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Artist Statement: This piece came together to represent my final project for ARTS4126. I started out with an idea that was completely different than what I actually ended up with. I wanted to do something with water and glass jars but noticed quickly that sometimes the jars had trouble picking up the colors and patterns as well as other things. I tested a few different materials and realized that bright white paper would be the best thing to work with as it makes the colors pop out. My first rendition of the project just featured two cutouts made from foam posterboard that was just a single thought bubble and a brain cutout. They lacked texture and the brain had a black outline on it that made it look a little more cartoon-y and 2D rather than a projection on a sculpture. For my second rendition of the project, I cutout a few more thought bubbles (3) and added some cotton balls on them for texture. I wanted to make them look like fluffy clouds and when projected on, it would look like real "thoughts" from the brain! However, the brain cutout was still lacking something, and so I decided to follow Corrina's advice and add some crumpled paper towels to it in order to simulate brain wrinkles. When projected on, it really looks like the brain has folds and works really well in juxtaposition to the fluffy thought clouds! As far as choosing to project, I had a few ideas as to what theme I wanted to convey. I first wanted to choose videos that would convey different emotions, like love, sadness, anger, and happiness. But, I through suggestions and rethinking, I decided to use videos that convey the left and the right side of the brain. For the more analytical videos, I picked imagery that would be related. I decided to choose a video of someone playing chess, a video of some electronic imagery that reminded me of coding or scripting, and finally a video of geometric patterns. I wanted the videos to be interesting but also different than the other set, the artistic set of videos. For the artistic videos, I chose a long video of different ink arts (which looked really good on the thought bubble), another video of rainbow ink flowing around, and finally a video of someone painting a winter scene. I used VDMX to set up a grid of about 10 videos and then syphoned them into MadMapper to make sure the videos were in the perfect spots with the correct shape. The interactive portion was included using the MIDI controller with three buttons being set aside to toggle the three videos on the three different thought bubbles. This allowed you to have a mixture of the different types of bubbles, some analytical and some artistic. I thought that was a great representation of the different brains that some people have. The combination of thoughts also represents people in general as we can have different thoughts at different times and people aren't usually thinking in one category or the other. The different mixtures of videos went well together and provided an interesting mix of media. Overall, I really enjoyed this project and learning how to use VDMX, MadMapper, and light projection in general.
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