Friday 25 April 2008

Skirt Construction

32 metres of fabric have arrived. Here are the 3 layers of fabric together flat.


I have started to drape the lengths over a manequin to see how they work together and create the volume of the skirt part of the costume.





Madoona performing 'Vogue' live at the MTV awards

THis clip shows perfectly the movement of pannier corseted gowns.

Tuesday 22 April 2008

The Pool - Jan Lewin

Jan Lewin describes herself as an interactive sculptor, Her "Light Harps" were at Burning Man in 2005 and are 'immersive installations using movement and laser light to trigger sound.I have been creating light harps for the last 12 years. These harps have varied from art installations, to stage and performance installations and large outdoor sculptures'.

"Through my art, I play with the relationship between the physical and the digital, the virtual and the real. This allows my audience to enter into a world where light might respond as if it were a physical string, where a conductive silk butterfly can dance opposite as a partner, or where a physical wall might move and flex to the sound of a voice. In this interplay, the user and the piece participate in a unique "moment" that is often unpredictable and spontaneous."



For Burning Man 2008 Jan Lewin has been awarded a honorarium grant to install The Pool, an environment of giant concentric circles created from interactive circular pads. By entering the pool, you enter a world where play and movement can create a cascading effect of swirling light and color. The pool is a playful, energetic, interactive and totally immersive environment. While in the pool, you can use your movement to create your own swirling light path. You can also use your movement to create light paths that join with other light paths (and allow additive color) or you can use your movement to collide with other paths (removing color and light entirely.)

Basura Sagrada Temple, Burning Man 2008

Design for the Basura Sagrada Temple at Burning Man 2008

Death Guild at Burning Man

Beyond Burning Man - Season 1 - Episode 1: The Beginning

Beyond Burning Man - Season 1 - Episode 2: Band of Misfits

Beyond Burning Man - Season 1 - Episode 3: Road Warriors

Fabrics ordered

12 metres of lightweight tulle with diamantes 112 cm wide (for top layer)



10 metres of stitched holographic sequined tulle 147cm wide (for 2nd layer)




10 metres of tea stained cotton lace 147 cm wide (for under layer)



2 metres of Shattered glass thick foil lame 114 cm wide (for corsetry under layer)



+ 10 metres of gold dress net and 40 sew on diamontes. Delivery thursday from Fabric Land, tel no: 01425461444.

Madonna The Beast Within (I'm Going To Tell You A Secret)

Intro from Madonna's 2006 Re-Invention tour. costumes and head dress.

Sunday 20 April 2008

Hiro Yamagata

Hiro Yamagata creates artworks that are simultaneously high tech and elemental, theoretical and visceral, abstract and immersive. He explores the links between science and art, micro and macro phenomenon, and geography, ecology, technology and cultural memory.



His most recent endeavor, planned for completion in 2009, will create 160 – 240 images of Buddhas on the site of the once enormous Bamiyan Buddhas, which were destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Over 140 laser systems installed 500m, 1km and 5km in distance from the Bamiyan hills will project multiple layers of original drawings in striking colors. The laser images will be projected for 2 hours after sunset, once or twice a week. The laser systems built specifically for this installation will shoot long range green beams and short range multiple color beams, designed to create a striking contrast to the purplish red hue of the Bamiyan sunset and the black mountain shadows.


Bamiyan Laser System installation


installation at ACE Gallery, New York


Quantum Field X3, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2004



installation over Los Angeles River

Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker is best known for large-scale installations. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) consists of a wooden shed which she had blown up by soldiers. She then arranged the fragments of wood in a large room, as if in the process of being blown through the air. In the centre was a light which cast the shadows of the wood dramatically on the walls of the room.

charcoal retrieved from a church struck by lightning

rocks

Mona Hatoum


Entrails Carpet, silicone rubber, 1997

James Rosenquist - Speed of Light

"What you see is what you don't get." - Rosenquist

"In Einstein's study of the speed of light, apparently the speeding person looks out the windo, and the view is altered because of the tremendous speed. And then the spectator, watching the speeding person - the look of that is also altered. Things are crammed together, and they're foreshortened. It's a pun, really. Like the difference between the artist and the critic, how different people see different things." - Rosenquist discussing his inspiration for his 'Speed of Light' paintings 1999 - 20000




Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller was born in the USA and has lived and worked in London since the early 1970's where she became well-known for her innovative and influential practice in a wide range of media, from drawing to video installation. Her work can be seen as an excavation of overlooked, ignored, or rejected aspects of our shared cultural production, and her varied projects have been described as investigations into the 'unconscious' of culture.

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin is an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially-available fluorescent light fixtures.






CLICK HERE FOR DAN FLAVIN INSTITUTE

James Turrel

James Turrell (born 1943, Los Angeles) is an artist primarily concerned with light and space. He is best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater. Located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, Turrell is turning this natural cinder volcanic crater into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena. His other works usually enclose the viewer in order to control their perception of light; a James Turrell skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people. Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof. He is also known for his light tunnels and light projections that create shapes that seem to have mass and weight, though they are created with only light.





Saturday 19 April 2008

Rene Magritte - The Empire Of Light


Empire Of Light, Rene Magritte, oil on canvas, 1950


The Empire Of Lights, oil on canvas, 1954


In Empire of Light, numerous versions of which exist (see, for example, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), a dark, nocturnal street scene is set against a pastel-blue, light-drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. With no fantastic element other than the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a fundamental organizing premise of life. Sunlight, ordinarily the source of clarity, here causes the confusion and unease traditionally associated with darkness. The luminosity of the sky becomes unsettling, making the empty darkness below even more impenetrable than it would seem in a normal context. The bizarre subject is treated in an impersonal, precise style, typical of veristic Surrealist painting and preferred by Magritte since the mid-1920s.

Light


A beam of white light (entering upwards from the right) is dispersed into its constituent colors by its passage through a prism. The fainter beam of white light exiting to the upper right has been reflected (without dispersion) off the first surface of the prism.

Animation of the dispersion of light as it travels through a triangular prism

Extremely high resolution spectrum of the Sun showing thousands of elemental absorption lines (fraunhofer lines)

A cloud illuminated by sunlight

Thursday 17 April 2008

Dress Shape 1


side view

Petticoat Flounce


The Petticoat Flounce Peony Rose produced by Kampjes Gardens New Zealand.

Dress Net 3





Tear sheets