A Look Back Above, Below, and at all the Nothing in Between.

Last month, I completed a commissioned new media installation for Trinity United Church in NJ entitled As Above, So Below. So, below are some installation shots! 

Installation

(I know I have some more shots and videos somewhere that I'll try to edit in at some later point when I get them organized.) [Edit: done and done!] The project integrates viewers in real time into the projected imagery and randomly recomposes itself every 50 minutes. Click the link above to dive down a rabbit hole full of more information on the project's genesis (Biblical pun intended).

I had the great honor of not only exhibiting and holding an artist talk (in which I spoke about my search for a contemporary mysticism and how I'm specifically dealing with the Art/Faith intersection in my work), but I also hosted a Forum on Contemporary Issues of Art and Faith and a Contemplative Service centered around my work. 

Presentation

I was blown away by the amazing responses and depth of thought by of those who came to the Art and Faith talk. We discussed the historical rift between the church and the art world, and strategized about how we might as a church body begin to mend that rift by reacquainting ourselves with the true power of fine art. By understanding art not only as an aesthetic experience, but as an entire worldview made thoughtfully manifest, and by relearning how to read and engage with the language of art, we might be able to tap into it's power to broach difficult subjects and become a relational tool for connecting people to a spiritual force and to each other. Moreover, by church leaders and laity learning to see the world as an artist does - experimentally, self-critically, aware of their mediums, in constant growth and adaptation, seeking after their biggest questions - together we might learn to transform the world with the sublime power of deep Beauty (Chamad), doing the societal work of salvation (Sozo) as my friend theologian Russ Wills brilliantly figures it. We had great conversations about the nuances of functioning relationally in a hyper-connected, polymorphous, post-secular world, propelled by a proper embrace of art. If you want the detailed version, you'll have to come to my seminar at Drew in November!

Contemplation

I was blown even further away by the profound effect of the contemplative service later that week. I prepped the room with stations consisting of a piece of artwork, a chair, and a votive candle (and my interactive installation) and I invited congregants to follow meditation prompts - or not - and attempt to let what they experienced in the artwork open them to a new awareness of God and the space around them. Each prompt adapted traditional mystical strategies or contemporary philosophical phenomenologies. This ranged from mindfulness exercises to apophatic negation strategies, and contemplations of beings coming into Being, and more. All the prompts functioned as a response to the artwork they were focused on, but could also function devoid of artwork. In this way, the art becomes a conduit to seeing the world in a different way - a tool toward a true outlook of contemplation, but not a crutch to a mystical experience. After all, contemplation is learning to see, and should ultimately be an active, modular, versatile state of being, not just a deliberate moment of meditation. 

If you'd like to read the actual prompts themselves, you can link to the Meditation Prompts here. Good mystic that I am, I made sure to establish many rules and guidelines and then negate them all, allowing the Spirit to move as it will in the interstices. At the end we regrouped and discussed our experiences. That's like a rare delicacy to an artist - immediate, honest, discursive feedback, and the chance to help people unpack their time with your work without being prescriptive.

Setting up for the contemplative service - artwork at each station with a votive candle and a meditation prompt, and my installation at the far left end of the sanctuary.

some congregants beginning their contemplations

I was indeed pleased to watch the transformation that took place as people genuinely reconciled God and their often inhospitable phenomenological world-views. People spoke of noticing the complexity of space and having a sublime moment of awareness of their place in it, or noticing the way the work not only functioned internally but also in relationship to the space around it. They spoke of things not being as simple as they had expected, but yet being entirely interconnected and unified. They even spoke of thinking of God in ways they never had before. I was floored. I'd have gone home and called it a win right there. But it wasn't over.

What I didn't expect was for there to be such an immediate mending of the rift between them and the art itself. It was icing on the cake. At the end of the hour people with little to no exposure to fine art started reading and engaging with the work in ways I would have only expected after an MFA degree. Simply by giving people the freedom and the undistracted space to experience the work unapologetically, without fear of being wrong, and without the stigma of "you have to know what this art means," (presumably because it was psychologically replaced with the stigma "did you find God in it yet?" But that's a different can of worms...) they began to genuinely experience the work and all that it gathers (in the Heideggerian sense), and even connect that to the real world.

