I've found the past few weeks really difficult to concentrate and to make much progress towards EOY unfortunately (a combination of personal life stresses, medication brain fog and post-assignment crash, woohoo!), hence the lack of regular blog updates recently. In terms of what's been happening studio-wise, I've had space for EOY confirmed and know what I will be putting forward for some of it at least, which I'm excited about. Following the group exhibition last year, I'll likely put forward my kaikomako prints are part of EOY and feel good about having resolved the questions I had around scale etc. I have also been continuing to create point cloud works in RealityCapture and Blender from the recent stay on Rangitoto island, and am trying to figure out how to make use of them in a way that does them justice. At the very least, I've figured out how to streamline this process as much as possible, which has sped up worktime a lot - it's something.
Initially I had hoped to work the individual point cloud sequences together to form a longer moving image sequence, but the more I work with them the more I feel like each could happily play by themselves; they definitely don't all need to be included in the process, and they feel detailed and strange enough to stand on their own potentially... Still, I'm continuing to create small recordings of each for now to piece together and I'll continue testing them both individually and together. It occurred to me that there is also the possibility to have them displayed as separate works (i.e. on individual screens), but then the question is why and to what effect, etc. etc...
Of the sources for each, many are from sections of rock formations (1/2 meter to 2 meters approximately in size), however some are from small patches of lichen, mosses, and lava flow patterns (approximately 30 x 30 cm if not smaller). While the detail and origin of the larger works is visible, I feel like the smaller, lichen-focused sequences work slightly better. I like the ambiguity in them - there is more uncertainty around their scale and origin, and their point clouds feel like they could be of small, observed subjects, distant galaxies or vast indistinct landscapes, which I think plays with the main themes I want to explore around much of this well...
Below are a few stills from these pieces at a distance (still images don't really do them justice, hence my interest in continuing to find a way to make the moving image idea work):
Unfortunately, due to some of the Yr 3s works being installed in the projection room darkspace I haven't been able to test out projection of the point clouds in there, but I did manage to try things out in my studio space and at home (the latter gave me some control over blocking out light better). While I like the immersive scale of the projection, I don't feel like they work as well as they do on screen - the screen contains the point clouds better (the framing provides a sense of structure to them that I think the projection lacks), there is some detail lost in the projection due to the light washing things out, and the colour saturation is more difficult to maintain. (I did retest some other footage of the more object-like orchid and cave sequences I have though - those can stand on their own as projected works, which is good to know). In saying that, I've only been projecting onto large wall spaces - if I were to project onto a smaller ground (from behind a stretch piece of translucent fabric for example) with something surrounding it to control excess light, perhaps that would work better... something to test this week. (See Songsataya's Mnemosyne and Sriwhana Spong's Now Spectral, Now Animal installation at AAG for reference).
Around all this, I still feel like there needs to be a narrative, soundtrack or some other piece to these moving image works that unites things together - I think this is where I'm really struggling (not helped by the fact that I haven't been able to write!). In discussion with Glen prior to study-week, we identified that there are some nebulous and rich concepts at work here that link together; I just have to figure out how to pull them together... (I'm also conscious as someone with some perfectionistic tendencies, the fear of doing something badly often gets in the way of me doing the thing, which could be at play here to a degree. But most things worth doing are worth doing badly, and no one's going to catch the crayfish for me are they).
In a smaller test of things, I've looked into printing some of the LiDAR textures at a large scale with the possibility of creating larger prints of their abstracted patterns, however due to their file sizes this wouldn't be possible without vectorising them first. As this isn't a priority right now, I haven't taken this experiment further than idea stage for now, but it's something I can revisit in future...
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