Art: (b)Logos: Installing the Infinite

I am bit late on posting about it now, but last thursday I loaded up my car to install my interactive projection piece Dissolvation. (If context eludes you, you can catch up by going to my first post about the project.) I'm super excited about all the work in the show. There are a ton of really innovative, captivating installations and projects, including an immersive cosmological diagram that takes up half the gallery, line drawings created by mouse tracking software following the artist's day job activities as a photo editor (which give me big apophatic goosebumps all over in the sort of "why didn't I think of this first!?" sort of way), life-size cardboard ejector seats halted from hurtling into a projection wall by bungee cords and chain links, and video projection onto a relief black hole (created by a friend of mine, Gianluca Bianchino, who I'm very happy to get to show with).

During my test installation at home, you may recall I had to rig up a makeshift armature to affix the masonite boards to in order to get my project to fit on my wall. As if to scream that everything indeed happens for a reason, it was a VERY good thing I had that experience...

As I showed up at the gallery, I was greeted by a slight surprise:
Due to a typographical error and honest misunderstanding, the wall allocated to me turned out to be half the size I expected, and a good foot and a half smaller than the width of my project! As I racked my brain for a solution, the only thing the curator could offer me were some extra planks of wood leaned up in her office (...sounding familiar?)

So I began reconstructing - almost exactly as I did in my home - an armature that would hold my project and affix to the wall, extending its holding capacity to the necessary size! I have to thank the curator, Jeanne Brasile, for being extremely accommodating and helpful as we sorted out the mixup and worked for the solution.

a couple beams across to extend the width

adding the circle components

and finally the central mandala gallery form

After a few innovative hours, I was caught back up to the starting line and was able to begin installing the projector, computer, and camera, all which thankfully went off without a hitch.

Then to begin my ritual of aligning the projection and finding the crop points in the video capture (with some much appreciated help from one of the gallery assistants)

And we were soon ready to go!

The piece actually ends up being site responsive in yet another way I hadn't foreseen. Depending on the ambient light in the room, the colors of the projection alter. As the sun began to set, the colors became darker and bluer, and I expect when the gallery is lit for the colors to become slightly more natural, and with whiter highlights more of the time.

This project holds a lot of potential for performance too. One interesting discovery was that the delayed capture holds a memory of any light shone on the projection surface. For example, this shot below is from about 15 seconds after my camera had flashed its red autofocus light at the subject (The red light is no longer shining at the moment this photo was taken)

The possibilities for light painting are intriguing...

It will also be very interesting to see how the project behaves over the month and a half it will live at the gallery, constantly compiling and dissolving video footage. My suspicion is that each day when the projection gets turned off it will essentially reset the coloring of the projection, allowing it not to get too muddled. Who knows, maybe something unforeseen, strange and beautiful will happen!