show-and-tell tuesday 4/20
it's still. it moves. 6
e32 @ 5c cultural center lounge
20 april 2010
6:30ish to 10ish
traffic cone transcending traffic
a traffic cone which is part of a landscape with vehicles driving through it (a traffic cone's natural habitat) is continually painted. the traffic cone is vibrant, saturated orange, while the rest of the landscape is murky and dim. the transitory cars are also translucent, making the brevity of their appearance in the scene a counterpoint to the stable constant of the traffic cone. "traffic cone transcending traffic" is a new media installation in progress, incorporating computer-composited dynamic video which is projected onto a static painting of the scene.
so, how does the traffic cone transcend traffic? in addition to being a stronger part of the piece due to its vibrant color and central position, it is also visible even when a car passes in between the cone and the viewer - the car becomes invisible where the cone appears. furthermore, while individual vehicles appear for a mere instant, multiple layers of the traffic cone being painted (memorialized) are shown simultaneously. the surface onto which the dynamic video is projected is a painting; the traffic cone is painted orange. the traffic is not painted at all (although the road on which the traffic travels and the barricade and other constant elements of the landscape are). the traffic cone therefore transcends the traffic by its physical reproduction, by its prominence in the composition, by its ability to make portions of vehicles disappear in order to let it remain visible, by its constant presence in the piece, and by the number of layers it occupies in the projected computer-composited digital video element of the piece.
in a single piece, "traffic cone transcending traffic" explores a few themes which are often on my mind - the nature (and definition) of painting, the evolution of painting, the use of technology in order to expand the dynamic range of color, the concept of painting as a time-based rather than a static medium, and the appreciation of traffic cones as an aesthetic practice. "traffic cone transcending traffic" is related to "square of cones," "cone time," and "eight views of a traffic cone, eight times removed (http://www.flickr.
videoing of the cone occurred on the 8th and 9th of april, 2010. painting (and videoing) the cone layers hasn't begun yet, nor have editing and programming. the final installation will be variable in size and the final painting will be completed on-site when the piece is to be shown. i will likely create a smaller version in my studio as well.
"traffic cone transcending traffic"
working on a new piece. will describe another day. related to "cone time" (http://eswip.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/cone-time/) and "eight views of a traffic cone, eight times removed" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chashama/4132152226/in/set-72157622745970459/,
http://eriksanner.com/random/2009/how_to_enjoy_traffic_cones/proposals/090824_eight_views.pdf). as much about "place" and "context" as time - brings together many of the things important to me - what painting is, evolution of painting, painting as a time-based medium, and aesthetic appreciation of traffic cones - all in one piece. excited to have started it.
twenty-five hours of artmaking
current state of the first improvisation (in yellow, blue and orange). blurry picture taken with my camera phone. that's an oil painting on canvas (four feet high by five feet wide) on the wall. below it you can see my palette on a chair, to the right is the laptop showing the photoshop "painting" which is being projected onto the oil painting. you can't see the projector and video camera, both to the right of the computer. think the first part of making this improvisation (the oil painting and the photoshop "painting") will be complete in a few days. editing and programming the digital projected element will probably take a couple of weeks after that. but i'm getting to the point where i can more or less envision what it's going to look like, at this point it's more about doing the work than figuring out what to do. there's still some of that, but way less than at the beginning, with the blank canvas and the blank screen. inevitably becoming less and less of an improvisation the more time i spend working on it.
this feels paradoxical and slightly unnerving - the whole reason i wanted to make improvisations is because i want to explore while i'm painting, i don't want to already know what a piece will look like - but there's no escaping, eventually we know what it is becoming. the perverse aspect of imagination - the more real it becomes, the more difficult it is to imagine the infite alternatives which do not exist. the plastic arts born of our minds become the concrete arts of the real world.
this feels paradoxical and slightly unnerving - the whole reason i wanted to make improvisations is because i want to explore while i'm painting, i don't want to already know what a piece will look like - but there's no escaping, eventually we know what it is becoming. the perverse aspect of imagination - the more real it becomes, the more difficult it is to imagine the infite alternatives which do not exist. the plastic arts born of our minds become the concrete arts of the real world.
