Man Ray “space writing” discovery!

I am rushing out the door right now,but I must stop for a moment and report on this very cool discovery related to Man Ray and light painting, or as he called it “space writing”.  I was forwarded this information by the Man Ray Trust.

Man Ray is the first light painter.  His “space writing” images are the very first recorded light painting images that I can find.  You can see his 3 “space writing” images here.

Well, in a recent article in The Smithsonian Magazine there is news about an interesting new discovery in his “space writing” images.  Quoting from the article, “…Ellen Carey, a photographer whose working method is similar to Man Ray’s, has discovered something that has been hidden in plain sight in Space Writings for the past 74 years: the artist’s signature, signed with the penlight amid the swirls and loops.”

This is a link to the article. Be sure to check out the interactive demonstration at the right hand side of the page to see his signature outlined clearly.

I’ll have more about “space writing” later as I work to include these images, and analysis of them, into Luminary.

Robyn at Designwrite Studios

I just want to write a brief blurb about how much I appreciate the tremendous work that Robyn Lingen from Designwrite Studios has put into the Luminarymovie.com website. She has a very solid personality and speaking with her gives me a confidence and serenity about any project she is handling. Robyn even helps me walk through some very basic stuff with her on the phone and is interested in my ability to problem solve as much as she is interested in her specific efforts. This is a brief summary of one of the tenants behind DesignWrite:

Above anything else, we are in service to our client’s vision, and so is our design. That is why it is so important to listen to more than just the words. We must listen deeply enough to understand the personality of the organization, and imbue the design with what we hear.

Anyone out there looking for a strong, solid, experienced and mindful web designer or developer should seriously consider contacting Robyn at Designwrite Studios!  She can be reached at 651-260-0730 or by email: robyn@designwritestudios.com.

Check out this video from Designwrite Studios

Cheers!

LAPP-Pro TV, Gestalt, and Kinesthetic Intelligence

See this article at LuminaryMovie.com

LAPP-PRO makes the rest of us feel something. We felt something when we visited them and it seems like more and more people are starting to feel the power of their images. It’s not hard to understand why folks are attracted to LAPP-PRO’s images. It’s exciting to see that they have gotten some TV play in their home town Bremen. Check out the movie here.

LAPP-PRO creates some of the most compelling and, dare I say, astonishing pictures I have seen. They are full of Psychic Energy and Gestalt. Gestalt is often defined in English as: A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.

LAPP-PRO see’s the Light

“Gestalt psychology is based on the observation that we often experience things that are not a part of our simple sensations…Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists, we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations.” (Dr. C. George Boree).

Now, I think these are apt descriptions for light painting in general, but especially for the images LAPP-pro create. Their pictures are much more than the sum of their parts. The gestalt of LAPP-PRO is seen in each gesture, in every “brush stroke” they make. The unique nature of LAPP-PRO is that it is a whole body, kinesthetic, action/experience that is simultaneously technical, creative and developmental. The following is a quote from Dr. Gerald Grow:

“The core elements of the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence are control of one’s bodily motions and capacity to handle objects skillfully (206). Gardner elaborates to say that this intelligence also includes a sense of timing, a clear sense of the goal of a physical action, along with the ability to train responses so they become like reflexes. Along with these, you often find a high degree of fine-motor control and a gift for using whole body motions….Gardner cites a dancer’s conviction that we all have the capacity “to apprehend directly” the actions, feelings, or dynamic abilities of other people, without help from words or pictures (228)” (Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. 1983. New York: Basic Books, 1985)

So, I feel like all of these statements are pertinent to the analysis of LAPP’s creations. We can “apprehend directly” the actions and dynamic abilities of Jan and Jorge by deconstructing their motions. Light painting allows us to deconstruct the artists’ motions and the complexity (or simplicity) of their movements as they relate to the “whole.” Kinesthetic Intelligence and the “clear sense of the goal of a physical action” are definitely things we experienced in our time with LAPP-PRO. The “goal” of their actions is both technical and conceptual and it is the unique interaction between these elements that makes LAPP-PRO so extremely and aggressively impactful. They have a “clear sense” of the image they want to represent as well as the “high degree of fine-motor control and a gift for using whole body motions” to make it happen. The magic comes from the intuition and psychic sensitivity to the subconscious, emotional, and psychological representations on their pictures. A simple technical execution of light painting does not ensure an emotional response in the viewer in the same way that pure concept and gesture do not ensure a quallty image. However, the thoughtful juxtaposition and interaction of these skills really does manifest a Gestalt that evokes both thoughts and feeling of a “higher order”. As a viewer we experience and then interact with their art on the same level at which it was created.