All in all, it was a fantastically rewarding experience, and very affirming for me. I was honored to have helped people negate their preconceptions and find God anew in the artistic, ambiguous space left in between the sacred and the secular.

Much On Which to Catch Up

Can a title end with a preposition?

...well anyway, I apologize that it's been a while since my last post, and that I've left a few loose ends hanging. This past month has been nightmarish. Just after a whirlwind of exhibitions, traveling, a move, a wedding, and many other "real life" occasions, my wife fell very ill (we're told it's very possible she was about 3 days away from death had we not gotten help when we did). She ended up needing major emergency surgery followed by 10 days in the hospital and a VERY long road to recovery. She's doing very well now, thank God, but the recovery process is a very time intensive uphill battle. Needless to say my attention has been usurped away from blogging for a bit...

I've been keeping as much of a foot in the art world as I can during this time, and I'm extremely thankful for a coincidental break in the action that has allowed me to devote my attention more fully to family right now. I will be trying to catch up on blogging soon, as there is much on which to catch up (and no preposition in sight to end on! ...wait a minute...): My recent installation and accompanying artist talk, discussion forum on Art and Faith, and special contemplative service, as well as 2 very exciting upcoming interviews about my work! Coming up in the fall are still my solo show at Andover Newton Theological School's Sarly Gallery, as well as the continuing ed. class on Art and Worship I will be teaching at Drew Theological School.

I'm looking forward to resuming some normality (not to mention studio hours that don't fall between midnight and the awakening of my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed two year old!). Thank you to those praying for my wife's health. We certainly feel it!

John D. Caputo writes about experience coming alive as experience at all when we reach a limit experience and confront the impossible. This, he says, is the basis for true religion. ...Let's just say things have seemed very religious of late! But that's the beauty of faith. It necessarily exists most when it seems it couldn't possibly, and carries us through to the very experiences that most motivate me as an artist and a human.

Upcoming Events at the Intersection of Art and Faith!

Sunday, Thursday, Saturday...

My recent endeavors coming to fruition

"As Above, So Below," 2014
TRINITY UNITED CHURCH
118 King George Rd, Warren, NJ

3 EVENTS NEXT WEEK:
As Artist of the Month at TUC, the church commissioned me to create an interactive, site specific, new media installation. With this I will be leading 3 exciting events this coming week. You can follow the links below to their respective Facebook Events pages, but more importantly come on out and join me for one or all of them!

1. Artist Talk and Reception
   This Sunday 7/20, Immediately following 10:30 am service (c. 11:30 am)
   I will be speaking about my installation and other work on display, as well as the evolution of my practice in light of the themes of art and faith. All are welcome to join me for the service prior to the talk as well. There will be food and drink (church folks are good about that...)


2. Discussion Forum on Contemporary Issues of Art and Faith
   Next Thursday 7/24, 7-9 pm
   I will be leading a presentation and space for open discussion about the role of art in a spiritual context, and strategies for its effective use within religious institutions.


3. Contemplative Service
   Next Saturday 7/26, 6-7 pm
   I will be facilitating a service of guided and free Contemplation/Meditation aided by my artwork. We will borrow from traditional mystical strategies as well as contemporary phenomenological thought to open ourselves to a new experience of the divine.

 

I hope you can make it out for these events (each at the church address provided above). They are all FREE and open to the public.

* I promise an intriguing set of events regardless of your spiritual leanings, but for my more theologically inquisitive friends, Trinity United Church is an Open and Affirming/More Light congregation (supportive of the LGBTQ community) that combines the Presbyterian and United Church of Christ denominations. It is known for its radical hospitality, inclusivity, and its history of supporting the arts. Every week they welcome guests by saying, "no matter who you are or where you are in life's journey, you are welcome here!"
And so you are.

Continue on to the final post on this project here

As Above So Below, Part II

Tomorrow I will be installing my commissioned projection piece for Trinity United Church, As Above So Below. (See the beginnings of it and more of the conceptual groundwork in my prior post, here).

I've been doing quite a bit of coding, translating my fantasies into Java in Processing, and it's just about all ready to go!

Basically it works like this: a Kinect sensor views the room. The code devides the room into 25 zones (by x y z location, cropped into circles [with the exception of 5 rectangular zones]), and masks those zones so that anything that falls within those given thresholds gets displayed, and anything else gets omitted. 