cone time
idea for a piece:
traffic cones seem to embody the stillness of a buddha in an always-changing world. of course the cones themselves are moved around, mangled, and decay, but for the most part our daily experience of traffic cones is witnessing swiftly-moving traffic and clouds and rain while the traffic cone is a constant presence in a fixed location.
cone time will be a new media installation. i will record video (or time-lapse photograph) a single cone (or arrangement of cones) in a landscape (once or multiple times – there could be several different landscapes with traffic cones, or one landscape with [a] traffic cone[s]). i will make a painting (or paintings) of the same scene, emphasizing the bright orange of the traffic cone, with the other elements (e.g., street, sky) less-emphasized, less-saturated color (maybe even black-and-white). i will write software which projects two different moments of time of the video of the cone. one moment will just show the traffic cone. it will be frozen in time. perhaps somebody is walking by and has cast a shadow on the cone – the shadow will be static. every minute or so, another moment will appear, also frozen. the rest of the scene will show real time passing. if someone walks by, you will see them, or their feet, or their shadow. if a car drives by, you will see it. the clouds moving, the sunlight changing. but none of those things will affect the traffic cone, frozen in its own moment in time. utterly still and not experiencing (or exhibiting) the passage of time the same way other elements of the scene (the sky, the people, the traffic) do. the cone will show the stillness of cone time.
improvisations
have been spending many hours in the studio. haven't been blogging. these are related.
before i knew about (or cared about or loved) painting, i listened to music. (i played music too, but i think i was usually to nervous to love it. too many mistakes, no real interest in the practicing necessary to achieve good technique, too much criticism following predictable underwhelming results...) when i did begin to love painting, it was abstract art (kandinsky, rothko) that made the deepest impressions - the unfathomable mystery, not being able to comprehend what i was looking at, plus the simple encounter with "beauty" and "color" and "imagination." i began to equate abstract art with music - not trying to represent anything, both exist as purely aesthetic phenomena. (regardless of whether or not the artists were trying to communicate something, this is how i thought of the work, as little artificial universes constructed to confuse, baffle, overwhelm and excite people.)
the more i learned about painting, the more i wanted to paint. however, the more i learned about painting, the less original my own work seemed. and original or not, it seemed that only a very few people would ever care about my abstract paintings, no matter what. i tried (and have been trying, for quite some time) to somehow integrate my desire to make abstract paintings into conceptual projects, with mixed results, both in terms of my own satisfaction with this-is-something-i-want-to-be-doing, i can feel my art growing, and viewer response (this is interesting, this is beautiful, i like this, i understand this, i don't understand this, i'm glad i saw this, etc.). however, even when i have an open studio, and somebody loves an old abstract painting i did, i don't feel great about that. one of my goals is to utilize contemporary technology and techniques in my work. it is certainly more challenging to make a "new" painting with oil paint and a brush on canvas. regardless of whether or not i could meet that challenge, i want to find out what we can do with new ways of arranging colors. for several years, i have wanted to make some abstract paintings using new techniques. that is what i have finally begun to do. and that is why i haven't been blogging.
i used to have a computer which lived only in my studio. it died in september, and i haven't replaced it yet - my laptop now serves as my only machine, for video rendering, programming, blogging, email, etc. one defect of my laptop is that it doesn't like to run an internet browser if adobe photoshop is open - the browser will crash. since i've had a photoshop window open for over a week, i haven't blogged. (i can do some things on my phone or on other computers, but it takes longer, and other things i just can't do.) i think it could be a week or more before i want to close that photoshop window - hence this extra-long blog post, explaining what i'm up to these days. why am i keeping a photoshop window open? why don't i quit photoshop, do my internet stuff, then restart photoshop, as usual?
