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Joanie Lemercier and Juliette Bibasse’s talk gave insight into the ways that digital and immersive art can be mobilized toward social action, and can amplify activist work. I found the most compelling segment to be around the 6:30-minute mark, where Juliette talks about the confluence between personal, aesthetic, and visual crises, and the responsibility in the way we use technology to “ask ourselves what type of imaginaries we want to propose to the audience.” This question pushes an aesthetic question toward one of future-building, asking if there are ways “to bring life, to bring nature, to bring water, to bring the Light Of The Sun… to make those imaginaries as desirable as the mad and dead landscapes.” This calls on visual artists to imagine hopeful futures, potential realities less oppressive than the present. 

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Pippilotti Rist @ Luhring Augustine

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Pippilotti Rist @ Hauser & Wirth

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@imimothq #vezér

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@imimothq #vezér

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A few things stood out to me about Visualist, namely, some of the focus on light and light-related art as a means of constructing new, alternate, or super-imposed realities and the exploration of light’s core emotional frequencies. At one point, Joanie Lemercier explains, “if reality is light then by controlling the projection on the light you can almost manipulate reality…You can open the world you can make something disappear or reappear you can almost like...completely change how people see the world around them.” For me, the work shown that expanded beyond the ‘rectangular’ screen or projection was often the most compelling – light sculptures that move or remain static, projection onto translucent materials or water/mist/fog, or those that illuminate unique architectural spaces in sequence. Nearer to the end of the film, subsequent to another artist’s warning that it is easy to get lost in the forms and gadgets and lose sight of concept, Zach Liebermann posed a few questions, “Exploring, playing with these things, manipulating them pushing them trying to figure out where the boundaries are and actually...you know really thinking critically about what does it mean what do these things mean what to they imply and and how can we use them for non commercial weird things.” At times, I have grappled with means of constructing the conceptual narrative of projects while quickly adopting new digital tools and processes in the IMA program – and I want to think about ways to slow down some of these processes, engage critically with the tools and build upon the theoretical underpinning of the work. 

Some artists referenced or featured in the documentary whose work I’d like to research and read/see more about include:

Herman Kolgen, 1024 Architecture, Alex Augier, Robert Henke, Miryam Bleau, Ali M. Demirel, Coldcut, Hans Walter Muller, Pablo Valbuena, Daniel Canogar, Daito Manabe, Marta Verde, Albă G. Corral, Anna Diaz/Hamill Industries

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'I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.' Louise Bourgeois (quoted in Kellein 2006, p.16.)

Research Study the artist's life and style for inspiration.

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider the Mistress and the Tangerine (full film available on youtube)

Louise Bourgeois – Art to Read Series (book link – I had bought this one at Mass MoCA a while back)

Articles:

A Dangerous Method – Artforum

Spiraling into Louise Bourgeois's Inner Realm - Galerie

Texts - Louise Bourgeois: the return of the repressed - Exhibiciones | Fundación PROA

Louise Bourgeois, recognizing the self the artist's way, with Jason Smith | Art World Women

Bio from Tate

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Concept & Mood Board Create a simple concept for your installation & make a mood board for visual inspiration

Concept Ideas:

Project different Louise Bourgeois works on to a miniature scene set up on the desk in my small home office/studio space, using found objects from the space, and referencing some of the architectures of Bourgeois’ works and the aesthetic of her home/studio space

Emerging perhaps in part from my background in social work and past job providing counseling to young children living with parental illness, I want to work to understand and explore Bourgeois’ reflection of trauma and repressed childhood memories in her work

Group series of works thematically and juxtapose different forms

Mood Board Pinterest Including LB Visual references: Link

Mapping & Content: Choose 2D or 3D mapping and create content related to your choice.

