New Contemporaries

I visited the New Contemporaries showcase a while ago and saw some things which I believe are worth mentioning, especially since I believe that I saw something which may have influenced me to base my final piece on it. Here’s who I came across.

Jim Campbell
San Francisco-based artist Jim Campbell is widely known to be one of the most extraordinary and important artists working with new media. His installations have pioneered new ways of showing images, from LED screens to touch-sensitive computers. He uses digital media in the service of profound humanism.

Motion & Rest - Jim Campbell

Here is an image of Jim Campbell’s motion and rest. If you watch the installation in action really close up, it will leave you clueless. The way you’re supposed to understand this is to take a few steps back and look at it a bit more vaguely; this way you will get a better view.

Behind the scenes

This piece ‘Motion and Rest’ by Jim Campbell had me looking at it for close to five minutes trying to figure out what the trick was. The way he controls the brightness of every individual led gave me the illusion that there was an elderly figure walking slowly across the plane. It just seemed so three dimensional, and it was all done with just led’s. The Motion & Rest piece was based around people being physically handicapped, the led’s gave it a pixilated look – and the fun bit was deciding at which point it did and didn’t reconstruct a human figure.

Another piece I saw by him was Church on 5th Avenue (2001) and I thought it was marvellous. The background on this piece was basically a set image (nothing on the background moved). What took place (with very subtle audio) were black ‘vague’ shapes which would move around the plane. The best part was the fact that you had to keep looking at the piece trying to catch the actual figures ‘within the shadows’. There were even birds flying around which made it more interesting. This had to actually be seen properly to fully appreciate it for what it is.


Links:

Info on Jim Campbell:
http://www.jimcampbell.to/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Campbell

Church on 5th Avenue :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ur2Jaf8v_c


Bibliography

Motion and Rest:
http://www.seeartmakeart.com/wp-upload/campbell.jpg

Behind the scenes:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/closed_circuit/images/circuit_03.R.jpg


Dan Flavin

This is another artist whose work I went to see in a gallery. I can’t remember what the name of the gallery was but it was based somewhere near the London Eye.

The meanings within Dan Flavin’s artworks are really subtle. He likes to wok with light sculptures a lot it is kind of hard to make something of it. I remember looking at his art and thinking “which angle does he want the viewer to look from” because I just couldn’t understand it. I did like one thing though, the way he used to make the colours blend in to each other flawlessly, the colours would bleed in to each other in harmony as if they were one.

A Retrospective

His sculptures are pretty minimal and simple, but they are not something that would inspire me to create something in the same manner. It just doesn’t seem to give me much of a narrative to work with or even gives me a pregnant idea in my mind where I can peel its skin off layer by layer to uncover something secretive behind it. Nonetheless they are pleasant to look at.


Bibliography

A Retrospective:
http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/flavin-exhib/flavin-exhib-top.jpg


Links:

A lot of background info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Flavin

Art Institute:
http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/flavbrid/

Youtube video of Flavin’s work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liyGFyM4IY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aYxcpgbhDg

Some led art work:
www.sunbzero.mit.edu/fbyte/ledart
http://www.clarkson.edu/~johndan/datacloud/archives/000982.
htmlhttp://www.led-art.nl/Eng/index.html

LED Art via Beijing:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJJ9m0K4EY8

Japan Bloomberg Ice – Interactive game:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4IbAQ1K8X94

Bloomberg Ice - Digital Interactive Cello:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lBNVKFjB2uo

A fan with embedded led’s and YouTube link to see it inaction:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZuIvDry8w