Tears for Colors.
2011 | installation, interactive device, iamas graduate work
“This is a story involving Santa Claus. I wanted to physically reproduce the idea behind this animation.”
There is something enchanting about the physicality that objects have: in addition to their texture and feeling in the hand, there is the sense that something real exists there, confirmed by your touch. Looking back on my past work, I found this to be true even when my digital works were reproduced with paper and ink: there was something physically different from their solely digital form.
This installation explores that idea of physicality. Video footage as a form of expression moves in a temporal fashion, so making an animation a physical object is inherently constrained by the fact that the display is adjusting light, something that cannot be reproduced outside of the boundaries of a video frame. However, building on top of these works with the addition of the same inks used in print production allows me to replicate the animation in physical form.
When viewers watch the animation, the three LED displays begin emitting flows of cyan, magenta, and yellow ink, leaving trails behind.
My goal was mining these animations to leave behind something physical. The rhythm and flow of the ink expresses that idea and emotion.
As time passes, the flowing ink hardens in place. Based on viewers’ chance interactions with the display apparatus, this leaves a random, layered shape behind.
This detritus is a testament to the project — that video frames, which appear and disappear, disappear and then appear, have successfully been taken out of their context and reconfigured as a physical form. The trails, a kind of support medium like that used in painting, at the same time become tears symbolizing the striving for an idealized physical form.
IAMAS 2011 Graduation Exhibition
February 17 – 20, 2011
Softopia Japan / Ogaki, Gifu, JAPAN
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/exhibit11/
