New work in progress, "Conducting Chaos." In this work I am applying a torch directly to 12” x 8” sheets of tempered glass. The way in which the heat is applied greatly influences the break pattern of the glass; however, there remains an equal amount of unpredictability and randomness. I am interested in this balance between the human hand influencing the material, and the ultimate reactions made by the material itself. I hope to show how something more tangible can emerge from a molecular system that is largely disorganized.
4 comments:
Inspiring work. When you step away after heating the piece, that pause leading up to the explosion kills me. Almost as if the glass is contemplating how it wants to respond to your hand, rapidly deciding in an impressive moment of order/chaos visualization. I'm curious to know your thoughts on the work vs. process vs. documentation. What is important for your story? Is the video the piece, or the glass itself. The process/investigation itself brings up lots of interesting questions, but I'm wondering how you would frame the conversation in what you choose to show (and how it's shown) and what you choose to hide from the viewer?
and a big thanks for starting this up. let me know how we can post to this as well and I'll do my best to make something worth contributing.
one more thing... check out the work of john cage if you're not familiar with it. less material based, but also dealing with creating parameters in which randomness could run rampant. haven't been able to find a great text on the subject, but here's one to get ya started:
http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/cage/texts/bookintro.html
Thanks for the feedback. As of now Im thinking that the piece will be a looped series of these events, a video presented on a relatively small monitor so that the torch and hand are to scale. I also might project the video onto a small sheet of glass from behind. I actually kind of like that idea better. It does present a lot of options, the glass panels themselves are really interesting artifacts. But like you said, its seeing it happen, particularly that moment in between heating and breaking, that Im interested in portraying. I also like the idea of the smaller monitor, I'm hoping it invites the tendency to look closer... figuratively and literally.
I think John Cage is definitely relevant to this as well, Im gonna keep him in mind.
can you reuse the glass once it cracks? perhaps slumping it back to a flat pane again or something like that returning it to its "original" state.
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