Saturday
Jan302016

Shopping Carts and Zed with Sheep

The first two weeks of my second semester at CCAD has been a lot slower than I expected.  Things just aren't moving like I would like them too.  Part of that has a lot to do with deciding what to do with Zed.  I made a movie and will likely be revisiting that movie in order to add a few panning shots.  At the moment it is a little stagnant and doesn't do a very good job of displaying what it is like to stand in front of the piece or to move around in the space.  So there is that.

There is also the challenge of doing something completely different because as the saying goes, semester two is the semester to fail forward in.  Why though?  Because I have two more to be safe in after this?  Here is the conflict.  On one side of the coin, a lot of me (most of me) wants to explore the potential rabbit hole that exists with Zed and find grounded ideation to support this largely intuitive construction.  On the other side of the coin, I see the benefit of doing something that seems entirely ridiculous personally.  If it works, great, if not, then I learned a lot.    So in response to all this conflict I decided to do what I do and just make things.  For me, difference will come through doing and not diparting as I normally look for new ways to solve problems.

To get started I did a few experiments on Zed.  First I attempted and failed a quick attempt at using the projector to make the 3D elements of Zed flatten out.  Basically I took a photonegative of Zed and projected it onto the surfaces.  Light filled the shadowed areas and sorta made things flatten into 2D space but not very well.  The white balance was off and the Image was shot with a wide angle lens and created distortion that can’t be corrected in the projector.  I believe this will work with a little more understanding of projection mapping.  In the end I think I can create an illusion that will make the sculptures shift between 2D and 3D space and bend the mind into perceiving the existence of a lie. 

Why and I doing this experiment?  I believe that a lot of the best art involving light uses it in a way that creates lies or illusions in much the same way that a painter uses paint to create a lie of a realistic tree in a landscape.  Tames Turrell’s ability to make a space any shape he would like with the use of light is an example.  Robert Irwin is another example, blending light and paint to trick the mind into believing that the light is drawn or the drawing is projected or vice versa. Illusions Illisuons Illusions.

After this first attempt at flattening space I decided to see what video looked like projected on the surfaces and came up with this.

I am really excited about what I discovered through this experiment.  The subtle interactions between colors is really exciting for example with a green becomes a deep orange.  Geometric forms interacting with the surface communicate well with the modular characteristics of Zed (squares with squares).  Again this lead me to thinking about the projection mapping possibilities of lighting the contours of the forms and having lines dance around the surface.  Lots of thoughts.

Yesterday I started making "shopping carts" (called this because they are made of only steel rods and remind me of the silver buffalo).  These forms are free standing or hanging (haven't decided yet) sculptures that will be wrapped like the forms in Zed.  I will be displaying them in a similar way to zed but with the intention of learning how to projection map so that I can explore the potential of that avenue.

Here are some sketches of potential forms and applications with space.

And here are the "shopping carts"

 

Thursday
Jan282016

Zed in Movie

This is a video of "Zed" for those of you who didn't get a chance to see it in person.  I made me think alot about illusion and how I can use light to be a liar.  We'll see where I go with it.  I'll be diving deeply into the ways in which James Terrell manipulates environments with light.  More videos soon.

Saturday
Dec122015

Zed

Title - Zed

Media - Primer on Spandex over Steel Rod and Plywood

Dimensions - 74” x 74”

“Zed” is an interactive illuminated sculptural installation.  The lighting in the room is controlled by viewers who will choose color swaths, insert them into a scanner, and direct the data received to the right or left side of the piece at the push of a button.

This project was completed as my final first semester project.  It will be up for a while so let me know if you would like to experience it first hand.

 

Tuesday
Dec082015

Statement Post

Name - Zane A Miller

TItle - Zed

Media - Primer on Spandex over Steel Rod and Plywood

Dimensions - 74” x 74”

“Zed” is an interactive illuminated sculptural installation.  The lighting in the room is controlled by viewers who will choose color swaths, insert them into a scanner, and direct the data received to the right or left side of the room at the push of a button.  Some surfaces of the white sculptures are then illuminated by one color or the other, while other surfaces allow for a blending of the two color choices or are shrouded in shadow.  This piece is an exploration of form with respect to light as well as an attempt to surrender choice of compositional color to the viewer.  These are 3D explorations born of lineage I create in 2D space.

Behind the curtain is an arrangement of wall sculptures that read as dimensional paintings.  In the center of the room there is a pedestal that has a color scanning box that drives the LED strips that are set at wide angles from the center of my arrangement.  I’m not going to post a working photo of the inside of the room yet, but it works.  Instead I will post an extremly small photo that when clicked will take you to an external link.  Click the photo or don’t, it’s your experience to spoil ---> () <---. Here is a look at the arrangment on the ground before it when up on the wall as well as the LEDs working correctly without gramlins.  I still have to paint the back wall black as well as the cieling because it is too reflective and distracting.  I also going to be adding shields to the LEDs so that people don't see the light source.  

