Nicholas Clark
Gil Scott-Heron Proposal
My goal is to construct a body of work that starts a conversation involving the artist, the art and the viewer. The conversation will concern the life and work of Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron was a jazz poet and musician among other things. His lyrical content is concerned with social and political issues in the United States. The recently deceased poet will serve as a potent subject due to his untimely death and the relevance of his work.
The art will be separated into columns. Each column will form a single idea based on some aspect of Scott-Heron’s work. They will be accompanied by motion-activated sound that will play segments of the poet’s lyrics. Each column will have a sensor and the columns will activate depending on where the viewers stand. In a sense the viewer is in control of the project’s auditory aspects. Alternatively, a button will trigger the sound if the motion aspect does not pan out.
The visual portion of this work will be done digitally and influenced by pieces of Scott-Heron’s music. As I have not defined a specific scale for the images, working digitally will be beneficial; however the minimum size will be 13”x19” per image. The final scale will depend upon how the printed work turns out.
A secondary goal in this project is to make it an interactive piece, hence triggering the sounds with a motion sensor. Creating an interactive piece is not a particularly original idea, but it is one that further involves the viewer and that is nearly always a positive consequence in art. The decision to incorporate an interactive feature stems from a longstanding appreciation of Scott Snibbe’s work. For example, Snibbe’s, Boundary Functions, is a project that critiques the idea of personal space. The piece does not fully become art until at least two people enter the space. This is the level of viewer interaction that has guided me to the Gil Scott Heron project.
another artist that has used motion sensors
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tim hawkinson
Tim Hawkinson is very interesting. If it were me, I might go larger in size than you if I were going for something like Hawkinson, but I think you are going for something more like Emory Douglas, so I think the size of your work will be fine. Personally, if it were me I'd just do the digital work and use Noah's links and the stuff you had in mind to make images that would stand alone, though, I could see the appeal of the sound devices. Juan did something kind of similar in Robin's artist book class. A question I had was if you were going to contain this solely to the gallery, or if it would go outside it in some way.
ReplyDeleteSound seems to be the dominating feature of the communication from your proposal. Depending on the volume of the sound that plays, various negatives and positives arise such as advertising your work from afar (if loud) or creating both a more active and personalized bond that limits those who can experience the work at any given time (if only a single viewer can hear the lyrics). It sounds as if you might lean towards the latter, in which case it might be good to research methods of sound projection. I'm not sure what they're called, but there was an interesting hanging speaker that limited sound to a very confined area of space in one of Peter Liversidge's works displayed in "Will History Be Kind".
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