The Clouds are in the Building

- England has a Minister of Loneliness. Japan has “Chatty Benches,” where people sit to talk to strangers. Sweden has Libraries of Things, where people gather to exchange objects and experiences. Loneliness is as bad for your health as drinking six alcoholic beverages a day, or smoking 15 cigarettes.

- What could a vision do to bring people together?

- What is the value of a secret vision? An image that one must seek out? To look through a narrow window in the corner of a stairwell? To peer through a vent into an air shaft?

- What is the experience of a vision that is gently evoked in an unexpected place? A skybridge that's shrouded in stars, clouds, nature.

- The most intriguing visual may be that which you cannot see. You see the world, but one part is hidden, evaporated. You want to know what's missing.

- The viewer becomes complicit.

- To be involved in a visual narrative mystery.

- To project negative space.

Photo by Ralph Gibson.

(plans for) I'm Kissing You Goodbye

Notes on a project.

A multi-channel semi-narrative installation about a romantic relationship breaking up due to external forces. The couple still love each other, but are being torn apart. The piece will capture the final decision to split and the anguish of giving up the love of your life. The images will be abstract and impressionistic, coupled with music, audio and dialogue, conveying the emotion of the tragedy without explaining the literal details.

The images will be projected on semi-translucent muslin. The viewer can move around and through the spaces, creating multiple layers in varying combinations. Many of the images will intentionally be blurred and effected, like a dream. Some lights and colors will be bounced off mirrors and through moving water, creating a hazy memory-scape. The voices in the audio will be muffled, distant, hushed behind music and sound effects. But at crucial moments, the image will flash into focus, or key bits of dialogue (in shouts and whispers) will pierce the noise.

A heartbreaking love song in three-dimensional images.

LOGISTICS

  • I have a studio space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

  • But I am also exploring a friend's apartment, which is new and mostly empty. There, I would also include installation objects evoking a recently departed apartment, such as empty cardboard boxes and packing materials, cleaning supplies, random left-behind personal effects.

  • I have projectors and screen materials.

  • I’m securing performers now to play the main role(s).

  • I will film the material myself with my own Sony a7s ii and Zoom recorder.

INSTALLATION

  • Projections on two muslin screens.

  • The audience can move between them.

  • Or, projections in an empty apartment -- in closets, on half-closed doors, within the detritus.

  • Sound from multiple speakers, surrounding the space.

  • Whispers

  • The emotion of a relationship falling apart.

  • Projection through water, off a mirror, other reflections and moving objects...

TEXT

  • Yes, I love you. I do. But I can't be with you anymore. I can't do this anymore.

  • No. No. No. This is the last time.

  • I'll come to you. Wherever you go. Please.

  • There's no time.

  • Wait.

  • You always say that. But it's not true. It's just not true.

IMAGES

pinterest.com/Rosenberg_MarkElijah/

  • A woman on the subway looks up from her book as the doors close and the train pulls away.

  • A man in a window in silhouette.

  • A woman disappears into a cloud of steam rising from the street.

  • A woman and a man hold hands as the sun sets, but she pulls away in anger.

  • A man slams a door. Darkness descends.

  • A woman cries by candlelight.

  • A man and woman laugh in a library / museum / art gallery. [somewhere with good lights]

  • A man and woman embrace under a street light.

  • A man runs through [Times Square]

  • A man and woman lie in bed, the sunlight streaming through the window in a shaft.

  • A woman packs a suitcase (angrily)

    • A man tries to stop her.

  • A woman lights papers on fire in the dark

  • A man throws papers off a rooftop.

  • A man sitting alone in an apartment, mostly empty but for some cardboard boxes, packing supplies and a broom.

MUSICAL INSPIRATIONS

ROUGH SAMPLE

INSTALLATION VIEW

Room will be empty, with mattress on floor, abandoned suitcase, un-used cardboard boxes, packing supplies, a half-empty bottle of vodka...

PREVIOUS VISUAL TEST






The orange light glowing from the door not entered...

What is hidden, intrigues. What is unseen, is imagined. What is not allowed, entices.

It was three in the morning and I was walking home in a light rain. The front wheel of my bicycle was mangled from a collision with a moving car that didn’t stop when I flipped over the hood. My feet were wet, my hands were bloody, my body ached. I didn’t think I’d see H____ again after the argument we’d had, and I regretted that already. I was thinking of falling asleep in a warm bath when I passed a dead-end alleyway I’d never noticed. There was a fire escape on the west and a series of trash cans on the east, and a small metal door jammed in a corner.