It then takes those 25 masked depth images (in real time), tints them a color, resizes, repositions, rotates, and then ultimately displays them in a space masked to fit to the real space of the choir loft ceiling when projected. The colors are somewhat transparent to allow for overlays and infinite other incidental color blends.

The position, size, rotation angle, and color of each overlaid image are all chosen at random, and every 50 minutes it resets, randomly reselecting a new configuration to replace the previous one. Since the piece is by nature interactive and dynamic, I wanted the composition itself to be in flux as well; something that cannot be grasped as a fixed absolute. That's absolutely a theological statement too. And should it land on a configuration that's not so aesthetically pleasing, there is grace:  a "minute of jubilee" (after the 49th minute, of course) in which all decisions are forgiven and the canvas is wiped clean to start again.

This will also create an ever changing ambiance in the choir loft chancel area. In dimmer light, the room will become engulfed in the stained-glass projection glow of the ever-changing, layered colors.

Here are some example images. The interaction is limited in these to me waving my hand at my desk, but it will become much more dynamic when the room is filled with people. Yet even with one person, the repetition and fragmentation of form gives what I think is a pleasing kaleidoscopic effect suitable for contemplation-in-motion.

Next to fit it to the space and then watch people interact with it!

Click here for the next post on this project

I Saw the Light

Last week See the Light opened at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts, for which my projection negation piece, UnKnowledge, had the distinction of adorning the title wall! As promised, Here are some of pictures of the opening. The show will be on view until 7/23/14, and you can track the beginning of this endeavor in my earlier 2 posts, here.

Me and my work

projection onto painting, calibrated so that they optically negate each other until the viewer interacts and reveals the painting with his shadow

Betsy Connors's transmission holograms 

I love watching kids interact with my projections!

Matthew 18:3

Museum Director Mim Fawcett unveiling the theme of next year's national juried show

Go check it out! This is a show worth seeing in person!

As Above, So Below, Part 1

[A quick note from the fuuuuuuture: if you'd like to follow the progress of this project from the beginning you're in the right place. If you're feeling impatient and you'd like to jump to the ending, you can do so here. Now then, enough anachronism. Where were we?)

Amid all the other stuff going on right now (install and an opening for a museum show, my son's second birthday, moving, and being in a wedding, all in the next week and a half!) I've also got this series of events coming up in July (see the third announcement here for more info), centered around a commissioned church installation.

The choir loft/chancel area has this fantastic sloped forced-perspective style ceiling that I thought would be lovely to project onto, so I will be creating an interactive projection piece called As Above, So Below, which will, in some form, transport the congregants onto that ceiling space. 

First, I began testing out some projection options, and then masking off the projection to anamorphically map to the ceiling space...

Trying to maximize throw distance without blinding whoever's preaching...

By drawing off the boundaries of the ceiling in illustrator and projecting black wherever the ceiling isn't, I was able to isolate the space for projection.

Here it is, the anamorphic projection with a grid to show "verticals" and "horizontals"...

...which actually look like this when laid flat, on account of the distortion from the angle of the ceiling and of the projector.

 My ultimate plan is to do something along the lines of using a Kinect sensor to project the silhouettes of the congregants into different overlapping positions on the ceiling, coalescing to reveal a stained glass like imagery, or perhaps in some places cutting away to reveal sky, or some other imagery. I tend to be pretty calculating with this sort of stuff, so I'm deliberately letting the imagery evolve as it goes, to see what kind of interesting stuff happens when I start overlaying transparencies and letting the images spill out as they please.

But in the mean time, I couldn't help myself...

Pretending that I'm James Turrell, if only for a moment! So satisfying! It really makes it hard to go back to thinking about imagery after immersing yourself in an endless array of colored light options!

Ok, where was I? Ah yes...

Mapped off the locations of the light fixtures and whatnot, so that I can design around them if need be

Taking note of the projector location (I'm a bit worried about that, but I've been told "put it wherever you need to!" I deliberately avoided the center aisle space (there are normally chairs arranged in rows like pews), but I worry about the line of sight for the people sitting behind the pedestal... here's hoping the payoff is worth the temporary inconvenience for them.

