CPSC-334/installation-art at main · risxyang/CPSC-334
Someone on my twitter feed last week pointed out how there are only 2 months left until 2022. This kind of spooked me– possibly because I'm set to graduate at the end of next year, and so next year has always felt forever away. It's also getting colder outside and darker a lot earlier, so it's hard to ignore the feeling that time is progressing, and things are happening despite our (in)ability to process things happening, which I think is the general vibe right now. So I felt like the appropriate thing to do with my anxiety was put it in an art installation.
During October Recess, I spent some much-needed time outside. The sun sets pretty early now, and I always love seeing the way light falls on things at this late hour.
This kind of light lasts very briefly, maybe less than half an hour, and I tend to take a photo whenever I catch it. A bit before I took these pics, I saw a film at a screening for my Animation class called Traveling Light (by Jane Aaron, made in 1985). The film animates light, exploring its materiality, giving it a playful, personified quality as it travels across various objects in a home. It's a short film, at < 2 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmHtgO7lfU
I wanted to make something that has a different vibe than Aaron's film, influenced by my current state of mind and my desire to just suspend time for a bit, to be able to breathe and catch up with life, or to sit with something beautiful and hope it stays for a while.
Going into this project, I also wanted to be more ambitious with the aesthetics of my digital visual output, and I wanted to spend more time on the design of my enclosure, working towards a more solid build quality. I wanted to dedicate time to learning to use CEID resources, so I could go on to be more ambitious with the physical side of my projects now and in the future.
I spent a lot of time addressing visuals first, building on my knowledge of Processing that I had acquired in the previous two modules. As opposed to the flat, 2D images I was generating before, this time I wanted to experiment with constructing the illusion of three dimensional space. I also wanted to try out Processing's inbuilt image blend mode and masking features.
I started with the interesting-lighting photos I had taken recently, and used another image I had taken for a mask— it's of some sunlight through a tree on campus, and is pretty texture rich.