2D mapping, with some additional exploration of using the projector as a light source to illuminate existing objects/structures

Content: paintings/drawings/sculptures from Louise Bourgeois’ body of work, as well as small sculptural elements that reference her work (wire recreation of her Maman spider sculpture, placement of clay carving tools to cast shadow mimicking Personages sculpture, books stacked to recall  Memling Dawn, small stone fire pit hanging wire to create space for projection of suspended sculptures, small toy chairs from my own childhood lit red to recall her work with C-project / Cells / Red Room, small stone fire pit to represent Nature Study – Velvet Eyes)

Equipment List and briefly explain the equipment you'll use, including your projector choice.

Vamvo 12400 (far from the most high quality projector, but this is the one I have at home at the moment)

Step ladder for stabilizing projector

Macbook Pro with MadMapper

Desktop surface in my home office/studio to setup scene

Found materials from home office/studio to create scene:

Newspaper collage box

Glass-domed display case

Spider bent out of black wire

Mini dollhouse chairs

Stone mini firepit

Mini canvas

Antique wooden box sewing set

Black hanging wire

Red/gold encyclopedia stack

Tools for clay sculpting and wooden sculptural toy base

Paper bag

Sunset lamp for underdesk illumination

Reflection

Representing the work of an artist like Louise Bourgeois, even in such a small way, is a massive task, given the extent of her body of work and the longevity of her artistic life. I think any number of pieces that I settled on, even if I had been able to project 100 works, would have felt minuscule and never close to fully representative of all that Bourgeois created. Between watching the documentary, The Spider the Mistress and the Tangerine and collecting and projecting imagery, I do feel like I've spent more time with her work and have more context for the pieces of hers I've seen in person at Mass MoCA, Storm King, and Dia Beacon over the years.

Practically/technically, I had some challenges with the fragility of the environment once the projector was set up, having to reset or adjust masks if objects shifted, etc. That made tinkering with the setup on the desk feel hard, and I found myself stuck at one point, not thrilled with the initial balance but not wanting to move things around and re-mask. I eventually did make changes to the physical environment, and am glad I did - even having to go through and re-arrange elements in MadMapper. There was a lot of testing, doing and undoing, to understand what kind of surfaces do and do not work well for representing images/light.

Representing or curating another artist's work in a way where they cannot consent and be involved in the process, especially with an artist who was often so protective of where and how her work was shown, certainly impacted the choices I made creatively, wanting to be sensitive to the original work and its varied contexts. Having watched the documentary mentioned above relatively recently, I found myself recalling Bourgeois' voice throughout the process.

Documenting projection work is also tricky, but it was nice to have the piece up for a while at home so that I could try different angles and lighting situations, etc. Projector quality is also something I'm thinking more about now, potentially wanting to invest in a higher quality projector for use in contexts like this and beyond.

Working through this project, I started to feel my own aesthetics emerging in projection, and in crafting balance in a scene, editing what to include and what not to include when there is so much to reference and still being able to get a sense of the thematics of a work.

Lastly, completing this project while having COVID was certainly its own challenge, given my fluctuating energy levels and body/brain temperatures, but it was a good exercise in breaking creative work down into discrete tasks and production planning.

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Documentation of in-class pyramid projection exercise w/ Magdalena, AJ, and Yaching

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Watching the Gabe BC artist talk did color a lot of the works in a new light – giving insight into the process behind them and perhaps making their mechanisms more accessible, which starts a different conversation than one solely surrounding aesthetics and operation. At one juncture in the video, Gabe BC talks about shooting elements of video pieces separately to the same ‘soundtrack’ where people in different shooting sessions would respond emotionally to cues in the soundtracked, later synced to look like they were in the same place at the same time. Something about that small process detail, makes the video pieces so much more interesting to me, understanding that they are a composite, a collage, a marrying of moments. 

In describing another piece and talking about the extent to which the ‘prompting’ for the AI pieces is its own process of prompting/refining/upscaling/editing, BC talks about wanting the AI generated images to have the same specific visual language of his non-AI pieces. This escapes the ‘press a button’ problematic of AI art generation, exploring the intense co-creation BC is doing with the AI models to craft outcomes that are visually compelling to him. In a branch of that same conversation, BC responded to a question about his choice to not use photos of real people in the nicho boxes, and explained “anybody you put in here thats real, instantly brings like a meaning to it that’s different in a weird way like I think if you're elevating someone to a saint that's a real person it’s like, who is that person, what’s their background, why did they do that… and there's something interesting to me about them being false Saints, none of them are real, they're all like computer code they're all generated and they're kind of like collage.” 

