Valleri Foster- composition research

For this media class, I wanted to focus on using projections. When considering composition, so far, I have been thinking about how I want to present the projection rather than what will be projected.

In the initial stages of researching projection artworks/artists, I had come across a video of Ryoji Ikeda’s “The Transfinite” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omDK2Cm2mwo) and I was interested in how he chose to project not only on the wall but also on the floor. I liked how Ikeda used large projections compared to the sizes more commonly seen in classrooms. I quite like how the height of the video makes the people watching it look as if they are apart of it instead of an audience and his work in general made me more conscious about the lack of limitations that come with using a projector.

I then watched Y-3’s Spring 2013 runway show in New York Fashion Week (http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/y-3s-new-york-fashion-week-runway-projections-were-a-colorful-triangulated-masterpiece). In the show, they had projected images onto pyramid shapes that pushed the projections to another level and dimension. This led me to look at others who had projected onto non-flat surfaces, such as Katja Loher. The video sculpture artist does something similar in her piece “Video Planets” (http://katjaloher.com/videoplanets.htm), where she has projected videos onto floating chloroprene balloons. Also, her work “Bubbles” (http://katjaloher.com/bubbles.htm) pointed out the opposite to that of Ikeda’s, as she made me consider the potential smallness of a projection (although Bubbles does not use projections). However, Loher’s projections still managed to compliment the spherical shape of the balloons.

I then came across Dev Harlan and Olek’s “Suffolk Deluxe Electric Bike” (http://vimeo.com/19817933). Because the bike was a single colour and its shape simplified, the projection was able to alter the look of the bike. The crochet pattern projections combined with the plain silhouette of the bike made the lines and shapes melt and created the slight illusion of a new form.

“Lit Tree” by art duo Kimchi and Chips (http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/communicate-with-a-potted-plant-using-projected-light) projected onto trees to produce a light pattern that has a sci-fi-outer space look. I was particularly interested in this piece because of the way the artists had used the trees to make the projections more abstract. I found this video to be the most interesting because of the distorting nature that occurred to the projection from the leaves.

However most, if not all, the artworks above had projections that were intended and planned to be somewhat “synced” or complimentary to the “canvas”. One idea I would like to create is more similar to that of Lit Tree and Suffolk Deluxe Electric Bike where the use of a textured and/or an unconventional canvas would distort a projection while still being interactive to an audience like Ikeda’s mentioned work. I thought about projecting onto balloons of different shapes and colours, asking for audience participation as they throw darts to pop the balloons and reveal the true image. The image/video would (hopefully) be distorted enough that people could not tell what it was unless the balloons were popped.

Another idea I had would be to project into a dollhouse. Like Loher’s Bubbles, I thought it would be interesting to use the insides of a dollhouse as a canvas due to its smaller size. Based off a song by Melanie Martinez titled Dollhouse, I also like the concept of dollhouses being the example of a perfect life. So there could be the projections of different people in different rooms and situations around the dollhouse to either emphasize the “perfect” life or contradict it.