Luke Talbott – Dream Reality

Robert Wilson – Creating an Environment

Posted on March 23, 2013May 17, 2013 by Luke Talbott

In order to create an immersive and interactive environment, we have to pay particular attention to how it looks, and how we create it. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project was influenced by the ambient glow to rob the audience of their individuality and we wanted a similar use in lighting to beneficially aid our performance. We had the initial idea since the formation of our group to create a completely white enclosed environment to act as a blank canvas for lighting and projections. Our main aim is immersion and to do so we need to create the correct ambiance and set the mood and the overall feel of our performance for the audience. In order to do this we looked at the works of Robert Wilson.

Robert Wilson is a theater artist, director and designer, he fuses sound, image, text and movement to create unique and evocative exhibitions, installations and stage sets. His unique approach to creating environments is something that we will draw inspiration from we we create our own interactive and immersible environment.

A particular sculpture design of his that attracted my attention was his installation for the Isamu Noguchi: Scultpural Design exhibition at the Design Museum in 2001. Design Museum talk about the results:

The result was a sensational sequence of galleries: one shrouded in darkness, the next brightly illuminated, followed by stepping stones tripping across an elegantly raked sea of sand and the icy white set elements from Martha Graham’s 1944 Herodiade standing in a lake of shattered glass.

It was an extraordinary tribute to the work of Isamu Noguchi, the American-Japanese designer-sculptor who was the subject of the exhibition (No date)

I like the way the lighting is used to enhance the environment, and is used methodically to cooperate with the space. The lighting and the sculptures share a symbiotic relationship to work with the space and is used to enhance the overall mood and ambiance of it, yet is used in delicate balance to not feel overwhelming and cluttered.

Works Cited

DesigMuseum. (No date) Robert Wilson. Available at: http://designmuseum.org/design/robert-wilson (Accessed: 23 March 2013)

Links to photos.

http://designmuseum.org/media/item/4001/-1/12_11Lg.jpg

http://designmuseum.org/media/item/4063/-1/18_8Lg.jpg

http://www.preview-art.com/previews/06-2005/bg/SAM-NoguchiInstall1bg.jpg

http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/02/35/21/644205/3/628×471.jpg

By Luke Talbott

Influences

The Weather Project

Posted on March 17, 2013May 17, 2013 by Luke Talbott

The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson was an installation piece. It consisted of an entire space bathed in an orange ambient glow. At the back of the space was an orange semi-circle, the roof of the space was mirrored to give the illusion that the orange semi circle was in fact a full circle and in turn looked like the ‘Setting Sun’. What is captivating about this piece and what inspired us was that it wasn’t the exhibition that the audience engages with, it’s how the audience engage with themselves “Not only does the audience help to create Eliasson’s work of art, but, in the weeks since the exhibition opened, the behaviour of that audience has added another layer of meaning to it.” (Dorment, 2003), the audience were able to view themselves on the mirrored ceiling, but because of the lighting and the haze in the air caused by humidifiers pumping a solution, the audience appeared only as silhouettes. The exhibition had stolen the audiences individuality allowing everyone to appear the same, “the less we look like individuals, the more aware we become that we share a common humanity” (Dorment, 2003). It was this sense of being insignificant that transfixed our attention to this piece and allowed our inspiration to be drawn from it. We admired the concept that everyone is the same, and everyone is connected, and we wanted to use this concept in our own performance. We wanted our performance to be immersible and to do so we needed a common ground that our audience can relate to, which is why our idea of dreams is so compelling, it’s something we all share, we all fall asleep and we all dream.

Another aspect of this performance that we drew inspiration was the setting of the scene. The Sun appeared to be setting, but never progressed, it remained transfixed permanently, a rising Sun could represent the beginning and a night sky could represent an end, the setting Sun however, hangs in limbo, it’s acts as if in a state of balance never progressing but never regressing, which drew us to our dream concept again. A dream never has progression, as much as we would like, we never have the beginning of the dream and we never have an end, we start the dream from the middle. We liked this concept and sought to advance it further, having our performance beginning as if already begun, and ending before it’s due to end.

