SynAesthetic Imaging

These are a collection of images I have produced in the past couple of months that are revolving around my theme. Some quite obviously are about notions of connectivity, some convey a more sensory feel. I have enjoyed playing with capturing light and and in many I am focusing on reflections and mirroring  - how what is before us is not always reflected back in the same and expected way - altered perceptions.  They are a mixed bunch of varied styles at the moment but I just wanted to get them up on to the blog to add a bit of credance to them for myself and to garner any comments from yourselves also. Some, for me, are just functioning as idea 'jump off' points, triggers, some are visual note taking, some have more purpose aesthetically and are making their way toward final pieces  -  in their current or an altered state as I work on them in photoshop. Those images that I am working on I am doing so also with a nod towards neuro imaging  - which I am keen to play around with . The way that MRI and PET scans visualise and measure cerebral activity is something I feel I want to capture with my creative output on synaesthesia as I have spent so much of my research time reading in this area and am intrigued so much by it, but given the complex nature of the subject am struggling to express it  so hopefully I will have more success with attempting it through these images once they're complete.  In any case they are in progress, most need and a good re-framing, but here they are.....

"Reflection photographs are much more than mirrors of the sky: they are mirrors of the mind."
Marcia Smilack

Back to the Grind

So after a wonderful 10 months of maternity leave the end is nigh. I'm back on Monday 5th September with the new bunch of 3rd Years on the BA (Hons) Visual Communication. It always takes both them and me a few weeks to get the measure of each other. I find that period frustrating often and a lot of hard work, but with a great sense of anticipation too because it is also a time that I love - cultivating a relationship with students, anticipating the rapport with each individual. And cultivating too a passion in them for the life path they've chosen. I just decided to post  the fruits of the last few days labour, in the shape of my first 2 briefs of the year. I thought posting them would be a reminder for me of the upcoming year, both in the masters and in everyday life, where there'll be a shift in focus back to my teaching self... life after REV!

                              

SynaeSence

Finally posting on SynaeSense - my first piece of work for REV. I had hoped for better images having borrowed some additional lighting but will need to source something more powerful, I just wanted to finally update on the blog here on the work produced.

I suppose the idea for the visual approach to this work stems from the abstract nature of synaesthesia - it is the removal of the subject matter. This is one of the elements that motivated me to investigate the condition. I am not trying to create an image of synaesthesia in this piece, but attempting to express it in more abstract terms.

The inspirations for this piece came from a variety of sources,  - a mantle piece decoration we have, a mapping article in a recent issue of eye magazine and also from a 2d graphic visualisation I uncovered in the research that visually interprets musical texture,  its called SisTeMu by Laia Clos.

The piece is a map of the mind of sorts, - the senses each have an area in the white matter and are populated with colours allocated for each sense. I have assigned red to sight, blue to hearing, green to touch, yellow to smell and orange to taste. The main colour for the sense dominates each pin stack but the other sense colours have also mingled in and crossed over. This illustrates the nature of the condition where areas of  the brain not usually stimulated by a trigger to one sense become ‘exhitory’  or excited. (Neurologically our default with this inhibitory) .

I have also included 2 ‘areas’ that are not senses themselves - memory and emotion - but which nonetheless are tied in with our perceptions of the sensory world - in the way a smell can immediaely trigger memory and also the way in which synaesthetes have another ‘hook’ to hang memory from -  they often use the colours of  numbers to remember the sequence - in a phone number for example. Both memory and emotion are expressed with a dominance of silver, reflective of that which surrounds them.

The final communication layer on this piece is the threading together of the pinstacks across the sensory zones to show the functional cross wiring of the synaesthetes brain. I’m really happy with the way this has turned out, even if I am in two minds as to whether I need to add in a little more threading.

I have attempted to photograph the piece with some decent lighting but I need still more illumination to fully explore the potenital visually with the shadows. Finally, I had initially planned on leaving loose threads for the viewer to interact with the piece and do some cross wiring themselves, but once it was finished I realised that it really isn’t be robust enough for that. It was really  labour intensive hand colouring foam dot stickers and stacking tiny punched circles onto needles, but I wholeheartedly loved creating this piece, from concept to completion and am happy with it, for now at least.

Inspirations from Barcelona

A 3 week house swap to this visually rich city was truly amazing, well worth the annual clean up that comes with the exchange  - and fair play to my 4 year old and 8 month old for not complaining too much while being dragged in to every exhibition I could manage with them. Well done Kal and Finn!

This is a short clip made at Casa Batllo - one of the architect Gaudi's famous houses in Barcelona. It was in a room that was used for laundry in the house and this was communicated by projecting on to sheer material in the darkened room. It immediately reminded me of my thinking with the panels idea for REV, the effect here is simple but effective.




"The Cinema Effect - Illusion, Reality and The Moving Image" at the Caixa Forum. The exhibition, which was originally curated for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, offers an in-depth exploration of contemporary moving-image art, examining the ways in which “the cinematic” has blurred cultural distinctions between reality and illusion. Cinema was the unrivaled art form of the twentieth century; in the art world, the use of film, video and cinematic language and devices for works in a range of media has been growing since the early 1960s. The influence of film and its vocabulary have grown to the point where the boundaries between real life and make-believe are at the least blurred and at the greatest almost indecipherable. Artists included Andy Warhol, Rodney Graham, Tony Oursler and Kelly Richardson among others



I managed to see a bit of quality video mapping by collective Telenoika.  Like the exhibition above, video mapping also blurs the boundaries between reality and non reality, it transforms a real space into an imaginary one. The projection of images onto the surface of the building totally transforms the visual landscape and it is really powerful to see this kind of work in the flesh -  the scale and atmosphere of it with the sound effects is utterly absorbing.

This is a short clip from inside a dome-roofed room at the top of Casa Batllo. In the centre of the room is a mirrored hemisphere fountain with a light shining directly onto it. The effect, you can see, is of the water running down the walls of the interior and it was another inspiration point for me. Synaesthesia is a state of heightened sensory perception where the synaesthete perceives things that the rest of us just can't  - "like a veil of unawareness" over our perception as one synaesthete describes it. In my view this installation captures that idea, as do other examples of inspirations I have posted here - they involve the notion of what is seen or unseen. 


Outside of this room the roof of this building is all mosaic and curvacious, the audio tour describes the shape as being influenced by the story of St George slaying a dragon. You can hear Kal's take on the experience at the end of the clip!



Also I encountered some unusual examples of typography which caught my attention - whether because of the scale, the method of application, the labour involved in the production, the typeface or the sheer impressive nature of it. Below are just a few examples.

FOR OLLIE AND JOANNE - Hughie O Donoghue - The Road

This is a post for Ollie and Joanne.
I meant to post these images a while back but better late than never.
I took them at the recent show of Hughie O'Donoghue's latest exhibition entitled 'The Road' during the Galway Arts Festival. They are very beautiful paintings and I thought they might be of interest to you -  both thematically and stylistically. Needless to say my photos are not doing doing them justice here but if they are of interest I'm sure a quick google search might give some useful results for you. It looked like he had overpainted on to large photographic prints, and the effect was visually beautiful and full of mystery.

The way he had captured the light through some of the windows reminded me of what you too are capturing Ollie in the Granny Peggy project and there seemed relevance for you Joanne in the overpainting technique as well as the subject matter. Hope it may be of some help!

REV E- JOURNAL 2 Voicethread July 2011