In response to the interactive piece, BC talks about the images being “buried” in the system, discoverable by changes in physical placement, in relationship to the screen/computer system. In the physical space, my mind only tracked left to right motion as influencing the images on-screen, not proximity to and from the screen. Conceptualizing the space in front of a screen as a dimensional field of interactivity, perhaps then, makes us consider the viewer’s positionality as a means of uncovering, of forging a world between dimensions, and of inscribing meaning in relation to the screen, to the piece, to the artist and to AI personages. 

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Between the flooding and a trip out of the city, I was not able to visit Moma between classes, but I had seen the Refik Anadol piece earlier this year, so I will share a few thoughts about it here. Anadol’s Unsupervised, which MoMA describes as a “a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art” is a complex machine-learning model that is trained on the MoMA collection that also fluctuates visually based on differences in “light, movement, acoustics, and the weather outside.” Though I didn’t necessarily find the ‘big screen’ form compelling, the motion and movement of the piece stands out more to me than other artworks I have seen that are either AI-generated or incorporate or rely on AI technology. I am drawn to art that processes or re-conceptualizes memories, and that is definitely felt here, even if fed through algorithms as opposed to other creative processes. Anadol explains, of the piece, “I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future, and to make the invisible visible.” Maybe too, it starts to talk about the ways in which all art is intertextual and derivative to some extent, an index of other art pieces, inputs, memories, experiences, filtered through the artist’s brain and hand. Here though, the machine-learning model walks alongside the artist’s intention, much like any other medium (even a paint-brush-stroke) might and “reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come.” 

(quotes from: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535)

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Projection Mapping Startup Workflow

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Gabe BC Purgatory Exhibition @ C24 Gallery 9/22 Visit

Purgatory questions human-computer interaction, relying heavily on rhetorics of artificial intelligence, and our relationships to the images that AI can generate. The press release for the show, on C24’s website states several questions about AI underpinning the work, namely: “Where is this going? How will this ability be used, and by whom? How do we know anymore what is real and what is machine generated? And what will be the legacy of these new capabilities?” 

The three pieces that stood out the most to me: Vigil (2023), Oracle (2023), and Relic (2022); are separated from the other works in that they did not feature photos/videos of people. Oracle is a generative language machine that iterates “life advice” every time the handle is pulled, mimicking the motion of a slot machine and outputting a tweet-like sentence. The language system was built on 50,000 quotes from varied historical sources, and plays at the “dopamine release” (and perhaps the algorithmic propensity for addiction) that binds gambling and social media. Relic also reminds us of the hand-device attachment in the present digital era, sanctifying and preserving our data footprints, a take on religious relics that were “holy objects or pieces of a saint’s body preserved to represent the connection between the holy and the human.” Lastly, Vigil, re-imagines the setting where church candles sit in vigil, here with flickering images on small screens attached to microcontrollers in a tiered system. The screens move between different AI generated icons informed by Gabe BC’s own drawings, blurring the line between “religious, cultural, and technological symbols,” a “survey of humanity” situated somewhere between “Paleolithic cave paintings and animated gifs.” Perhaps I am drawn to these three specifically because they do not incorporate photo-realistic images, a trend in AI-generated art and art about AI-image generation that feels very present and all encompassing in this cultural discourse. I’m curious about how they all operate technically (including the others that I did not detail here) – at first glance I saw a few Arduinos or other microcontrollers behind the small-square-screen-based works. Also interested in understanding more about just how ‘generative’ the AI-involved works are – if they are working from a pre-determined set of outcomes or from an endless and ever-changing variables, and what the narrative potential may be for either possibility.  

(https://www.c24gallery.com/purgatory-and-conflicted)

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In-Class Projection 2D Test Assignment