decided to do a series of improvisations. each one will integrate additive and subtractive color during the making, and result in a new media installation projecting "painting" onto a painting. began the first one (improvisation in yellow, blue and orange) on sunday, 21 march 2010. realizing there are so many ways to approach this, decided on a few methodological constraints, which makes me want to try other procedures in future pieces after this one is complete. for this initial piece, i decided:
- it would be a solo work (in the future, hope to do some collaborations);
- it would utilize one projector (as opposed to multiple projectors);
- the projection would be onto a flat surface (no building out into space);
- i would use only photoshop on the computer (not illustrator, no video);
- i would "paint" all of the projected imagery using only the paintbrush tool in photoshop (no photographs, no insertion of existing visuals, no copy/paste, no undo, no filters, etc.; basically getting as close as i can to "painting" in the digital world);
- i would paint all of the physical imagery (no collage);
- i would try to match the size of the physical paintbrush with the photoshop paintbrush (originally intended to use only a #6 boar-bristle brush and a 3-pixel photoshop brush, but began wanting to do smaller detail work, necessitating a much smaller sable brush and a 1-pixel photoshop brush);
- i would work on the physical painting or the projected "painting" whenever i felt inclined to = i'm not keeping track of time, i'm not working for strictly thirty minutes on the digital element and then painting for the next thirty minutes, i might spend two hours painting followed by forty-five minutes of "painting" in photoshop).
the first real hiccup i noticed is that the position of the video camera and the position of the projector means that significant glare from the projection onto wet paint is being recorded. in one future improvision, that won't be a problem - i'll do the physical painting first, then the projection, which will let me wait until the painting is dry. however, it might also be possible to project from a higher angle, that might eliminate all (or much) of the glare.
however, at present, i don't want to touch the setup. right now, everything is lined up - the projector isn't moving, the tripod for the video camera is taped down, and the photoshop window is open on the monitor so that the edges of the canvas line up exactly with the digital image. so that's what i'm working on and that's whay i haven't been blogging. i want to keep that photoshop window lined up with the canvas, while i'm painting and "painting," until the piece is done. i anticipated spending only maybe eight hours or so painting and "painting," but i realized not too long after starting that what i want to do will take a lot longer - so i'm going to keep working on it until i get it to where i want to be. i've been taking some documentation pictures, which i'll be able to post whenever it's done. the picture above was taken with my mobile phone, aimed at my pocket camera, which was time-lapse recording as i begin the piece a week ago. i wouldn't want to show the piece now even if i had another computer - i think i like where it's going to go eventually, but it just changed from getting worse and worse to getting better and better - i think...
before i knew about (or cared about or loved) painting, i listened to music. (i played music too, but i think i was usually to nervous to love it. too many mistakes, no real interest in the practicing necessary to achieve good technique, too much criticism following predictable underwhelming results...) when i did begin to love painting, it was abstract art (kandinsky, rothko) that made the deepest impressions - the unfathomable mystery, not being able to comprehend what i was looking at, plus the simple encounter with "beauty" and "color" and "imagination." i began to equate abstract art with music - not trying to represent anything, both exist as purely aesthetic phenomena. (regardless of whether or not the artists were trying to communicate something, this is how i thought of the work, as little artificial universes constructed to confuse, baffle, overwhelm and excite people.)
the more i learned about painting, the more i wanted to paint. however, the more i learned about painting, the less original my own work seemed. and original or not, it seemed that only a very few people would ever care about my abstract paintings, no matter what. i tried (and have been trying, for quite some time) to somehow integrate my desire to make abstract paintings into conceptual projects, with mixed results, both in terms of my own satisfaction with this-is-something-i-want-to-
i used to have a computer which lived only in my studio. it died in september, and i haven't replaced it yet - my laptop now serves as my only machine, for video rendering, programming, blogging, email, etc. one defect of my laptop is that it doesn't like to run an internet browser if adobe photoshop is open - the browser will crash. since i've had a photoshop window open for over a week, i haven't blogged. (i can do some things on my phone or on other computers, but it takes longer, and other things i just can't do.) i think it could be a week or more before i want to close that photoshop window - hence this extra-long blog post, explaining what i'm up to these days. why am i keeping a photoshop window open? why don't i quit photoshop, do my internet stuff, then restart photoshop, as usual?
