3.2, Art, Painting, Physical/digital hybrid art

Legacy 3.2 – Part Two: how your work meets the world

Sites

I have been thinking about the degree show increasingly as, despite advice that an exhibition isn’t obligatory, this seems to be the route most people take and, from particular experience, to make gains towards their eventual grade. The possibility of gain implies the equal possibility of loss which means something other than an exhibition would have to be off-the-wall brilliant and that rather bothered me.

I live in a semi-rural area with almost no mobile signal and few venues with wifi which would mean access to the AR would be intermittent to nil even if I could find somewhere to hang things and people to do that for me. Luckily, Brighton is just along the coast and has enough 5G to keep everyone in tin hats for the foreseeable. But where other artists have made large physical pieces and installations (see Amma Talbot and Katherina Grosse, also William Kentridge who gets me every time with his moving silhouettes and compelling music), I will be using A1/A2 pieces and projecting them, along with their AR layers, on selected buildings.

Selection is critical both for consent (from the owner) and safety of viewers when using the app to access the AR. I hope to find these selections along a walkable tour track that doesn’t require too much leg-work, which could be important to my potential collaborators. I would need six buildings for my work and six for the participant collaborators.

Testing

I’ve been using two buildings in the village as ‘canvases’ for around two years. I’ve also installed AR on non-art targets such as wheelie bins, a telegraph pole, the gap under a bridge, published poems (e.g. Tom Sheehan, 2021, The Linnets Wings), and graffiti in an underpass that I call my Gallery in the Wild. This has given me insights into what conditions maximise activation of the AR, the safety issues regarding siting, consideration of material suitable for family viewing and how more challenging material would need its own venue, permissions, and also potentials.

The sky effect is via MotionLeap, the image is my pastels and acrylics mural on my living room wall.
Audio is by Shadow Warrior via Pexels. Interpolated video clips are also via Pexels.
‘Rift’. Made by slicing the image of a painting in PhotoMirage. The original painting was enhanced in Rebelle5 and Flamepainter by Escapemotions and finished in FilmoraPro. Audio is a) Perseverance rover on Mars via NASA and free for non-commercial use; and b) my own recording of a fast-flowing river under a bridge. Locations such as this are unreliable due to changes in surrounding foliage and dramatic shifts in lighting. They make for rather interesting videos though.
This building is my most reliable site. I use it for test purposes but on this occasion, it hosted the work of all the artists showing at a nearby hall during the local art trail. I ask the owner of the takeaway regularly, wrote a short letter with contact details explaining what I wanted to do, and also showed him how the artwork was visible only through the app. Language is an issue in that we don’t have one in common.
Commissioned by The Linnet’s Wings to accompany the poem ‘Single Shot’ by Tom Meehan.
‘Space Monkeys’. First attempt at stop-motion on greenscreen, here seen in an underpass with graffiti as the target for the AR app.

The artwork here is my own with the exception of the Steyning Arts poster. I also use effects provided by animation apps such as MotionLeap and CyberLink PowerDirector.

Unattributed audio and film clips are via Epidemic Sounds and Pexels, both of which provide free material for non-commercial use.

Through this, I have learned how to use green-screen so that I can confine AR videos relatively accurately to the shape of a building or space.

SCH 2024

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