Friday
Dec042015

Dimensions and Rejection

This is a mega update.  I have made little ones for John Cairns’ Digital Culture class but have really neglected to create one that focuses on my current direction in the program (which is a huge left turn).  I’m just going to go in chronological order from the last time I made a post outside of Halloween fun and my attempt at cultural satire.  I shot footage for this little video a few weeks before my last critique on October 22nd.  It gives a little taste of what it's like to be in my studio.  Time seems to slip into interesting directions.  Around that time I was having studio visits with a lot of people.  Nicole Gibbs (Project Manager to Ann Hamilton), Victoria Fu, and Bev Fishman (Head of Painting, Cranbrook), each had their own way of telling me to break out of habit and explore harder.  They each suggested that I minimize my use of color in order to restrict my intuitive abilities and allow concept to surface.  This trend was repeated during my critique.  I felt that I had been making steps across new ground involving canvas but it still doesn’t hold the energy  that my more confortable applications of mark making on paper have.

The canvas paintings did however influence me into a new place.  The above painting holds an old spirit that became buried in the chaos of the new.  I used to paint works that involved heavy focus on negative space and how that space can be imagined into something of dimension like this one.  So I thought, maybe it is finally time to make them dimensional.  I wasn’t sure that I would make it to this place this semester but it looks like I am completing part of my initial application proposal.  

On the 28th of October I raided the fabric closet for a piece of stretchy cloth and came up with this concept.  It is constructed out of a piece of plywood, 1/8th inch steel wire, the fabric, and staples.  I was rather happy with how it compared to my 2D work as it seems to just slip right into the lineage.  So what was next?  I initially thought that I was going to attempt to make a 4 x 8 foot piece that would be covered in this gesture and then I lifted the sheet of ply that I was going to make it with and after long thoughts decided that it would be best to make a bunch of little ones.  I had discussed the approach with Gordon Lee and we thought it would be interesting to create a-symmetrical forms like my concept but in the end I think I wasn’t ready to rip that far away from traditional painting.  The first few weeks in November I was heavy in production.

Pretty early in production I decided that I wanted to design an LED lighting setup the would light the sculptures form two sides. Initially it was going to be a programed sequence of colors that would interact with the surfaces of the sculptures but then over the head of creating an idiea for a final project for John's class I decided that I wanted to make a device that would allow the veiwer to make the color choices in real time.


 

I stopped at eight for a bit knowing full well that I was going to have to make one more because I couldn’t come up with a way to arrange eight in my head.  Final project time comes around for John’s class and I dove head first into Arduino microprocessors.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I was pretty confident in my ability to plug and play like a set of Legos but I had no idea how to read let alone write the codes required to drive sensors or LEDs.  After a trip to the hobby section of Micro Center I stayed up and figured out how to make a few things happen.  This video shows some of those early tricks.  I made LEDs blink a lot and then eventually figured out how to make a sonic sensor turn LEDs on based on distance.  I really wanted to make an interactive piece that detected a viewer's presence and then displayed different LED patterns based on their distance from the art.  Maybe I will try something like that in the future.

Eventually I fell into literacy with the Arduino but I was having issues. The trouble was getting multiple processes to talk to each other and in my case making a ColorPAL color sensor drive NeoPixel strips was becoming a challenge.  I managed to merge the basic sketches and was left with erratic data and a sensor that was not putting out correct data to the LEDs.  My thoughts on this matter were that the LEDs were dragging the program down.  Basically it was taking too much time to make the LEDs light and was falling behind the rate of the sensor reads.  So, John and I got together and did some brainstorming and messing around with the code.  We managed to get the code to create correct data reads but it was still lagging.  This meeting really pushed the ball over the edge.  Thanks John!

In the end this code was going to be heavily altered in order to make it controllable by the viewer.  I wanted two sets of LEDs to be controlled by buttons, A and B.  At this point I had to dissect a few different sketches in order to create button functions that told the LEDs to change to the color that the ColorPAL reads at the instance of the button press.  First I figured out how to do it on one button and one LED strip and then when that worked I went for two separate button/LED channels and here is how it works.  Party party party!!!  The next step is where I find myself now, upscaling my design and making it installation ready.

The idea here is to have two strings of LEDs running up the wall to the right and left of a 3 x 3 grid.   Veiwers will get to select a pair of paint swaths and scan them with the sensor in the box.  The lights will then change to the color in the scanner at the press of a button.  More on this in another update before critique.  I'm having trouble getting a stable current from the wall and my LEDs are not behaving...