Mike and I have been continuing our progress with our series of video projections up at the Bronx Museum with Acconci studios.  We decided that some new, better footage was required, so we filmed a new series of objects with the intention of keeping it purely abstract instead of the human gestural moments that were too recognizable based on anatomy.  Some of the experiments are below.  The footage was than edited and multiplied to highlight certain aspects of the architecture of the corian structure.

Work in progress. Content for the Acconci Studio installation at Bronx Museum 2009-10.

Copyright Michael Kelberman and Angela Chen.

Deathstar Automata is a modular video “pod” that can be reconfigured and built as a simultaneous sculptural wall divider and multi-plane projection surface.  Its form and content is a physical manifestation of a branching recursion.  As a video sculpture it utilizes a geometrical shape as the means for creating modular yet singular mutli-plane projections. On the technical side, it uses Augmented Reality as the means for letting the camera know where to project the moving image.

color study

tree study in Maya (mad props to Nick Rubin for the assistance)

drawing. front elevation

drawing. side elevation

rendering: rhino/photoshop color study

Forgive me.  I sort of know where I’m going here and I sort of don’t.  It started off as a project with Adam Lassy using boxes and QR codes to implement Augmented Reality on top of the forms.  The idea started off as an exercise of redefining form which in turn would redefine function type thing, ie.  how you arranged the boxes would determine what would be projected upon them (ie. a lamp, or a dresser that would than function as one).  But now I’m off on some tangent and I’m not sure how or where it will end up.  I started off with the block which I played with and came up with the form you see here.  These blocks I wanted to be multiplied and stacked upon so it still has the modularity aspect but I was playing with the idea of having the images projected upon the boxes to become a sort of chandelier. but maybe it would just be a wall sculpture…seeing that there could be a lot of complications with having the camera see the markers from the ceiling and how to hang the whole structure off the ceiling without blocking the markers so that the camera can see it in order to activate the projections.

PROPOSAL:

I found an old volume of the complete works of Henrik Ibsen that I am envisioning having a form laser-cut and using it as a “set” for a new type of scene.

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At first glance, it is solid, this tome.  It is a magnum opus…an ever-expanding volume and series.  Now it becomes a building block, and acts as the keystone to the threshold that lays behind and within its pages.  Its words are weighty and the tension builds until it must be split or perhaps ripped into strips inches wide, centimeters and now, nanometers.  We aim to make the pages become light, like Nora taking flight and leaving her life behind.  Her words must be cut out, must be freed.  But first the house must be built before we destroy it.  This is the house that Ibsen built.  It is built on the immaterial and the unwieldly.  So build it and than we will watch it slowly crumble down with the hypocrisy of the situation, in reaction to constructs set up by proper society.  It wil fall over Hedda Gabler as she picks up the pistol, and Hedvig as she chooses her own life over that of a fowl.  All for what? For an ideal that the human heart cannot bear to know nor understand.  Instead, it splits in two: with Matta-Clark’s chainsaw; with a laser so that it smells of charcoal and smoke; and with a blade, so that the cold steel rends it apart.  It is sliced into several parts, as if we were disecting a specimen.  And than it will be reconstructed inside-out.  Casting the plaster of a house from the inside out.  everything will be backwards and upside-down.   The master builder is telling us to hammer away at the characters and break down their conceits.

From within the pages now springs a new form.  The laser has formed, and shaped, and carved away until there is nothing left but the crux of the irony that lays underneath this form.  When this tome is now opened, the words that once appeared like grids, and streets, and buildings, now rises out in a new dimension, a new axis.  Let us put the negative space where there were once words, replacing their meaning with the light of another source.  Here we can insert the image of a new story.  It grows like vines, and twists itself around this crumbling structure so that where there was once the remains of a life, there is a new life.  We project through this negative space.  It will cast its shadow onto the space around it, transforming everything now into Ibsen’s house of the new order.

olafur eliasson’s Your House

gordon matta-clark, splitting

Mike and I filmed a series of experiments of us playing with spandex as part of our effort to integrate projection with Vito Acconci’s corian sculpture up at the Bronx Museum.  Our motivation was derived from an effort to extend Vito’s analogy of the sculpture as body, pulling, poking, tearing, etc., and the idea of conveying emotion through the use of gesture and shadow.  So we took it upon ourselves to really manipulate the idea of skin, texture, and surface.  See the full blog post here.

a self-portrait posed through a forensic exploration of my uniqueness, and how body elements of hair and blood are derived and have roots in cultural, historical, and genetic footprints.  References to many female artists who use manipulation of the body, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper, were considered.  Using the metaphor of the hourglass to represent the passage of my time as a living, breathing, functioning human being.  Filmed my hair and drops of ink in water using the high speed camera at 420 fps.

AntiVJ light sculpture for ClubTransmediale in Berlin.

Video Sculpture Assignment #1:

In the vein of the Constructivists, I wanted to use light to interact with other mediums.  My challenge here was to take something that was existing and use light to emphasize its geometric/structural form.  The second goal was to give it utilitarian purpose.  Hence Window Vision => Light Sculpture => Coffee Table.