An orange light glowed from the half-open door, like there was a sunset tucked inside the building.

I kept walking. And for the rest of my life, I’ve always wondered what was inside that doorway. I’m an artist because I keep imagining the other side of that door, and in my writing and films my characters pass the door, return, are barred from entry, dream of what’s inside, strive to get there, and one way or another pass through.

beguiling

The illusion of seeing.

James Turrell / Derek DelGuadio.

Bats, birds, shadows, shooting stars.

Dorveille — a portmanteau derived from dormir (to sleep) and veiller (to be alert) – denotes a state of semi-consciousness, or a period of wakefulness between shifts of sleep.

The negative space of light.

A continuous image fractured across multiple screens, connected by spirit. What happens in between?

Connecting people with a shared, real world experience (even one that’s ephemeral, phantom).

Clouds with personalities. Clouds brimming with meaning.

Narrative fireworks.

To make a work of art the viewer isn't aware they have experienced, and yet they are decidedly transformed henceforth.

A stone is not an object; it is a series of events.

Then what am I?

Anthony McCall

Thursday in Zurich

Switzerland is supposedly a beautiful place. Snowy mountains, crystal lakes, deep dark woods.

Or are those rock-covered mountains, sunlit forests, lakes shimmering with mystery.

The most conventional of oil paintings fails to capture the shifting beauty. And the walls themselves are beginning to melt.

A garden courtyard. Family homes. A slug the size of Thursday. Impossible hands massaging a rainbow of companions, through the window, or are the window, with someone behind it, you inside it, the artist trapped dancing escaping. The rubble of the garden shifts as the sun slides sideways and the music turns upside down, under the water, inside the flowers, floating up the drainpipe to the sky.

 

Adults become children; children are transported. We are wrapped in a sunny night of eternal play.

And then in the other room things get abstract. The static shapes shift and hover like lakes shimmering with mystery, casting outline traces of eyes on the bottom of the moonscape.

 

Switzerland is truly a beautiful place.

 

From Within the Particles

Before Technicolor: Early Color on Film & Refik Anadol: Unsupervised at MoMA

 

Dancing around you, the particles of the museum reveal elemental truths of line, color, texture, shape. Waves of color splash the walls and crash down upon you; dashes weave their way up the canvas the paper the plaster to fold over and around you; objects emerge from the fog of history and disappear in your memory.

The artificial intelligence which scans and reinterprets every work of art in MoMA’s collection is smarter than you and needs your guidance. (It’s not, as the title playfully misleads, “unsupervised.”) It is an emotional revelation machine and a raw data combinator. Its inputs are vast and real; its output a puzzle, a riddle (try to decipher the equations). The final product is astonishing but not a mystery. All human art is an elucidation of influence and experience, as Anadol’s creation is, but lost is the ineffable, the unquantifiable elements—mistake and misinterpretation, black holes in memory where the data cannot be recalled but is evoked nonetheless.

Early experiments in color film show the beauty in the haphazard, the experiments. Colors appear not as they do to the naked eye. The artifice of lights and makeup are applied to counteract the artificial process. Dyes leak over the objects they signify. Where the hand stutters, beauty lies.

(The video projection of these archival prints doesn’t do the image justice, and when the quality of the picture is the significance of the exhibition, it’s disappointing that the museum didn’t strike new prints.)

I am intrigued for the day when the AI separates from its human-derived inputs. When AI art at MoMA is truly unsupervised.

The Banality of Purgatory

Gabe BC, Purgatory, at C24 Gallery.

 

A slot machine. The ultimate capitalist inactivity. No illusion of skill, no intimation of thought. Put your money and in and watch it spin (away from you). Or here, receive a cryptically meaningless message, like a MadLib fortune cookie. A comment on emptiness, but an empty comment.

 

Souls trapped in shrines, tortured by their liminal existence. As digitally created creatures. As icons for micro-frustrations. As ghosts of the present era, in the primacy of screens. Cheap tabernacles, lit with neon, evoke not the flames of hell but the lights of Las Vegas. The tawdry performativeness is best seen as comedy.

 

(I’m afraid) I’m not laughing.

Can you see a lens flare without a lens?

On Sarah Sze, Timelapse.

1. Explain how projection is part of each installation.

Projectors are a tool for making art, like ladders or tape. The ladders and tape are in the work. The medium is the message.

 

2. Find out where the content comes from or is stored.

The content comes from memory. It is stored in dreams.

