needed to control and beware of during the performance. Although we had a timeline, it would have helped if we practiced more just to be familiar with what needed to happen when and how long something would take. As my role was to oversee the performance timeline, there was a lot of pressure on me to direct the members, which was very nerve-racking and ended up with us making a few spontaneous decisions when the plan derailed. More practice also would’ve allowed us to see the amount of technical difficulties we could run into, and not have them happen during the performance. 

Team Work

Lexie and Snow thought of the bulk of the proposal of the project and the timeline for what the performance should follow; Lexie manipulated the visuals, Neo made and manipulated the audio and the graphical score; Snow was the object of the performance and I was the overseer of the timeline during the performance and manipulating our physical components during the performance. We comminuted through a timer and just speaking to each other. Although we all had our own roles which made it easy, there was a disconnect in connecting our individual parts into a cohesive performance. 

Conclusion

I think the biggest thing was that we should have practiced more, as most of our issues came from not being able to collaborate well in the live setting, which would have helped if we were more familiar with each other and the content.