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

Synexperience by Carrie Firman... and some interactive leads

Carrie Firman is a synesthetic graphic designer. 'Synexperience' is project work from her MFA in Visual Studies at the University of Buffalo. There are some fascinating insights into the synaesthetic experience here and her expression of them is unique, communicative and compelling.

This first piece contains Flash based interactive examples of her synaesthetic visual reactions to everyday sounds.

And here she uses those flash examples to create an interactive installation using sensors to trigger audio and projections of her sound-to-visual experiences.




I had previously come across Processing myself (bookmarked on Delicious on June 15)  its an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations and interactions. Its' free to download but I haven't looked at it fully yet. I've also come across the 'Arduino Microcontroller'  which seems to be the type of thing that can make an interactive installation happen.
Audrey and Shelaghs' suggestions involving viewer interaction and viewer setting off sensors/switches etc requires sensors that can convert to a computational language so the computer can respond to the trigger and that is what this Audrino kit does it seems. Its' open source also - but I feel like I would need a helpful 'tech-head' to get this notion off the ground... I'm getting that technology overwhelm again!
There was a presentation on it in a Dublin conference I was unable to get to recently.... "Connect everyday objects to the Internet" Jeffery Roe, TOG Hackerspace, Dublin - (by the way if anyone knows a "helpful tech head" - or where to find one - I'd really appreciate it!)

This next piece is another Flash based interactive piece based on her changing calendar, from college to holidays, with a period of confinement due to a broken leg.

Finally, here are some photographs she created that resembled some of her personal photoisms. (They demonstrate similarities to Kluvers 'Form Constants' - see the previous post)

Taxonomy of Perception - Form Constants

In the last 2 weeks I have encountered multiple references in my research to Heinrich Kluver, who in 1926, undertook experiments where he catagorised the visual effects produced by mescaline. He discovered that mescaline produces recurring geometric patterns in different users. He called these patterns 'form constants' and categorized four types: 
lattices (including honeycombs, checkerboards and triangles), cobwebs, tunnels and spirals. He compared the subjective visual experiences of synaesthesia, hallucination and physical/psychological stress (e.g. fever, migrane). Form Constants are still being used to  investigate commonalities among the unique experiences of synaesthetes. 
These Form Constants give us  a taxonomy of perception, and provide commonalities for us to identify in the type of shapes, spatial arrangements, depictions of movements and aesthetics in art be it painting, photography, video or 3d artforms.
                           
I'm not sure yet whethter this is something I may draw upon in my own work but felt the need to post on it  - to filter it, as previously unposted discoverings on fractals have been diluted in their relevance as I failed to comment on them properly here on my blog. (Fractals are rough geometric shapes that when split into parts each part is a reduced size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity. They are often considered to be infinitely complex. Natural objects that are fractal are snowflakes, some vegetables eg. cauliflower/broccoli, ferns.

An Eyeful of Sound

Samantha Moore is a film maker who makes animated documentaries. 'An Eyeful of Sound' is her award winning film about synaesthesia, and is a wonderful expression of the synaesthetic experience - the best I feel I have unearthed in the research to date. This film took her and her team 3 years to complete, I take comfort in that and smile at the innocence I had in my initial ambitions for the REV module... bless!
Enjoy this animated work and the amazing descriptions from the synaesthetic women involved. (One aspect that is absent from this film that I hope to include in my (post REV) motion piece is the element of viewer interaction).

I was reminded in viewing and listening to this film of a snippet from Dr Richard Cytowics' Llibrary of Congress presentation....
"People often say 'Wow, isn't it confusing to see all this extra stuff - doesn't it drive them crazy?
And I say - well no more than a blind person saying to you - Gee, everywhere you look you're always SEEING something, doesn't it bother you having to see everything ALL the time?"

That aside just makes me smile. Its the texture of our reality, and synaesthetes have a different texture.