THEME
Play/Material & Immaterial
CONTEXT
This is one of the first versions of Medusa’s origin being a human being, turned into a Gorgon as a punishment, rather than more archaic mythology whereby she was always a Gorgon.
https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-statue-david-model/835549
I initially had some thoughts about 3D printing being a facet of the experience in my hypothetical gallery but later moved away from that idea; but this is still relevant as context in so much as they needed to create a 3D render of the statue in order to create a model for 3D printing, and visually this is similar to what I was imagining in the installation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YizMalWigkI
This is a visual example of what I thinking of with the scanning of objects to bring up the sculptures; however it would be dissimilar from this video in that the art that pops up on the screen will not be the same as what is scanned.
METHOD
Following last weeks exercise I wanted to continue on with concepts related to novel use of galleries and audience interaction with art installations. Regarding material and immaterial, I interpreted the immaterial in a fairly literal sense by focusing in on folklore and myth as the central thread. Materiality comes in by way of the gallery space and the intersection between the (physical) art installations and mobile phones. From there I narrowed my focus further and decided that the myths/figures I would be looking at specifically were female mythical figures that lacked agency in (some, but necessarily all) their mythology. The two I chose for the example are Persephone and Medusa; within the context of their mythologies they are both often presented as passive agents. Persephone eats the pomegranate and loses all of her personal agency in having to return to the underworld each year, Medusa is transformed into the Gorgon (in later retellings of the myth, early origins are different) and is then slain by Perseus. In my vision for this hypothetical gallery all of the art pieces are related to stories like these, and each myth will be represented physically in the gallery space as an object (e.g, a pomegranate for Persephone, a snake for Medusa) that viewers can then scan with their phones (or provided tablets?) to see the actual art piece; which would be 3D models in the style of classical marble statues. The audience would also be wearing headphones, and as they scanned the objects and inspected the artwork a voiceover would explain the mythology that they exist within.
RESULTS
I struggled with the theme this week, and I’m still not confident that I engaged with it as well as I could have. I love mythology, and I really wanted to incorporate it into one of the weekly objects this semester for APD. I’m not unhappy with the end result for this week, and I think the concept could be pushed or tweaked in quite a few interesting ways, one of the vague ideas I had while brainstorming was the idea of a micro-gallery; you could have a collection of very small objects that could be scanned to then show off much larger virtual pieces.