There is most definitely a “curve” to being able to analyze and fully experience LAPP-PRO’s art. The beauty is that, classically, the journey literally IS the destination. Light painting marks the artists’ literal physical passage and “kinesthetic intelligence.” Like anything else it takes practice; practice to make and practice to completely appreciate. Why does it take practice to appreciate it? Well, one of the first questions people often ask when they see light painting is “how did they do that?” and sometimes the answer is simple. But with LAPP’s creations it is a complex process that is hard to decipher and challenging to deconstruct. It requires some serious thought and analysis to begin to imagine exactly how these pictures could have possibly been made. We, as viewers, imagine ways in which they must have moved, lights that could have been used etc….We create pictures, movies, in our minds as we imagine and “re-trace” their movements in 4 dimensions. We “re-live” the journey they took through the frame, through time, to make the picture and we begin to “apprehend” their feelings and/or “dynamic abilities.” Remember, the journey is the destination. When watching light painting being made in real-time we only see the light in the literal and proverbial “Now”. We experience the process as a series of motions illuminated in increments and gone when the shutter clicks with no “real” image left. The picture captures the motions, the journey, and when we see the image our understanding of the meaning of the artists’ actions becomes clearer while simultaneously evoking something completely different than what we feel while watching the process.

Another important element to the Gestalt is the interaction with environment, but I’ll save that for another article.

LAPP-PRO has steaming balls.

Luminary Playlist

gotta have music for a road trip…especially a 15 day whirlwind European Tour.
…so what’s in rotation for Luminary? Here is the ongoing and developing playlist for the trip…in no particular order…

Burnt Friedman - Need is All You Love from First Night Forever

Burnt Friedman and the Nu Dub Players – Fly Your Kite from Can’t Cool Down (personal all time fav album)

Manu Chao and Radio Bemba Dia Luna Dia Pena – Cuarto De Tula from Lo Peor de La Rumba Vol.1 Malas Fiestas

Jamie Lidell – Whats the Use (Mocky remix) and Multiply (in A Minor Key – Piano by Gonzales) from Multiply Additions

Lambchop - Cigaretiquette from Tools in the Dryer

Dub Pistols – You’ll Never Find from Speakers and Tweeters

Emo - In The Back Of The Car (Denmark) from Putumayo Presents A New Groove

General Electrics – Take You Out Tonight (featuring Lateef the Truth Speaker)

CSS – Let’s Make Love & Listen To Death From Above

Aim – Good Disease

Amp Fiddler – Superficial from Find My Way EP

Patrice – anything by Patrice!

There is much more of course…but I’m tired now…enjoy!

matt

4-10-09 Luminary Eric Staller Gonzo Art Gonzo Documentarianism

So, the little voice in my head that operates on instinct and background machinations keeps speaking up about Eric Staller. Maybe it’s because of what I see as similar artistic processes, although of a much less global and “multi million dollar” scale.

Just read his book “Out of My Mind” and while reading I found that most all of the emotions and thoughts he expresses about his process etc….ring very true and familiar to Che and I’s artistic development and past.

The easiest similarity to spot is that we have have done massive, ridiculous art cars for the Art Car Parade for 8 years in a row with our “family” of friends. Eric is a Grandfather of the Art Car movement with Lightmobile. His descriptions of seeing reactions to the car in New York in the 70’s read like memories of our riotous trips through the streets of Houston in monstrous, motorized contraptions that shock all the “everyday” people out of their insulated caccoons. The immediacy of the reactions that our insane cars cause in folks is like a great Rorschach test. Making eye contact with people when they first see a crazy art car rolling up next to then on a perfectly normal day is a magic moment. The times we have taken “joy rides” in our Art Cars are all permanently etched into my mind/emotions. There is something indelible about experiencing the moment of discovery, questioning, (fear?), joy, surprise and wonder with unsuspecting pedestrians as they cope to integrate our spectacle into their world view.

There is an almost tangible energy that manifests between us and the on-lookers. We get to experience the power of our art in a very immediate way. But it’s not just the object of the car, it’s what our radical presence and passage implies. We represent something wild and uninhibited physically and psychologically. Our message is one of freedom, a message of empowerment and re-contextualization. A not so gentle reminder that the world outside ourselves is an exciting place that should be explored actively.

Our comfort zones should be avoided….regularly.

