Justin Lewis: Senior Portfolio: December 2009

Research Blog - Sound vs light and some ideas

To more fully define my methods of creating, I am working on understanding the aspects of music and light. On a quick tangent, I found something interesting that John Cage says; that there is no difference between noise and music, it is all just sound. To apply this to the visual realm, I would say that there is no difference between, say, paint buckets spilled on a canvas and a purposely ordered painting. In both cases the aesthetic value is determined by the viewer or listener, like how one cultures music may sound like noise to another and vice versa. This idea opens my mind to broadness of possibilities for creating my music and visual work. It doesn't have to be music, and it doesn't have to be totally structured. It has got me thinking about painting a picture as I play a song on the guitar, where I would hold a brush in my picking hand the movement of my arm strumming would create strokes on the canvas. I could record the song, and then add more layers over top of it in the same way. I know this is another totally different avenue for my work, but I am very excited to try this.
So anyway, here I will attempt to relate as many visual elements to audio elements as I can

Musical element = visual element:
Key=Color
Pitch=Brightness
Timbre=Shape
Dynamics=Size (of shape/timbre or of entire piece)
Texture=Texture
Rhythm=Composition

I am having trouble defining melody and harmony. Melody and harmony are functions of pitch, which I have defined as brightness. This kind of ruins my ideas because right now a melody or harmony would be created by a combination of different colors rather than by changes in pitch/brightness. Perhaps instead of defining key as color, I should allow the color to define the melody and harmony.

Artist Lecture - Amy Hauft

Amy Hauft, Counter Re-formation, 2009
Plywood, canvas, sugar, ABS plastic, polystyrene foam, plaster, epoxy, paint;
32 ft x 27 ft x 35 in

I went to Amy Hauft's talk about her new installation at the Anderson Gallery, Counter Re-formation. The work was based on a Louis XIV banquet table and included sugar sculptures which were supposed to reference times before porcelain when artists would create sugar figurines and sculptures for dessert tables. It also had a tablecloth that seemed perfectly fabricated for the piece. I was disappointed when I found out that it was about . I thought it was an interesting, well crafted sculpture, but I was interested in it for its formal elements and I found the real meaning to be very uninteresting. I had trouble taking anything away from it other than the interesting way that this table was able to seat so many people. The installation also included a stair case for viewers to be able to get a higher perspective to see the whole piece which I thought was cool because it allowed a better view of the strange form of the table. This work is pretty unrelated to mine, but after doing my Sustainability sculpture, I was really noticing the craft and workmanship of this piece.