Erwin Redl

His work really lends itself to work about the universe and our place within it. If I decide to move my work into the field of visualising information I think he could be very relevant too. Interestingly one of his main influences is James Turrell, as light is clearly one of the biggest themes in his work. His site is down at the moment but here is a quote that sums up his practice.
"Artist Erwin Redl creates large-scale LED installations and environments to investigate questions of phenomenology and perception in the age of the digital experience. He uses a metaphorical “reverse engineering” to re-translate the abstract aesthetic language of Virtual Reality and 3D computer modeling into powerful light-based architectural environments that can often quite literally destabilize the viewer’s perception of space."http://www.location1.org/imho-with-erwin-redl/

These are the ideas that I have had as a result of looking at his work, and I would like to use them for the '5 day project' happening in March in one of the project spaces..

I have found some perfect LEDs on ebay so depending on my tutorial tomorrow I may buy a load of them to get making with!
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120641092276#ht_1836wt_1130

Visualisations - The Nature Book of Art and Science

"JMW turner, the magician of light and colour who was the dominant figure in British Romantic painting in the first half of the nineteenth century, dealt less with conventional boxes of pictorial space than with ‘the wide concave of the circumambient air’. His phrase should be understood in the context of his intuition that ‘the building of nature’ was ‘too colossal for the intellectual capacity, its height to measure or its depth to fathom – the universe and infinitude’."

"...By contrast, the American artist, James Turrell, is creating spatial structures on a huge scale to sculpt the passage of natural light and even to reshape the sky itself – in a Turnerian quest to stretch out to infinite reaches of time and space.
In 1975, Turrell searched for a suitable site for the realization of his vast vision of a new ‘Skyspace’. An aerial survey of the western USA drew his attention to Roden Crater, a cinder cone located at the east of the San Francisco volcanic plateau. The project, commenced in 1979 and due to be completed early in this millennium, involves the excavation of geometrical spaces that will serve as exploratories for our perceptions, as vessels for the enclosure of solar, lunar, and stellar illumination, as devices for the inscription of time (like a sundial or gnomon) and as a compound observatory in which precision, wonder and imagination are united.
At the centre is the crater transformed into a bowl with an even rim, 3000 feet in diameter. For the observer low in the bowl, the vault of the heavens is transformed. Subjectively perceived as a shallow dome – a phenomenon much debated in psychology – the sky appears to be anchored circumferentially to the crater’s rim. Around the crater, chambers are being tunneled out, in such a way that the passage of light – night into day – will paint the interiors with a succession of shaping shadows and luminous colours.
The fumarole, or secondary vent, will be the focus for chambers oriented towards the four compass points, joined to a series of linked interiors to provide varying spatial perceptions. A tunnel 1035 feet long will lead into an oval sky chamber as an atrium for the main bowl. Subsequent progress to the top of the rim culminates in the reattachment of the dome of the sky to the far horizon of the land.
The resonances of Turrell’s project, which is presented through models, paintings, drawings, prints, and photoworks are astonishingly rich. They range from the prehistoric observatories of stone circles and ancient temples, through the great astronomical castle and garden of Tycho Brahe on the Danish island of Hven around 1600, and the camera obscuras of Jesuit magicians in the seventeenth century, to the huge dishes of modern observatories. And, at its heart, is a vision of ‘infinitude’ worthy of Turner.
As Turrell says, ‘looking at light in a skyspace is akin to a worldless thought’- and such thought has boundless potential."

Strange and Charmed

This book has been really useful in narrowing down my concepts, and I've been selecting some quotes from it, here are a few of the most relevant.

"As we look at the two images we entertain the notion that both science and art are essentially ordering activities, part of the universal human inclination to find, expose and celebrate the world’s structures and patterns. Even more fundamentally, they gesture towards the fact that both art and science are expressions of a common intellectual curiosity – the profound human desire to know things which often starts with the possibility of envisioning and therefore of making a picture of them."

"Viewing scientific images we are perhaps confronted - sometimes more vividly than we are through conventional artworks – with a sense of our own impermanence and fragility, where our consciousness of boundary an identity and scale is displaced."

"All this evidence points to something much more profound than mere illustration. Such sparks of cross-disciplinary inspiration seem, however, to require some sort of neutral territory – an area of interest not completely monopolised by either domain. In short, artists and scientists seem to have identified visual images, and, maybe more specifically, the technologies and sites of image making, as a fruitful place in which unusual inspiration and even interaction can occur."

"One of the few artists who has seriously addressed the physics of space, time and matter through artistic concepts and visualisations is John Latham. In work which is often difficult to categorise, Latham has deliberately overstepped the boundaries generally applied to art and makes references to physics, psychology, linguistics and anthropology. His artworks are not to be regarded as ends in themselves or art for art’s sake but as devices for comprehending the universe and crucially the individual’s place in it. In this respect, Latham regards himself as an ‘incidental person’ instead of an artist who ‘stands at some distance from events and is capable of reflecting upon them critically, reaching insights by means of intuition.’...The purpose of art, he believes, is to re-create what he regards as the lost relationship between the individual and the whole, as a result of a crisis in physics because of the limitations of theories ‘which fail to include individual consciousness’."

"The distortions of time and place and scale glimpsed through an acquaintance with science suggest an imagined landscape of epic proportions. Inevitably we become less preoccupied with the minutiae of our lives and we are forced to reconsider our place in the universe."