It seems that Eric Staller’s art pushes people out of their comfort zones. I see that he seems to recognize that art is a perpetual action, a manner of approaching the world mentally that causes all the input stimuli to be re-amalgamated into what always ends up as a new artistic “expression”….

Art is active and the “appreciation” of it should be physical as well. As bio-mechanical machines we respond on the cellular level when we are flooded with emotions. Our biochemistry literally changes with our emotions and those changes have a profound effect on our thoughts and emotions. When art shocks people and pulls them in like a monster magnet….when it causes an involuntary physical/emotional reaction in the viewer….then it has done it’s job. When the state they are shocked into is a state of pleasant wonder and active engagement, then the artists has given a gift.

The gift is a chance to feel what many of us loose in the “rat race”…a chance to give ourselves permission to break out of our everyday bubbles because the spectacle/experience is so far outside the self constructed limitations of our “daily routine”. When presented with something like a Lightmobile in some random street at night in the middle of NYC in the mid seventies what else can a person do except stop in their tracks in surprise and wonderment? That moment for the viewer is an instantaneous transformation, a threshold crossing, from one emotional reality to another. The place they exist in while interacting with the art is a state that they know, somewhere inside, that is possible to inhabit every day in every moment. Maybe the pedestrian lacks the courage to live wild and free…maybe they have convinced themselves that they are “on the right track” and are not involved with a daily self transformation. But the artist is there is remind them that our true state is one of power, creation and joy.

So, in Luminary, these concepts are present as well. The process of making Luminary is “gonzo documentariansim” and my job is to get into the experience, to live it and re-present the realities I inhabit along the way. Ultimately, I think the light painting images have the same power on the viewer as seeing an art car that is a 20ft octopus attacking the Alamo drive by with a monstrous sound track of sub sea battles and musket/cannon fire projecting a benign insanity on the onlookers.

In the same way that it may be hard to imagine how/why/where someone would build such a monstrosity car, the light painitng images can stop people in their tracks and hold them, rooted, while they enjoy the sensations they are flooded with.

I hope that I am transfixed by the process and the objective is to create a product that reminds me and everyone else that we should be pushing forward, accumulating experiences, integrating concepts and having shit loads of fun while we’re alive.

Bring the light…bring the noise…leave your mark…..

matt

Luminary Dana Maltby

So, we started with 50 mph wind gusts that canceled our original flight.  But we were up early the next morning for the first flight out.   It made our first day on the ground a shooting day and we had our game faces on.

first flight out after a canceled flight the night before

We made it to Minnesota safe and sound….ready to rock……

cool geometry at the minnesota airport

The nights were exercises in mad entry and tactical assessment. Dark, echoing iron in forgotten industrial interiors with machines the size of an entire floor that were left with the building……machines whose scale are fearful. How were these beasts installed…piece by piece or was a wall left open and was there a crane of mythic proportions grinding metal braided cables and chains over greasy pulleys creaking under the strain of lifting their now abandoned load? Maybe, and probably, some poor people schlepped every piece of each of these machines up the narrow, dangerous stairs. They must have had a system because the stairs will not accommodate 2 people going in different directions especially not laden with metal machine parts.

at night these stairs are scary

Hard concrete, metal doors, broken windows and vast spaces reverberating with emptiness. Osha certainly had no say in the construction of these places. And now, in repose, the open elevator shafts and uncovered floor shafts lie in wait like deep-water, bottom dwelling, predators…..quiet, sinister, deadly and waiting.

Climbing old, iron mill stairs, narrow for one person passage, creates a noise from vibrating the stairs on the way up and down that resonates throughout the rusted iron of 7 stories. It turns into a deep hum when 6 people tromp down the stairs in boots. The braided metal cables clang on the 4th floor from the movement and startled pigeons dart off with the first bang of loose, swinging, metal cargo doors left to rage nightly in the swirling Minnesota wind.

This is concealed lights held low, cupped near windows and cascading ominously down through the grating of iron stairs creating crazy motion down the shaft of a stairwell designed to create a fear of death and cast out the weak of heart and mind. The strong persevere up, down, up….the flashlight swishing is a welcome distraction from ghosts mildly stationed in shadows content to watch your passage, but secretly shifting and shuffling to distract, to cause a misstep…..to have you join them in their eternity.