Works Cited

Dorment, R. (2003) ‘A Terrifying Beauty’, 12 November. Telegraph [Online]. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3606332/A-terrifying-beauty.html (Accessed: 17 March 2013)

No Photographer (2010) Eliasson Weather. WordPress [Online]. Available at: http://turfmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/tate-modern-10th-anniversary/eliasson_weather/ (Accessed: 17 March 2013)

By Luke Talbott

Ideas

Immersing the Environment

Posted on March 13, 2013May 17, 2013 by Luke Talbott

During our rehearsal process we have been influenced heavily by the use of immersion and blurring the boundaries of a dream and reality. To assist us in doing this we needed to ensure that the space was to be advantageous towards our idea, yet be practical enough to enable a functional live element. We had already toyed with the idea of using the grid, something that had never been done before at the LPAC, and were keen to explore other innovative ideas to make sure that our performance was as engaging and dynamic as possible.

We looked into the concept of creating real life clouds in the LPAC. The reason of this is because we are exploring the definition of reality, and what can perceived as real and not. Being able to create something natural, something that exists only in the “real world” in a space that we created something that isn’t real would assist with our attempts to blur the distinction. However, to do this, we needed to see whether or not creating a cloud in a space is possible.

Conceptually, creating a cloud in a space is not impossible. Here is the MetOffice’s definition of how clouds are formed:

Clouds form when the invisible water vapour in the air condenses into visible water droplets or ice crystals. There is water around us all the time in the form of tiny gas particles, also known as water vapour. There are also tiny particles floating around in the air – such as salt and dust – these are called aerosols.

The water vapour and the aerosols are constantly bumping into each other. When the air is cooled, some of the water vapour sticks to the aerosols when they collide – this is condensation. Eventually, bigger water droplets form around the aerosol particles, and these water droplets start sticking together with other droplets, forming clouds. (MetOffice, 2013)

In order to form water droplets into a form that looks like a cloud it needs to be cooled, cooling the moisture in the air allows it to condense, but in order to allow the moisture in the air to condense the lower half of the auditorium would have to be heated allowing the moisture to remain airborne, and the top of the auditorium would need to be considerably colder to allow for the moisture to condense. This would have meant drastically changing the size of the space into something that would be more manageable, and we weren’t willing to go that far just for a concept that seemed more and more unfeasible. It was becoming clear why something like this had never been done before, because it is either way beyond our capabilities, or is just not possible, so we looked into another possibility, of creating the illusion of a cloud.

A dutch artists by the name of Berdnaut Smilde has accumulated attention by creating clouds in doors. His approach is the most likely way to be able to create and mold a cloud into a desired space.

(Xellent10, 2013)

Smilde’s method of cloud formation is somewhat similar to the natural occurence in the way that the moisture in the air becomes denser. What Smilde does is saturate the air first with a bottle of solution, after the air is moist enough he then adds a light puff of smoke from a smoke machine which effectively ‘clings’ onto the water droplets allowing a brief formation of an apparent cloud. Fundamentally all that is happening is he just turns on a smoke machine. It is the moisture that is saturated in the air that prevents the smoke from dispersing too quickly. This means that the conditions in the room temperature wise have to be perfect to allow the cloud to stay in shape for as long as possible.

This method of cloud formation in a space would be the most simple, and practical way of doing so, but there is a draw back, and that is the fact that the cloud disperses in just a few seconds. In order for clouds to remain throughout the performance the air would have to be saturated constantly throughout and the smoke machine activated intermittently. Because we are creating a sense of immersion, we didn’t want the immersion to be broke by one of us spraying solution over everyone’s heads. So unfortunately for the mean time, this idea will remain just an idea

Works Cited

MetOffice (2013) What are Clouds and How do they Form? Available at: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/clouds/what-are-clouds (Accessed: 13 March 2013)

Xellent10 (2013) How to Make Clouds Indoors: The Art of Berndnaunt Smilde. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr4Fhr8JF-U (Accessed: 13 March 2013)

By Luke Talbott