Computers are one of the few objects rarely seen.

 

3. Identify the type of projectors used.

Panasonic, LG, Sanyo, Werner, Comfort Zone, Scotch, Elmer’s . . .

The sun, the moon, clouds and atmosphere, the oculus of the Guggenheim museum . . .

 

4. Describe how they are set up.

They are set up differently in each iteration of the piece, different years, different locations.

 

Further questions:

What are the screens? What are the reflections? What is the room?

The eye searches for the center. The mind wanders in details.

 

What is the shape? Where does it begin and does it end?

 

5. What did you learn from these installations?

 

Montage.

A collection of fragments equals a coherent whole.

What is the connection between a rainbow and a hill of sand? Between gravity and light?

 

Travelers Among Streams and Cascades

 

Can you interpret an image / object in isolation? What is the meaning of a sunset?

The objects are generic. The images are universal. Everything repeats.

(A cardboard box; a tape measure, pliers.) (Sand; hand; color and texture.)

Can you identify yourself, your place?

 

A signifier operates in context. Context is subjective.

Layers of non-meaning equal an experience, a series of experiences constitute a life. Standing in a museum, walking on the street, what matters to you?

 

Then: a single sleeping girl. The daughter of the artist? A rare moment of specificity, individuality. What is personal, what is universal, what is a shared secret?

 

Moving images moving.

A river that flows like a cloud. Clouds that roll like trolleys. A cheetah that runs in place. An explosion as gentle as a bath.

 

The shadow of a bird upon a silhouette of a bird. Projecting darkness. Highlighting (by obscuring) the ephemeral. Making the ordinary magical.

 

The light of flames, the light of the moon (a reflection of the sun; not pictured), no brighter than the sea.

 

In the transposition of movement and time, we question both. Does time repeat? Can movement be replicated?

 

A Certain Slant

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, 

. . .

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

 

(Emily Dickenson)

 

Can you see the wind?

Plastic plants, real shadows. The platonic ideal of a leaf.

Static, test patterns, plastic tubs of paint, the torn edge of a print -- the absence of image.

Projections on paint, like water. Paint dripping, reflected.

"Here lies one who's name is writ in water." (Keats, tombstone)

 

Peering through the lattice work. Is the artwork the object or the space inside it?

An unnecessarily complicated way of hanging a hammock and projector.

Planets, a constellation, celestial bodies, heavens. An observatory . . . on the ground. An inversion.

 

“A system of pulleys and wires to illuminate the moon with power lines.” — Brent Green.

 

A Personal Planetarium

"What would it look like to build a planetarium of one's own?"

— Sarah Sze

I myself have "made" a portable planet. My son, Elliot PDS-70b Rosenberg Skaff, is known to all as LP, for "Little Planet." I have snapped approximately 15,435 photographs of him in 4 years. 1,343 videos. 251 audio recordings. I can access almost all of these documents on a tiny computer I keep in my pocket. When I examine the files, what do I remember -- the moment, or the archive of it?

The answer is even more ephemeral when asked of my son, whose bank of memories is 10 times less full than mine, but the same amount more dense -- a day of his life is like a year of mine.

"...if we try and remember one thing that happened to us when we were, let's say, 10 years old. It's very hard to remember even what happened in that year. And for me, I can think of maybe one, maybe two, and that one moment has expanded in my mind to fill that entire year. So we don't experience time in minutes and seconds. So this is a still of the video that I took, printed out on a piece of paper, the paper is torn and then the video is projected on top of it. And I wanted to play with this idea of how, in this kind of complete immersion of images that's enveloped us, how one image can actually grow and can haunt us."

Is it possible, to build a memory for another person? A family member, a friend, a total stranger? Could you create visuals that would be universal enough to be recognizable to all, but specific enough to be archived in the mind not as image but as memory? What framework would be needed to contain and deliver the imagery? What other inputs would be needed to forge embed within an existing neural pathway?

Could one enlist the viewer's friends, family members, long lost acquaintances, to seed the concept into fertile mental soil? Or could you draw upon a public inventory -- internet images of locations, times, objects, personal history. Pull from social media and google street view and high school yearbooks? What would be the contemporary experience for the viewer? What would be the result?

This is a world played in by Derek del Guadio and Chris Marker, David Blaine and Christopher Nolan. David Eagleman has studied the phenomenon. Sarah Sze's work interprets the experience of memory, and maybe tangentially her own memory. But could you imprint the memory of others?

La Jetee

Inception

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