3 days….cold wind, snow drifts, swollen Mississippi river reflections from spun fireballs under a bridge with pleasure boats drifting, over-lit and gaudy, by our time capturing moments unaware of our magic lurking just out of site in the night with mystical lights shielded from their view by monster modern concrete columns. They are just far away enough to not smell the acrid smoke, to see unidentified spinning lights shooting their way across our retinas and into the time machine that is our camera. Their lives do not contain fireballs skimming horizontally across the Mississippi river before being extinguished by water struggling to stay above freezing.

mississippi river boat in Minnesota

Where are the lines and why are they drawn? Which occasions were they designed for? Lines of entry, lines of delineation and circumvention….lines of light that mark our passage, all lines lead to and stem from an interior space. Our progress is across thresholds lonely in their memories of busy passage, of life, of humanity that conceptualized these spaces then moved on. Our motion is internal and towards an internal place. A place we feel exists, that draws us, that motivates us to get up, get out and quest for something. What is the quest for? What is the end game for this?

Well, the destination is not really a physical one and the journey is only representational in it’s physicality. The image at the end of this process is tangible and physical, but the end game is the experience for the viewer; the mental space they are (hopefully) jolted into upon seeing the image. The image experience is the destination and the journey for the viewer. The journey and story of the image is consolidated into a single picture that implies enough, and is compelling enough creatively, to instantly make the mind of the viewer work feverishly analyzing the image, enjoying the challenge, feeling wonder, smiling at the feeling and imagining the actions it must have taken the artist to not only make the image but arrive at the location…..the journey, they end up taking it with you in their own way, left to fill in the story with realities the artist helps construct with the creative execution and intangible imbuing of the image. The emotions and sensibilities of the image provide the pallets for the imaginations of the viewers as they follow you in their mental journey.

gotta get there to get it

When I look at a light painting picture in a location that is in some way “extreme” or outside of my everyday reality I feel the power of that place in the image….If I make a light orb, for example, in my kitchen and then make another orb in the French Alps at the snow line, I bet the Alps orb will be more impactful. Certainly, the details can be argued, maybe I set-dress the kitchen creatively and make a wicked image…..but the point would remain…it’s the background, the environment, that the orbs/light sculptures/artists interact with and place the light objects into that is the main signifier.

The journey is towards an experience that is in itself intangible, but more powerful than any of the concrete walls, massive metal doors swinging violently shut with spasmic irregularity, or loose shaft grates that would welcome a new passenger down their lethal slide. The journey is through these gauntlets physically, but into the mind/emotions/psyche…..the journey evokes and elicits sensations unique to the nature of each location. The procession imbues each traveler with it’s essence and we integrate, re-assimilate, re-contextualize, re-invent these sensations through the artists’ alchemical internal swirl into expressions of our psychic imprint from the environment. The light images come from outside ourselves and inside ourselves in equal measure. We are vessels and masters simultaneously.

The artist acts in the space of time travel and assimilates the lifetime’s and life of the people that have passed before. The psychic traces and psychological reactions to the stark evidence of previous lives puts the artist into a place that is impossible to fully imagine before the moment comes. It’s a progression to an internal place whose time and space are infinitely variable and impossible to predict, but once there the artist knows it instinctively. The spirit descends and the calm, quiet, exhilaration moment arrives when you know for certain, without reason, that you are meant to create right then, in these moments, in the captured series of time and motion that is the light painters’ aboriginal hand print on the face of the invisible, quantum mechanical surface of our new world order rock walls.

It is a new technology extension of our human need to leave an indelible mark on the palaces of our ancestors.

The production journey of Luminary has begun. We are after a series of images and experiences. We are after interactive encounters that exists because of a shared creative vision. We are seeking the nature of creative moments.  We can’t predict the specifics and we can’t govern all the details, but be sure, when the time comes we’ll be rolling…..in surround sound.

surround sound

peace

matt

wave-particle duality

…wave-particle duality….sounds like fun….

….the science and nature of light are worth covering in relation to Luminary.

I have to say that I’m re-learning the principles of light as Luminary pushes onward. But the great thing is that the medium that light painters use just happens to be an incredibly compelling, almost magic, thing…light.  The study of light was pivotal in establishing quantum mechanics when Einstein analyzed the photoelectric effect and determined that light has both wave and particle like properties. This is called wave-particle duality and it is firmly entrenched in the roots of quantum mechanics.

So, artists wielding a luminous quantum mechanical tool making art in 4 dimensions….sounds like fun.

btw…if you watched the video in the link above…..i love the shirt, but the “rod charging” was….uhhhhh….

on the way

…..this is the first blog entry for Luminary.

Luminary begins tomorrow with our trip to Minnesota to shoot with Dana Maltby, {tcb} on flickr.

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