Assessment

Anthony Mccall

This completely sums up what I love about art and it relates to my project. Its beautiful, simple, and best of all it's involving. "It has to be large enough to be capable of incorporating its spectators' This is exactly what I want to do.. Make the audience a part of something beautiful! I just wish I had come up with it!
My response to this work is to make a bigger version of this star torch that I got at christmas.

The one on the far left is what I would like to make bigger. The torch is actually quite weak so it would be good to make it into light beams as powerful as Anthony Mccall's.
If I'm going to do this I need to learn about 16mm film!

Assessment

This is the final loop that will be projected onto the aerogel.

I've put it up here because I've had to make the circle on the actual footage tiny, due to the projector, and you can't see as much detail as I would have liked (I wish I could just get massive circles of aerogel!) I used footage from BBC Wonders and changed the colours, used 'Punch' effect to make it look spherical, and framed it into a circle.

Here is my studio space where the work will be shown, inside the little box.

Retrospective...

I have written a few paragraphs to summarise my project so far, because I know this blog is good as a commentary but I want to look back over what I've done a little.

Before I started this project, I researched intensively the topic of physics and space through articles, attending events and reading books. My areas of interest were mainly the mysteries of space that were being solved through new concepts, the human relationship with space, and the beauty of the imagery.
The concept that my project is primarily communicating is the enthusiasm and awe of the Universe. For me it has been a vehicle to investigate more challenging concepts that grapple with the physics and workings of space, which have therefore informed my work through having a thorough understanding, despite the concepts not being explicit in my pieces.
For me my use of materials reflects the problems I have faced in choosing a subject which deals with not only the very large but also the completely perfect. I have struggled to find materials that are perfectly round, perfectly smooth and that glow or shine uniformly..My choice of materials have been based on the closest things I can find to the reality. In the case of the aerogel I have found something which is not only genuinely used in space exploration but also visually lends itself to artistic use.
I have discovered through making my work that putting together elements that imitate an unreachable place lends the work a magical quality that communicates quickly to the viewer. If the viewer is initially drawn to the beauty of a piece of my work, they then ask questions and learn about the science behind it. I intend to push this idea further into the realms of the interactive and involving, as I hope to create environments that could never otherwise be experienced.
In a way I think my work explores new conceptual territory because it takes the subject of scientific discovery in space and the philosophy behind it, and adds my personal visual ideas.


I have decided today that I will try to make work that is a result of my imagination, not the materials that I have to hand. I know aerogel wasn't 'to hand', but I definitely want to go bigger and to rent equipment from outside companies if I need to..