Concepts

(work in progress blog post!)
I've found a lot of quotes that support my concept..

"it is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Isaac Newton

"Broadly considered, a religious attitude and often some religious content is part of virtually every scientific investigation. If we look at the universe in the large, we find something astonishing. We find a universe that is exceptionally beautiful, intricately and subtly constructed. Whether our appreciation of the universe is becuase we are a part of that universe, evolved in it and by it, is a proposition to which I do not pretend to have an answer. But there is no question that the elegance of the universe is one of its most remarkable properties. It is very hard to look at the beauty, intricacy and subtlety of nature without feeling awe. I don't even think the word reverence is too strong." Carl Sagan in conversation with Edward Wakin

"in the cosmic context, the very scale of the universe - more than one hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than one hundred billion stars - speaks to us of the inconsequentiality of human events. We see a universe simultaneously very beautiful and very violent. We see a universe that does not exclude a traditional western or eastern god, but that does not require one either."Carl Sagan in conversation with Edward Wakin

"I wouldn't seperate the world of nature from the religious instint. Einstein, among others, made that point very strongly in his appreciation of the depth and beauty of the universe, which he described as a religious experience. To quote him 'in this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious men.'"Carl Sagan in conversation with Edward Wakin

"if you look into science you will find a sense of intricacy, depth, and exquisite beauty which, I believe, is much more powerful than the offerings of any bureaucratic religion, I would not even object to saying that the sense of awe before the grandeur of nature is itself a religious experience."Carl Sagan in conversation with Edward Wakin
Conversations with Carl Sagan By Carl Sagan, Tom Head

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
"..Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the universe is not obliged to conform to what was considered comfortable or plausible."A universe not made for us, pale blue dot

"our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunkings of our conceits" A universe not made for us, pale blue dot

"once we overcome our fear of being tiny we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome universe that utterly dwarfs in time, in space and in potential, the tidy anthropocentric procemium of our ancestors." A universe not made for us, pale blue dot


"Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell's art places viewers in a realm of pure perceptual experience. His fascination with the phenomena of light is ultimately connected to a very personal, inward search for mankind's place in the universe. Influenced by his Quaker faith, which he characterizes as having a "straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime," Turrell's art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona."
- http://www.rodencrater.com

"The next space to be constructed is the South Space, (shown here, above) a space aligned to the North Star that concentrates the viewer's attention on the night sky and provides a panoramic daytime vista of the Painted Desert surrounding the crater. Visitors will ascend via a rising spiral ramp to an open, circular space at the top with an unimpeded view across the desert. The center of this space is open to below, allowing light into the inner room of the South Space. An alternate path at the base takes visitors inside. Benches for seating line the interior and visitors will look upward towards the sky. The central feature is a structure that forms an astronomical instrument similar to the Jai Prakash Yantra in the celestial observatory at Jaipur, India. With this instrument, one can track celestial bodies and events (such as lunar and solar eclipses) as they occur within the timeframe of the 18 year, 11 day Saros Cycle. A single seat provides a view focused on the North Star. The South Space is, in effect, both a space with its own particular characteristics and a calendar for the celestial movements and events that are at the heart of the varied spaces of the Roden Crater project." http://www.rodencrater.com

what am I doing?

I had my assessment and got fairly good marks overall, but I have to say I've been left feeling a lot more lost than before I went under such scrutiny. Prepare yourself for a post that is the result of a very scrambled brain:

my main criticism was lack of theory and critical language.

I think my problem was that I kept going on about how I wanted to create an otherwise impossible environment, but didn't actually set up any installations. Why not? because its a bloody pain, its a big commitment in both time and money, especially when you're not even sure what environment you want to create yet.

I can't help but feel that I'm wrestling with two opposing arguments, one is that I should just do whatever I feel like making - as the rest of the world seems to enjoy it, and it makes me happy, and I think i could even use it in a commercial field - BUT, it doesnt (so far) relate enough to what other artists are doing and hasn't got any roots in any critical theory, so its hard to write about

SO lets just say that I've got to the point where I have found a visual style and am simultaneously stumbling somewhere towards what I think is important in art.

I think I've just about realised at this point that while I had honestly set out to make astrophysics into art what I really ended up doing was imitating a visual style which wasn't very deep and didn't involve much artistic theory.

My options now are to either go with the theory that explores experiences in art and installation, or to go with something based more on my subject matter.

AS I think that I want to go with the former for my dissertation I may try and put it off for now, which means I need to find artists who dig deep into *specifically* what I'm communicating - and WHY?

I want to keep the element of beauty, experience and innovation but use the more challenging subject matter of data visualisation - not really very different, but more specific.

I did mention data visualisation ages ago as being something that crops up in my mind quite often, and I think if I could find a new way of representing data that is relevant and innovative and exciting that could really work as an installation.

space and planets counts as data so It's really very similar except this way I am giving myself clearer guidelines - e.g. no imaginary orbits, actual mathematical precision..

Here are a few things that have been inspiring me to move more into this area.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/02/wanted-the-next-leonardo.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/

http://www.ted.com/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html

This does all tie together with what I've been doing!! but I just can't quite articulate how yet....

Maybe I'm gearing myself up for doing commercial work. Is it too soon?

Hey, I'm just going with what excites me, I can't do much more than that.