Going Dark

I really enjoyed the week and a half working with Tom from Sound and Fury. I have always been interested in space and the cosmos (until I realized I couldn't do calculus, I wanted to be an astronomer, and then an astronautical engineer), so it was exciting for Tom to share his ideas for the company's next project. Working with the piece Physical Universe, I feel the group came up with some great ideas, and with the time and limited resources we had, presented a really interesting, and apparently debatable performance. Just the words, "There was a local eddy in the swirling gas of the primordial galaxy..." (Louis Simpson, Physical Universe), gave an immediate mental picture of what I thought we should do, and I think that cup of coffee worked beautifully. It also proved to be challenging for both the group and me, since I was being pulled away regularly to help sort out technical equipment. I must help to figure out a better way to handle these things, since it is not fair to me or to the group for me to be absent for potentially long periods of time.

Final Meeting Place....for now

What a crazy week it's been! I can't believe how much Catherine and I accomplished for the final showing of our project (at least for now), but also how much more there was that we would have liked to do. The night we started to set up did not start off smoothly, as we could not use the same partitions we had used previously as our structures to build the "screen" from. We found a couple of items which we made work, and actually gave us another aspect to the installation which we had discussed but decided not to do because of time constraints. This was the idea of making the entire thing possible to be backlit for shadow play.
I would have liked more time in the space, in the dark, for the opportunity to really experiment with the slides. Once again, I certainly did not have any chance to really be able to play with them in the actual environment that we wanted to present the project in. That's what happens when you have to share a space with 4 other groups, and there is a limited amount of time in the space. Next time, I will make sure that we can at least set up some sort of mock up, so that there's an opportunity to look at things in the lighting we require. Being a professed lighting designer, it's one aspect of this project that I feel like got left behind a bit, and I know there is more to be explored.
I am satisfied with what we shared for our final assessment, but I still feel like there's work to be done. That's how I tend to feel after most of the projects I work on. It's not that I feel like the work is incomplete, because it is the best it can be at the time it's presented, but it's something that can continue in it's journey. I'm not done learning or evolving as an artist, so why should my work feel complete? A question and feeling to keep in mind as I continue.