decided to do a series of improvisations. each one will integrate additive and subtractive color during the making, and result in a new media installation projecting "painting" onto a painting. began the first one (improvisation in yellow, blue and orange) on sunday, 21 march 2010. realizing there are so many ways to approach this, decided on a few methodological constraints, which makes me want to try other procedures in future pieces after this one is complete. for this initial piece, i decided:
- it would be a solo work (in the future, hope to do some collaborations);
- it would utilize one projector (as opposed to multiple projectors);
- the projection would be onto a flat surface (no building out into space);
- i would use only photoshop on the computer (not illustrator, no video);
- i would "paint" all of the projected imagery using only the paintbrush tool in photoshop (no photographs, no insertion of existing visuals, no copy/paste, no undo, no filters, etc.; basically getting as close as i can to "painting" in the digital world);
- i would paint all of the physical imagery (no collage);
- i would try to match the size of the physical paintbrush with the photoshop paintbrush (originally intended to use only a #6 boar-bristle brush and a 3-pixel photoshop brush, but began wanting to do smaller detail work, necessitating a much smaller sable brush and a 1-pixel photoshop brush);
- i would work on the physical painting or the projected "painting" whenever i felt inclined to = i'm not keeping track of time, i'm not working for strictly thirty minutes on the digital element and then painting for the next thirty minutes, i might spend two hours painting followed by forty-five minutes of "painting" in photoshop).
the first real hiccup i noticed is that the position of the video camera and the position of the projector means that significant glare from the projection onto wet paint is being recorded. in one future improvision, that won't be a problem - i'll do the physical painting first, then the projection, which will let me wait until the painting is dry. however, it might also be possible to project from a higher angle, that might eliminate all (or much) of the glare.
however, at present, i don't want to touch the setup. right now, everything is lined up - the projector isn't moving, the tripod for the video camera is taped down, and the photoshop window is open on the monitor so that the edges of the canvas line up exactly with the digital image. so that's what i'm working on and that's whay i haven't been blogging. i want to keep that photoshop window lined up with the canvas, while i'm painting and "painting," until the piece is done. i anticipated spending only maybe eight hours or so painting and "painting," but i realized not too long after starting that what i want to do will take a lot longer - so i'm going to keep working on it until i get it to where i want to be. i've been taking some documentation pictures, which i'll be able to post whenever it's done. the picture above was taken with my mobile phone, aimed at my pocket camera, which was time-lapse recording as i begin the piece a week ago. i wouldn't want to show the piece now even if i had another computer - i think i like where it's going to go eventually, but it just changed from getting worse and worse to getting better and better - i think...
eraser-burn
liz and i have been talking and thinking a bit about our collaboration. yesterday i spent some time on it, here's the result.
http://eriksanner.com/random/2010/liz_keithline/eraser-burn_possibility_100319.pdf
project tracking
after creating and subsequently revising that what-i'm-working-on document (http://eriksanner.com/random/
ultimately, though, i view it as a project tracking tool, just giving me an overview of some of the things i want to be working on.
erik sanner works in process
erik sanner works in process
editing (with sound!)
most of my work is visual, no audio. most of the video clips i edit and either include in work or post online are silent. but life mapping involved story telling - so i find myself in the unusual position editing sound along with the video. actually i'm starting with the sound - i have a pretty clear idea in my head of how i want the video to flow, i'm fairly confident i can synchronize it to match the audio if i can get the audio to do what i want. just want a few snippets, maybe three minutes out of eight hours of footage, but to get those bits, you have to sift through the entire thing - you can't zoom through the audio the way you can fast forward through visuals (or i can't anyway) - so i've been spending a lot of time recently editing. more time than i'd usually spend on a short documentation clip like this. but enjoying it - different is good, sharing work is what it's for, being able to show somebody what we did and how we did it is a necessary step in the completion of a project even though the art has been made and shown.
how we enjoyed traffic cones
not so many weeks ago was the absolute deadline to turn in the final report for my 2009 manhattan community arts fund grant. while filling out the form (http://www.lmcc.net/uploads/
http://eriksanner.com/random/
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