Some interesting conceptual things will end up happening because of the position of the kinect and the projection anamorphosis. For one, the Kinect will view people in front of the chancel area, but not in the chancel area. So, the spectators outside of the chancel area will be integrated into the area (inviting them up into the choir loft, sharing the space of the cross and blurring the line between sacred space and lay space), yet at the same time when one physically goes up there, their body will cease to be in the projection, and the image will become pixelated and distorted because of the severe ceiling angle. In away, this is the apophasis of the piece, as the closer you get to the divine representation, the more it falls apart and slips through your fingers. It's inviting and estranging at the same time.

In the same vein, the image will be created by the interactions of the lay people, not from the worship leaders. This de-centered socialization of the sacred space falls in line with my postmodern leanings towards a God that is found in all places, not just in the pious elite, and is revealed relationally.

This idea of "As above, so below" is apophatically postmodern as well, at once dualistic and non-dualistic. It can be read to imply that there is a split between the "above" and the "below," with a correlative relationship to each other (think Pauline Dualism). Or it can be read to imply that there is no split, that what we commonly thought to be "above" and "below" are actually one, not to be separated by distinction, beyond this recognition (think certain branches of kingdom theology). Its this ambiguity that I enjoy - the interplay between the "here" and the "there," and the disjunction/unification of the two that happens in the projection.

Next step is to translate that ceiling image mask to the imagery that will be revealed by the silhouettes, and then translate that all into Processing, which will control the whole interactive shindig! Ready, set, go!

...well, I was worried about the pedestal being too tall for people... I guess I don't have to worry about that any more! As I was transporting the pedestal back into my studio the top just popped right off in my hands! That shortens it a good 6 inches, anyway.

Follow this project to the next post about it here

Moving Towards the Light

This weekend I traveled up to Attleboro, MA to begin installing my piece for See the Light at the Attleboro Arts Museum. Left the house at 5 am for the 4 hour drive, and arrived just as the museum opened, and joined the director, a few other artists, gallery assistants, and volunteers in getting to work!

A feat of modern engineering, I managed to get a 48" diameter masonite circle, 18" square pedestal, projector, computers, painting materials, and hanging supplies all into my wife's Nissan Versa!

Carefully padded and strapped in, and leveled with MDF scraps underneath to make a flat surface

At last I arrived!

Excited to learn my piece has been designated for the Title wall of the show!

laying out my stuff

Got the circle hanging!

readying the projector across the way so that people can walk in front of it to get to the other side and thereby interact with the projection negation.

A brilliant curatorial move, setting up relationships between pieces

resizing the projection in order to mask it off and begin painting

My space was designated by a traffic cone, a la Erik Sanner!

how many identical images can we display at once??

Masking!

Screw Driver + Belt Loop = Side Holster Masking Tape Dispenser!

Masked!

Painted! With 20 minutes to spare on my 8 hr day!

All ready to go with the projection now!

After working until 5:30, the museum staff had about had enough, so it was time to call it a night. The interesting plot twist then came when I learned about the next day's plans...

I had originally planned to stay at a friend's house and come back to work on the projection in the morning. However, it quickly became apparent that the lighting in the gallery would not be set in place until Tuesday, and my piece depended on that lighting being set in order to function properly. On top of it, Saturday (the next day) was occupied by a massive street fair expo that draws 10,000 people and happens to be run by the museum staff, practically in their back yard! I would have had to arrive 4 hours early just to avoid the road blocks and get a parking spot (with a special permit and police dispensation!), and then be essentially in the museum alone as I worked with a piece I wouldn't really be able to do much with on account of the lighting...

Thinking better of this idea, the director and I hatched a plan for me to simply head back home for the weekend and come back on Tuesday as they figure out the lighting. And that's what I'll be doing! Heading up (at the crack of dawn once again) to work Tuesday, stay over with said friends that night, and then hang out until the opening on Wednesday night.

Which makes for quite a week! Add to those logistics my son's second birthday (today, Sunday), moving on Thursday after driving back from the opening (still packing! Ack!), 3 days on Long Island for a wedding next week, and then another installation the following weekend (that I'm still very much figuring out!) Should be quite a ride...

Regardless, this show is going to be fantastic! There's a ton of really amazing work, including holography, light sculpture, motorized fiber-optics, plenty of painting and photography, and other projection work!

I'm very excited! When next I post, you'll get to see the finished product and some shots of the opening! Wish me luck!